The attack on the phoenix tree ended as fast as it began, but the damage was staggering. The ancient tree had been stripped nearly bare. Of the nuo masters who had gathered in its branches, fewer than one in ten survived.
Li Yingzhu and her husband, Guo Yue, were among the lucky ones. They looked around at the wounded—some missing limbs, others half-dissolved by the ravenous flesh—and felt their stomachs turn.
The phoenix was gone. So were the surviving spirit birds. The tree stood scarred and silent.
"That peasant was right," Li Yingzhu murmured. "But how did he know? And how did he get onto Mount Jiuyi?"
The mountain was supposed to be sealed. The imperial guards watched every path. Yet Su Yan had walked in as if the gates were open.
The couple went looking for him, but Su Yan had vanished. So had Veyon, Elder Xiao, and Guo Xiaodie.
* * *
"So you're the Demon King Xu? You're a demon?" Guo Xiaodie circled Su Yan, studying him with open curiosity.
Su Yan considered this. "My name is Su Yan. And I'm probably human."
Guo Xiaodie bumped his shoulder with hers, grinning. "Don't be so sure. Here, let me check if you've got a tail."
She reached behind him. Su Yan yelped and swatted her hand away.
Guo Xiaodie laughed. "You definitely have a little tail hidden in there!"
Su Yan's face burned. "I do not—"
Veyon explained the misunderstanding about Su Yan entering the Dao under the phoenix tree, and Guo Xiaodie let it go with a shrug. She was the kind of girl who didn't dwell on things. What she did dwell on was the mystery of the crawling flesh.
"Let's find where it came from," she said, grabbing a stick and poking at a lump of dead meat. The stench made Su Yan's eyes water.
The imperial guards were already cutting the flesh into chunks and hurling them off the cliff. Su Yan knelt to examine a piece. Inside, he found rows of tooth-like bones. Whatever this thing was, it had been alive.
The great bell's voice rang in his mind, uneasy. "A-Yan, the thing that attacked the phoenix was the same god I sealed at Little Stone Mountain. It's working with the woman in the coffin. I scared it off, but I'm still wounded. I need qi and blood—lots of it—to erase the woman's palm print from my surface."
"You'll seal it again," Su Yan whispered.
"When I'm whole, yes. But I'm not whole." The bell groaned. "Where did that Zhou Qiyun go? If I could just absorb a little more from him..."
Su Yan shook his head and walked to the cliff's edge. The flesh had climbed from a lake at the mountain's foot—the same lake that served as the gateway to the Abyss of Cangwu.
Guo Xiaodie leaped off the cliff without warning. She used the Guo family's Cloud-Ladder Sky-Leap technique, landing gracefully by the lakeshore. She waved up at them.
Su Yan and Veyon exchanged glances. Sword light wrapped around them both. They cut through the air like falling stars and touched down before her.
Elder Xiao followed more slowly, using the Yuan family's Spirit-Leap Art. He muttered to himself, "The young master has gotten flashier. That Su Yan is a bad influence."
"What technique was that?" Guo Xiaodie's eyes sparkled. "Teach me! I'll trade you our Cloud-Ladder Sky-Leap!"
Su Yan had admired her movement art since their first clash. "It's the Sword Control Art. You need deep understanding of the sword to cultivate it."
Guo Xiaodie beamed. "My family's martial nuo includes plenty of sword practitioners. I'm no amateur. But our Cloud-Ladder Sky-Leap requires opening the Crimson Palace Secret first. You still want to trade?"
"Yes," Su Yan said without hesitation.
She slapped a thick scroll into his hand. "I'm not cheating you. This is the Azure Sky Scripture. The eighth form is Cloud-Ladder Sky-Leap. If you can learn it, more power to you."
Su Yan handed her a crumpled paper with barely two hundred characters. "Sword Control Art. Ask if you don't understand."
Both walked away satisfied.
Veyon watched them, a quiet sadness in his eyes. If not for the Yuan family's burden, he could have traded so freely too.
* * *
Su Yan skimmed the Azure Sky Scripture. Every step required drawing on heart-force from the Crimson Palace Secret. Without it, cultivation would burn out the practitioner's heart and kill them slowly.
He had felt Guo Xiaodie's impossible strength during their fight. Now he knew why.
"A-Yan, you're at the Gate-Breaking stage now," the bell said. "Your heart-force is strong enough. You should be fine even without opening the Crimson Palace."
Su Yan's eyes lit up. He read on.
Guo Xiaodie, meanwhile, stared at the two hundred characters of the Sword Control Art. Her face reddened. "Is this even human language? I can't understand a word!"
Veyon smiled to himself. He and Su Yan had written that art together, distilling sword essence into the fewest possible words. Without the right insight, it was gibberish.
"Enough studying," Guo Xiaodie said, stuffing the paper away. "Let's jump in!"
She plunged into the lake. Su Yan and Veyon followed.
The water looked deep but was only a thin veil. They fell through it into an immense chasm—the Abyss of Cangwu. Red light pulsed from somewhere far below.
They drifted down, following the flesh-tendrils as they stretched through the void. After miles of descent, the tendrils curved upward again.
Su Yan broke the surface of another lake. He climbed out—and froze.
Behind him stood a massive water vat. They had just climbed out of it.
Before them, embedded in the mountainside, rose a crimson hall with green doors. Dried tendrils crawled from the vat across the ground and up the threshold, lifeless as sun-bleached worms.
Guo Xiaodie crept toward the doors. "Your Majesty?" she called out. "Who's the white-browed boy?"
Su Yan stepped inside. A gloomy middle-aged man stood on one side of the hall. On the other stood the white-browed youth—Zhou Qiyun.
Between them, seated on a shrine, was a middle-aged man with a horsetail whisk. He smiled down at them with boundless compassion.
He was made of flesh, not wood or clay.
The tendrils grew from the center of his brow.
Su Yan's breath caught. "This... is a flesh god?"
Zhou Qiyun spoke calmly. "Your Majesty, this ancient cultivator is already dead."