The bronze mirror struck the stone coffin with a sound like cracking ice.
The great bell dove, expanding into a dome of light that swallowed the grass hut whole. Su Yan plunged through the shimmering wall and seized the mirror mid-air. He exhaled—then saw the fracture.
A hairline split ran across the mirror's face. Through it, the ghost girl smiled, waved with cheerful malice, and leaped into freedom.
Chains snapped like thread. The coffin shattered.
The shockwave tore the hut apart. Straw rained down. And where the coffin had stood, space itself seemed to expand, vomiting forth weapons of terrible scale.
A stone axe, its haft thicker than Su Yan's torso, its blade stained with the blood of beasts that no longer walked the earth. A bone spear skewered into the ground, its shaft a whole tree trunk carved with crimson sigils. Bronze halberds. Stone swords. Bone flutes. Weapons from an age when giants had hunted gods.
At their center rose a second coffin, greater than the first. And plunged through its lid was a weapon of bronze and liquid gold—a Heavenly Dao artifact, humming with sacred wrath.
Su Yan understood the murals now. The woman had faced her tribulation. The light of ascension had come. And when she lowered her guard, the ancients had struck. The divine weapon had pierced her heart. They had sealed her flesh, trapped her soul in the mirror, and built sarcophagus within sarcophagus to hold her rage.
"She can't escape while that weapon pins her," Su Yan said.
"Correct," the bell said, though it had shrunk behind him.
The inner coffin exploded.
A woman sat up amidst the splinters. Black hair floated around a face of heartbreaking beauty. She turned to Su Yan, and her smile was warm as spring wine.
"Husband," she breathed. "My chest pains me. Won't you rub it?"
The world dissolved into softness. Su Yan walked toward her, his hands reaching for the weapon's hilt. Just one pull, and he could ease her suffering.
The bell screamed.
Su Yan snapped awake. He was kneeling at the corpse's side, both hands wrapped around the divine weapon, about to draw it free. He jerked back, gasping, his robe soaked with sweat.
"Visualize," the bell said, its voice cracking. "Anchor your spirit. Now."
Su Yan summoned the mountain—ten thousand peaks, unshakable. The illusion shattered. The beautiful woman flickered and was gone. In her place lay a corpse with a hole in its chest, black blood drying at its lips.
She tried again. Seduction. Threats. Visions of annihilation that turned the air to ash. Su Yan walked through them all, his mind fixed on the only thing that mattered.
The tea table.
The hut was kindling. The roof was gone. But the table stood untouched, as if the storm had forgotten it existed. The teapot sat primly beside a single cup, steam curling from its rim in a perfect spiral.
Su Yan crouched. Beneath the table, he found carvings. A giant bowing before the coffin. And words, scratched deep:
The giant had been a genius. He had guarded this place, cultivated here, and in a moment of weakness, accepted the woman as his teacher. She gave him a broken immortal art, meant to chain him. He had played the fool, stolen every fragment, and spent a thousand years rebuilding it into something true.
But ascension was a lie. Something blocked the path. Something hungry.
Disillusioned, the giant had returned here. He had grown tired of his teacher's voice. And so he had poured one last cup of tea. Spill it, and the brew would awaken every weapon in the chamber, turning them against her in a dance of annihilation.
The inscription ended with a name: Left by the Master of the Mud Pill Palace.
Su Yan's blood chilled.
The corpse stirred. It reached for an ancient bow, and the weapon shrieked in protest, tearing the flesh from her arm down to glistening muscle. She did not care. She drew.
An arrow of light lanced toward Su Yan's skull.
The bell threw itself between them. The impact drove it backward, grinding against the jade wall with a sound like tearing metal. A dent sank into its bronze flank.
She drew again. And again. Each arrow struck the bell, hammering new craters into its ancient body.
"Done yet?" it screamed.
Su Yan lifted the cup.
He threw the tea.
The liquid became a flood. Not water—something older, denser, carrying the weight of three thousand years. Ancient weapons rose in the torrent, spinning, striking, guided by an intelligence that no longer lived. They moved like the limbs of a giant with a thousand arms and a thousand faces, each blow perfect, relentless, divine.
The woman screamed. She abandoned the bow, unleashed every scrap of immortal light in her shattered body, and for a moment the flood paused.
Then it broke through.
Water and bronze and bone poured into her eyes, her mouth, the wound in her chest. Her flesh peeled away like wet paper. Bones stood in the deluge, tall and proud and terrible.
Then they too crumbled to dust.
The weapons fell, one by one, their purpose spent. Even the divine weapon corroded, pitted, and flew away into the ascension light, broken beyond repair.
Su Yan and the bell collapsed onto the wet stone.
"Half my qi," the bell groaned. "Five days of rest, minimum."
Su Yan rose slowly, staring at the powder where a god had died. His voice was very small.
"The Master of the Mud Pill Palace was a giant. The skeleton Zhou Qiyun killed was barely man-sized."
He turned to the bell.
"So who did Zhou Qiyun really kill?"