Zongyi’s casual backhand sent Mo Luan skidding across the blood-stained arena, a jarring clash of metal and bone announcing her impact with a pile of discarded training automatons. The remaining cult operatives, cloaked in midnight-hued garments that seemed to absorb the arena’s pale light, froze. They were elite, hardened killers of the Iron-Petal Synod, accustomed to terror, but not to their interim-leader being swatted like a bothersome moth by their lost master.
“Dirt,” Zongyi repeated, not to Mo Luan, but to the air itself, as if the very concept offended his sensibilities. He nudged a tiny, wilted petal with the toe of his boot. “And now more of it, tracked in by… these things.” He gestured dismissively at the frozen assassins, then at the thousands of orthodox sect members encircling the arena, their faces pale masks of fear and impotent rage. Their severed steel lay in rusting heaps from his earlier bout of weed-clearing.
Elder Teng Jian, pale and shaking, found his voice. “Monster! He’s the ancient butcher! He’ll corrupt this entire land!” He tried to rally the weaponless masses, but his voice cracked against dry teeth.
The Synod vanguards, recovering from their shock, snapped into action. “Master, we must retrieve you!” bellowed an armored brute whose carapace seemed forged from petrified briars. “The Synod awaits your return!” He lunged, not at Zongyi, but at the paralyzed orthodox seniors, attempting to batter a trench through the weaponless ranks. A torrent of ink-black energy erupted from his fist, churning the flagstones to powder.
At the same moment, a dozen senior cultivators, fueled by panic or pure idiocy, launched themselves towards Zongyi. Having lost their blades, they resorted to bare hands, their knuckles flaring with elemental aura. One, a veteran of the Blazeforge Clan, howled as he condensed an orb of roaring combustion the size of a wagon wheel, slinging it directly at Zongyi’s head.
“The orchids!” Zongyi barked, horrified not by the burning sphere, but by the scorched drift heading toward a rare, four-petaled ‘Crimson Whisper’ planted near the rim. He instinctively raised a hand, not to defend himself, but to shield the delicate bloom that lay just beyond the arena’s edge. His gaze locked onto the delicate petals, ignoring the incoming blaze entirely.
Before the heat could singe a hem of Zongyi’s coarse smock, Luo Jinxi stepped across the tile. She had watched the chaos unfold with an unnerving calm, her eyes tracking Zongyi’s every minute movement. She saw his alarm, recognized the implicit instruction. Protect the garden. Ensure its perfect form.
“No,” Jinxi’s voice was a low, resonant hum, devoid of fear, filled only with an eerie certainty. She stepped forward, planting her bare feet into the shattered paving stones. Her gardener’s robes, stained with earth and sweat, billowed around her as a pulse of energy, dense and ancient, erupted from her form. It wasn't the searing heat of conventional Qi, but a deep, throbbing pressure that felt like the very roots of the world shifting.
The burning sphere from the Blazeforge patriarch faltered mid-flight. Its outer corona twisted inward, suffocating as if starved of breath. Jinxi raised one dirt-caked palm. A tendril of shimmering, verdant force lashed out like a whip, snapping around the shrinking combustion. The flare snuffed out instantly, leaving only a flake of gray ash that scattered upon the breeze.
“Uneven growth,” Jinxi muttered, her appraisal cutting across the orthodox seniors and Synod infiltrators alike. “Too much deadwood choking the bed.”
Her feet rooted deeper, the cracks in the arena floor widening with an audible groan. From these fissures, from every tiny crevice in the ground, a horrifying botanical storm erupted. Not mere plants, but constructs of pure, solidified Qi, mimicking the most aggressive, parasitic flora. Thick, crimson briars, barbed with needle-sharp thorns, exploded upwards, snaking through the air with terrifying speed. They outpaced any refined lunging blade and ripped through spiritual barriers like wet parchment.
The bladeless seniors found themselves netted before they could step back. The vines wrapped around their arms, their legs, their torsos, binding them with an inescapable grip. Jinxi, her expression serene, moved with an almost leisurely grace. She didn’t strike to kill, but to reshape. A vine lashed out, catching a screaming senior’s left arm, then another, snapping both into exact, mirror-like angles. A sickening crack echoed as his humerus and radius were snapped into perfect, agonizing alignment, his body contorted into a grotesque, symmetrical bow.
“For balance,” Jinxi murmured, her eyes distant, as if viewing a particularly stubborn shrub. Another elder, a plump man with a flowing white beard, found his two legs bent inwards, forcing his knees to meet with bone-shattering force. He shrieked, but his cries were drowned out by the rustling of the blood-vines and the snapping of bone.
The Synod marauders fared no better. The briar-clad brute who had charged the sect ranks was hoisted five paces into the air by twisting scarlet coils. They bound his limbs, then his neck, then his torso, compressing his formidable physique into a compact, perfectly symmetrical block of agony. He struggled, roaring, but the vines only tightened, extracting his Qi with every violent spasm, leaving him withered and weak.
Mo Luan dragged herself from the twisted iron automatons, spitting crimson grit. What unfolded was not the old sovereign’s crushing bludgeon, but an ancient, terrifying application of canopy cultivation. Jinxi was not sparring; she was pruning livestock.
The arena fell still, an unholy arbor of living timber where every captive cultivator hung twisted into precise balance. Their Qi, their very life force, was slowly, agonizingly, drained into the earth beneath Jinxi’s feet, feeding the insatiable network of vines.
Only Elder Teng Jian remained loose on the flags. Stripped of steel, he forced his dantian to burn dry, condensing his remaining cultivation into flattened fingertips that gleamed emerald green. This was the suicidal edge-form of the Azure-Terrace, meant to sever stone and marrow even if his meridians burst under the pressure.
He lunged past the girl, aiming straight for Zongyi, who was still crouched over a potted stem. “Monster! Perish!” Teng Jian drove his jade-tinted spear-hand toward the groundskeeper's ribs.
Before his fingertips grazed the rough burlap smock, two callous-roughened fingers pinched his wrist. Jinxi had stepped into the line of motion without rustling the gravel. Her grip locked like cured ironwood, and the green brilliance sputtering across his hand faded instantly into her skin. Teng Jian gasped as his momentum ceased on the spot.
Jinxi held him effortlessly, his arm completely paralyzed, his Qi flowing into her like water into a sponge. She turned her head slightly, her gaze serene, looking back at her grumpy mentor. “Master,” she asked, her voice calm amidst the screams of the harvested, “This one is quite… fibrous. Should I compost him, or will he make good mulch for the new bed?”