The air tasted like a bitten tongue.
Xiao Mei stood on the wooden veranda of the Eastern Pavilion. She held a ceramic tray against her chest like a shield. She wasn't moving. She couldn't. The atmospheric pressure pressing down on the Qinghe Mountain Range was so dense it made the fluid in her inner ears vibrate. It felt like standing at the bottom of a deep lake without holding your breath.
Down in the eastern valley, three thousand feet below the cliff edge, Mo Zheng was awake.
He hadn't attacked the sect. He hadn't breached the outer wards. He was simply performing his morning cultivation routine in the center of the Iron Blood vanguard camp.
A Celestial Initiate cycling his meridians in the open air was not a private event. It was a localized natural disaster.
Crimson qi bled from the valley floor, rising like a reverse waterfall of boiling blood. It stained the morning mist a bruised, violent purple. The sheer gravity of his exhalations stripped the pine needles from the trees along the lower slopes.
Up on the central peak, the grand bell of the White Jade Sect remained silent. Bai Qian was not sounding the alarm. She was standing on the highest balcony of her sanctum, a tiny white speck against the gray stone, watching the display. Mo Zheng wanted her to watch. He wanted every one of the three thousand disciples on this mountain to feel the exact, crushing dimensions of their own mortality before the three-day deadline expired.
"He's burning the dew," Wei Tian said.
Xiao Mei flinched. She hadn't heard him open the paper screen door.
Wei Tian walked past her, wearing his cheap white scholar's robe. His cloth shoes made a soft scraping sound against the floorboards. He walked directly to the edge of the veranda, leaning his forearms on the wooden railing.
He held a half-eaten steamed bun in his left hand.
"Look at the grass near the tree line," Wei Tian pointed casually down at the valley with the bun. "The ambient heat from his core rotation is vaporizing the moisture. It's terrible for the local soil acidity."
Xiao Mei stared at the back of his head. Her knees were trembling so violently the fabric of her pants rustled. A monster capable of flattening a city was currently breathing fire at the base of their home, and the mortal husband was offering an agricultural critique.
"He is a Celestial," Xiao Mei managed to choke out. The words scraped her throat.
"He is loud," Wei Tian corrected. He took a bite of the bun. Chewed. Swallowed. "Loud usually means a leaky foundation. If your house is built correctly, the wind doesn't whistle through the floorboards."
Down in the valley, the crimson light condensed.
Mo Zheng shifted his stance. The heavy boom of displaced air echoed up the cliff face, hitting the Eastern Pavilion five seconds later. The wooden railing beneath Wei Tian's arms rattled.
The Celestial Initiate began cycling through a martial sequence. It was a display of absolute, unadulterated violence. Every punch fractured the air. Every kick kicked up a localized dust storm that obscured the vanguard tents. He was carving a crater into the bedrock purely through the kinetic bleed-off of his movements.
On the high balcony, Bai Qian's posture remained rigid. She was calculating angles, speed, raw destructive output. She was measuring the exact distance between her Saint Peak core and the monster in the valley. The math was not in her favor.
Wei Tian watched Mo Zheng throw a sweeping crescent kick that sheared the top off a granite boulder.
"Wasted kinetic energy," Wei Tian murmured to himself. "He's bleeding twenty percent of his force into the dirt. Showmanship."
Mo Zheng drew his hands back to his chest. The violent, explosive movements stopped. The crimson qi swirling around him compressed, pulling inward, tightening until it formed a suffocating, hyper-dense sphere of dark red light around his body.
He was preparing to lock the sequence. To seal the cycled ambient energy back into his core.
Wei Tian kept chewing his bun. He was completely bored.
Then, Mo Zheng moved his hands.
It was a locking seal. A standard practice to conclude a high-tier cultivation cycle. He brought his palms together in front of his sternum.
But he didn't use a standard lower-realm closure.
Mo Zheng's index fingers hooked together at the second knuckle. His thumbs crossed at a precise forty-five-degree angle, pressing flat against the webbing of the opposite hand. And his ring fingers—instead of pointing upward—inverted completely, tucking backward against the proximal phalanges of his middle fingers.
The geometry was absolute. It formed a perfect, asymmetrical void space between his palms.
Up on the veranda, Wei Tian stopped chewing.
The lazy slouch vanished from his spine. His shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch.
For exactly two seconds, Wei Tian went completely, terrifyingly still.
It wasn't the stillness of a man holding his breath in fear. It was the stillness of a predator that had just caught the scent of blood in a desert. It was an ancient, geological lack of motion. The ambient mountain wind hit his white robes and simply slid off, refusing to disturb the fabric.
Xiao Mei gasped, staggering back a step. She didn't know why, but her chest suddenly felt tight, as if the oxygen had been deleted from the space around the scholar.
Wei Tian didn't look at the crimson qi. He didn't look at the crater Mo Zheng had dug. He looked exclusively at the negative space between Mo Zheng's fingers.
The Seventh Harmonic Seal.
The name surfaced from a depth of memory Wei Tian had not accessed in eons.
That specific hand fold did not exist in this lower realm. It wasn't written in the White Jade Sect's archives. It wasn't carved into the hidden monuments of the Iron Blood Sect. It was a mathematical absolute designed to manipulate the foundational geometry of the cosmos, invented by an organization that operated entirely outside the boundaries of this speck of dirt.
A mortal cultivator playing at the Celestial tier could not accidentally invent that seal. It required a physical restructuring of the hand's metaphysical meridians just to fold the ring finger at that specific, painful angle without shattering the wrist.
Someone had taught it to him.
Someone who did not belong here had given a local warlord a cosmic key, and the warlord was currently using it to lock his morning exercise routine.
One second passed.
Wei Tian's eyes—usually as unreadable as shallow water—darkened into a void so deep it devoured the morning light. He saw the strings. He saw the puppet.
Two seconds passed.
The stillness broke.
Wei Tian blinked. He slumped his weight back onto his left hip. The terrifying pressure hovering around him evaporated so fast Xiao Mei stumbled forward, coughing as air rushed back into her lungs.
Wei Tian looked down at the half-eaten bun in his hand. He took another bite.
"His left thumb is too high," Wei Tian said. His voice was back to its flat, uninflected drawl. "He's putting stress on the secondary joint. It's going to ruin his foundation if he keeps doing that."
Xiao Mei clutched her tray. Her knuckles were white. "What... what are you talking about?"
"Joint health, Xiao Mei. It's very important as you age."
Wei Tian turned away from the railing. He didn't look back down at the valley. He had seen the crack in the board. He knew exactly what was bleeding through it.
So, Wei Tian thought, swallowing the dry bread. I am not the only thing on this mountain that doesn't belong.
It changed the math. The Iron Blood Sect was no longer just bureaucratic noise. Mo Zheng's arrival wasn't a local weather pattern. It was an engineered storm, and someone with access to the upper floors of reality was turning the dial.
BONG.
The heavy, brass sound of the inner courtyard bell shattered the morning air, ringing out from the central peak. It wasn't the deep, resonant tone of the outer gate bell. This was sharp. Demanding.
It was the Hour of the Snake.
Xiao Mei jumped at the sound, nearly dropping her ceramic tray. She looked from the bell tower back to Wei Tian. The terror of Mo Zheng's display was suddenly eclipsed by a much more immediate, administrative dread.
"The bell," Xiao Mei whispered, her voice cracking. "Elder Shen Mu... the Assessment."
Wei Tian wiped a crumb from his chin. He looked at his plain cloth shoes. He thought about the obsidian resonance stone waiting for him in the main courtyard. He thought about the third-tier illusion array, and the combat instructor preparing to break his ribs in front of three thousand people to prove a political point.
Yesterday, he had planned to fail the Assessment by breaking the equipment. A mundane, structural failure. A quiet way to maintain his useless persona and keep the peace.
He glanced back over his shoulder, toward the valley where the crimson light was finally fading.
A cosmic hand seal. A puppet dancing on strings pulled from above.
"Xiao Mei," Wei Tian said.
"Yes?" she squeaked.
"Did Elder Shen Mu specify exactly how many testing stones he requisitioned for today?"
She blinked, totally confused by the question. "I... I think there's only one obsidian stone. It's a heritage artifact. It's priceless."
Wei Tian nodded slowly. He slipped his hands into his opposite sleeves.
"Pity," he said.
He walked past her, heading toward the winding stone path that led down to the main courtyard. He didn't hurry. His footfalls were perfectly even.
"He should have ordered spares."