“Form the Cloud-Cleaving Wedge!” Kuang Yu’s roar shook mortar from the fractured vault. “Leave the woman’s core intact for interrogation. As for the cripple—hew his limbs and let the crows finish what my punishment started!” Two hundred swordsmen in silk of azure and polished silver descended the breach, steel drawn, boots crushing the pulverized stone. Their blade hums intertwined into a piercing resonance that sheared the remaining ferns to ribbons. At the center of the stepped basin, Fan Zhirui remained crouched beside Nie Chuyin. Her breath rasped against his collarbone, hot and shallow, her blood staining the knee of his rough homespun trousers. He did not rise immediately. Instead, he scooped a palmful of sour, unrefined loam from beneath an upturned foundation block. It was choked with tangled, yellowed thistle and coarse crabgrass—the filthy, stubborn detritus no proper botanist would deign to touch. [ERROR: Unregistered flora detected in host meridian pathway.] [Foreign entity: Common Blow-Ball (Taraxacum vulgarum). System rejected. Purge advised.] Zhirui spat a globule of phlegm into the dirt. With a blunt fingernail, he carved a crooked, intersecting stroke across his own forearm, smearing his blood into the dirt cake. “Purge yourself,” he whispered. He stood, shielding Chuyin behind his broad back. In his left hand he held no hoe, no sacred stem, and certainly no sword. He held a lone, desiccated seed-head, brittle and pale as sheep wool. Kuang Yu halted twenty paces away, his greatsword—the celebrated *Frost-Bite Apex*—resting upon his shoulder. Its edge gleamed with five cold-forged spirit veins, rippling like ice water. The elder’s thin lips peeled back from tea-stained teeth. “Look upon him,” Kuang Yu projected his voice, dripping with theatrical pity for the retinue behind him. “Once the favored pupil of our outer hall. Now he cowers in a ditch, cradling weeds like a destitute widow. Zhirui, is this the great harvest you promised when you renounced our Dao? You abandoned the noble metal of heaven to play in swine muck!” The swordsmen chuckled, a unified chorus. Several young adepts tilted their chins, swords twitching in eagerness to harvest merit points. “Elder, permit me to sever his tongue,” yelled a youth at the right flank, his scabbard ringing. “A swordless cur has no right to breathe the same air as the Ascendancy!” “Granted,” Kuang Yu sneered. “Make it clean, Boyan. Do not stain your silk.” Zhirui did not blink. He lifted the fuzzy dandelion stem to his mouth. He blew. A cloud of soft white fluff separated from the stalk. It drifted upward, caught in the hot drafts rising from the cracked earth. To the Ascendancy swordsmen, it looked utterly pathetic: forty or fifty downy motes floating through the humid stench of the ruin, wobbling on the breeze like stray goose feathers. Boyan laughed aloud as he lunged forward, executing the *Gliding Hawk Slash*. His silver blade drew a flawless crescent of light, straight toward Zhirui’s throat. A single tuft of white fluff drifted across the arc. The moment the seed’s minute, barbed hairs touched the cold steel, the blade’s hum ceased. Not silenced. It died. A bloom of coarse, rust-red crumb erupted where the fluff landed. Within the span of a single heartbeat, the corroding decay chewed outward along the blade’s fuller. The polished sky-iron turned porous, pitted, and brittle as dried clay. Boyan’s smirk froze. “What is—?” He tried to redirect the blade, but the sudden mass of crumbling oxidation threw off his momentum. The fungal rot struck the sword’s core formation—and the compressed qi inside found nowhere to flow. *BANG!* The steel weapon detonated in Boyan’s grip. Shards of powdery rust and jagged amber flakes blew back into his face. The youth shrieked, clutching bloody sockets, his fine silk shredded into bloody rags as he tumbled backward into the dirt. Silence seized the crater. Kuang Yu’s smile vanished, his greatsword lowering an inch. “A poison trick. Swordsmen! Deploy the Wind-Scouring Array! Disperse those spores!” “Spores?” Zhirui’s voice was dead, devoid of heat, yet it carried over the groaning masonry. “They aren’t spores, Kuang Yu. They are weeds. The kind you pull from your paved courtyards because they break your precious marble.” Zhirui dragged his boots through the mud, stepping deliberately toward the silver ranks. With every stride, the cracked earth under his hemp sandals groaned. Patches of dull, common dandelions burst through the fissures in their thousands, shooting up from the poisoned soil by the sheer, unbridled vitality of a creature that needed no divine dew to thrive. They sprouted, matured, and went to seed in three seconds, whipped into a blizzard by the very wind-arts Kuang Yu’s men had panicked into conjuring. “No, wait!” an older swordsman shouted, swinging his rapier to deflect the billowing cloud. The instant metal touched fluff, the rot spread. *Crack. Hiss. Crunch.* A cascade of deafening pops echoed across the terraces. Across the entire two-hundred-man formation, pristine heavenly swords were transformed into brittle, corroded honeycombs. Beautiful scabbards warped, bursting open as their internal clasps rusted into flaking crusts. Runes carved with decades of meticulous spirit-ink sizzled, choked to death by ravenous fungal threads hiding inside the weed’s downy heads. “My blade! My ancestral blade!” “The qi is backfiring! Cast them away! Cast them—*ahhh!*” Fighters hurled their ruined hilts into the muck. The sudden loss of their bonded spiritual weapons sent backlashes of blood spurting from dozens of throats. Men who had strutted like immortal sovereigns stumbled, wailing, slipping on the slick mud as their pride turned to brown dust between their empty palms. They scrambled on hands and knees, scrambling through the muck like hogs in a sty, gagging on the dust of their own exploded treasures. Kuang Yu retreated three rapid paces, his boots sliding in the mud. He lifted *Frost-Bite Apex* in a trembling two-handed guard, pouring pure lightning qi through the hilt to incinerate the floating cloud before it could land. Three dandelion seeds landed square on the crossguard. The elder gasped. The bright azure lightning instantly turned the color of stagnant puddle water. Deep, cancerous pits opened along the spine of his prized greatsword. The metal shrieked like a dying horse as ochre scales peeled away in thick chunks, falling to splatter in the slush. “Monster!” Kuang Yu choked out, his arrogance crumbling into naked terror. “This is witchcraft! You have betrayed the sacred lineage of the sword!” “You broke my core because it wasn’t shaped like a sword,” Zhirui said, closing the distance, his footsteps slow, heavy, inexorable. His shadow stretched long across the ruined soldiers writhing in the dirt. “Now look at your hands.” Kuang Yu dropped the remains of his hilt just before it disintegrated into a shower of brown grit. He stumbled backward, tripping over a fallen swordsman, his immaculate robes soaking in foul agricultural runoff. Zhirui stopped four feet away. In the young cultivator’s eyes, there was no mad glee—only the chilling, absolute resolve of an exterminator stepping into an infested granary. Kuang Yu’s chest heaved. Trapped, stripped of his pride and weapon, his hand plunged desperately into his inner sleeve. He pulled out an octagonal jade plaque bound in dried, blackened vine. He squeezed the jade until it fractured, screaming at the top of his lungs: “Grandmaster Ouyang! Save me! The vessel has broken its tether!”

Rust and Dandelions