The sky bled down across the limestone crags. Ozone scorched the throat, carried on a drone that shook loose pebbles from the terraces. On the flagstones below, disciples, chancellors, and deacons scattered, clutching dry meridians. Their internal reservoirs had hollowed to dust; the bedrock gems pried from masonry had left pitted stone where wealth once anchored power.
“The foundation conduits collapsed!”
“My meridians are parched! I can’t condense a single breath!”
“The perimeter wards are failing!”
High above, clinging to a splintered cornice of the ancestral hall, the heroine shrieked. Ash streaked her silk hems. The destiny-kissed luminescence had drained from her skin, leaving soot, bile, and venom leveled straight down at the figure waist-deep in circling jade tallies.
“Ning Weiying!” she shrilled. “You monstrous leech! You tore the marrow from our peaks! Chancellors! Men of the mountain! Cleave her head off before the thunderhead wipes us out!”
A knot of grey-bearded grandmasters converged below the terrace. Even starved of ambient essence, their Core Formation auras pressed down like iron anvils as they glared toward Weiying. She stood amid cracked flags, enclosed by a thin lattice of salvaged gems. Tongban squatted against her boot heel, belching crushed jade shards and snapping them out of the air with a metallic tongue.
“The Heaven-Severing Array required a priming fee,” Weiying murmured, tilting her chin as Mu Cangyuan watched in grim stillness from the mud basin. She adjusted a bone hairpin, bored by the squawking.
Before the seniors could coalesce their intent into killing arts, an azure flash tore through the crimson murk. Dodging the descending storm discharge and slipping past the dying sect talismans, it struck the plaza like a falling star. White limestone pulverized under the blow. Through the dust cloud strode Chu Tiankuo.
Flame-colored hair whipped across his brow, his tunic billowed with uncoiled vitality, and his stare burned feverish and feral. He swept one arm back. The crater he had hollowed was heaped to the rim with apex beast cores. Some measured the size of millstones, thrumming with feral heat that scorched the fringe of his sleeves.
“Ning Weiying!” Chu Tiankuo shouted down the wailing crowd. He jabbed a soot-stained finger toward the pile. “I bought it. All of it. Every breath of your attention for the next ten years. Exclusive. Your consultation rates, your extortionate audience fees, and whatever lunatic scheme you are feeding.”
He threw his arms out, baring teeth in a starved grin. “Now look at me, Weiying. Acknowledge this. Acknowledge what I bring you.”
Weiying did not lift her chin toward his face. Her fingers merely glided over an abacus mirror, calculating the yield of the beast pile. Beside her, Tongban vibrated so violently its brass joints squeaked.
“Adequate,” she said over the shouting, bypassing Chu Tiankuo's posturing. “This, added to what Cangyuan surrendered from the Crimson Dawn Vault, covers the central warding costs. Tongban, start feeding the perimeter. Lock down the exterior bastions.”
The toad opened its cavernous gullet with a grinding croak. Runes blazed across its metal belly, spooling along the fractured flagstones. The mound of monster relics dwindled, marrow drained away to nourish deep sub-mountain conduits. Weiying tossed four copper sigils from the Mu clan into the furrow lines.
A bass vibration shook marrow and masonry alike as the ancient mountain bastion woke. A thick green hemisphere shot upward from the boundary trenches, ringing the inner compound in solid emerald light. The concussive displacement hurled charging seniors and Lin Feifei skidding twenty paces back across broken slate.
They crouched on the raw mountain rock, locked on the exterior side of the rampart while the sky split wide above them.
“No! Weiying!” Lin Feifei scrambled upright, beating bleeding fists against the emerald gloss. Her qi sputtered against it in dull sparks. “Lower this dome! You cannot leave us out here under the clouds!”
Weiying looked through the translucent glaze. “Sect wards shelter paid sect assets,” she said coldly. “You spent your balance on grandstanding. The ledger does not cover your frontage.”
Black thunder crashed from the crimson ceiling, thick as a cedar trunk. Diverted by the funded ward, the strike veered sideways, slamming into the huddle of retainers flanking the heroine. Three deacons and four disciples vaporized where they knelt, leaving only charred footprints on the granite. Lin Feifei dropped to her knees, choking on ash.
Weiying tallied the casualty points without blinking. Karma targeted the debtors first—those who had fed on the chosen one's inflated providence. Tiankuo's spoils and Cangyuan's ancestral tokens had settled her own immediate toll.
Then a gold spear dropped through the vortex. Unhindered by the jade dome, it pierced the firmament at absolute speed—not seeking slaughter, but foreclosure.
The golden bolt struck Weiying directly in the chest.