The Celestial Sword Pavilion's Inner Sect unfolded before them like a dream carved from blade and cloud—a realm where the air itself hummed with restrained power, where every floating terrace and winding path existed in perfect, lethal harmony.
Lin Feng's boots met the first jade pavilion's platform with a silence that spoke of ancient formations woven into the stone. The structure beneath them was not merely built—it had been cultivated, its curved roofs and tiered balconies grown from a single slab of celestial jade, veined with threads of silver that pulsed faintly in time with the moonlight. The railings were not wood or metal, but polished bone-white spirit coral, their surfaces etched with infinitesimal sword forms that shifted when unobserved, as if practicing their own eternal kata.
To their left, a light bridge arced across the void to another terrace, its surface not quite solid, not quite mist—a ribbon of condensed moonlight stretched taut between realms. It shimmered with the same transient fragility as a blade's edge caught mid-swing, and though it held firm beneath the occasional disciple's footstep, the abyss below yawned with quiet promise. The bridge's glow caught in Meixiu's eyes as she tilted her head, her grin sharpening.
"Ooooh," she breathed, wriggling in Lin Feng's arms just enough to make him tighten his grip. "If I jumped, would you catch me?"
Lin Feng's thumb pressed against her ribs. "You'd scream the whole way down," he said, so deadpan the bridge itself seemed to hush.
Meixiu gasped. "I would not! …Maybe a little."
Past the bridges, the true marvels of the Inner Sect drifted: the flying swords.
These were no mere transports. Each one was a monument—a slab of forged star-iron longer than three men laid head to toe, their edges so finely honed they split the very light that touched them. They hung motionless in the air, their surfaces engraved with the sinuous strokes of the sect's founding mantras. Some bore scars from legendary duels; others gleamed with the soft sheen of recent polish. A senior disciple stepped onto the nearest blade with the casual grace of one mounting a trusted steed, and without sound, without tremor, it carried him away into the higher mists, his robes fluttering like a banner in the thin, charged air.
Beneath it all, the pavilions themselves perched on their floating islands like herons poised to strike. Some were private sanctuaries, their paper screens glowing with the warm light of meditation candles, the shadows within moving with the deliberate grace of cultivators deep in sword trance. Others stood open-walled, their interiors alive with the murmur of disciples debating technique over cups of spirit tea, the steam curling into shapes that mirrored their spoken concepts—here a twisting dragon, there a blooming lotus of condensed qi.
And through it all, the wind carried the scent of the high-altitude gardens—night-blooming swordflowers, their petals edged like razors, releasing a fragrance like chilled nectar and freshly whetted steel. The blossoms trembled as the moon's light intensified, their stems bowing slightly in a slow, synchronized dance, as if paying homage to some unseen blade saint.
Meixiu's fingers tightened in Lin Feng's collar, her laughter a bright, living thing against the pavilions' serene lethality. "A-Li," she whispered, as if sharing a secret, "I think I want to lick one of those bridges."
The corner of his mouth lifted. "Do it, and I'm leaving you here."
Meixiu's laughter was bright as a whetted blade. "Liar. You'd miss me too much." He adjusted his hold on her and stepped forward, into the heart of the Celestial Sword Pavilion's dominion.
Above them, the moon watched, its light catching on the floating islands' undersides, where the remnants of old sword tests had left scars that never quite healed.
The scent of steel and ozone lingered as they crossed into the pavilion's heart, where the jade stones remembered every footstep that had come before.
The jade pavilion's platform was not truly flat. Lin Feng's boots registered the almost imperceptible slope—a deliberate tilt, like a blade angled to guide blood toward its tip. The stone remembered. It remembered the disciples who had stood here before, their weight, their worth. Some had left no mark. Others had pressed down hard enough that faint, ghostly footprints lingered in the jade, their edges shimmering with residual sword intent. One set, near the terrace's edge, glowed a dull crimson. A warning. A story.
Meixiu's boots—the ones Lin Feng had given her during the trials—scuffed against the groove in the stone where some long-ago cultivator had driven their sword in triumph. The groove hummed at her touch, a vibration that traveled up her calf and made Mr. Bunbun's left ear twitch in response.
To their right, a light bridge arched toward a distant training platform. Up close, its surface wasn't smooth mist, but millions of microscopic sword strokes suspended mid-air, each one a frozen fragment of some master's perfected technique. They shifted as Lin Feng's shadow passed over them, realigning with a sound like wind over a knife's edge. A junior disciple, halfway across, hesitated. The bridge shuddered. For a heartbeat, the void beneath her feet yawned wider, hungrier—
Then Lin Feng glanced at her.
The bridge solidified. The disciple scurried forward, her face pale.
Meixiu giggled. "You're such a bully," she murmured, patting his chest.
His fingers flexed against her back. "Your bully."
Beyond the bridges, the flying swords waited. The nearest was a slab of black iron veined with gold, its surface pocked with tiny craters—not flaws, but the healed scars of lightning strikes willingly absorbed. Its hilt, taller than a man, bore a single character: 忍 Endurance. The edge wasn't sharp. It didn't need to be. The air around it was already split, a permanent wound in reality that hissed faintly as it carried disciples upward.
One of the Top 10 Core Disciples stood upon it now—a gaunt figure in ash-gray robes, his arms crossed, his eyes closed. As the sword began to rise, the moonlight caught on the scars around his wrists. Not shackle marks. Fang marks. Something had bitten him, and he'd let it.
Meixiu's nose wrinkled. "That one smells like dead fire," she observed.
Lin Feng's fingers flexed against her back. A silent agreement.
The pavilions themselves were alive in ways stone shouldn't be. The eaves of the nearest dormitory curled slightly as they passed, like a cat arching into a touch. Its paper screens bore not paintings, but imprints—shadow-play scenes of legendary duels, their figures moving in slow, endless repetition. A flicker of two cultivators clashing. A spray of blood frozen midair. A sword plunging earthward, its descent never quite complete.
And the gardens—
The swordflowers weren't merely blooming. They were dueling. Petals clashed with tiny, metallic chimes, their edges leaving hair-thin cuts on the air. A fallen petal drifted onto Meixiu's sleeve. Lin Feng's hand twitched toward it—but the petal left no tear, only a shadow where the threads darkened, as if remembering a wound.
"See?" Meixiu grinned. "Even the flowers know not to mess with me."
Somewhere above, in the highest floating pagoda, a single window blazed with blue flame. The silhouette within raised a sword—
And the moon's light bent toward it, liquid and obedient, forging itself into a second blade in the figure's free hand.
Meixiu's breath hitched. "Oh," she said, very softly. "That's where the fun ones are."
Lin Feng followed her gaze. His arms tightened around her—not in warning, but in acknowledgment.
Yes.
They'd arrived.
---
The Mist Library Tower rose before them like a blade sheathed in stormcloud—its obsidian spine cutting through the layered mists, its upper levels wreathed in the ghostly luminescence of knowledge too sharp for daylight.
Lin Feng set Meixiu down at last, his fingers lingering half a breath longer than necessary at her elbow as she twirled to face the tower, Mr. Bunbun swinging precariously from her grip. The ground here was different—not stone, not earth, but compressed pages of forbidden treatises pulverized over centuries into a whispering carpet that crunched underfoot with the sound of distant arguments. Each step released a puff of ink-scented dust that curled into fleeting characters before dissolving.
The tower's base was a ring of twelve open-air reading decks, their jade lattices carved into the likeness of swordsmen mid-kata. The figures moved when unobserved, their stone blades tracing the edges of long-lost techniques. Disciples sat cross-legged on floating meditation mats, their faces lit by the glow of hovering sword manuals—manuscripts that hovered of their own accord, their pages turning with the lazy grace of leaves caught in a breeze. One manual pulsed crimson as its reader traced a finger down its edge, the characters rearranging themselves into a more lethal variation mid-sentence.
Meixiu skipped ahead, her shadow stretching long and lean across the etched swords of the floor mosaics—only for the mosaic blades to twitch minutely, aligning with her shadow's throat, its wrists, its heart. Lin Feng's boot came down on the nearest sword's pommel. The mosaic stilled.
"Look, look!" Meixiu crouched by a disciple slumped over a flickering scroll, his nose bleeding sluggishly onto the parchment. The scroll's glow was deepening to an unhealthy violet. "This one's eating him," she observed with delight, poking the disciple's cheek. He didn't stir.
A librarian materialized beside them—a gaunt figure in ash-gray robes, his eyes sewn shut with threads of silver. The hovering manuals parted for him like wary birds. "The lower floors digest the unworthy," he intoned, his voice dust-dry. "The higher floors devour."
Above them, the tower's middle levels rotated slowly, their outer walls made entirely of sliding panels that revealed glimpses of interior shelves—each one stacked not with scrolls, but with swords. Thousands of them, each sheathed in a scabbard of human bone. Some trembled in place, their guards clattering against the wood like caged things.
Meixiu was already scaling the nearest staircase, her fingers brushing the banister—which wasn't wood at all, but the petrified spine of some massive creature, its vertebrae polished smooth by generations of desperate climbers. Halfway up, she paused. The air here shimmered with a haze like heat off a forge, and the steps ahead warped unnaturally.
Lin Feng appeared at her shoulder, his sleeve brushing her wrist. "The barrier is designed to kill," he said flatly. "Step back."
She grinned. "I know."
Beyond the distortion, the true upper levels loomed. The books here weren't illuminated—they were illumination, their spines glowing with captive starlight, their pages whispering to one another in the sibilant tongue of edge and aftermath. A single misplaced glance at the wrong title could send a cultivator's sword intent spiraling backward through their meridians.
At the very top, visible only in fragments through the roiling mists, was the Crown Floor. Its walls were transparent crystal, and within floated a single scroll—unrolled, its ends never touching, its characters swimming in and out of legibility like fish in moonlit water. The scroll was alive. It was watching.
Mr. Bunbun's ears stood straight up.
Meixiu took a step forward—
The librarian's hand clamped down on her shoulder. "No," he said simply.
For a heartbeat, the tower held its breath. The mosaic swords angled themselves toward the librarian's ankles. The hovering manuals froze mid-page-turn. Even the bleeding disciple's scroll paused in its feasting.
Then Meixiu laughed, bright and ringing, and the moment shattered. "Next time," she promised the tower at large, blowing a kiss to the Crown Floor's distant glow.
Lin Feng's hand found the small of her back, steering her firmly toward the next terrace. Behind them, the librarian exhaled through his nose. One of his silver threads snapped.
The scent of old parchment and sword oil clung to their robes as they left the tower behind, giving way to the metallic tang of honed steel that announced their approach to the dueling grounds.
The Divine Hall of Duels loomed ahead like a sleeping beast, its curved ivory walls catching the moonlight in pearlescent ripples that mimicked the play of muscles beneath skin. Each breath of wind made the entire structure creak—not the groan of aging timber, but the resonant hum of something alive and merely resting. The crossed greatswords framing its entrance stood sentinel, their edges perpetually damp with condensation that dripped in perfect synchrony with the distant clang of practice blades from within.
Meixiu skipped ahead, her twilight robes fluttering as she spun to face Lin Feng. "A-Li," she sang, pointing to the nearest monolith, where fresh cracks spiderwebbed from a recent impact. "Look! Someone got very motivated." The stone pulsed faintly where she touched it, releasing a metallic tang into the air—the aftertaste of someone's shattered sword intent.
The arena's outer gallery was a mosaic of motion. Disciples clustered in animated knots, their voices layering into a buzzing chorus:
"—did you see how Elder Ru's disciple reversed the Sky-Piercing Thrust into—"
"—no, no, the third variation works better if you channel through the—"
"—broke three ribs but he still won, the absolute madman—"
A pair of junior disciples reenacted a famous duel using chopsticks as swords, their movements sharp enough to slice the steam rising from their abandoned tea bowls. Nearby, an elderly steward recorded bets on a scroll that adjusted its odds in real-time, the ink crawling across the page like ants.
Lin Feng's shadow fell across the threshold, and the chatter dimmed for half a breath before resuming at a more respectful volume. Meixiu, meanwhile, had pressed her ear to the Hall's ivory wall. "It's purring," she announced, delighted. "Listen!"
And it was—a subsonic vibration that resonated in the bones rather than the ears. The sound of a thousand stored clashes, a library of impacts humming in the walls. The very architecture here was battle-hardened; the arched ribs of the ceiling bore the polished sheen of countless shoulders pressed against them by recoiling fighters, the floor tiles worn smooth in the exact spots where victors had stood to receive acclaim.
High above, the domed ceiling swirled with living murals—ghostly afterimages of legendary strikes replaying in endless loops. A particularly vivid sequence showed two blurred figures moving at impossible speeds, their duel frozen at the moment one blade found the other's throat. The defeated phantom still twitched occasionally, his expression caught between outrage and admiration.
Mr. Bunbun's button eyes tracked the images, his head tilting at a sharp angle when a new duel materialized near the apex—one that made several onlookers gasp. The combatants moved with eerie familiarity, their styles mirroring—
Meixiu's fingers dug into Lin Feng's sleeve. "Oh! They've got us up there!" She bounced on her toes, pointing to the spectral likeness of herself mid-pirouette, a needle-thin dagger glinting in her off-hand. The frozen moment showed Lin Feng's shadowed form behind her, his sword angled to intercept a strike neither had ever actually faced in reality.
"Prophecy duels," murmured a passing disciple, noting their attention. "The Hall dreams of battles yet to come. Sometimes."
Lin Feng studied the images, his expression darkening. "The footwork is wrong," he said coldly. "That's not how we fight."
Meixiu beamed. "Maybe it's how we should fight."
"Next time," she declared to the ceiling, "make me taller."
The Hall's vibration shifted pitch—something almost like laughter—as they moved toward the next terrace, leaving behind the scent of scorched silk and the echoes of blades that had not yet crossed.
The path curved gently away from the Divine Hall of Duels, winding past terraces where disciples practiced sword forms with meticulous precision. As Lin Feng and Meixiu walked, the air gradually thickened with the scent of smoldering herbs and molten metals—a cloying, medicinal sweetness undercut by the bite of scorched minerals. The ground beneath their feet warmed subtly, the stone tiles radiating a heat that pulsed in time with distant, rhythmic thumps, like the heartbeat of some great slumbering beast.
Then, rounding a bend where the floating lanterns flickered green from residual alchemical vapors, they saw it—the Pill Flame Hall.
It stood slightly apart from the main thoroughfare, nestled against the mountainside as if trying to remain unobtrusive, yet failing spectacularly. The structure was a tiered pagoda of dark ironwood, its eaves upturned like the edges of a smoldering scroll, blackened at the tips from centuries of escaping fumes. Unlike the austere grandeur of the Mist Library or the brutal elegance of the Divine Hall, this building seemed almost alive in its disarray. Vents along its sides exhaled shimmering vapors—some gold as dawn, others venomous purple—that curled into the sky before dissipating into the sect's protective formations.
The roof was crowned not by a spire, but by a massive, revolving cauldron of blackened bronze, its surface etched with swirling flame patterns that glowed faintly from the heat within. Every few moments, the vessel tilted of its own accord, spitting a gout of iridescent fire skyward before righting itself with a resonant clang. The resulting sparks rained down in slow, hypnotic arcs, only to be caught in an intricate net of silver wires strung above the courtyard—each ember sizzling as it landed, leaving behind tiny, glowing runes that faded moments later.
Meixiu's nose twitched. "Ohhh," she breathed, eyes alight. "That's where the fun smells are coming from."
A gaggle of alchemy disciples hurried past, their robes streaked with soot and their sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms mottled with faintly glowing chemical burns. One clutched a still-steaming pill to his chest like a newborn, hissing as it seared his fingers. Another muttered frantic calculations under her breath, her hair standing on end from a recent qi backlash. None of them so much as glanced at Lin Feng or Meixiu—too absorbed in their volatile craft.
At the Hall's entrance, a massive iron door stood ajar, its surface pockmarked from explosions and etched with warnings in five different scripts. The most legible one read: "KNOCK. THEN RUN."
From within came a symphony of controlled chaos—the hiss of quenching liquids, the occasional whump of a misfired ignition array, and, once, a high-pitched wail that cut off abruptly with a sound like a wet sack hitting stone. A moment later, a perfectly spherical cloud of mint-green smoke rolled out the door, hovered contemplatively, then shot upward to merge with the ever-growing haze above the pagoda.
Meixiu was already halfway to the door when Lin Feng's hand closed around the back of her collar.
"Wait." His voice carried the weight of experience. "That violet smoke carries soul-poison."
She pouted, swinging Mr. Bunbun in protest. "I just want to look! Maybe poke one little cauldron—"
A fresh explosion rattled the windows. Something that looked suspiciously like a disembodied mustache floated down from the roof.
Lin Feng didn't loosen his grip. "Later," he said, in the tone that meant When I can supervise your arson.
She sighed dramatically but allowed herself to be steered away—though not before pocketing a stray ember from the silver net. It burned cheerfully in her palm, casting flickering shadows across her grin.
Behind them, the great bronze cauldron belched a plume of fire that momentarily took the shape of a laughing fox before scattering into the night.
The lingering scent of burnt herbs followed them down the path as they left the alchemists to their volatile experiments, giving way to the crisp night air of the higher terraces.
The path from the Pill Flame Hall sloped gently downward, the scent of scorched herbs fading into something crisper—cold mountain air laced with the faint, papery sweetness of burning talismans. Ahead, the ground opened into a vast circular plaza, its borders marked by twelve towering stone braziers, each cradling a flame that burned without fuel, their colors shifting restlessly between gold and ghostly blue.
This was the Sky Lantern Plaza—the beating heart of the sect's public life, where challenges were issued, decrees announced, and the ambitions of disciples hung suspended in the air like blades waiting to fall.
At its center stood an ancient, gnarled wishing tree, its branches stripped bare of leaves but heavy with hundreds of lanterns, each one a fragile paper vessel glowing from within. Some burned steady and bright, their surfaces inscribed with elegant calligraphy—formal duels scheduled, missions accepted, vows sworn. Others flickered wildly, their light sputtering as if in debate with itself, their messages still unresolved. A few had gone dark entirely, their ashes clinging stubbornly to the branches like dead fruit.
Around the tree, disciples moved in a constant, murmuring stream. Some stood reading the latest challenges pinned to the announcement boards—polished slabs of magnetized jade where notices hovered in neat rows, rearranging themselves as new ones were added. Others clustered around the more animated displays—floating orbs of water that replayed notable duels in shimmering reflections, or miniature storm clouds that crackled with the residual energy of particularly vicious challenges.
Meixiu darted ahead, weaving through the crowd with the ease of a shadow slipping between sunbeams. She paused beneath the wishing tree, tilting her head back to watch as a new lantern flickered to life near the top—its surface still blank, its light pulsing like a hesitant heartbeat.
"Ooooh," she cooed, nudging Lin Feng with her elbow. "Someone's feeling bold."
High above, the moon cast overlapping shadows across the plaza, its light catching on the countless challenge slips fluttering in the night breeze. Most were simple things—requests for sparring partners, offers to trade techniques. But a few bore the crimson seals of blood duels, their edges sharp enough to draw blood if handled carelessly.
Nearby, a senior disciple slammed his palm against one of the announcement boards, sending a ripple through the floating text. The characters dissolved and reformed into a fresh challenge—his own name blazing at the top, the intended opponent's left conspicuously blank. A dare to anyone brave or foolish enough to step forward.
The crowd murmured.
Meixiu's grin widened.
Lin Feng's hand settled on her shoulder. "Don't."
She turned her most innocent smile up at him. "I wasn't going to—"
"You were." His fingers tightened slightly. "Wait until we know the rules."
Somewhere in the branches above, a lantern burst into sudden, brilliant flame—its light so fierce it cast the entire plaza in stark relief for one breathless moment, etching every face, every weapon, every unspoken rivalry into sharp relief—
—before fading just as quickly, leaving only the afterimage and the slow, inevitable turn of the sect's endless games of ambition and power.
Lin Feng's hand settled at the small of Meixiu's back.
The plaza held its breath.
Then the moment passed, and the murmur of voices resumed, the dance of challenges and replies continuing as if nothing had happened at all.
The echoes of whispered challenges still hung in the air as they left the plaza behind, their footsteps carrying them toward the wilder edges of the sect's domain.
A quarter-mile east of the Sky Lantern Plaza, where the floating pathways dipped low enough to nearly brush the treetops of the mortal world below, the air grew thick with the musk of wet fur and the electric tang of storm-stirred ozone. Here, nestled between the Heaven Stair Arena and the Nine Rings Bamboo Grove, lay the Spirit Beast Garden—not so much a garden as a sprawling, half-wild preserve where the sect's tamed creatures roamed free.
The entrance was marked by a towering archway of interlocked antlers and talons, their surfaces carved with the names of every beast that had ever served the Celestial Sword Pavilion. Some gleamed as if freshly polished; others had faded to near-invisibility, their bearers long since returned to the cycle of reincarnation. As Lin Feng and Meixiu passed beneath it, the bones hummed softly—a greeting, or a warning.
Beyond, the terrain shifted unnaturally. One step carried the scent of sun-warmed grass; the next, the damp chill of a fog-drenched marsh. The garden defied simple geography, its biomes stitched together by ancient formation arts. To the left, a crystalline pond shimmered with the sinuous shapes of water serpents, their scales refracting light into rainbows across the mossy rocks. To the right, a grove of ironwood trees shuddered as something large and feathered shifted in the canopy, sending down a slow drift of indigo plumage.
Meixiu crouched to inspect a set of claw marks gouged into the cobbled path—each one longer than her hand, the stone around them melted at the edges. "Ooooh," she breathed, tracing a finger along the groove. "Someone's been moody."
A low growl rippled through the air, felt more than heard.
Lin Feng's hand found the back of her robe. "Up. Slowly."
At the center of the garden stood the Taming Pavilion, a circular platform of white jade where disciples could commune with their chosen beasts. Currently, a junior disciple stood trembling in its center, clutching a flute with shaking hands as a moonfang lynx—easily twice his size—circled him with disdainful slowness. The beast's fur was the color of midnight smoke, its eyes twin pools of liquid silver. Every few steps, it paused to lick one massive paw, its tongue rasping against dagger-length claws.
The disciple blew a wavering note on the flute.
The lynx yawned, revealing a throat lined with thorns.
Meixiu clapped her hands in delight. "A-Li, can we keep him?"
Lin Feng eyed the lynx's thorns. "Only if you train it."
Past the pavilion, the garden deepened into wilder territory. A stormhoof stag grazed placidly in a field of lightning-charged clover, each step sending tiny sparks skittering across its obsidian hooves. Nearby, a shadow-weasel no larger than Mr. Bunbun was methodically disassembling a training dummy, its tiny paws moving with unsettling precision.
And then there were the less classifiable things—shapes that flickered at the edge of vision, their forms never quite settling. A pair of glowing eyes in the hollow of a tree. A ripple in the pond that had too many fins. Something that might have been a fox, if foxes had six tails and smiled with human teeth.
Meixiu was already elbow-deep in a bush, trying to coax out a flame-sparrow that had built its nest from smoldering twigs. The bird regarded her with beady suspicion, then spat a tiny fireball in her direction.
Lin Feng caught her by the back of her robes before she could retaliate.
"Hey!" she protested.
"You'll scare the prey," he said flatly, nodding toward where the lynx had frozen, ears pricked toward them.
Above them, the moonlight cast its glow through the branches, and for a moment, every creature in the garden went still, their eyes reflecting the celestial glow in eerie unison.
Then the moment passed, and the lynx sneezed, and the disciple fainted, and the garden returned to its usual, barely-contained chaos.
The lingering musk of beast and ozone clung to their robes as they departed, giving way to the damp, earthy scent of approaching mist.
The farther they walked from the Spirit Beast Garden, the quieter the world became—not the heavy silence of the library or the anticipatory hush of the dueling grounds, but something softer, older. The air grew damp, clinging to skin like the ghost of a touch, and the path beneath their feet transitioned from stone to smooth, water-worn pebbles that gleamed faintly in the low light.
Then the mist rolled in.
It curled around their ankles first, pale and weightless, then rose in slow, undulating waves until it swallowed the world beyond arm's reach. The sounds of the sect—distant clashing steel, the occasional shout—muffled into nothingness. Even Meixiu's usual chatter stilled, her voice stolen by the lake's pervasive quiet.
When the fog finally parted, it revealed Lotus Mirror Lake in increments:
First, the water's edge—a perfect, knife-straight boundary where pebbles gave way to glass-smooth surface. No waves, no ripples. Just endless, depthless clarity, reflecting the sky with such precision it was impossible to tell where the world ended and its double began.
Then the lotuses.
They floated undisturbed, their petals a shade of white so pure it verged on silver. Not a single blemish marred them—no insect bites, no water stains. They were too perfect, like sculptures rather than living things. Each one held a single dewdrop at its heart, and within those droplets, tiny scenes played out in endless loops: a sword stroke perfected, a disciple meditating under a waterfall, a figure kneeling in the snow with a blade through their chest.
Meixiu crouched to poke one. The moment her shadow touched the water, every lotus on the lake turned to face her.
Lin Feng's hand settled on his sword hilt. "Don't move."
But the lotuses merely watched, their dewdrop eyes flickering with borrowed light, before slowly turning back. A breeze that didn't exist stirred the mist, and when it cleared again, the lake's far side came into view—where the Ascension Stairs began.
Seven massive steps, each carved from a different celestial material (jade, star-iron, ghost-coral), rose into the clouds. The mist clung to them like a shroud, obscuring whatever waited at the top. The air here was thinner, the spiritual pressure so dense it made their bones hum.
This was the threshold.
Beyond it lay the Seven Peaks—where the sect's true masters walked.
Meixiu straightened, her usual mischief muted by the lake's influence. For once, she didn't speak. She didn't need to.
Lin Feng studied the first step, then glanced at her. "Ready?"
The first step gleamed, waiting.
---