"You are too modest," the Pavilion Mistress said bitterly.
"I tricked him, as you well know," Xilai said. "I could never have even hoped to match him power to power even when I reached Qi master. And less so now, when he has sold himself to the Demonics and I have languished in a prison of his making for a decade, at least."
The warriors and the merchant watched these exchanges—back and forth—like spectators at a joust. Even Wuyi, whose precious anonymity had teetered at the edge of extinction, was lost.
"Let me understand this," he said. "Our Enemy is really a man?"
"Not anymore," Xilai said. "Now he is an entity called Luding. His powers used to be as righteous as mine are to the lady Pavilion Mistress. But things have changed; now neither I am purely righteous, nor is the lady, and certainly not him."
The Monk at the end of the table had stopped writing. Now he looked at them all in horror for some reason.
