Su Yan stopped. Turned back.
"Elder," he said to the sorrow-faced man. "Any more tea? I'm parched."
"No!" The elder's voice cracked.
"Where can I buy some, then?"
The three administrators—sorrow, white, and red—twitched in unison.
Su Yan walked on. Behind him, the woman in red hissed, "He used to collapse after one cup. We could write his whole life and he wouldn't remember. Now he's asking for refills."
"What's in that soup?" the white-robed man muttered.
Su Yan found Yun Qian at the cliff's edge, studying the giant's footprints. Two impressions, each the size of a cart, had crushed ancient trees into splinters.
"You knew him," Su Yan said. It wasn't a question.
She nodded. "A brilliant man. Cautious. Generous. In my era, he was the brightest light we had—the one most likely to break through."
"That doesn't match the man I met," Su Yan said. "The Mud Pill Palace Master I know laid traps in every technique. He harvested disciples like wheat."
Yun Qian gazed at the distant peak of Mount Jiuyi. "Three thousand years is a long time. People change. Or they pretend to."
She paused. "The nuo master who faces tribulation tonight—he is opening a path no one has walked since my era. Even if he fails, he will be remembered."
"He won't fail," Su Yan said. "And he won't ascend either."
She looked at him.
Before she could ask, Mount Jiuyi ignited.
Three hundred and sixty altars blazed across its nine peaks. Each one was a full divine-descent platform, scaled for gods, not mortals. Zhou Qiyun wasn't making a humble offering. He was rolling out the red carpet for the entire heavenly bureaucracy.
Three hundred and sixty gods. One for every degree of the celestial wheel.
The mountain range lit up like a second dawn. Even the hidden peaks of the New Territory glowed with reflected fire.
"How many graves did that man rob?" Guo Tianxiong whispered.
Xiang and Shisan Niang, who had once summoned the Plague God and thought themselves masters of scale, stared in silence. This was a hundred times larger. A thousand.
The sky tore.
Not with thunder—with pressure. Massive shapes pressed against the wound in reality, limbs the size of rivers, scales scraping the firmament. Heavenly gods descended into the altars, drawn by the scent of ancient sacrifice. By the time the first hundred had landed, the air itself seemed ready to collapse.
"Is he bribing them?" Su Yan asked Yun Qian.
"He's doing something worse," she said. Her voice had gone thin. "He's kidnapping them."
Su Yan understood instantly.
Three hundred and sixty gods, trapped in the mortal realm, bound by ritual and sacrifice. The Heavenly Dao couldn't strike at Zhou Qiyun without shredding its own servants. He had taken the entire cycle of heaven hostage.
Yun Qian's hand found his arm. Her fingers were cold.
"He might actually survive," she whispered.
Above Mount Jiuyi, the tribulation cloud erupted. Not from Zhou Qiyun's will—from the Heavenly Dao's fury. It expanded with terrifying speed, swallowing peak after peak. A hundred li. Three hundred. Five hundred. Eight hundred.
The cloud kept growing.
Su Yan watched it spread, and for the first time, he felt something he didn't expect.
Hope.
If Zhou Qiyun could cheat heaven itself, then maybe the sealed path could be forced open. Maybe there was a way up after all.
And maybe the man waiting at the top of that path was the real Mud Pill Palace Master, ready to claim his prize.