"Let go of my wrist, woman." Jiuyou tore his arm free with enough force to fray the silk of his cuff. "I walk under my own power."
"Keep your pride, blind man, but pick up your feet," Hua Qingyan hissed, ducking low under a hanging bundle of dried lake-kelp.
They had tumbled through a rotting service hatch into the floating city's sub-deck. Here, under the gilded pavilions, the air reeked of swamp muck, stale tallow, and bilge water. The floor beneath their boots was not smooth jade but the squelching, fibrous rib-wood of the floating lotus pads. Above them, ceiling planks rattled under the thunderous treads of sect enforcers and the lingering chill of that silken, demonic voice.
Jiuyou swung his iron-tipped wooden cane, mapping the dark. Three feet wide. Rotting timber left, hanging roots right. He hitched his three-stringed sanxian securely against his ribs with a sharp jerk. "You know who that was."
"Demon Lord Xue Zang’s vanguard, or the devil himself," Qingyan said, gliding forward without a whisper of sound. Her breath was steady, disgustingly calm. "He wants to rip the continent's spine out to stop the immortals from drinking mortal souls. The Zenith Council thinks he’s a rabid butcher. He thinks the Council is a pen of blood-ticks. They're both right, and they both pay me handsomely to slit the other’s throat while pretending I belong to them."
"A mercenary vermin," Jiuyou spat, tapping his cane sharply against a slick cluster of wet tendrils.
"A surviving vermin," she countered, smirking in the dark. "The righteous sects harvest commoners’ vitality like barley to feed their longevity pills. Xue Zang wants to smash the leylines and let every mortal starve in the barren dirt just to spite the heavens. Pick your poison, minstrel. I picked gold."
Her boot suddenly paused on the spongy fiber.
A needle-thin whistling sliced through the damp fog.
Jiuyou’s ears twitched. Steel parted the damp air twelve paces back—high, horizontal, coated in bitter scorpion venom. An elite executioner from the Citadel's Secret Adjudication Court, moving without footfalls.
"Target acquired!" a rasping voice echoed.
Instead of drawing steel or throwing a talisman, Qingyan hooked Jiuyou’s shoulder, whipped behind him, and shoved him straight into the oncoming line of flight.
"Block him for me, darling!" she purred with ruthless malice.
A venom-soaked crescent blade spun toward Jiuyou's throat.
Spite flared hot beneath his milky, unseeing stare. The sheer insolence of this viper. Using a blind beggar as meat armor?
Jiuyou refused to duck. He stood square. He slammed his left thumb across the python-skin face of his sanxian, yanking the thickest silk chord upward until it groaned, then releasing it in a mournful, dragging down-stroke.
The note wasn't a war cry. It was an antique lullaby—the sleepy, droning hum of an old grandmother rocking a cradle under a weeping willow.
The strike hit the air like heavy molasses. The masked killer, airborne with twin crescent blades, sneered through blackened iron: "A toy lute against an Earth-Piercing Razor? Die, beggar!"
Then the root-works groaned.
The massive, fibrous structural roots forming the ceiling and walls—veins of the continent-sized lotus pad that had slept for three hundred years beneath layers of human sewage—quivered. The lullaby seeped into the pulp like pure spring rain into parched desert dirt.
Crack!
Wood fibers burst. Thick as tavern barrels, slimy green vines lined with serrated, dripping barbs exploded from the bilge walls.
The assassin’s sneer vanished. His twin blades struck the roots, throwing sparks, but the iron bounced off wet cellulose like twigs off stone.
"What—what formation is this?!" the killer shrieked, scrambling backward on the slimy slats.
"It’s not a formation," Jiuyou murmured, his fingers dancing across the pegs, sliding into an eerie, hypnotic cadence. "It’s just an old song. Plants like it."
The vines surged forward in a churning knot. Four massive tendrils wrapped around the assassin’s boots, hauling him off his feet. He screamed, hacking wildly with his crescents, severing one tendril only for three thicker roots to spear straight through his armor plates. The vines bypassed crushing bone; they lashed his chest, his shoulders, his gaping mouth, sprouting fleshy blossoms ringed with translucent teeth.
The petals clamped shut over his head with a wet, squelching crunch.
The man’s screams muffled into sickening gulps as the carnivorous lotus dragged him into the hollow under-chambers, swallowing him whole into the city's living foundation until nothing remained but a smear of oil and his severed scabbards.
Silence crashed down upon the alley, broken only by the dripping of swamp water and the soft hum of the vibrating sanxian string.
Jiuyou turned his sightless face toward the darkness where Qingyan stood frozen. His mouth twisted into an ugly, biting sneer.
"Next time you push me into an iron blade, woman, I'll make sure the briars feed on your liver first."
Qingyan took a step back, her boots splashing softly in the scum. Her cynicism had cracked, leaving behind raw, naked terror. She stared at the clean wood where a Golden Core killer stood three breaths ago. Her throat bobbed.
"You... you cultivate through gutter noise," she whispered, haughtiness scraped raw from her tone. "You possess no golden core. You simply strummed at him."
"Music is vibration. Pitch shapes the Dao. The Dao belongs to mud and grass, not your bloated sects," Jiuyou said coldly, shifting the neck against his shoulder. "Now take your gold and vanish before I play another verse."
Qingyan stayed planted. She expelled a ragged breath, wiped grime from her cheek, and forced her face back into a flinty sneer, though her knuckles trembled.
"No," she said, reaching inside her dark tunic. "You just proved I picked the right shield. Even if you're a prickly bastard who smells like river mud."
She pulled out a scroll of pale sheepskin and tossed it. Jiuyou caught it out of the air by the sound of its flight.
"I can't read paper, idiot," he snapped, fingering the texture.
"Channel a spark of qi into it. It’s parchment made of spirit-fern fibers," she said. "It speaks in pulses."
Jiuyou scowled, pressing the pad of his index finger against the skin. A thread of viridian pitch sank into the fibers. Instantly, an intricate, thrumming geometry etched itself directly into his mind's perception.
It was a full anatomical chart of the Nine Veins Continent. But instead of flowing rivers of pure heaven-energy, the lines were black, bloated, and grotesque. Thousands of silver needle-points were driven into the veins—strongholds, academies, and grand palaces—sucking the sap out of mortal farmland and villages, refining it into pure immortality elixirs for the righteous sects. Millions died of famine every year so an Elder could live another century.
Jiuyou bared his teeth. "The immortals are parasites."
"And Xue Zang is the cleaver that wants to amputate the limb to kill the lice," Qingyan muttered. "Look closer at the center."
Jiuyou traced the pulsing lines in his mind. The map flared violently. A massive, central leyline node pulsed like a dying heart. It was positioned directly beneath their feet, anchored inside the submerged root-ball of the Drifting Blossom Citadel.
Suddenly, the spiritual map flickered crimson.
A rhythmic, ticking shudder thrummed through the parchment, traveling down through the spongy rib-wood beneath their boots. It wasn't the natural pulse of the earth.
It was a high-grade, heaven-shattering blast-core, buried five hundred feet down in the lake-depths, primed to detonate and tear the vein apart.
"Xue Zang's dogs never came to conquer this tournament," Qingyan whispered, staring at the humming timbers. "The charge is already armed."