The four-armed idol bent over the altar, staring at the pearl floating at its center. The god was dead—only a shell remained, its soul long gone. Yet strange light flickered inside its hollow skull. Summoning inscriptions. Active and humming.
The great bell hissed in Su Yan's mind. "The two stone dragons were mesmerized by the idol's incense. Those prayers they chanted were summoning rites. They summoned themselves to death. Once their souls left their bodies, that pearl shattered their spirits and harvested the undying essence."
The method was monstrous. Carve summoning inscriptions inside a god's head. Wrap the idol in powerful incense. Let the rites draw living souls near. The incense would mesmerize them, make them devout. They would kneel, chant the rites, and—*pop*—their skulls would burst. Souls would fly free, only to be ground to dust by the altar's furnace, leaving behind only the tiniest fragments of undying spirit essence.
Ten thousand souls for one pill.
"This is dark cultivation," Su Yan whispered.
He looked up at the temple floating between the five peaks. "Yuan Qi is still in there."
"He's dead," the bell said. "Accept it. We can't save him."
Su Yan said nothing. From the sky, he had seen dozens of altars scattered across these mountains. If every altar had an idol like this one, the scale of the killing was unimaginable.
"Strange," the bell muttered. "Those summoning inscriptions had errors. A true ancient cultivator wouldn't make such mistakes."
Su Yan frowned. A sword immortal, making beginner's mistakes?
Then the pill matured.
A fragrance unlike anything Su Yan had ever known drifted from the altar. It didn't reach his nose. It reached his *soul*. His spirit suddenly hungered, desperate to devour that floating pearl.
The two remaining stone dragons had been mourning their brothers. Now they forgot everything. They lunged for the altar, roaring.
"The pill is mine!"
They tore at each other in midair. Incense offerings became flying swords, cutting stone scales, sparking against golden bodies. One dragon pinned the other to the altar and reached for the pearl.
"I feel it—eat this, and I become immortal!"
*Pop.*
Its skull burst. The dragon beneath it also burst. Their souls rose, still fighting, still screaming about the pill—then the summoning inscriptions in the four-armed idol's head pulled them inside.
Silence.
Su Yan stood frozen. In moments, four deadly enemies had destroyed themselves.
He approached the altar carefully. "Uncle Bell, what does the Myriad Souls Pill do?"
"It heals Primordial Spirit wounds. That's all I know. My era was already the decline of qi cultivation. Much was lost."
The bell's voice grew quiet. Its master, a genius beyond measure, had disappeared after sealing the woman in the coffin. Three thousand years. No word.
Su Yan reached the altar. The chanting of ten thousand worshippers assaulted his consciousness. He almost knelt. Without his divine sense, he would have ended up like the stone dragons.
He stabilized his mind and pressed forward. The Grand Unity Daoyin Art had strengthened his spirit beyond ordinary cultivators. Even this dense incense couldn't break him.
He leaped onto the altar and snatched the Myriad Souls Pill.
"Can ordinary people eat this?" Su Yan asked.
"I don't know. A-Yan, something feels wrong. We should leave."
Su Yan swallowed the pill before he could taste it. Then he saw the four-armed idol's fingers twitch.
He understood instantly what he'd missed.
"The stone dragons' souls were absorbed into the idol!"
He shot upward. The idol's two massive hands slammed together where he'd stood a heartbeat before.
"The shell had no soul. Now it does!"
Su Yan kicked off the great bell, soaring higher. The idol's other two hands swatted at him like flies. He stomped on its face and dove for the altar, grabbed the bell's nose, and sprinted away.
The idol roared. It lifted the entire altar—a structure of impossible weight—and hurled it.
The altar screamed through the air, broke the sound barrier, and slammed down behind Su Yan. The shockwave threw him and the bell high into the air, surrounded by shattering boulders.
Su Yan hit the ground rolling. Behind him, the four-armed god crouched and launched itself in pursuit. The great bell's chimes went hoarse. "A-Yan, faster! It's gaining!"
Sword-length blades of incense qi sliced through the air behind him, cutting trenches in the earth. Su Yan turned mid-sprint and unleashed his sword qi—a blazing arc that forced the idol to defend. In that instant of hesitation, Su Yan didn't run forward.
He dug straight down and buried himself.
The idol soared past, unable to find him. It turned its fury on Prefect Zhou's men and the underworld spirits instead. From his hole in the ground, Su Yan watched through his Heavenly Eye as the dead rose from fresh corpses and drifted toward the five peaks.
"All those strong souls," the bell said. "They'll ripen more pills. And wake more idols."
Su Yan climbed out, dusted himself off, and looked toward the great temple. "We need to get Yuan Qi out. Now."
"He's dead. Let's go home and build him a shrine."
The great temple hung between the five peaks, radiating golden light and immortal aura. Inside its main hall, a figure in white sat upon a dais, white eyebrows and beard floating in a wind that wasn't there. Sword-like rays of light orbited him like a crown of blades.
He spoke: "One cultivates the Jade Pivot method. When true qi flows forward, the body feels pleasant. When it flows backward, it aches. So the student flows forward. Years pass. No progress. Classmates advance rapidly. The student asks—why does following the path fail?"
The immortal smiled. "Follow heaven's way, and you remain mortal. Rebel against heaven's way, and you become immortal. This is the truth of cultivation."
The hall erupted in murmurs of awe.
"Today I grant you the True Dao of the Jade Pivot," the white-robed figure said. "How much you gain depends on your fate."
He closed his eyes and began to recite. Below him, humans, yao, spirits, and even a few villagers sat enraptured, memorizing every word.
Among them, a massive serpent coiled near the front, tail twitching with excitement.
Yuan Qi had found his immortal.