Ji Dengqi had knelt behind his father that year, shivering in the biting autumn wind, and watched as the Wan family's patriarch slowly hoisted his father up, spat square into his blood-streaked face, and sneered with quiet contempt:
"The Ji family. Nothing more than this."
He kept his head bowed, tears streaming unending down his cheeks, dripping from his chin to soak his thin autumn robes and the mortar-seams of the courtyard bricks. When he forced his head up at last, he saw a richly dressed youth standing silent behind the Wan patriarch, staring back at him with a cold smile.
Only later did he learn that the youth was named Wan Xiaohua, the Wan family's young master.
Wan Xiaohua stood and sneered; Ji Dengqi knelt and wept.
What humiliation was this? The Wan family had struck Huazhong Mountain by surprise, cracking the mountain-guarding great formation that had taken three years to build in nineteen breaths, cutting down the sitting Ji patriarch, and dragging out every single member of the Ji household — even those still sleeping in their shabby robes. Twenty-nine of the Ji bloodline's direct line, most of them still in their nightclothes, wrapped in bedclothes, knelt shivering in the front courtyard, forced to watch his father, the Ji heir, be degraded.
Beyond the toppled courtyard wall, a whole crowd of mortals knelt — the common folk who lived under Ji rule — watching the immortal lineage being made to swallow humiliation one by one: clan women torn from their bedclothes and left to huddle in a ball, clan boys trampled underfoot and left to struggle.
Every night he dreamed of that scene, and every night Ji Dengqi woke with eyes split wide and tears flowing freely, before sitting up to cultivate again.
The Wan patriarch had kicked his father hard, until he spat blood and sagged limply to the ground. Crying, Ji Dengqi clutched at the man's leg and pleaded:
"Our Ji family will be your dog! The Ji family will keep watch over the Yu family for you beneath the Tang Gold Gate! The Ji family will send tribute every year..."
The man laughed coldly, kicked Ji Dengqi flying, and sent him spinning, dazed, losing two teeth in the fall. Then he laughed aloud:
"The two gates have always been mortal enemies, and the families that die on the border are beyond counting. If I weren't afraid that wiping out your Ji family would put us eye to eye with the Yu, would my Wan family even keep you alive? You Ji want to be a dog — but my Wan family wouldn't dare take you."
Wan Xiaohua stood behind the man, beaming at him with eyes full of sneers.
The man stripped the Ji family of its wealth, carried off the strutting Wan folk, and left behind a ruined Huazhong Mountain, a Ji family smeared with disgrace, mortals staring with strange gleams in their eyes, and a courtyard littered with bodies.
Three days later, his father died too — his Profound Vision Wheel shattered by that kick, the qi scattering out of him. He lay on the bed, groaning feebly, and Ji Dengqi, weeping, pressed his ear close to hear the old man's faint, broken words:
"Do not forget... break their formation... avenge your father."
Ji Dengqi bit his lip till it bled and took the seat of family head.
Ji Dengqi began to kill — killing the mortals who dared to lift their eyes to him, killing until the blood ran in streams and his hands were steeped crimson, killing until no one dared recall the night the Wan family had climbed Huazhong Mountain. Thirteen years old, he often took pleasure in smashing those mortals' skulls open face to face, savoring the scene of gushing gore.
Two years later, news came that filled Ji Dengqi with both rapture and keen regret: the man, a Qi Refining cultivator and a fine hand at formations, had died in Greater Li Mountain at the hands of an enemy. The glorious era of the Wan family had run out even its last coda. Wan Xiaohua, who had ascended to the head of the family in haste, once again drew in his power, and the lands to the east all went to the Lu family.
"But it isn't enough. Wan Xiaohua's talent is better than mine, and the Wan family's foundations run deep. This, far from enough."
Happily, an opening came. The Young Master of Tang Gold Gate came to Moonview Lake seeking a trace of heaven-and-earth spirit qi, and Ji Dengqi served him like a dog, running at his heels. Under the cold gazes of a ring of guards, he entertained the bored man lazing beneath a tree until the gold-robed man at last roared with laughter and asked what it was he wanted.
Ji Dengqi well understood: the man wasn't asking *what* he wanted but *on what grounds* he presumed to want anything. And so Ji Dengqi said the dog wanted nothing — the dog wished only to offer up a woman.
Reading the coldness in the ring of guards' eyes around the gold-robed man, Ji Dengqi whispered, fawning:
"Young lord needs a close companion — one who knows your heart, a confidante who possesses a spiritual aperture and decent talent."
Ji Dengqi offered up his own little sister, a girl possessed of a spiritual aperture, innocent and guileless — that twelve-year-old girl who laughed and hugged him and called him elder brother. The girl covered her face and wept, then spoke through sobs with a trembling resolve:
"Elder brother, I want to avenge us too."
So he watched his sister lie on that man's bed, her fine pale little feet swinging at the foot of it, and neither of them dared to cry.
His sister followed the man away and became the Young Master's maidservant. Thereafter, pills and supplies came to the house every year. Ji Dengqi cultivated with utter abandon, forgetting food and sleep, until at last he broke through to Qi Refining — and the first thing the Ji family did was not celebrate, not cheer, but weep with such emotion the tears would not stop.
He promptly slew the old Wan cultivator at the peak of Embryonic Breathing who had held the very lands the Ji family had lost, Wan Xiaohua's own uncle — and only then discovered that the Wan Xiaohua up on Huagan Mountain was merely at the Jade Capital Wheel.
No one could have imagined it — imagined that the Wan family's Qi Refining cultivator would die a sudden death, imagined that he, Ji Dengqi, would climb to Qi Refining within a bare dozen years.
It was only that the great formation left behind by the Wan ancestor Wan Huakun was as hard as a tortoiseshell. Ji Dengqi had harried it on and off for over ten years, and as he watched the Wan family reforge ties with the surrounding houses and threaten to catch its breath again, he loathed the thought so fiercely that he lay awake night after sleepless night.
Some nights ago, Ji Dengqi had received a message from his sister saying that the Young Master of Tang Gold Gate was bound for Moonview Lake again. He read it over and over, and a plan took shape in his mind.
After all those years, the man had returned to Moonview Lake, still seeking that same trace of heaven-and-earth spirit qi. Ji Dengqi could not say what uncanny qi it was that drew the man back again and again, but the situation had clearly turned in his favor.
He had his sister reveal the blood-deep enmity between the two families and, enlarging the tale, sing of the Wan great formation's impenetrability until he roused the man's competitive spirit. The gold-robed man threw back his head and roared with laughter:
"Wan Huakun was a marvel of brilliancy centuries ago — the formation genius acknowledged by all three sects. For Yu'er's sake, this young master will put this formation's depth to the test."
So Ji Dengqi led out the Ji family, long sabers in hand, and halted slowly at the foot of Huagan Mountain. Behind him his clansmen wore leather armor and watched with him as the whiteshining Huagan Mountain flickered in the distance.
"Where is your help now, Wan Xiaohua?"
Ji Dengqi muttered to himself:
"No matter how many more Qi Refining cultivators you call in, it will be of no use. Your Wan family's ruin is fixed for this day. Your reinforcements, your hidden cards — none of them will avail you."
A heavy sense of destiny settled over Ji Dengqi. His father's gaze, his grandfather's gaze — they seemed to watch from behind him in silence, watching him as he stormed Huagan Mountain.
"In this great war, my Ji family stands behind the rising tide of Tang Gold Gate. Man power has its limits — you cannot see it, and you cannot imagine it."
Tears suddenly slipped down his cheeks again, and the expression on his face, the resolution in it, no longer carried any taint of the cringing. Rolling malevolence and a surge of sorrow and grief gathered together in Ji Dengqi's body, making his short mortal frame seem strangely solid, so that no force on earth could make him any smaller than it had made him now.