The scent of cedar and dried ink filled Elder Lin’s private study, bitter against the back of the throat. The heavy larch door clicked shut behind Feng Zihuan, cutting off his indignant shouts about delicate constitutions. Kuang Mian lay motionless on the brocade chaise, monitoring the elder's footsteps against the floorboards.
“Awake, Blood-Ash Sovereign,” Elder Lin’s voice, devoid of its usual booming theatrics, was a low, guttural rasp. He tossed a glittering shard onto the marble table beside her. It spun across the grain, the polished surface reflecting her own knuckles frozen in the forbidden Nine-Grave Vault-Breaker seal.
She kept her pulse down to twenty slow beats a minute.
Elder Lin chuckled, a dry, brittle sound. “Oh, the theatrics. Impressive, for a common demonic dog. But the Truth-Seeking Soul Mirror, even shattered, does not lie. That seal… it is not one taught to a mere grunt, is it? You hold a rank, perhaps. A general, a captain? Or merely a thief with ambition far beyond your station?”
Kuang Mian let her eyelids flutter open, squeezing out moisture from the corners. She pushed herself up, clutching the silken fabric of her robes to her chest, a picture of delicate terror. “Elder Lin… I… I don’t understand,” she whispered, her voice a reedy tremor.
“Don’t understand?” Lin’s lips curled into a sneer. He leaned closer, his breath smelling faintly of spiced tea. “Let me make it clear, then. You are a spy. A demonic infiltrator. And I, Elder Lin, hold the proof that will see your head mounted on the Celestial Crane Peak’s highest spire.” He paused, letting the words sink in. “Unless, of course, you prove useful.”
Kuang Mian let two deliberate drops spill over her lower lashes. “Useful… how?”
“The Patriarch Tuo Buyan,” Lin stated, his gaze unblinking. “That senile old viper has been undermining my every effort. He’s a parasite, clinging to power. I want his personal seal. The one he uses to authorize sect expenditures, to approve cultivation contracts, to manage his entire network of influence. Bring it to me, unbroken, within three sunrises. And I will ensure this ‘evidence’ of your demonic taint conveniently vanishes.”
Kuang Mian stared at him through wet lashes, tallying the figures in her head. Tuo Buyan’s seal. A key to his vast resources, no doubt. But more importantly, a tool of crippling political damage. Stealing a senior patriarch's chop was a complicated endeavor compared to pocketing unsecured night-pearls.
Three sunrises gave her very little margin for error. Yet Elder Lin continued.
“Do this, little spy, and perhaps you’ll even be allowed to live out your days somewhere quiet. Far from the righteous wrath that will descend upon this peak when the eight-figure tax haul arrives next week. I, as its sole overseer, assure you, the sect will be in no mood for mercy.”
A ten-million-stone treasury consignment. The phrase rang like gold ingots clattering into an iron chest. Her throat worked as she swallowed down an involuntary grin. The modest reserves she had siphoned thus far were mere pocket change by comparison. A few spatial rings of Jade Essences and a raided herb plot made a fragile foundation for safety. Ten million stones meant an estate fortified with grade-nine boundary arrays, a private hot spring, and an army of guards. It was enough to buy her own small, sovereign continent, if she so desired. Enough to never hear the word ‘plotline’ again.
Running away with her current stash would be financial malpractice, abandoning an imperial feast for a moldy bun. Elder Lin had handed her an invitation to the vault.
“I… I will try,” she choked out, her voice still trembling, though now with a different kind of intensity. “I will try, Elder Lin. Just… please, don’t tell anyone.” She lowered her head, allowing her hair to curtain her face, concealing the avaricious gleam that had replaced the tears in her eyes. “I am so scared.”
Lin scoffed. “You should be. Now go. And remember, three sunrises. After that, this shard will find its way to the High Council.”
Kuang Mian stumbled out of Elder Lin’s study, her shoulders hunched, her hands clasped tightly together. She dabbed her sleeve against her cheeks, making wet, sniffling sounds. Her gait was that of a girl utterly broken by fear and humiliation. She knew exactly which courtyard Feng Zihuan would be pacing in, consumed by his self-righteous worry.
Around the corner of the Sunken Lily Garden, Feng Zihuan stood pacing beside the koi pool. His white sleeves swept wide as he strode toward her, brows pulled taut. “Yulu! What did that venomous old snake say to you? Did he dare to accuse you again? To soil your pure spirit with his wretched suspicions?” He reached for her elbow, but she shrank out of range, dodging the touch.
She hid her face behind her cuff, emitting a ragged sob instead of words. She slipped past him, a ghost of misery, leaving him sputtering with frustrated fury in her wake. The boy would spend the evening writing furious letters of reprimand to Lin, entirely out of her way.
Her steps, though appearing hesitant and weak, carried her with a singular, resolute purpose towards the winding path leading to Patriarch Tuo Buyan’s decrepit, yet strategically located, abode. Dusk turned the mountain ridges purple, but Kuang Mian only calculated transit times and cart capacities.
She found Tuo Buyan exactly where she expected him: hunched over a cracked tea set, stirring a murky brew with a twig, surrounded by a mountain of meticulously organized, yet seemingly random, ledgers. He looked up as she entered, his rheumy eyes twinkling with an unnerving lucidity.
“The little bird returns, not with a worm, but a whole nest, I presume?” Tuo Buyan rasped, a knowing smirk playing on his lips. “Elder Lin has made his demands, hasn’t he? And in doing so, revealed the true prize.”
Kuang Mian nodded, abandoning her sorrowful act instantly. “He wants your chop in exchange for his silence about the vault seal. More importantly, he's managing the ten-million-stone tax convoy arriving next week.”
Tuo Buyan’s grin widened, revealing a missing tooth. He reached beneath a pile of ancient scrolls and produced a rolled parchment, slick with age. He unfurled it, revealing a detailed map of the Jade-Spire Continent’s river routes, marked with small, precise Xs. “The tax fleet. A heavily guarded convoy, traversing the Serpent’s Coil River. That vast haul is indeed a worthy prize, my dear Bai Yulu. But to pull off something of this scale… we’ll need more than a simple diversion.” His gnarled finger tapped a spot on the map, a narrow gorge marked with a skull-and-crossbones symbol. “We need a distraction so catastrophic, so utterly consuming, that the entire sect will turn its eyes away from a mere treasury raid.” He looked at Kuang Mian, his eyes piercing. “Someone important must die.”
He slid the map across the table. “Either the arrogant boy, or the rival elder.”