The sun hung high, spilling light and heat over the world without favor. Old or young, noble or lowborn — great love is indistinguishable from indifference.
A fawn waded across a stream. Birds threaded the woods.
At first it was only a dark red spark at the edge of the sky. Then it closed in, dragging a tail of flame that drew a line across the heavens like a brushstroke from a god.
It swept over thousands of miles of the State of Zhuang in a heartbeat — until a black light surged up from below and barred its way.
A cold, invisible linkage snapped into place between heaven and earth. Primal energy churned. From east, south, west, and north, killing bale rose and joined as one. Storm clouds swallowed the northeastern corner of Zhuang's sky. Daylight went dark.
A muffled grunt rolled through the air. "Nine-Banes Yin Array!"
The falling spark tangled with the baleful clouds for only a moment before it tore free and dropped — faster and faster, larger and larger — until it howled down like a meteor.
* * *
The wilds beyond Maple City rarely saw a human footprint. There was only a small Daoist temple, long abandoned and half in ruin.
Boom!
The fireball cratered the earth outside it, yet some force reined in the blast, and the shockwave spread no further. When the dust settled, a man in a flame-red robe stood at the bottom of the pit.
His sword-like brows swept into his temples; his bearing was striking, the archaic patterns of his robe rich and elegant. Only his loosened hair and the cracks running through the fabric betrayed his state.
"To think that I, Zhuo Lie, would die in a backwater like this..." His gaze swept the surroundings and understood them at once. He asked, with strange wistfulness, "What is this place called?"
First the daylight had gone dark, then a star had fallen. The few beggars sheltering in the ruined temple were scared out of their wits, kowtowing at its gate. At the question, one of them stammered, "Im-immortal sir, this is the outskirts of Maple City. This temple... we... none of us know its name."
Zhuo Lie's fingers twitched. He was about to erase them.
It was an age of great contention, the states at war without end. Yet no battle in recent years had matched the ferocity of the great clash between Qin and Chu. Nearly a hundred thousand cultivators had been thrown in; the river valley at its heart was left barren, the earth sunken for a hundred miles.
As one of the losing side's central figures — a man who had single-handedly fought through Hangu Pass and nearly reversed the war — he could hardly complain about being hunted to the ends of the earth.
But these beggars were Zhuang's beggars. And Zhuang had dared to secretly aid Qin, letting them set an ambush array on its soil. In that case, these people deserved to die.
Then Zhuo Lie turned his hand over and snuffed out the spark at his fingertip.
"Zhuo Lie, Zhuo Lie. Is this the measure of you? Venting your rage on wretches no one would ever miss?"
He sighed. "Go."
Hands clasped behind his back, he turned his eyes to the ink-black sky. His enemies were up there — the hidden powerhouses closing in like wolves. Those were the people Zhuo Lie meant to kill.
The beggars fled as if pardoned from execution. Only the one who had answered him hesitated, glancing back into the temple — until a companion yanked him stumbling away. "Do you want to die?"
They ran for their lives, perhaps faster than they had ever run for themselves.
Zhuo Lie did not look away from the sky, but his brows knit. "You're not taking your companion?"
Within the reach of his spirit sense, there were no secrets.
The wooden idols in the temple had long vanished — burned for firewood, most likely. But beneath the offering table lay another beggar, barely breathing, motionless, counting down his final days. That was why the first beggar had hesitated.
Leaving the dead weight behind while fleeing was only human. Yet Zhuo Lie could not ignore it.
Men who had walked out of battlefields knew what companions meant. He knew his own body was a lamp nearly out of oil. He also remembered exactly what had carried him this far.
The beggars dared not refuse an immortal's words. They swarmed back at a desperate waddle, gasping for air.
To the gazes fixed on this place, they were no hardier than ants and no faster than snails.
Far too slow.
Shriek — shriek — shriek —
A dense, whistling storm swept in from the horizon: countless translucent water arrows, drawn together by some power and converging on Zhuo Lie. Water energy surged madly through the world. The rain of arrows formed a colossal funnel that blotted out half the sky.
This was the Qin army's signature wide-area killing art — Myriad Streams Arrow Rain.
"Here they come!"
Zhuo Lie raised his head. The gale whipped his robe and hair. He lifted his right hand, the wide sleeve sliding down to reveal an arm pale as carved jade — and powerful.
A red orb of light was born in his palm. In the next instant it blazed, hurling brilliance in every direction.
It was as if Zhuo Lie were holding up a sun with one hand.
This was the Dao art he had invented himself, the one that had made his name at the Yellow River Assembly when he was fifteen.
Solar Burst!
The falling arrow rain refracted the light into a riot of colors — and a heartbeat later, every arrow was dyed through with red. A furious, savage, incandescent red.
With Zhuo Lie's right hand as its center, the sky for a hundred zhang in every direction was swallowed by that red, and the arrow rain vanished into nothing.
The painting was so magnificent that no one noticed the faint ink smudges at its edges.
Before Solar Burst spread, countless stray arrows had already skittered loose and raked the ground. The fleeing beggars fell one after another, their bodies riddled with holes. They never had the chance to scream.
Life is that fragile.
"Slaughtering the innocent — is that your Dao?" Zhuo Lie's lips curled in a sneer, though it was unclear whom he was addressing. The starry brightness of his eyes was slowly being buried under something cold.
"Anyone who holds back while killing Zhuo Lie is an utter fool." The voice was ice. A line of cultivators in black uniform robes drifted down, sealing off the four directions.
Their leader was gaunt and pale, frost patterns embroidered at the hems of his black robe. His narrow eyes fixed on Zhuo Lie. "Mere ants — and they still register in your eyes?"
Even as he spoke, the black-robed cultivators behind him formed hand seals in eerie unison, as if cast from the same mold.
Eighteen translucent water serpents snapped into being, screeching as they coiled through the air toward Zhuo Lie. Not a breath was wasted between arrival and attack.
The Water Serpent Bind was a low-grade art, but in their exquisite control it turned vicious.
Zhuo Lie's expression didn't change. He pulled his hands apart and a blade of flame formed between his palms.
"Gong Han."
Holding the fire blade casually, he stepped through the air in a few turns and cut every serpent lunging at him cleanly in two. An art of the fire blade's level no longer required seals from him.
"You went to the trouble of hauling out the Nine-Banes Yin Array — why waste both our lives on these pointless tricks?"
"Please don't misunderstand... my respect!" Gong Han spread his hands, which had been pressed together before his chest, and jerked them upward. "Rise!"
The fallen serpent bodies did not dissolve. They leapt up instead — severed tails sprouting heads, half-heads growing tails. One became two, two became four. Fed by the Nine-Banes Yin Array, the serpents only grew fiercer.
It was a transformation of the Water Serpent Bind never seen before — a whole new life breathed into an old art. Undoubtedly the fruit of the Qin military's painstaking research.
Its name was the Wildwater Serpent Pit.
Hiss — hiss — hiss —
The sound scraped at the mind. Dense, snarling water serpents ringed Zhuo Lie in; as far as the eye could see, he might have been standing at the bottom of an endless nest of vipers.
He looked like a dead man.
His voice, though, rang on — clear and steady.
"If Ying Wu is willing to spend the Nine-Banes Yin Array on me, then I ought to die. But this wretched temple doesn't even have a name. How is a nameless place fit to bury Zhuo Lie?!"
Flames erupted from his skin.
They roared up, wild and clawing, igniting everything they touched, racing from point to line to field.
Fire art — Wildfire.
At seventeen, he had burned thousands of Yin demons to ash with this art and cowed the borderlands.
The entire serpent pit caught fire. Countless water serpents writhed and screamed in the flames, steaming into vapor. Zhuo Lie burst skyward through their dying masses, hair flying, momentum savage.
Just then — an eagle's cry!
A giant black eagle stooped from the heights, facing him head-on, and snapped its wings forward. Hundreds of iron feathers rode streaks of saber light, every streak a different saber style, some ferocious, some venomous. The storm of blades poured down like a cloudburst and chopped Zhuo Lie bodily back into the serpent pit.
A mechanical beast — the Blade-Feather Eagle.
On the eagle's back stood a barefoot man, his face masked, a bronze case slung behind him. He said nothing. Or rather, his words were in the saber light.
Sustained by the Nine-Banes Yin Array, the serpents multiplied faster than Wildfire could eat them. The art's endurance failed, and the flames slowly guttered. A defender who only defends must fall: serpent after serpent gouged wounds into Zhuo Lie, drawing blossoms of blood. He grunted at most, wielding the fire blade one-handed, cutting down only the ones aimed at his vitals.
Ten thousand serpents gnawed his flesh; the dark Yin flayed his soul.
The veins bulging at his forehead showed what it cost him. But his gaze stayed firm, and his free hand was still forming seals.
He never stopped fighting back.
Gong Han glanced at the man on the eagle and hesitated no longer. He interlaced his ten fingers before his chest, hair stirring in a windless air. "Yield now, and you can still go home in one piece! Because the art that comes next — even I cannot control!"
The temperature plunged. A touch of white frost condensed on his brows. The whole serpent pit seized up, sheathed in solid ice — extreme cold, extreme Yin, unbreakable.
This was the secret bloodline art of Qin's noble Gongyang clan, passed to no outsiders: the Dark-Ice Dungeon.
Whoever entered this dungeon — one breath and their exhalation froze to rime; two, and their blood congealed; three, and their body died stiff.
The water serpents became ice serpents. Frost crept over Zhuo Lie's body. Gong Han watched in silence. One more breath, and the blood would freeze.
But —
Everyone present suddenly heard the sound of a river in flood, raging and surging — it was Zhuo Lie's blood, roaring!
"BOIL! BLOOD! BURN! SOUL!"
His robe burned. His hair burned. His brows, his eyes, his flesh, his soul — everything burned. Body and will, life and spirit, all of it fuel.
The ice became water; the water became steam. The serpent pit and the Dark-Ice Dungeon collapsed in the same instant. Out of the white vapor stepped a man made of fire.
He looked down at his own blazing hands and murmured, "No wonder they call it a forbidden art of the imperial house. Inside this power, I can almost see... the true meaning of fire."
Then he snapped his gaze up to the Blade-Feather Eagle. "A fine toy."
The words had barely fallen before he was in midair.
The barefoot masked man kicked off and let himself drop backward, abandoning the precious mechanical eagle to the flames that crushed it to ash.
"If you want to keep your life, Mo Ya, that's not nearly enough!" Zhuo Lie's hands flew through seals too fast to follow, and the art was done.
Flame blossoms bloomed out of nothing and went on blooming. Fire annexed the whole sky — sky, earth, everything in the battlefield burned. Even the baleful clouds of the Nine-Banes Yin Array turned to firewood.
Blossomfire!
It was Zhuo Lie's most inspired creation. At nineteen, he had broken a city with it in a single battle.
Petals of flame — beauty at its limit, and power at its limit.
Mo Ya, still falling backward, spread his arms wide. Ten fingers splayed, each one tied to a translucent thread, every thread running back into the bronze case — he ripped it open!
Puppet Crows!
His fingers danced. A dense flock of puppet crows burst from the case and hurled themselves at the flame blossoms. Each crow smothered one blossom. But the blossoms seemed endless, and the crows came slower and slower.
Gong Han ignored the backlash of his shattered dungeon. His bloodline power surged; he pressed a finger to his jaw and opened his mouth — white mist poured out, and wherever it washed, flame blossoms died.
Bloodline art — Breath of Frost!
His black-robed cultivators formed seals with him. Vapor from the collision of blossoms and frost gathered overhead at visible speed, piling into clouds. The white clouds turned leaden; cloud called to cloud, cloud stacked on cloud.
Then the downburst came, screeching as it tore the air.
Gather, Pile, and Stacked Clouds — three arts combined into the high-grade water art, Chained Storm!
"Is that all?" roared Zhuo Lie, burning head to toe. "How is this enough to kill me?!"
His aura climbed like detonations, his pressure crushing down like a landslide. Inside the sea of fire he threw his head back and howled: "Extreme flame, burn heaven and boil the seas! True Ancestor Zhurong — enter my body!"
Within him, one point of firelight — mild, tame, utterly unlike the rest — suddenly swelled.
That single swelling change, and the crows in the sky self-ignited. The storm clouds blew apart. Every cultivator besieging Zhuo Lie spat blood.
Even Gong Han's face went ashen. "Impossible! Where would he get a Seed of Zhurong? And how could he possibly drive the True Form of Zhurong?"
"This is Zhuo Lie..." Mo Ya had cut his threads to the crows in time; mechanical iron wings now spread from his back as he hovered beside Gong Han, his voice heavy as wet earth. "The man who nearly fought through Hangu Pass alone."
Inside that vast, endlessly swelling power of fire, Zhuo Lie roared: "Who is qualified to kill me!"
"Come! Mo Ya!"
"Gong Han!"
A casual sweep of his hand sent a fire dragon tearing through the air, forcing the two men back again and again.
"What noble clans! Great houses! Geniuses! Dare you still claim those words before me? Weaklings! Cowards! Incompetents!"
The Seed of Zhurong seemed to be scorching him into madness.
"A family's shame, a nation's hatred — all the rivers and seas cannot wash it clean!"
He laughed, laughed until tears ran — and the tears burned dry in the same instant.
"Here is a fine head. Who can take it?"
"The one who kills my body is myself; the one who burns my soul is Zhurong!"
Behind him loomed the faint phantom of a supreme deity gripping a fire dragon, its pressure enough to suffocate.
"WHO CAN KILL ME?!"
Mo Ya reached back for the bronze case, meaning to open his last resort. His hand only trembled. There was no strength left in it.
In his spirit sense there was no wilderness, no ruined temple, no one at all. There was only fire — boundless waves of flame. The soaring heat warped space itself and nearly melted his thoughts.
He might hold out a little longer. Or he might die the next breath. His life was no longer his to command.
Before such power, what difference was there between him and the beggars who had died?
...
At the edge of the sky, a cold gleam came from the west.
Gong Han caught it only in the corner of his eye, and felt the illusion that his eyeball had been cut. He had no time to wonder — in the same instant he saw it, the gleam had already slipped up to Zhuo Lie and wound once around him.
Zhuo Lie's roaring stopped.
"So noisy."
A young man in white appeared out of thin air.
His face was cold to the extreme. He stood sideways to the world, as if forever keeping his distance from it. He slid his sword slowly back into its sheath, and his voice was flat, without a ripple.
Zhuo Lie's head dropped, rolled twice across the ground — and because of Boiling Blood, Burning Soul, not a drop of blood was left to spray.
Only then did a shriek like thunder ring out overhead: the sound of the white-robed man's single sword stroke from the west, finally arriving.
...
Gong Han and Mo Ya traded a look, and each saw vast horror in the other's eyes.
"Bai Yi, by order of Prince Ying Wu, I—"
Gong Han got no further. He shut his mouth, snatched up Zhuo Lie's head, and fled — because the white-robed man had turned his gaze on him.
His hair, his brows, his eyes, even the corner of his mouth were all sharp as swords. Yet his eyes were calm, almost mild — a mildness that carried a chill which made men shudder.
Whether they were heaven's chosen of the ancient holy lands or scions of the greatest bloodlines under heaven — no one dared ask why. No one dared say one more word.
There were only backs, fleeing in disarray.
...
Zhuo Lie was dead, but the Seed of Zhurong inside him had not scattered. It went on swelling, slowly.
That power had never been something a burnt-out Zhuo Lie could control. He was only the fuse, the medium — lending his genius and his resolve so that the great power of Zhurong's True Form could vent itself into this world for a sliver of a moment.
The white-robed man shook out a black token and watched it indifferently.
The token lay silent for a long time before a domineering voice answered: "We're even."
The instant the words fell, the token — made of no common material — shattered as if it could not bear the voice, crumbling to black dust that slid through Bai Yi's fingers.
Only when every cultivator had gone, and the token had finished falling apart, did Bai Yi tilt his head slightly toward the swelling seed.
He stretched out one slender, pale hand, fingers cupped like a pouch.
And only now, with no one alive to see, did something childlike show through his habitual mildness and cold.
He whispered, softly: "Pop!"
His five fingers opened at the exact moment the Seed of Zhurong burst.
An invisible force bound the explosion, forbidding it to spread; it only blew Zhuo Lie's corpse into fragments. Crimson flame blossoms bloomed their fill inside that tiny world — all their brilliance spent in an instant, all their splendor kept within a few square feet.
That ultimate beauty had an audience of one.
The corner of Bai Yi's mouth curved, just for a moment. Then it smoothed.
The fireworks were over.
He did not look at what Zhuo Lie's remains might have left behind. He felt no attachment at all. His body rode a streak of sword light and was gone.
* * *
From beginning to end, in the battle outside that nameless ruined temple, no one had spared the temple a single glance.
To mighty cultivators, the weak State of Zhuang barely merited a look. To Zhuang's three thousand miles of territory, Maple City was smaller than dust. And even to little Maple City itself, the ruined temple in the wilds had long been forgotten.
But the temple was not empty.
Inside lay a dying beggar who had only been waiting for death.
He had made his peace with dying. He had been waiting for it. Yet he was not dead — and from beginning to end, he had "heard" that magnificent battle.
Now the battle was over. Silence returned.
He was still alive.
Perhaps he was lucky — though luck sat strangely on him. His rags, his gaunt sickly face, his drifting breath: everything about him spelled misfortune.
Still, he was alive.
He thought for a while. Then he mustered himself and rolled out from beneath the offering table.
Teeth gritted, spending every scrap of strength, he struggled to his feet, swaying.
He stood, after all.
From the offering table to the temple gate: one hundred and thirty-seven steps.
From the temple gate to Zhuo Lie's corpse: three hundred and twenty-four steps.
The beggar counted each dragging step in silence, telling himself again and again — almost there.
Almost.
Every muscle in his body protested. Every muscle trembled.
No one knew where he found the strength to go on.
His remarkable perseverance had no audience.
Now he stood before Zhuo Lie's body — the end of his long journey. If that heap of shredded flesh could still be called a body.
Slowly, slowly, he squatted down. Squatting cost too much, so he simply sat.
He was truly, deeply ill; beneath the grime that blurred his features, you could still see a weak, deathly pallor.
Even his hands shook.
Trembling, they groped through the heap of flesh. Groping. Groping.
Flesh. Flesh. Bone shards. A snapped piece of metal. Flesh. Finger bones. Half of some unrecognizable wooden thing...
A bottle!
He turned over an unrecognizable mass of gore and found half of a jade bottle. The neck had been blasted away entirely; only the lower belly of the bottle remained.
Suppressing his ragged breathing, the beggar raised it before his face.
Carefully, he picked off the chunk of flesh plugging it, and peered down at the bottom.
There lay one single pill, black and glossy and round.
His breathing stopped.
He recognized it. It was the thing he had dreamed of day and night — the thing he had once obtained, and then lost.
A Meridian-Opening Pill.