The muffled drone of a eulogy, punctuated by the wet sniffles of the truly sentimental, scraped against Song Moyou’s newly returned consciousness like a rusty saw. Her neck was stiff, her body cramped. The persistent scent of sandalwood and funerary lilies was an irritant. What a dreadful place for a nap. And the speaker, some elder whose voice was far too reedy for such a solemn occasion, kept prattling on about her 'brief, tragic existence.' Moyou considered the complex calculus required to accurately simulate a void-rift, a task far more appealing than this forced wakefulness.
A single, exasperated sigh escaped her lips, sounding unnaturally loud in the confined space. The wood above her head vibrated with the elder’s theatrics. “Her spirit, though fleeting, was a beacon of...”
“Oh, just shut up already,” Moyou muttered, shoving upward. Not a gentle push. Not a graceful lift. It was a raw, frustrated kick. The coffin lid, crafted from ancient, spirit-infused ‘Whisperwood,’ exploded. Splinters shrieked through the air, carving arcs through the incense smoke before clattering against the polished obsidian floor of the Grand Sanctuary.
A collective gasp ripped through the assembly. Robes rustled as sect members stumbled back, mouths agape. The reedy-voiced elder choked on his eulogy, his face paling to the color of bone ash. Moyou blinked, sitting up amidst the wreckage of her own funeral pyre. Dust motes danced in the slivers of light filtering through the stained-glass windows, illuminating the horrified faces.
“Is the service over?” Moyou asked, her voice flat, devoid of any emotional tremor. She stretched, feeling a satisfying pop in her lower back. The Whisperwood splinters dug into her silken burial shroud, but she ignored them.
From the front row, a figure detached itself, lunging with the erratic speed of a wounded star-wyrm. “Junior Sister! Moyou! You… you’re alive!” Shen Tulie, her senior martial brother, tears streaming down his face, lunged forward. His spiritual aura, usually a comforting warmth, pulsed with frantic joy. He was halfway across the hall before Moyou even registered his approach.
Moyou’s brow furrowed. The emotional outburst was a disruption. Her fingers twitched, tracing an intricate pattern in the air before her. Swirls of azure Qi coalesced, not in a grand, showy display, but in a series of lightning-fast, almost imperceptible strokes. A spatial array, barely larger than her palm, shimmered into existence. It was a perfect, multi-dimensional displacement matrix, far too complex for anyone in the Cangxi Realm to perceive, let alone replicate.
Shen Tulie was almost upon her, arms outstretched, his wailing growing louder. “My poor, poor sister! I thought I’d lost you!”
A micro-ripple in the air. The spatial array flared, not with destructive power, but with surgical precision. Shen Tulie, mid-lunge, vanished. The trajectory of his embrace was instantly re-routed, his momentum redirected with terrifying accuracy. He reappeared an instant later, not back in his seat, but sailing horizontally through the air toward the eastern wall of the sanctuary. The wall, constructed from solid, reinforced ‘Stone-of-Ages’ – a material designed to withstand siege magic – buckled under his impact. A deafening crack echoed, followed by the shower of pulverized rock as Shen Tulie was embedded, head-first, several feet deep into the masonry. His legs, twitching feebly, were the only part of him still visible.
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the trickle of dust from the shattered wall. The disciples, from the lowest ranks to the grand patriarchs of the Qimen Star-Pavilion, stared. Not at the unconscious Shen Tulie, but at Song Moyou. The junior sister, known for fragile health and negligible talent, had just drawn a supreme spatial array in thin air without incantation or effort. And used it to throw the sect’s most promising talent through a wall.
Moyou, oblivious to the terror and awe she’d inspired, flexed her left wrist. A faint, intricate pattern had bloomed on her skin. It was a spiraling glyph, pulsing with faint violet light, radiating power that felt both ancient and forbidden. The first Abyssal Hexagram. Her past self truly had no sense of timing.
“Hundun,” she called, her voice echoing in the stunned silence. A ripple in the fabric of space beside her, and then a compact, furry form solidified. Hundun, her void-swallowing spirit badger, yawned, revealing a maw lined with rows of crystalline teeth. It blinked its obsidian eyes, then emitted a rumbling burp.
“Did you eat the funeral offerings again?” Moyou asked, not waiting for an answer. Hundun merely wagged its stumpy tail, then tilted its head toward the grand memorial shrine dedicated to Song Moyou. The shrine, a gilded monument adorned with votive candles and memorial markers, hummed with residual essence. Hundun’s snout wrinkled in distaste at the sight of the offerings it hadn't managed to devour.
With another, more potent burp, Hundun released a focused blast of void-force. The air shimmered, sucked inward, then expanded. The memorial shrine, along with its intricate carvings and ancient tablets, simply ceased to exist. There was no explosion, no dust, no sound. It simply… vanished, leaving an empty, circular scorch mark on the floor.
Outside, the sky cracked. The azure firmament of the Cangxi Realm, usually a placid expanse, split open like a fractured mirror. Not with lightning, but with a torrent of blood-red light. The maelstrom of chaotic Qi, usually hidden far below the floating continents, roared into visibility, churning in the fissures above. A crimson beacon, impossibly bright, lanced down, straight towards the Grand Sanctuary.
It struck the remnants of Moyou’s coffin, pulverizing the remaining Whisperwood into glittering dust. When the light faded, a figure stood in the crater where her coffin had been. He was impossibly tall, clad in armor the color of midnight, edged with razor-sharp obsidian. His eyes, the shade of polished jade, glittered with an almost psychotic amusement. A wide, predatory grin split his face, revealing teeth that seemed just a little too sharp.
“Well, well,” Zongzheng Wuyuan, Sovereign of the Calamity Marches, purred, surveying the stunned onlookers, then letting his gaze settle on Moyou. “It seems the corpse has grown legs. No matter. I came to claim it either way.”