The shards of the Cease-Strife Bell had not yet hit the ground, and the air over Sword Demonstration Peak had already gone dead still.
Among the elders struck by the backlash, Zhao Zhijie came off worst of all.
He was the one who had stepped forward with all that sly needling, the one who had pressured Gu Chengming into throwing down his sword and using his fists, so naturally he had also poured the fiercest torrent of spiritual power into the Cease-Strife Bell while working it from the shadows.
He had personally hoisted Gu Chengming over the fire, after all. He had to make certain that fire burned hot enough.
The price was that the recoil hit him hardest too.
The instant the Cease-Strife Bell shattered, Zhao Zhijie's body felt as though a giant hand had torn it open from the inside. He had no time even to scream. A dense series of muffled cracks ran through his chest, the sound of ribs snapping one after another inside him.
Blood surged from his mouth and nose at once, smearing that carefully composed face into a shocking sheet of crimson.
His knees gave way and he dropped onto the spectators' terrace, both hands clamped to the edge of the stone bench, fingernails gouging into the seams of the bluestone until his knuckles went white.
Several disciples cried out and rushed to hold him up, but Zhao Zhijie was long past caring about dignity. He dragged in great ragged breaths, and with each one a fresh froth of blood spilled from the corner of his mouth.
Those eyes had lost every trace of the poised eloquence he had shown moments ago. His pupils swam, his face turned ashen.
A disciple offered a healing pill with trembling hands. Zhao Zhijie took it, shivering, teeth chattering; the pill rolled twice across his palm and nearly fell to the floor. He finally got it into his mouth, and his throat worked violently several times before he managed to force it down.
But his gaze never left the center of the ring. At that very moment Gu Chengming was drawing his fist back, glancing carelessly toward the spectators' terrace, his eyes not lingering on Zhao Zhijie in particular.
And it was precisely that offhand, almost dismissive glance that made Zhao Zhijie's spine lock rigid. The taste of blood rose in his throat and he nearly vomited on the spot. Terror poured through him.
Only moments ago he had been down below at his leisure, laying the trap, fully confident that the law of the Cease-Strife Bell would blunt the man's spiritual power without a sound, that once Gu Chengming faltered in the ring for lack of strength, the Yunyue Sect's disciples would step in and finish him.
Instead the man had refused to follow the script at all. He had not only seen through the Cease-Strife Bell's little trick, he had punched a top-grade Fifth Realm spirit artifact of several thousand years' inheritance into scrap metal, and as the one who had secretly poured in the most spiritual power, Zhao Zhijie had eaten the heaviest recoil.
Kneeling there, regret written across his ashen face, his lips moved a few times as if to speak, and in the end all that came out was a groan bubbling with blood.
The disciple supporting him murmured that he should go to the healing hall first. Zhao Zhijie gave no answer. He simply let himself be hauled up by the arms, numb, and rose slowly to his feet.
Gu Chengming pulled back his fist and stood steady at the center of the ring, the last ring of white-gold resonance around him fading away, his robes snapping in the mountain wind.
He looked around and waited a full ten breaths. Nobody made a sound.
No, wait. Somebody did.
[The Hundred Bones Resonance cheers: "Heavenly Emperor Gu is so handsome! Kiss kiss for Heavenly Emperor Gu!"]
Old Hundred, that's rather ruining the mood.
Gu Chengming was somewhat speechless.
Not until a heavy boom rolled up from the foot of the mountain in the distance, the wreckage of the Cease-Strife Bell finally landing, did the crowd seem to come back to itself.
The first to recover was Liu Yezhou at the referee's seat. The Deputy Sect Head had, after all, weathered his share of storms.
Even so, his voice carried a definite hoarseness and disbelief. "...Victory to the Holy Son of the Hunyuan Sect!"
On the Hunyuan Sect's seats along the eastern side, Hua Daiyi sat frozen like a wooden chicken, thinking that back then he had believed Little Gu had talent as a body cultivator, and now it seemed he had still undersold it.
That punch just now could have killed three of me, easily.
But the old man's feelings ran mostly to gratification and excitement. Once he came around, he drained his wine in one satisfying swallow, then turned to the Hunyuan disciples behind him. "You see that? Watch and learn, all of you! That is our Holy Son!"
The disciples behind him had clearly been shaken to their bones. Their eyes blazed with fervor and their heads bobbed like pestles pounding garlic; from the look of them, they wanted nothing more than to kowtow to the man in the ring on the spot.
The several elders who had come along with the Hunyuan Sect could no longer keep their seats either.
One threw back his head and laughed, slapping his thigh. Another kept checking that he was not dreaming. A steward elder famous for his composure lost it entirely and seized the sleeve of the sect brother beside him, his voice shaking. "Elder Hua, my eyes aren't playing tricks on me, are they? A Third Realm Holy Son, Third Realm, smashed a Fifth Realm spirit artifact?"
Hua Daiyi did not answer. A few of the younger disciples had already begun quietly rehearsing how they would brag to the rest of the sect once they got home.
"You people really missed out. I saw it with my own eyes, the Holy Son hammered the Yunyue Sect's sect-guarding artifact with one punch. Their faces went green."
On the western side, by contrast, the Yunyue Sect's camp looked as bleak as a collective funeral.
Better than a thousand watching disciples on Sword Demonstration Peak stood without a whisper among them. Now and then someone stole a glance at the young man calmly settling his stance in the ring, then snatched his eyes away again, as if meeting that gaze would get him swept into the reckoning.
What made it more mortifying still for the whole of the Yunyue Sect was that the guest terrace held envoys from several small and mid-sized sects, all invited here to watch.
Earlier those men had sat bolt upright out of deference to their hosts. Now they traded glances, each with his own thoughts, and the meaning in those looks needed no spelling out.
The people of the Yunyue Sect honestly did not know what expression to wear. A Third Realm junior from an outside sect had swaggered onto their own home ground and smashed a sect-guarding artifact of several thousand years' inheritance with a single punch. By rights the Yunyue Sect should have had the moral high ground.
The trouble was, why had that Cease-Strife Bell begun to hum while the duel was nowhere near finished?
And right now the elders who had hidden in the shadows pouring in spiritual power, trying to force control of the match, were sprawled in various corners bleeding from every orifice. Was that not proof enough that someone had been rigging the board?
Their own people had thrown away their faces and then been caught red-handed, after which the other side had briskly smashed the whistle and the referee's box together into so much rubble.
If word of this got out into the cultivation world, the Yunyue Sect's already indifferent reputation was going to get considerably worse.
The few elders who had taken no part in the rigging felt something very strange indeed just then. Aggrieved, certainly, but more than that a helpless sense of "I said all along that this pack of old fools pulling their little schemes would drive us off a cliff sooner or later."
Never mind that a Third Realm cultivator had just crossed two full realms to put out mid Fifth Realm stat-sheet damage.
Which meant that on Sword Demonstration Peak at this moment, apart from Sect Head Qin Ruoxu, who was nowhere to be found, going down the roster from Deputy Sect Head Liu Yezhou, not one single unit could be certain of beating Gu Chengming.
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula, seeing how enthusiastically the Hundred Bones Resonance is cheering, knows it cannot be left behind, and cheers as well: "Chengming is amazing! These nasty creatures are all struck dumb!"]
[The Flowing Cloud Moon-Following has vented a great deal of pent-up spite and is thoroughly satisfied.]
[It huffs: "So sword cultivators come in good and bad after all. You, who cleaned up this batch of bad seeds for me, are the most agreeable sword cultivator I have ever met."]
[Flowing Cloud Moon-Following favorability +10]
[Current favorability: 90 / Adoration]
[Flowing Cloud Moon-Following favorability has reached its maximum]
Gu Chengming was rather satisfied as well.
Exactly. This whole Yunyue Sect affair was obviously the bond storyline tied to you. It would have been absurd if it hadn't even maxed your favorability.
In the shade at the western end of the spectators' terrace, several senior Yunyue Sect elders finally came back to themselves and began muttering to one another.
"Our faces are gone entirely. This cannot simply be allowed to end here."
"Then what would you have us do? Go down and spar with him? You first, or me?"
Silence.
"Ask the Deputy Sect Head to decide?" "...Look at the color of his face. He's more troubled than we are."
Another stretch of unbearable silence.
"Go find the Sect Head?"
Their movements were perfectly in unison as every one of them turned to look at Liu Yezhou in the referee's seat.
After a long moment, the elder with the most seniority steeled himself and shuffled over to Liu Yezhou. "Deputy Sect Head Liu, with matters come to such a pass, ought we not ask the Sect Head to end his seclusion? With the Sect Head's late Fifth Realm cultivation, surely he could..."
"Could what?" Liu Yezhou gave him a sidelong glance. "Could clean up your mess for you?"
The old elder's face stiffened. Liu Yezhou ignored him and simply went on speaking to himself. "The Sect Head has left the sect several times this past month without leaving so much as a word. I doubt he is anywhere near here at present."
"This..."
Liu Yezhou set down his teacup. "...We were in the wrong first, after all. Apologies and reparations will be unavoidable."
The old elder's mouth opened, then closed. In the end he swallowed his sigh, cupped his hands, and retreated to his seat.
Liu Yezhou sat alone in the empty referee's box, watching the young man in the ring calmly slide his sword back into its sheath.
After today, whatever this Holy Son of the Hunyuan Sect chose to do on Yunyue Sect ground, it was unlikely anyone would dare court that particular misfortune again.
The duel over, Gu Chengming leapt down from the ring and walked straight toward the Hunyuan Sect's seats.
Hua Daiyi came out to meet him from a good distance away, the old man's face folded into a mass of creases with his grin as he clapped Gu Chengming hard on the shoulder.
"Good lad!"
Hua Daiyi lowered his voice, his eyes full of pride and smugness he made no effort to hide. "Your master always says I made out like a bandit taking you as half a disciple. I used to argue with him about it. Now I see he was right! If I hadn't moved early and blocked a few troubles for you before you'd grown into yourself, you'd be calling me master today!"
Gu Chengming found that a peculiar thing to hear. What sort of thunderbolt of a statement was that from Martial Uncle Hua? Still, he cupped his hands slightly and gave a helpless smile.
"I've put Martial Uncle Hua to a great deal of trouble."
This Martial Uncle Hua had, in truth, most likely blocked no small number of troubles for him. Back when he had been living quietly in the Capital, he had wondered why his enemies almost never came knocking. Now it was plain that Martial Uncle Hua and his own master had been exerting themselves on his behalf.
"What trouble? Today you're the one giving me face." Hua Daiyi laughed out loud and waved a hand at the disciples behind him. "What are you all crowding around for? Hurry up and pour the Holy Son some tea!"
Several young disciples scrambled over one another to get close, all talking at once.
"Holy Son, how much of your strength did that last punch use?"
"Holy Son, may I touch your fist? Just once!"
[The Hundred Bones Resonance erupts in fury: "Body cultivators from outside sects have no manners whatsoever! Is Heavenly Emperor Gu's hand something you can just paw at?!"]
Gu Chengming found this overheated pack of sect brothers rather more than he could fend off, and fortunately Hua Daiyi stepped in to drive them away in time.
"Enough, enough, off with you. Let the Holy Son rest. You'll have all the time in the world to seek instruction once we're home. Give the man a little peace now."
The disciples were reluctant, but they retreated obediently to their seats, their eyes still brimming with worship whenever they looked at Gu Chengming.
Hua Daiyi handed over a pot of spirit tea and lowered his voice. "The Yunyue Sect will most likely come around with apologies these next few days. Hold steady and don't give them any handle on you. Though, that said..."
The old man's eyes crinkled into a sudden smile. "The ones with the headache now are the Yunyue Sect."
Word like that could not be contained.
Better than a thousand cultivators on Sword Demonstration Peak had watched the entire duel with their own eyes, and among them were envoys from several outside sects invited to attend. The very night the duel ended, flying-sword letters of every color went out from the Emerald Screen Range in all directions like a blizzard.
In under three days, the news that Gu Chengming had shattered the Yunyue Sect's sect-guarding artifact with one punch was on every tongue in the cultivation world for thousands of li around, and the versions grew more outrageous with every retelling.
The most widespread version held that the Third Realm Gu Chengming had not only punched the Cease-Strife Bell to pieces, but had frightened several dozen Yunyue Sect elders into vomiting blood and kneeling on the spot, and that in the end the Yunyue Sect's Deputy Sect Head had personally gone to his knees to sue for peace before the matter was closed.
Reactions among the various powers differed, but the several rogue-cultivator alliances who had long had bad blood with the Yunyue Sect chewed the story over again and again at the drinking table as a side dish to their wine. Someone even composed a bit of doggerel about it that spread widely through the markets and teahouses.
As it turned out, Hua Daiyi's judgment was accurate down to the last hair.
After the Cease-Strife Bell was reduced to scrap, Gu Chengming's treatment at the Yunyue Sect could only be described as being waited on like a living ancestor.
The Steward Hall worked through the night and somehow cleared out a private lodging on the eastern slope of Moon-Tracing Peak, on the choicest ground in the whole geomantic layout. The cushions laid inside were expensive spirit artifacts woven from ice-silkworm silk, and even the daily tea was swapped for "Moonglow Dew," the highest grade of hospitality the Yunyue Sect had to offer.
Rumor had it that ordinarily this stuff only came out, stingily, one pot at a time, when Sect Head Qin Ruoxu was entertaining eminences of the Fifth Realm or above.
Spirit tea in the morning, fresh incense in the afternoon, and someone assigned to come pay respects after dark. They tended him more attentively than they would their own fathers.
Gu Chengming saw straight through it.
That one punch had left the Yunyue Sect with psychological scars. They were afraid he might be dissatisfied, and afraid he might wander around and stir up some new incident that cost the Yunyue Sect more face.
So they had chosen the most presentable method available: enshrine him high on a pedestal, and incidentally keep him quiet for a while.
Unfortunately, the Yunyue Sect's leadership had miscalculated one thing. Gu Chengming did not need to go out and run the map himself at all.
Because for reasons unclear, the Myriad Mysteries Convergence Method was progressing remarkably smoothly. In a mere two days he had a grip on nearly all of the Yunyue Sect's intelligence.
And Gu Chengming quickly worked out why.
At the demon-repelling defense of Snowfall Pass, every major sect had sent disciples into the fighting, and the Myriad Wonders Assembly had long since spread through that crowd completely.
When those disciples returned to their sects, they promptly pitched the Myriad Wonders Assembly to their own sect brothers in the finest pyramid-scheme manner: "Senior Brother's going to show you something good."
Cultivation was dull work at the best of times. Who could refuse a forum that was perfectly anonymous, worked from anywhere, and whose browsing history no elder could ever pull up?
And so, without Gu Chengming having to lift a finger to cultivate it, nearly seventy percent of the Yunyue Sect's disciples were already members of the Myriad Wonders Assembly. All he had to do was take over the backend.
The Yunyue disciples' unrestrained anonymous venting on the Myriad Wonders Assembly was the truest intelligence network there was. Who resented an elder over resource allocation, where the spiritual qi of some earth vein had turned strange, even what hour the Steward Hall changed shifts, all of it lay open on the Myriad Wonders Assembly.
In two full days he had built a deep understanding of the Yunyue Sect's situation.
The grudges and entanglements among the peak elders, the disciples' private grumbling about Sect Head Qin Ruoxu, their awe of Deputy Sect Head Liu Yezhou... all the scattered fragments pieced together were enough to tell him exactly how things stood inside the Yunyue Sect.
But what actually let Gu Chengming fix his search coordinates was not the seething flood of gossip threads on the Myriad Wonders Assembly. It was a blind spot nobody mentioned at all.
The Pill Room Steward.
By any reasonable measure, that was a fat post controlling the logistical lifeline of the entire sect. From elders commissioning high-grade pills at the top down to outer disciples drawing their monthly allotment at the bottom, everything passed through that steward's hands. Yet on the Myriad Wonders Assembly almost nobody discussed him.
Nobody cursed him for lining his own pockets. Nobody praised him for handling matters fairly. It was as though not one soul in the whole Yunyue Sect cared that the man existed.
Gu Chengming's brows drew slightly together, and a sense of familiarity surfaced in him.
That was it. The Red Dust Immortal. The perception-veil.
To test the theory, Gu Chengming expertly posted a piece of filler on the Myriad Wonders Assembly's anonymous board.
[Daily help request: does anyone remember what the Pill Room Steward looks like? I saw him once yesterday picking up my monthly allotment, and today I can't recall his face for the life of me. It's like being haunted.]
Before long, replies started popping up one after another.
[Now that you mention it I'd forgotten too. Some very ordinary old man, I think?]
[What was the steward's name again... ah, forget it, probably some peripheral elder of no importance.]
And after that nobody cared.
So it really is that, Gu Chengming thought. Look how badly these poor fools have been affected. They can actually say out loud that the Pill Room Steward is of no importance.
Still, that settled the target. The man was genuinely a problem.
Having confirmed the anomaly around the Pill Room Steward, Gu Chengming was in no rush to move.
He first pulled every post relating to the pill room from the Myriad Wonders Assembly backend and read through them one by one. The result was as expected. There were plenty of posts mentioning the pill room, complaints about declining pill quality, gripes about how long the queues ran, but everything touching on the steward himself came out in a uniformly eerie, offhand way, as though everyone were instinctively skirting around the man.
Gu Chengming spent half a day mapping the Pill Room Steward's daily movements.
Nobody on the Myriad Wonders Assembly brought the man up voluntarily, but the scattered fragments, pieced together, were still enough to sketch a rough outline.
The man opened the doors at the Hour of the Rabbit and shut them at the Hour of the Rooster. He never attended sect assemblies and never associated with the other elders. All three of his daily meals were delivered to a side room by stewards on his behalf.
After nightfall, Gu Chengming rose and went out, drew a deep breath, and set the Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method turning in advance.
He might have the Legacy Teaching of Peace behind him, but it was still better to act with care.
The night lay like water, and Moon-Tracing Peak bathed in cold, clear moonlight.
Looking out toward the mountain's midsection, the pill room district lay drowned in fog, with only a few sparks of lamplight clinging to life.
The side room was cramped, its decorative style best described as four bare walls.
One battered low table, one pilled cushion, and an iron teapot with enough patina on it to go straight into a museum, the thick verdigris on the spout especially eye-catching.
Several stacks of jade slips and ledgers were piled haphazardly in a corner, the topmost volume marked with a vast brown ring where tea had soaked through, giving it a certain antiquity.
A white-haired old man sat cross-legged on the cushion, cradling the iron pot, taking a blissful sip and letting out a satisfied hiss.
The old fellow was thin as a length of dry firewood, his features utterly unremarkable. Drop him into a mortal vegetable market and he would melt into the background instantly. His eyelids drooped all day, and the standard-issue gray Yunyue Sect robe he wore had cuffs worn to fringe and old medicinal dregs crusted on the collar.
If the Myriad-Theft Immortal Sovereign could see this from the underworld, could see the inheritor of his own gate curled up in someone else's back garden playing the meek grandson, he would have kicked the lid off his coffin and come out to clean house.
This unimpressive old man was none other than Nuo Tao's revered master, the man who currently called the shots for the Myriad-Theft Gate.
The Nameless Daoist.
"Mm."
The Nameless Daoist took another sip of coarse tea, his gaze drifting to the jade slip spread open on the low table, densely annotated in red with the past half year's anomalies in the Yunyue Sect: the trouble in the spirit veins, the strangeness among the elders, and the rotting breath that seeped out now and then from deep in the Emerald Screen Range.
His purpose at the Yunyue Sect was the same as Gu Chengming's. The Dao Plague.
Years ago this grandmaster of theft cultivation had already sensed that the karmic threads of the Emerald Screen Range had been tied into a dead knot. For someone who cultivated the way of "stealing Heaven's secrets, pilfering karma," no disturbance in the karmic threads could stay hidden from him.
Following the vine to the melon, the old man had traced his way to the Yunyue Sect, spent three months altering household registries, and replaced the original steward without a soul noticing. With a perception-veil worked to the point of divinity, he had successfully secured himself an official post on the Yunyue Sect's rolls.
The Nameless Daoist shifted his gaze away, leaned back, and found a comfortable angle against the mottled wall.
His original plan had been to take it slow, to unravel this Dao Plague business at his leisure.
It was only that certain people who had arrived recently, and certain things that had happened, had changed his mind.
Gu Chengming.
He turned the name over silently.
Third Realm eighth level cultivation, and yet he had smashed a Fifth Realm sect-guarding artifact with a single punch, ground the great and mighty Yunyue Sect's face into the dirt, and not one of them had dared make a sound.
The old man took another sip of tea and made an appreciative clicking noise.
Not bad. As expected of the account the patriarch picked out. The boy's style really is wild enough.
Back in that Secret Realm in the Northern Territory, the patriarch had passed over his own direct-line grand-disciples and stuffed the inheritance into an outsider's hands, and as gate master he had certainly had his own feelings about that.
At first there had been a fair amount of unresolved grievance, but as one heaven-defying achievement after another came back on the wind about Gu Chengming, that grievance had long since converted into a plain acknowledgment that the boy had something to him.
And layered over that businesslike acknowledgment was a private filter of a certain kind, the soft-focus lens an elder turns on a promising junior.
His thoughts turned a corner and landed on his own disciple.
Ever since the Tao girl came back from her run at Snowfall Pass, she had not been right. That was better than half a year ago now.
On the surface Nuo Tao was still the same heartless wild girl after returning to the sect, but he had lived how many years? What mischief could get past these old eyes?
He had seen it with his own eyes: his disciple taking that Dragon-Seeking Token out every other day to hold up to the sun, polishing it to a shine, staring at it a moment and then stuffing it back into her robes like a thief. She spaced out in the middle of practice and meditation. Sometimes, when the girl was napping, he could hear her rolling back and forth on the bed wrapped in her quilt, muttering things like "Brother Gu," "you great block of wood," and "just wait until this lady's grown, I'll show you" and other such wolfish nonsense.
Nuo Tao would probably go to her grave believing her secret crush was the best-kept secret under heaven. In her master's eyes, the girl's mind was rather too easy to read.
The old man shook his head over and over. Giving it all away one-sidedly.
Every patriarch in the Myriad-Theft Gate's history had been the sort of ruthless operator who walked off with anything not nailed down. How was it that this generation turned into such a fool the instant it hit the barrier of romance?
Teasing aside, the old man's overall score for Gu Chengming was genuinely high.
From farming reputation at Snowfall Pass, to taking MVP at the Grand Tournament, to clearing the Tianque Secret Realm, and now the title of Holy Son of the Hunyuan Sect.
That was a resume that would let a man cut through Central Province like a knife.
Speaking from the heart, if the boy had not been bound to the sword cultivator class, and if the Myriad-Theft Gate had not passed its inheritance down a single line, he would long since have shouldered a sack, gone out and hauled the lad back to the Myriad-Theft Gate as its heir.
Still, impressive as the boy was, put him beside the old man's own youth and it would be about fifty-fifty.
Back in the day, when he was young... he had dared go up and fleece a couple of handfuls of wool off the Dharma-Station of Tianquan Star.
With his pair of Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils, he had reached up to the nine heavens to pluck the moon and down into the four seas to fish for gold. Whose house had he not left his shadow in?
The reminiscence picked up speed.
One year, in some month, he had slipped into the private residence of a certain Sixth Realm power and walked off with the man's treasure. That power had been furious enough to hunt him for three solid years.
And how had it ended? The old fellow had sent word through an intermediary, begging him to return the thing.
He had shown great mercy, and only then let the matter drop.
The highlight reel of memory wrapped up inside his skull. The old man stroked his beard with satisfaction, radiating the weathered aura of a retired veteran champion recalling his peak years.
A pity his disciple Nuo Tao was not present.
Had she been, she would certainly have torn the stage down on the spot. "Master, last month the version you bragged about had him hunting you for five years. Why the discount this month? And the time before last you said you stole his natal treasure, and the time before that it was somebody's thousand-year vintage. What exactly did you make off with, old man?"
To which the Nameless Daoist had only ever one line of patter.
This old man has handled far too many spirit artifacts. Getting a few crossed is only natural.
It was merely that this era had no trendy slang. Otherwise Nuo Tao's verdict on her own master would absolutely have been "Old Jiahao," the patron saint of tall tales.
What could not be denied, however, was that the Nameless Daoist ranked among the very top tier of the late Fifth Realm.
Apart from never having found a "Dharma-Station," every measure of him stood level with half a step into the Sixth Realm.
Exactly how much real gold was mixed into all that runaway boasting, nobody could say for certain.
Drawing his thoughts back to the present, the Nameless Daoist opened his eyes, his gaze settling darkly on the drafty wooden door of the side room, interest glimmering at the bottom of them.
He had assumed this trip to the Yunyue Sect would be thoroughly dull, and who would have guessed he would get to meet the very inheritor the patriarch had approved of.
He wondered what sort of noise the boy would end up making inside the Yunyue Sect.
He counted on his fingers, and a trace of surprise showed on his face.
"He actually found me through the perception-veil?"
"Not bad... not bad at all."
He laughed aloud, then stood, threw the door wide, and prepared to welcome his guest.
Outside, the night fog rolled like a tide.
The lamps of Moon-Tracing Peak glimmered faintly in the distance, but the pill room district close at hand looked as though it had been sealed off on its own behind some invisible barrier. Even the insect song was swallowed by the thick mist.
Footsteps came out of the fog, unhurried and even.
The old man raised an eyebrow, thinking that the boy did a decent job of drawing in his aura. If he had not calculated it out in advance, sensing alone would not have caught him easily.
The moment Gu Chengming's foot crossed the threshold of the pill room's side chamber, his earlier guess was confirmed beyond all doubt.
The perception-veil. The genuine article.
The man was plainly standing three yards away on a battered cushion, an iron teapot in his hands and slurping audibly, yet when Gu Chengming looked over, what he got was a strange murk in which he had seen nothing at all.
If Gu Chengming had not already suffered at the hands of this particular craft back in Floating Isle City, and prepared his defenses thoroughly beforehand, he might genuinely have let that guiding cognition steer him back out the door.
He stood at the threshold, his gaze cutting through the dim lamplight and landing squarely on the white-haired elder.
The Nameless Daoist finished the last mouthful of coarse tea, swallowed it, and let out a comfortable hiss.
Then he smiled, and what a kindly, benevolent smile it was, exactly like some warmhearted old uncle taking the shade under the big tree at the village entrance.
"Well now."
The old man spoke first, treating this prodigy who could shatter a Fifth Realm sect-guarding artifact with one punch as though he were nobody at all. "Here for your pills? We're closed for the day. Come queue up early tomorrow morning."
Gu Chengming did not take up the thread.
Three yards of air lay between them, and Gu Chengming was not yet certain of the man's identity, so he probed first.
"Senior has fine methods."
He did not step inside as he spoke. "With one perception-veil you have the entire Yunyue Sect spinning in circles. This junior is impressed."
The Nameless Daoist blinked twice, and something genuinely appreciative showed in those narrowed eyes.
"To walk right up to this old man undisturbed. Little friend, you have something to you."
[The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula warns: "Whether this one is friend or foe is unknown. Do not relax your guard."]
Gu Chengming had no intention of relaxing his guard. The more the other man behaved as if nothing were the matter, the louder the alarm bells rang in him.
"What does Senior seek, lying hidden here?"
The Nameless Daoist tilted his head. "Guess."
Gu Chengming stayed silent.
"All right, all right, I'll stop teasing you."
The old man waved a hand, set the iron teapot on the low table, braced both palms on his knees, and got slowly to his feet.
He was not tall. Standing straight, he came at most to Gu Chengming's shoulder.
Thin-framed, the gray robe hanging loose and slack off him, he looked for all the world like an old man living alone whom a stiff breeze might knock over.
And yet, in the instant he rose, the air pressure inside the side chamber grew several times heavier.
Fifth Realm at the very least...
Gu Chengming's eyes narrowed slightly as he made the assessment.
The Nameless Daoist stretched, joints crackling all down his body, then clasped his hands behind his back and ambled over to stop two yards from Gu Chengming.
His gaze swept up and down and came to rest on the storage pouch at Gu Chengming's waist. This was the Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils.
From that one brief glance the old codger had already inventoried the entire contents of Gu Chengming's storage pouch, and at present his eyes were glued firmly to one particular spirit artifact.
The End Lotus.
The old man's expression shifted, a flash of delight crossing his eyes. He had worn out iron shoes searching, and here it was.
He had lain hidden here more than half a year without finding a reliable tool for handling the bug deep inside the Dao Plague seal, and who would have thought this boy happened to be carrying the very object that could solve it.
All told, this Gu Chengming counted as a junior the patriarch had personally singled out, karmically entangled with the Myriad-Theft Gate, and on top of that his own Tao girl felt a certain way about him... ahem. In short, not an outsider.
And among family, borrowing a family member's gear and giving it back afterward, could that really be called theft?
From the birth of that thought to its conclusion, the Nameless Daoist's hands moved faster than the thought itself, and Gu Chengming registered the wrongness at almost the same instant.
The End Lotus was gone.
Gu Chengming glanced down at his waist, then lifted his eyes to the old man across from him.
At some point a pale golden lotus pendant had appeared in the Nameless Daoist's right hand, and he was turning it over and over between his fingers, admiring it, clicking his tongue.
"Good stuff. Truly good stuff."
He weighed the End Lotus in his palm and nodded with great satisfaction. "Set your mind at ease, little friend. This old man will borrow it for an urgent matter and return it once the business is done."
His tone was sincere, and he did genuinely mean it as "borrowing a junior's spirit artifact for a bit." But Gu Chengming did not so much as know who he was.
From Gu Chengming's perspective, an unidentified red-named mob of unfathomable stats, lying hidden inside a sect, had just lifted his core artifact right in front of his face.
The verdict required no discussion.
Hostile unit. Engage.
The Nameless Daoist was still contentedly examining the End Lotus, marveling, "Whose masterwork is this karmic circuit," the picture of untroubled tranquility.
The next second.
A ringing chime.
Ten flying swords left their sheaths as one.
In the instant the sword light flared, the side chamber's dull yellow lamplight was torn apart on the spot by the violent edges. In the dark, ten silver-white arcs shuttled and interwove at frantic speed, forming a strangling net without a single gap.
Gu Chengming did not waste half a word. The Ten Perfections Sword Formation ran at full power, locking the old man dead center.
At the same time, his right hand snapped through a seal, spiritual power flowing in reverse.
The Red Dust Art. Activated.
The Yin-Yang Creation Strategy roared into motion in his Sea of Consciousness, forcing the law of cause and effect into reverse gear. The outcome in which the End Lotus vanished from his opponent's hand was forcibly inverted into the cause.
A pale golden lotus pendant settled itself once more, safe and sound, in Gu Chengming's palm.
From drawing his sword to reclaiming his gear had taken no more than two breaths. Clean, decisive.
The Nameless Daoist stood rooted where he was and looked down at his utterly empty right hand.
Then up at the End Lotus, whole and undamaged, in Gu Chengming's palm.
And finally at the ten flying swords wheeling at high speed around him, straining at the leash.
"..."
The old man blinked several times in a row, and for the first time his tone carried a note of bewilderment. "The Red Dust Art?"
Gu Chengming heard none of it. The Ten Perfections Sword Formation had already closed, and sword qi came down like a cloudburst.
The Nameless Daoist's footwork, however, was divine. His figure swayed slightly, both hands clasped behind his back, and he strolled through the dense sword net as if taking a turn about his own back garden. Ten flying swords chased him, hacking, and always missed by a hair.
With a late Fifth Realm stat sheet sitting there, Third Realm auto-attacks really did struggle to break through.
"The Red Dust Art... turning effect back into cause." He slipped past a downward cut and clicked his tongue in wonder. "This old man's Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils pierced three layers of your wards with no karmic ripple whatsoever, and you can force a rollback and take the thing straight back?"
Another blade grazed past him.
The bane of the way of theft. Turning effect back into cause is precisely the mechanic our Myriad-Theft school finds most maddening.
The way of theft is about erasing traces. The Red Dust Art is in the business of dredging up old accounts.
Another flying sword skimmed the hem of his robe and shaved off half an inch of cloth. The old man glanced at it and shook his head repeatedly, thinking that the man the Myriad-Theft Immortal Sovereign had chosen had gone and mastered the very art that countered the Myriad-Theft Gate, and mastered it this smoothly. The Tao girl had never mentioned that part either.
Mid-thought, his brows shot up, because he had suddenly noticed that every falling stroke of sword light carried a sticky, thread-like drag that attached itself to him without a sound.
The Cling sword intent.
"Ho. Interesting."
The Nameless Daoist batted a flying sword aside offhandedly and appraised the strand of sword intent on his arm. His spiritual power circulation had indeed been slowed, though only by the barest fraction, effectively nothing to the late Fifth Realm.
"This sword intent is rather amusing. The idea is inspired. Unfortunately, for this old man, the effect is vanishingly sm-"
His words jammed again. The ten flying swords had not slowed for an instant; they came down at a higher attack speed, and every stroke stacked another layer of Cling sword intent.
One layer, two, five, ten.
The old man remained composed, but he had discovered a serious problem. Why was there no cap on the stacking of this Cling sword intent?
A visible hitch entered his movements.
He frowned faintly and tried circulating his art to cleanse the negative state, only to find it had no effect at all. This sword intent did not argue about the relative strength of spiritual power. It simply rewrote the underlying rules of motion.
No matter how high your stat sheet ran, if it hit you, the slow was applied by force.
"That's not right." At last there was weight in the old man's voice. "How does this sword intent pierce this old man's resistance check-"
Before the words were out, Gu Chengming's left hand had already closed around the End Lotus. This was a combo he had worked out long ago.
In truth, ever since he had risen into the Third Realm, the combination of the Ten Perfections Sword Formation plus the Cling sword intent had been stretched a little thin. Fourth and Fifth Realm enemies were hardly going to stand there obediently and let you build stacks.
But the End Lotus made up for exactly that flaw. If the stacking was too slow, why not simply fast-forward to the scene after the stacking was done?
Since the ending was already fixed...
Then skip the stacking phase entirely and jump straight to the results screen.
Golden light blazed from the End Lotus.
In the next instant the Nameless Daoist's whole body locked rigid. The Cling sword intent on him leapt from dozens of layers to hundreds in a heartbeat, cause and effect jumping directly to their final state.
"-!"
All composure vanished from the old man's face. His expression went stiff, his half-raised right hand froze in midair, and the left foot he had been about to step forward with stuck fast where it was. His spiritual power circulated as though mired in thick sludge; every motion cost an enormous drain of mana.
His late Fifth Realm foundation was deep enough that he was not outright immobilized, but for a short window he had gone noticeably sluggish. The End Lotus's glow dimmed accordingly, its mana cost clearly severe.
And the old man's mood had finally shifted from watching a show to facing a genuine threat.
What in the hell is this thing?
How is this sword intent a percentage-based reduction?
Gu Chengming naturally knew nothing of his opponent's thoughts. The old man would muscle through the debuff on raw cultivation soon enough; the damage window would be gone in a blink.
And at that very moment...
The Free and Unfettered Art turned of its own accord. The aura around Gu Chengming changed, becoming, without warning, the aura of the Myriad-Theft Immortal Sovereign.
It was only a simulated knockoff, but the essential character of that "Lián Tian Zhi" Dharma-Station had been reproduced right down to the marrow.
The Nameless Daoist, straining with everything he had against the sword intent's suppression, felt that aura, and his body reacted faster than his mind.
He was completely stupefied.
That bone-deep familiarity, the pressure of his patriarch, the Myriad-Theft Immortal Sovereign...
"You-"
That single syllable contained shock, confusion, blank bewilderment, and a dozen other tangled things.
But he was, after all, the master of the Myriad-Theft Gate. After two breaths of system crash he snapped back. No. The patriarch has nothing left but his lingering will. How could he possibly claw his way out of the grave? This is absolutely the boy faking it with some art!"
"You little wretch, using the patriarch's aura to cheat this old man out of a dodge-"
He never finished. The fist was already plastered across his face.
White-gold radiance lit the side chamber. The Hundred Bones Resonance, full power output.
A mid Fifth Realm damage stat detonated in an instant. The savage shockwave flipped the low table over, sent the iron teapot and pill formula ledgers whirling madly through the air, and shook plaster rattling down the walls.
Pinned under several hundred layers of slow and thrown off balance by his patriarch's aura, the Nameless Daoist genuinely could not dodge this one.
Fortunately his foundation was solid. He forced both arms up into a cross-block. The force of the punch slammed into his forearms and shook the whole side chamber; the old man plowed two deep furrows into the floor and skidded back a full ten feet.
He had caught it, at least. He had just shaken out his numbed arms and was about to strike an elder's pose and deliver a bit of commentary, when his field of vision changed.
Not to darkness. To sudden brightness.
A dim sealed chamber laid itself directly over his sight. At the center of that chamber stood a long wooden bench, and behind it sat two women.
The girl in blue-green robes on the left sat perfectly upright, bamboo slips at her waist, her face graver than a judge of the underworld. The languid woman on the right dangled a wine flask, idly running a brass-buckled belt that glinted with a dim light through her other hand.
On the empty floor before the bench, a long row of brand-new hats had been laid out in neat, orderly ranks.
The girl in blue-green picked up the first hat, opened her bamboo slips, and cleared her throat, ready to call the roll.
The woman on the right tipped her head back for a swallow of strong liquor, and the belt in her hand cracked through the empty air.
Snap!
The Nameless Daoist's mind went blank.
What in the hell kind of unholy technique is this now?
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