Chapter 34 – The Hand Behind the Flames
The mountain groaned.
Lin Xuan's spear split a demonic cultivator's guard; Bai Liang's saber finished the man with a clean, merciless cut. Smoke dragged shadows across the arena, where disciples had moments ago cheered finals and now fought for their lives. Overhead, the inner veil flickered, trying to shelter the sect from a storm that had crawled up through the mountain's roots.
Then the air itself tore.
A seam opened above the eastern pavilions, not a door so much as a wound. From it descended a man in blood-black robes, hair bound with a silver clasp, eyes the color of old wine poured over iron. His aura bled out over Cloudsky like a drowning tide.
"Mo Tianyin," someone whispered, and a shiver ran the length of the stands.
Peak Soul Transformation Realm—and wrong besides. His qi wasn't only his; it was swollen with the press of other lives spent to fatten his strength. He landed lightly on a toppled pillar, barefoot, smiling as if he'd arrived for a festival.
"Orthodox friends," Mo said, voice rich and amused. "Balance holds only while both sides are even. But heaven's dice roll where they choose, don't they?"
His gaze swept the pavilions, the ring, the tearing veil. "A celestial pill tribulation blooms near your borders—and we smell ripe fruit. We can't permit a tree like that to grow behind orthodox walls. So here we are."
Murmurs rippled—disciples grasping at his meaning, elders grim. No one flinched more than a heartbeat toward Lin Xuan. The demonic sect knew someone within Cloudsky had the skill to birth such pills. They did not know who. Not yet.
A single presence answered Mo Tianyin's pressure with mountain weight.
The Sect Leader stepped onto the arena from the high dais. Gone was the quiet observer; the man who stood now was a blade sheathed in a mountain. His eyes were clear frost.
Peak Void Transformation Realm—one step from Dao Fusion. Sky and earth around him seemed to remember their places.
"Bloodfiend dog," an elder snarled.
Mo chuckled. "Envoy, if we're keeping titles tidy. But call me what you like. I've come to right a tilt." His head tipped, amused. "And perhaps harvest a secret."
"Your tilt ends here," the Sect Leader said, and vanished.
He reappeared in front of Mo in the same breath, palm flattening the world between them. Mo's smile widened. A lattice of blood-chains erupted from his sleeves and caught the blow. Stone shrieked. Shockwaves clapped the air into thunderheads. A dozen demonic foot soldiers nearby went boneless, bodies flung wide.
Mo slid back half a step, heels carving twin grooves. He looked delighted. "Ah. A proper mountain."
The Sect Leader didn't answer. His hand cut a stroke, and a blade of condensed qi sang into being, its edge so thin it made light stutter. Mo met it with a ring of crimson beasts, each a snarling knot of sacrificial will. The blade bisected the first three and kept going.
They moved—no, the sect moved around them. Every breath of theirs shifted the battlefield a pace.
---
On the ring, Lin Xuan and Bai Liang fell into killing rhythm. A protector-ranked demon pressed them with needle-thin threads of qi drawn between his fingers, each flick a surgeon's strike. Aegis of Shifting Skies flashed to wind—threads shaved harmlessly aside—shifted to earth—and a palm meant to pulverize met a soft, swallowing wall. Lin's spear snapped through a seam in space and found the man's shoulder; Bai Liang's saber chopped low, breaking stance. They drove together until the protector threw himself backward and vanished into smoke.
"Don't lose the ring edge," Bai Liang warned, eyes cutting to the veil.
"I see it," Lin said. His ribs ached from the earlier shock. He bit the pain down and moved.
---
In the colonnade, Senior Brother Wen stepped over another body, face carved into winter. A second masked enemy came at him with whip-sword and laughing eyes. They tangled, steel ringing like temple bells. Wen's blade traced clean geometry through chaos; the whip-sword answered with curves meant to strangle line into knots. When the whip snaked for his wrist, Wen let it graze—then cut through three links at a weak point he'd memorized an age ago. The mask's laugh hitched.
"Good," Wen said quietly, and ended it in four strokes.
---
At the Alchemy Pavilion, Junior Sister Mu held a corridor with a storm of white fire, every brazier and crucible plundered to feed her will. The demonic elder with the oily aura pressed into her flames, robes rimmed in burning lace. He lifted a hand and the heat dipped—the shadow of his qi flattening her sun.
"Yield your hall," he said. "Or I take your hands and eyes and you brew for us in the dark."
Mu's answer was a spit of bright profanity and a Thunder-Fire Seal stamped onto the tiles. The floor bucked, the corridor bulged into a throat of incandescent air. The elder raised his sleeve; the blast hammered him against the far wall anyway. He came off it snarling. Mu grabbed two attendants and ran, throwing heat behind her like a wall of glass, shattering it into knives when she heard pursuit.
---
Above, the inner veil shuddered. Another blow from below sank into the mountain's ribs. Formation masters bled from the nose and didn't stop drawing strokes. The Sect Leader's will sank into the stone to shoulder the load, and the mountain steadied a fraction.
He and Mo Tianyin collided again. The Sect Leader moved in lines—edicts; Mo moved in spirals—seductions. Blood-qi beasts clambered over the Sect Leader's decrees and dissolved; qi-blades shredded Mo's chains and found tender places. Each exchange cracked tiles into spiderwebs, turned walls to chalk.
"You are strong," Mo said, not in praise so much as in careful measure. He lifted both hands. A blood tide rose behind him, a thousand screaming faces patterning its surface. "But you carry a sect on your spine. I carry nothing."
He slammed his palms. The tide collapsed into a hammer.
The Sect Leader didn't leap aside. He sank his stance. Sky and earth braided down his arm and met the blow. Sound had no room left to exist; it went somewhere else, and silence hit harder than thunder.
The hammer shattered. The Sect Leader's sleeve blackened to ash along one edge. Mo Tianyin's smile finally slipped a sliver.
From the fringe of the dais, elders stared, no one daring to step into the wake of those strikes. In the corner where Elder Qiu should have been, the seat sat lonely as an empty coffin.
---
"Left!" Bai Liang barked.
Lin didn't think—he moved. His spear blurred through a spatial skip; lightning crawled the haft and leapt for an assassin with a bone-knife dirty with talisman rot. The man twitched, jaw clenched on his own tongue to keep from screaming. Bai Liang took his head.
"Fine partner," Bai Liang said, eyes never leaving the next threat.
"Same to you," Lin returned. He pivoted, Heavenstorm Lance folding fire into lightning into a neat puncture that sent a third attacker pinwheeling off the ring.
A man with a broken nose at the edge of the crowd stared, paling, and realized with a little horror that the outer disciple he'd mocked weeks ago was the calm center of a killing storm.
---
"Cloudsky!" the Sect Leader's voice cut through chaos. "Hold the east! We sever the root in ten breaths!"
Mo laughed. "Ten breaths? Then let's end a few futures quick."
He reached inside his robe and drew a bone spike etched with twenty-seven cramped names. The spike burned red. He flicked it toward the Alchemy Pavilion.
The Sect Leader was already moving—but the spike wasn't aimed like a blade; it was aimed like a prayer. It vanished into the pavilion roof, and the next instant an absorption array peeled open beneath Mu's feet, sucking her flames into a gullet.
She cursed, tossed both attendants through a side door, slapped a seal to blow the array's lip mid-suck, and dove. Heat roared out in a sideways plume that turned three approaching demons to black statues.
From the ring, Lin saw the plume and felt his jaw tighten. He turned a strike meant for his thigh and put the attacker down hard enough to break tile.
---
"Where is he?" a demonic lieutenant howled to his squad, face sprayed with his comrade's blood. "Which one is the pill-maker?"
"Someone in Cloudsky," another snapped, eyes scanning the ring, the pavilions, the dais. "Kill enough and we'll find out who screams when you break their furnace."
They didn't look at Lin twice. Their mistake.
---
Mo Tianyin spun a finger. A chain-wheel of blood iron coalesced and screamed toward the Sect Leader's chest. The Sect Leader answered with a flat hand that turned the wheel inside-out and dispelled it as if it had been an idea he'd already considered and rejected.
"Your rites stink," he said, calm. "Your foundation's borrowed."
Mo's eyes glittered. "Borrowed power spends the same." His foot slid a half step; the ground cratered under the bare skin of his heel. "And you, mountain, are busy. You can't be everywhere."
He was right. All across Cloudsky, battle howled.
Senior Brother Wen met another equal and bled. Junior Sister Mu turned medicine into war and ran out of hall to give. Outer disciples held a stair with bodies and stubbornness. Lin Xuan and Bai Liang killed together, unlovely and exact.
Under the mountain, fists of blood-qi kept beating time against the inner veil. A steady, patient rhythm, like a heart that had decided not to stop.
The Sect Leader drew in a single breath that tasted of ash and iron and disciples' courage and elders' fear. He let it out. "Ten breaths," he repeated, as much to the mountain as to his people.
"Let's see," Mo said, and rushed him in a blur.
They met again. The sky cracked.
And everywhere else, the fight did not pause to watch.