The Sect Moves
On the Azure Sky Sect's thunder-peaks, bells tolled war.
Elder after elder assembled under banners the color of stormwater. Talismans burned, swords hummed, and disciples stood in ranks that seemed to stretch from one cliff to the next. The Young Master did not appear; his fury was a storm behind closed doors. In his place, a hawk-eyed elder raised a hand and sneered.
"Order received. We sweep the ant nest."
He turned to the gathered forces—mid Core Formation and below, a tide of cultivators sufficient to drown ten mortal kingdoms.
"Crush them," he said, falling back on the oldest cliché in the sect lexicon. "Let the Empire learn what happens when ants bite dragons."
Clouds darkened. A black wing of cultivators lifted from the peaks like a plague—and arrowed toward the Imperial Capital.
A Whisper from a Throne
The capital's walls cast long shadows over fields gnawed to stubble. Locusts had stripped the outer provinces; now a menace of another kind bore down. Warning drums rolled like thunder along the battlements. The Imperial Guard formed ranks in scarlet lacquer and steel, pikes leveled, archers stringing bows with hands that shook despite themselves.
Inside the Jade Dragon Palace, the Empress stood at her balcony, veil discarded, eyes on the razor horizon. She had been trained never to pray. Rulers do not beg the sky. But her lips moved anyway, as soft as breath.
"Please… help."
She meant it for no one and for one man only. For a farmer who priced pumpkins like kingdoms and smiled like a god in disguise.
And from far away—no, from everywhere—an answer coiled around her bones.
Mm. The pretty merchant daughter calls for help.
She flinched, a hand to her heart. Her guard startled. "Your Majesty?"
"Ready the Guard. Close the inner gates," she said evenly, though her pulse stuttered like a drum. "Hold. Help is coming."
Two Shadows, Then War
Above the capital's outer wards, the sect's vanguard broke formation, laughing as they saw pikes and mortals and flags. A spear of lightning coiled in a Core Formation elder's grasp. He raised it high for the opening strike.
The lightning never fell.
Two dark streaks fell from the sun like dropped hammers and smashed into the avenue inside the walls, shattering stones, the air buckling around them. When the dust ripped away, a white-haired young man stood barehanded with a grin full of fangs, and beside him a lean youth with eyes like a calm storm.
Garfield and Long Fei.
"Training," Garfield said, rolling his neck as the sect host reeled. "Master said not to die."
"Mm," Long Fei replied, drawing a breath the Food for the Soul had taught him—down to marrow, out through will. He looked at a thousand enemies and felt only the steady rise and fall of wind through wheat.
Over the capital, a veil of glass-thin light unfurled with a sound like a distant bell: Lai's formation, invisible to most, sealing the city from collateral ruin. Swords would break on it before roofs did. Fires would bend away from children. This was a farmer's mercy: keep the fields safe.
A captain of the Imperial Guard blinked, then bellowed, voice cracking like a standard in a gale. "With them! Dragon-Tortoise Wall! Shields!"
Scarlet shields locked. Pikes lifted. Banners streamed. The walls themselves seemed to brace.
Garfield smiled wider. "Let's harvest."
Garfield vs. The Sky
Three elders dove together, trusting speed and thunder to carve him to pieces. Garfield stepped into their storm like a man into surf. Gold Skin flashed over his shoulders; lightning crawled and died on him, spitting harmless sparks into the dust.
"Too soft," he said.
He met the first elder's spear with his palm, gripped, and ripped the weapon into jagged shards. His counterpunch caved the man's chest and sent ribs through spine; the corpse folded around Garfield's fist like paper.
The second elder screamed and loosed a dragon of blue fire. Garfield shouldered through it, skin glowing like molten ore, then took the elder by the skull and hammered him into the cobbles again and again until red mist burst between his fingers.
The third elder took one look and tried to fly. Garfield leapt, his silhouette expanding, a ghost of the white tiger of legend unfurling behind him. His clawed hand scythed the air; the elder and the three disciples behind him came apart in neat, falling pieces.
Around him, Imperial archers loosed. Volley! Arrows laced with talisman fire stitched the sky. Sect disciples sneered—until those arrows hit the edges of Lai's unseen formation and bent—curving into precise arcs that pinned cultivators' shadows to walls, where Garfield's fists and the Guard's pikes found them waiting.
Garfield laughed as blood ran from his forearms. "Iron golems hit harder than you." He pivoted, a comet on two legs, and a pack of spectral tigers broke from his aura, pouncing into the ranks above the market roofs, dragging Core Formation elites down screaming into alleys and courtyards where the Guard was waiting with pikes like a forest.
Long Fei's Lesson
They came for Fei by the dozen—Qi Refinement, Body Tempering, wide with grin and contempt. "A mortal boy," one said. "Fetch his head."
Fei's breath did not quicken. The Food for the Soul dragged fear down his spine and burned it there. He picked up a fallen pike, hands steady.
"Hold line!" the Guard captain roared. "With me!"
Fei stepped into the first strike and broke an attacker's knee with the pike's butt. He spun the haft into a throat, thunk—another collapsed, gasping. A sword hissed for his ribs; Fei pivoted and drove the pike through a shoulder, then used the man like a lever to flip the next in line into the waiting shields of the Guard.
He remembered being tied to a tree until the wood learned his bones, remembered wooden fists turning his organs to paste, remembered waking and waking and waking.
This was easier.
A ring of disciples tried to circle him; Fei stamped the butt of the pike and breathed. The world narrowed to a circle of effort and result. A step, a twist, a strike—three fell. He took a cut along his forearm, blood slick; the breath moved it away, pain down, intent up.
"Forward!" the captain cried.
Fei matched his pace to the Guard's cadence and the formation sang—pikes surging, shields bracing, boots hammering cobble. Disciples expecting chaos found law; expecting fear found hunters; expecting ants found men whose ancestors had taught dragons how to measure their steps.
The City as an Engine
The Dragon-Tortoise Wall rolled. Alley barricades blossomed like teeth; doors opened at precise moments to let squads pass through houses where grandmothers pressed cups of water into hands; rooftop runners flashed signals in cloth and mirror. Lai's glass veil caught falling fire and poured it into gutters where nothing would burn.
An Imperial talon squad vaulted along the wall-walk, their short blades flickering. Garfield crashed through their wake like a plow, turning sect ranks into churned soil; Fei anchored the hinge of a shield line, his pike a metronome of ruin.
Overhead, a Core Formation banner leader shrieked down an order—"Break the center! They're only mortals!"—just as a cabbage leaf fluttered through the sunlight and shaved his jaw off.
He didn't die. He had a moment to slap his face and feel the slick absence where bone used to live. He opened his mouth to scream.
A second leaf drifted lazily across his throat.
He never finished.
Far from the wall, the Empress watched from the balcony with a hand over her heart. She saw the white-haired demon tear elders like weeds, saw a boy who moved like a soldier birthed in one day, saw the city itself become a sentient machine for survival.
And she heard a wind chime from very far away.
Mm, that not-voice teased the edge of her thoughts, wry and warm and terrible. Training.
Her lips parted. She buried the smile. She was Empress. She did not smile at slaughter.
Collapse of the Wing
The Azure Sky Sect's mid-tier host broke on the capital like surf on a reef. Elites fell in spirals of red; the remainder dissolved into shrieking knots, scrambling for altitude, only to find their flight bent by an unseen geometry—Lai's barrier tugging vectors and lines until those who rose came down where Garfield leapt or where Fei's shield wall waited.
The last Compact of the day was signed in blood: a talon of thirty Core Formation cultivators swore to crush Garfield in one. They dove as one spear—perfect, elegant, a page from a sect manual written in a more arrogant century.
Garfield's knee cracked the first man's spine. His fist dented the second's skull. The third he caught by both wrists and tore in half, face to belt. The remainder hit him like rain on granite and slid away.
He glanced at Long Fei. "Good drills."
Fei panted, grinning despite blood in his teeth. "Iron golems hit harder."
They laughed. The Guard laughed with them. And then the city cheered so loudly the banners shivered.
– A Mortal in the Hall of Swords
High on the Azure Sky Sect's thunder-peaks, the main hall glowed with a terrible cold. Disciples knelt in rows, elders gathered in ascending arcs under a roof painted with a thousand victories. The Young Master paced like a trapped blade. Rage had stripped his smile down to fangs.
"Report," he hissed. "Where is the wing I sent to crush an anthill?"
No one answered. The soul-mirrors lay in spidered shards. The scrying pool refused to hold an image.
A door clicked.
A man in plain linen stepped into the hall, brushing dust from his sleeves with farmer's hands. He didn't carry a sword. He didn't carry anything at all. He had soil under his nails and a smile like the last thing a nightmare might see.
"My, my," Lai said, as if commenting on weather. "If only your Young Master hadn't lusted after someone I had my eyes on…"
Silence devoured the hall.
"Who," whispered a disciple, "is this mortal?"
Lai's smile deepened—patient, merciless, and almost kind.
Death had come to the mountain.