“D-draw that back,” Yansheng stammered, his fingers tightening on the chipped hilt of his weapon until his knuckles turned chalky. The steel rang with a low, ravenous vibration.
Young Master Lin tilted his head, smiling with the detached amusement of a man observing an ant beneath a burning glass. He did not thrust the spear. Instead, the crimson mist curling off its point drifted down, eating tiny, sizzling pits into the packed dirt.
“Not here, sweeper,” Lin said smoothly. “A dog killed in a ditch robs the stands of their spectacle. I want your blood splashed across the grand ring, where the entire sect can see your senior sister weep for you.” Lin spun the weapon behind his back, tucking it under his silk sash with casual precision. “Enjoy your remaining days. Savor the dust.”
He turned and dissolved into the ring’s reeking shadows, leaving behind only the lingering tang of curdled copper.
*“He carries the Nine-Viper Stance,”* Yuwen Zhan hissed inside Yansheng’s skull, the phantom form shimmering with icy green fire. *“His thrusts bypass spiritual flesh entirely to rot the marrow. You cannot parry that lance with what you know now. We must find the record of the Sun-Severing Counter before the tournament bracket locks at dawn.”*
Midnight descended over the Obsidian Swallow Institute in suffocating silence.
High above the lower dormitories, perched on the sheer face of the northern bluff, stood the Jade Archives. Its doors were slabs of polished nephrite held shut by archaic sigils that glowed with the pale, sickly luminescence of dying embers.
Mei Chulan knelt beside the lower lock mechanism, her slender fingers tracing an intricate silver stylus across the seam. Her midnight-blue sleeves were tied back with braided cord, revealing the pale curve of her wrists. “The night patrols change every three-quarters of an hour,” she murmured, her voice barely carrying past Yansheng’s ear. “If the seals flare, the array will alert the Law Enforcement Pavilion instantly.”
“I… I should be the one taking this risk, Senior Sister,” Yansheng whispered, shifting to shield her back. His voice snagged, dry as sand. “If you are seized, they will strip your rank.”
“Be quiet and hold the light-dampener,” she countered gently, though the curve of her lips in the moonlight was warm. “You saved Dalong today. You think I would abandon you to fight a madman alone?”
With a soft click of displaced stone, the nephrite door drifted inward.
Inside, aisles of petrified wood bookshelves rose toward vaulted ceilings lost in gloom. Thousands of jade slips and rotting bamboo scrolls rested upon velvet that had turned to grey dust centuries ago. The air tasted of desiccated cedar and cold earth.
They moved deep into the restricted historical annex, guided by the phantom general’s urgent directions. Yuwen Zhan hovered near the upper shelves, his translucent hand pointing toward a recessed alcove carved into the rock wall.
“There,” Chulan murmured, standing on tiptoe to reach a soot-stained cylinder of blackened pigskin. Her shoulder brushed against Yansheng’s chest.
He froze. Up close, the fragrance of crushed plum blossoms radiating from her hair seemed to drown out the oppressive stench of decay filling the mountain. His pulse thudded against his ribs like a trapped sparrow.
“Ch-Chulan,” he began, the syllables snagging in his dry mouth. He had never dared speak it without her title before.
She paused, the cylinder resting beneath her fingertips, and turned her head. Her dark eyes reflected the dim silver glow of the distant moonbeam slicing through the clerestory window. “Yes, Yansheng?”
His tongue felt thick, heavy with years of silence, with years of enduring kicks in the dirt while she alone had offered him salves and gentle words. “I… when this ends… if I survive the ring… I want to—”
*Click.*
A copper tripwire, invisible beneath the dust, snapped taut under his heel.
“Move!” Chulan shoved him sideways just as a battery of concealed wall-tubes hissed.
Scores of blackened steel needles sprayed across the aisle with the force of ballista bolts. Yansheng crashed against a wooden cabinet, knocking the pigskin cylinder free. The case hit the stone floor, splitting open to reveal a brittle parchment that unrolled under the moonlight.
Before Yansheng could gather his breath, the flagstones beneath the central rotunda groaned. A ten-foot statue of a bygone sect guardian—carved from solid, spirit-dense thunder-slate—ground to life. Its eyes flared with harsh cerulean malice. It drew a massive, four-bladed poleaxe from its back, the weapon humming with concentrated kinetic arrays that threatened to flatten the room with sheer gravitational force.
“Intruders,” a hollow, mechanical rumble grated from the automaton’s stone chest. “Treason punished by summary execution.”
“Yansheng, look at the scroll!” Chulan cried, drawing two thin willow-leaf daggers from her sleeves as she darted left to draw the statue’s gaze.
Yansheng pinned the edge of the unrolled parchment. Ink written in human blood retained its crimson hue even after five hundred years. The characters danced before his sight, describing an forbidden ritual: *The Blood-Lotus Ascension.*
*“Look at the sacrificial medium,”* Yuwen Zhan barked, his spectral armor clattering in mental agitation. *“A female born under the Frost-Weaving star, bearing the Pure-Yin marrow. To seize the dynasty’s stolen divinity, the practitioner must drain her heart-blood during the apex of the heavenly alignment!”*
Yansheng felt a freezing nausea churn in his stomach. Bai Yueli was born under that exact celestial sign. Lin had never sought to marry her out of clan prestige or genuine desire; she was cattle fattened for slaughter. He meant to bleed her dry in the ritual grounds beneath the arena finals.
“You arrogant pile of rock!” Chulan’s shout shattered his realization.
The stone guardian swung its enormous poleaxe in a devastating horizontal arc. The concussive shockwave blew apart three rows of preserved bookcases, splintering mahogany into deadly shrapnel. Chulan leaped clear, but the displacement threw her against a stone pillar, knocking the wind from her lungs.
The automaton stepped over the debris, raising the heavy head high to bring it down upon her defenseless form.
Something inside Yansheng snapped.
No more stuttering. No more hesitating while others bled for him.
The Starving Heaven Cleaver shrieked, an ear-splitting howl of pure, unadulterated gluttony that rattled the very foundations of the peak. Black miasma erupted from the rusted edge, enveloping Yansheng’s arms in coiling bands of spectral sinew.
He did not run; he simply ceased to be where he had stood.
He reappeared mid-air above the automaton’s shoulders, bringing the rusted edge down directly upon the descending haft.
*Clang!*
The impact sounded like a bell dropped from heaven. The automaton’s kinetic arrays flared to maximum intensity, attempting to crush Yansheng into paste, but the black miasma surged hungrily into the four-bladed shaft. The heavy metal did not merely snap—it was unmade. Crackling veins of pure spiritual ore were sucked straight into the weapon’s corroded iron core.
A torrential flood of purified spiritual force reversed through the blade’s handle, slamming directly into Yansheng’s shattered dantian.
The blocked pathways within his chest, calcified and dead for three agonizing years, ruptured open under the immense pressure. The agony was blinding, white-hot and incandescent, but behind the pain came an intoxicating rush of flowing power. The dead meridians cleared, uncoiling like frozen rivers thawing in spring. True qi, thick and golden, roared through his limbs once more.
With a final crunch of breaking stone, the drained weapon disintegrated into useless dust. Yansheng landed smoothly, kicking off the automaton’s chest with newly restored force that sent the multi-ton stone behemoth toppling backward into the ruined shelves.
“Chulan!” Yansheng shouted, his voice ringing out clear, steady, and without a trace of stammer.
He gripped her around the waist, pulling her toward the exit as the outer courtyard alarms finally began their brassy wail. They slipped through the narrow gap in the nephrite door and tumbled out into the mountain mist, sliding down the treacherous gravel slope until they reached the sheltering shadow of the bamboo grove.
“We… we made it,” Yansheng breathed, turning to her, his chest heaving with renewed vitality. “Chulan, my meridians… they’re open. I can fight him. I can stop—”
Her body went limp against his chest.
Yansheng steadied her shoulders, his triumph freezing into sheer horror. Her face was ashen, her lips tinted a faint, bruised violet. Protruding from beneath the embroidered collar of her robe, just above her collarbone, sat a single, hair-thin needle from the archive’s trap, pulsing with a foul, oily green sheen that was spreading along her neck.
“Yansheng…” she murmured, her eyelids fluttering weakly as her hand slipped from his sleeve. “Cold…”