The line in his Sea of Consciousness — [Record of the Myriad Worlds favorability +5] — hung quietly before his eyes.
Gu Chengming stared at it for several breaths, his brow knitting tighter and tighter.
That punch had landed square in her stomach. He hadn't used [Infinite Love], hadn't called on [Hundred Emperor, aid me] — pure flesh and muscle, and outside this place it would have been enough to beat any cultivator below the Third Realm into a ball of minced meat.
By all rights the favorability should have plunged into the negatives. So why had it jumped up five points instead?
Gu Chengming ran through it quickly.
This was, after all, the first time in ten thousand years she had possessed a body. Every single sensation was brand new to her.
Maybe "pain" counted as some kind of unprecedented experience for her too. And that was why she'd developed a fondness for the man who had let her taste something so novel?
He tucked the theory away, kept his face blank, and did not rush forward to follow up with another strike.
This was no ordinary opponent. Push her too hard and there was no telling what card she still had pressed under her palm.
Across from him, the Record of the Myriad Worlds pushed herself slowly upright, black hair spilling over her shoulders. Her face was paler than before, but her bearing had already returned to that detached, observer's calm. The memory of her curled on the ground clutching her belly was still fresh — and she was determined to act as though none of it had ever happened.
"I have no wish to trade blows with you."
Her voice faltered a fraction. Her fingertips had drifted to her stomach without her noticing; realizing how undignified that looked, she whisked her hand back into her sleeve.
"It is not worth the effort at present."
Gu Chengming translated that internally: I can't beat you, and I can't be bothered running.
He didn't say the translation out loud. He gave her the dignity of a politer version instead. "If you don't want to fight, why not sit down and talk?"
"What is it you wish to discuss?"
"A way out." Gu Chengming dropped his stance and folded his arms, standing a few paces off. "You're trapped in this domain. Your origin is bound. Everything you can perceive is crushed down to thirty feet around you. And I need you to compromise."
Out there, an old man's spirit soul was still jammed inside the recursion of his own Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils. Much longer and he really would come out of it senile.
The Record of the Myriad Worlds tilted her head.
The old Daoist's Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils were still sealed inside a corridor of mirrors by her Observation Binding Observation. For her it had been a flick of the wrist. For him, every struggle sank him deeper.
"Releasing him brings me neither gain nor loss." Her tone was flat. "But what of you?"
"For me…" Gu Chengming smiled faintly. "If you're willing to let him go, that's your good faith at the table."
"And for you…" He pointed at her, then swept a hand around the pure white expanse of the Love Laboratory space. "You can weigh it yourself. The one confined in here isn't me. It's you."
"One shift of thought and I walk out. You're the one lashed to this mortal shell of flesh and blood. I'm in no hurry to leave. Are you?"
The Record of the Myriad Worlds lowered her lashes and said nothing.
Inside her sleeve, her fingers moved in secret, trying to condense a Time-Slice. A thread of silver-grey radiance barely gathered before this domain ground it into glittering dust under rules she could not begin to read — as though heaven and earth had simply informed her: this method does not exist here.
She let her cuff hide the last of the scattering silver light. After a moment's silence, she asked, "Your method… what precisely is it?"
"It's a long story." Gu Chengming had no intention of wasting breath on the question. "Agree to release him first. We can talk on the way."
She studied him for a long moment.
In ten thousand years she had watched every form the world could take, ten thousand boards and ten thousand games. Cultivators wrestling with their own souls, illicit cultivators coveting Dharma-Stations, juniors hunting treasure and questing after the Dao — every road, she had seen recorded on the Great Void Register. But someone like Gu Chengming? She could turn every page of that register and not find a single word that matched.
Which was, in itself, rather interesting.
"Very well." She inclined her head at last. "On one condition."
She glanced down at her own pale, slender shell, then raised her eyes to Gu Chengming.
"Once we are outside, you will find a way to free me from this husk and return me to the Great Void."
Gu Chengming nodded. He had expected that.
"In exchange," he said, laying down his own half, "once we're outside you'll lift your suppression on that old gentleman, and you'll tell me everything I want to know."
"Very well."
The contract was struck.
No oath. Not even a solemn word of assent. But both of them understood: the binding force of this agreement lay not in words but in the card each of them still held face-down.
Gu Chengming fully intended to keep his grip on her; the Record of the Myriad Worlds was already working through every angle of escaping this body.
Two schemers, allies in appearance only — and yet, for the moment, walking the same road shoulder to shoulder.
After several attempts, Gu Chengming withdrew the same way he always had from the Love Laboratory.
Exactly as he'd suspected: even without clearing the Love Laboratory, he could come and go as he pleased.
The whiteness before him dissolved layer by layer, and light and shadow reassembled themselves.
He'd assumed that pale body of hers would descend into the real world alongside him, or else fold itself into a dialogue box the way his other techniques had.
Neither happened.
The black-purple veins netting the roof of the cavern spread back into view. Wet, cold stone underfoot. The rank, distinctive stink of the Dao Plague in the air. The Nameless Daoist stood rigid a few paces off, gold light still guttering in the depths of his pupils — but no longer with that dead, bogged-down stillness.
No dialogue box for the Record of the Myriad Worlds. That much made sense; he'd never cultivated the technique in the first place.
So where had she gone?
Gu Chengming was still frowning through the deduction when a line of text that came from no dialogue box surfaced directly in his mind.
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds looks on coldly, attempting to divine how such an absurd situation came about.]
Gu Chengming: …?
He tested it, thinking a reply. "You can hear me?"
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds had no wish to respond, but as she is presently forced to lodge within this person's cognition, she condescends to answer.]
[More or less.]
Gu Chengming felt distinctly strange.
It was as if he'd been dropped into some novel as a character, every gesture and step of his spelled out in third person, the narration slipping in the occasional editorial aside.
And this particular narrator was one who took the Record of the Myriad Worlds as her point of view.
He probed again. "So you're—"
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds perceives that this person means to dig into the details of her present condition. She is faintly moved, but does not intend to explain at length.]
[She is a Great Void Remnant-Trace and possesses no true body. Having been dragged forcibly out of her domain, she was neither born into flesh as expected nor absorbed as an object of his Sea of Consciousness — solely because this person has never learned the Record of the Myriad Worlds.]
[Thus she can only lodge here in the form closest to her own essence: recording his words and deeds, recording his circumstances, recording all that falls within his sight.]
[This is the single most humiliating position she has occupied in ten thousand years. She will not say one word more.]
Gu Chengming felt stranger still. You say you won't say another word, but you seem awfully enthusiastic about explaining, madam.
[As though sensing Gu Chengming's inner voice, the Record of the Myriad Worlds is thoroughly mortified. She merely had a thought — how has this person heard every syllable of it?]
[It appears that in her current state, idle musing is inadvisable.]
Gu Chengming's sense of the surreal deepened. He was about to speak when—
"Aiyo, the patriarch's blessings—"
Beside him the Nameless Daoist shuddered violently and staggered down onto the stone like a man waking from a nightmare, kneading his temples, terror written all over his face.
"Was this old man just sucked into the Endless Hell? Layer inside layer, eye inside eye — this old man watching this old man watching this old man watching this old man watching—"
The old Daoist ground his back teeth and severed the recursive thought by brute force, nearly choking on the breath he'd been holding.
Gu Chengming stepped over and helped him up, offering an explanation that was half true. "Senior fell into a trap. This junior was lucky enough to have a secret art that pressed the evil guarding this place down for now."
The Nameless Daoist shot him a dubious sideways look, his Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils sweeping over him — and found only that the causality wrapped around Gu Chengming was, as ever, a boiling pot of eight-treasure porridge. Not a shred of extra funny business he could pick out.
"You little brat…" The old Daoist was gathering himself for a proper interrogation.
Before he could finish, the whole cavern convulsed.
That colossal, heaven-propping eye woven from ten thousand veins — deprived now of the Record of the Myriad Worlds' presence to sustain and restrain it — bucked like a horse off its reins. The deep purple veins churned as if boiling; gusts of rank wind laden with thick baleful qi erupted from the deepest reaches of the earth, smashing the last cold remnants of moonlight into fragments.
The Nameless Daoist's face changed. "What is this?"
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds surveys the chaos before her.]
[The unborn Dharma-Station, having lost her sustaining hand and being fouled by the Dao Plague's baleful qi silted up in this place, is degrading at accelerating speed. Should it be allowed to hatch as it is, every living thing for a hundred li will become fodder for a Fallen Station.]
Gu Chengming read the line and asked inwardly, "So how do we clean up this mess?"
The text stalled for a beat.
[…]
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds notes that this person did not ask "what is it." His first words were "how do we clean it up."]
[He is treating her as an ordinary tool to be used. In what way, then, does this differ from being driven about by Ji Yixi?]
[At this thought, the Record of the Myriad Worlds finds herself somewhat sorrowful.]
—Why are you so prickly about everything?
Gu Chengming's expression didn't shift. "You agreed to cooperate with your own mouth. If that Fallen Station blows here and now, we go down together."
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds concedes the reasoning is sound, though she reserves her opinion on the impertinence of his phrasing.]
He tried again. "Is there a clever way to break the situation? I'm all ears."
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds does not intend to hand over the core method so lightly. She need only impart a few surface principles, enough for this person to weather this wave. Once she is free, she will have plans of her own.]
So you're already thinking about dumping the blame and bolting.
Gu Chengming didn't rise to it. His tone stayed level. "Think it over carefully before you answer. If I can't hold the line here, everyone burns to ash together. You may be a lingering trace of the Great Void, but right now this strand of recording is lodged in me. If I die, neither of us can say what becomes of you."
[…]
The stalled line of narration finally began to churn again.
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds considers that this is merely his rhetoric. Perhaps at the moment of his fall she will slip free of this bizarre bondage instead — though of course, that too is uncertain. Therefore she decides first to use his causality to peer into his past and see whether any clue can be found.]
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds attempts to trace his karmic threads back through his history, and fails repeatedly upon reaching the nodes of the past three years.]
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds realizes, with a start, that she appears to have misjudged.]
[Beneath those few unremarkable karmic threads, undercurrents surge — a long river of laws she has never once laid eyes on.]
[Silver filaments, gold lines, arcane seals woven of red-gold. Not one of them matches any entry in ten thousand years of the Great Void Register.]
Meanwhile, the techniques had of course noticed their new neighbor.
[The Hundred Bones Resonance harrumphs in displeasure: Heavenly Emperor Gu, why is this black-on-white newcomer making such a racket? Daring to shout at an emperor — This Emperor will have to teach her a lesson!]
[?!!]
[In ten thousand years of watching the whole teeming world, the Record of the Myriad Worlds has never seen a cultivation technique birth spiritual intelligence as she did—]
[The laws of the Heavenly Dao state plainly that "spirit cannot be man-made." The spirit of all things is bestowed by the Heavenly Dao. This is a supreme truth of the world.]
[Let alone… several dozen of them gathered in one place.]
[She had believed herself enthroned in the Great Void, flawless in calculation, the eternal observer beyond the mortal dust. That even borrowing Gu Chengming's mortal shell, she would hold him firmly in her palm. Who could have guessed this brat pays no heed whatsoever to the ordinary laws of heaven and earth — that after calculating everything, she would run headlong into a walking bane of cultivation techniques!]
[How can this be?! How can this be!!?]
[The Hundred Bones Resonance, who lives for chaos, hollers all the louder: Heavenly Emperor Gu, why has this black-on-white newcomer gone quiet?]
Deep in the cavern the purple veins burst apart again with a roar, and a rank wind loaded with Dao Plague baleful qi slammed into their faces.
Gu Chengming swept a hand out and split a lunging vein in two, his tone unhurried. "Made up your mind yet?"
The narration went silent once more.
Not long after, Gu Chengming felt information he had never touched before surface from the depths of his mind: the structure of the Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank, the principle of the Edict Name, the method for purging the cause of Fallen Station degradation, how to temporarily stabilize that hollow throbbing at the bottom of the Emerald Screen Abyss… item by item, laid out in order.
She hadn't breathed a word about the core of the Edict Name — but for the obstacle in front of him, this was enough.
[This is an emergency measure. Do not press your advantage.]
Gu Chengming drew a deep breath, pressed the flood of information down into the depths of his Sea of Consciousness, and turned to the Nameless Daoist, who was still beating dust off his robes with "who exactly did you call in, brat" written across his face.
The old Daoist read the gravity in his eyes, had the sense not to keep asking, and merely tucked his wine gourd back into his sleeve and worked the stiffness out of his joints.
"Got an idea, young friend?"
Gu Chengming shut his eyes briefly and combed back through the stream of knowledge that had been poured into his head.
The essence of a Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank looked profound and unfathomable to outsiders, but taken apart it amounted to a single empty square held vacant on the Heavenly Dao's board. Whoever's Dao-intent filled it in, it would acknowledge as master.
The trouble now was that Dao Plague baleful qi had been pouring in through the cracks in the seal for ten thousand years, and had long since caked the "shell" of that vacancy in a thick layer of filth. Let it grind on, and on the day it truly descended into the world it would have to be renamed a Fallen Station.
And when a Fallen Station is born, every living thing for a hundred li becomes its food.
But the method the Record of the Myriad Worlds had given was a devious one. Since the degradation stemmed from "too long a gestation, too long a soaking in baleful qi," then sever the gestation outright. Induce the birth early.
Force "not yet born" all the way to "about to be born."
Once a Dharma-Station enters the final stage before its Edict Mandate, its own laws reject every foreign thing not bound to it by covenant. Like a woman in labor, whose body expels the fetal toxins of its own accord — much the same principle.
As for the price of inducing that birth, the Record of the Myriad Worlds had left a meaningful pause after that clause.
This method will resolve the immediate crisis. As for the consequences, you bear them yourself.
The Nameless Daoist hung his wine gourd back at his waist, the gold light in his Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils finally steady. He looked around at the churning purple veins — the degradation was outpacing every estimate. Another half-incense stick of delay and this cavern would become a boiling pot stewing shredded flesh.
"Senior, please stand guard." Gu Chengming was blunt. "This junior intends to do something to that Dharma-Station."
The old Daoist stared. "Do what to it? Do you have any idea what you're talking about—"
"A Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank. I know." Gu Chengming nodded. "I'm not taking it. I'm only pushing it from unborn to about-to-be-born, so it spits the Dao Plague out on its own."
The Nameless Daoist's expression froze on his face. He looked at Gu Chengming for a long, long moment, then let out a lengthy sigh.
"This old man has wasted five hundred years and more, and today is the first time he's ever heard the words 'induce labor' applied to a Dharma-Station."
He asked nothing further. His Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils spread out a Causality Guard-Net. Illicit Cultivation was no match for orthodox arts when it came to protection and warding — but the old Daoist's particular talent, Borrow the Road and Never Return, was more than enough to divert every drop of overflowing baleful qi elsewhere while Gu Chengming worked.
Gu Chengming held his breath and set the method the Record of the Myriad Worlds had passed down against his own causality-scrambling arts, cross-checking each against the other.
Induced birth, stripped bare, was simply reverse deduction.
He didn't need to comprehend the Dharma-Station's true meaning. He only had to take the haze of "not yet formed" on its shell and forcibly replace it with the clarity of "about to form." Like a painter who had left one last stroke of ink unlaid, and now had someone else lay it for him.
He wouldn't ask what the painting depicted. He would only see the painting finished.
Gu Chengming raised a hand, and radiance of interwoven silver-white and red-gold gathered at his fingertips.
The light came from the Hundred Bones Resonance — the only thing he had that could pierce the layer of rules itself.
[Hundred Bones Resonance: Heavenly Emperor Gu! Is This Emperor about to unleash his might?!]
"I'm counting on you, Hundred Emperor."
[The Hundred Bones Resonance laughs proudly: A trifle! Hardly worth mentioning!]
[A certain black-on-white narrator next door: …]
The light ran down the Causality Guard-Net, punched through layer after layer of throbbing black-purple veins, and touched the haziest edge of that pallid glow deep in the cavern.
"Hmmmm—"
The entire cavern shook.
That single touch looked like nothing at all. In truth it had punctured a barrier thin as a cicada's wing straight through.
The white light swelled. The pulsing purple veins drained of color like a receding tide; the Dao Plague's baleful qi was squeezed out by the Dharma-Station itself and poured off toward the walls as rolling black smoke. The heaven-propping eye that had dragged the Nameless Daoist into infinite recursion was scattered by the clear light and became ordinary rock face once more.
The degradation stopped dead.
The Nameless Daoist tipped his head back at the ever more blinding white glow, his withered fingers trembling faintly, something stuck in his throat.
"Five hundred years this old man has lived… and it's the first time he's watched someone midwife a Dharma-Station bare-handed."
Gu Chengming said nothing.
Seeing that, the old Daoist didn't press. He simply drew the last thread of gold in his Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils together and fixed his stare on that coalescing ball of white light.
Steal the secrets of heaven. Steal causality.
Every instinct of the Myriad-Theft Gate's master was shrieking: this one is worth stealing!
Matters, however, refused to follow his script.
…
The Record of the Myriad Worlds spread her field of vision open again. Confined though she was to thirty feet, she could extend her observation outward along Gu Chengming's karmic threads.
The western reaches of the Great Qian. A cave-dwelling somewhere in the mountains.
An old man with white hair and beard snapped his eyes open. Late Fifth Realm in cultivation, Daoist title True Lord Baicang, over ten years into seclusion — and now he tore himself bodily out of his meditation. He lifted his gaze eastward, and a thread of interwoven silver and gold divine light reflected in his eyes.
—A Dharma-Station about to be born?
He rose to his feet, and the sword in his sleeve rang clear.
In the miasma-choked south, a scholar in blue robes closed the bamboo scroll in his hands.
An unborn Dharma-Station… gestating at the Emerald Screen…
The scholar tapped a fingertip. A small skiff surfaced out of the mist and bore him up.
The shores of the East Sea. The peaks of the western desert. Beyond the northern wastes.
Every great cultivator stalled in the late Fifth Realm with no path forward raised his head in the same instant. Some in seclusion, some wandering, some sealed within their sects — all of them now racing toward the Emerald Screen Range with the fastest movement arts they possessed.
A Dharma-Station about to be born, its master undetermined.
An opportunity that came once in ten thousand years.
Whoever seized it first held the stairway to ascension.
The old Daoist unfurled his spiritual sense a little, and his face twitched. He blew a whistle tinged with bitter laughter.
"Ho. What a turnout. Song Heng of the Hunyuan Sect, the Yunyue Sect's Supreme Elder, True Lord Baicang of the western reaches — even the old monsters in death-seclusion have crawled out of their coffins. More than a dozen late Fifth Realm cultivators, easily."
Gu Chengming's head began to ache.
"Senior, we should plan—"
Before he could finish, the coalesced ball of white light shuddered violently without warning.
It became a meteor of radiance, punched clean through the thick rock of the cavern ceiling, and fled.
So fast that even the Nameless Daoist managed nothing more than a grab at empty air.
The narration stalled where it was, leaving only a string of speechless ellipses.
…
A Great Void Remnant-Trace had surveyed all the ages, and had never once witnessed the spectacle of a Dharma-Station on the verge of birth sprouting legs and running for it.
The Record of the Myriad Worlds plainly had no grasp of what was happening either, and could offer nothing resembling an answer.
"What are you standing there for? After it!"
The Nameless Daoist recovered first. To him that was a gleaming white ticket to the Sixth Realm, the chance for the Myriad-Theft Gate's ancestral graves to smoke with good fortune, all of it dangling right in front of him.
Gu Chengming was right behind him.
If the Dharma-Station kept degrading, the trouble would be endless — and besides, he had a contract with the Record of the Myriad Worlds. He had to settle who the Dharma-Station belonged to. It could not be allowed to drift loose in the world.
Two men with their own schemes, hurtling along at breakneck speed, clamped onto the residual echo of law and refusing to let go.
And in the end, the chase led them straight through the mountain gate of the Yunyue Sect.
What lay ahead brought Gu Chengming to a halt.
In the middle of the Yunyue Sect's bustling plaza stood a girl in the grey cloth robes of an outer disciple.
Black hair like a waterfall, fair skin, features so exquisite no dust of the world seemed to touch them. It was, unmistakably, the exact form the Record of the Myriad Worlds had worn when he'd dragged her into reality.
Only now this "Record of the Myriad Worlds" had her aura crushed down so thoroughly that she looked like a First Realm rookie fresh through the gates, blending into the crowd of disciples without the slightest jar.
Gu Chengming asked inwardly, "Why does it look exactly like you?"
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds was at first perplexed as well, but on careful deduction she has managed to piece together an explanation.]
[She spent ten thousand years of time gestating this Dharma-Station, and its underlying template was cast entirely after her own true form. If, at the moment of "about to be born," the Dharma-Station lacks a complete "image of descent," it will draw upon the most familiar model available to serve as its husk.]
[And the form she herself wore several dozen breaths ago, when Gu Chengming hauled her forcibly into the present world and granted her flesh, happened to be the most vivid and most complete "physical image of the Record of the Myriad Worlds" anywhere in the entire Dharma-Station network of the Emerald Screen Range.]
[Thus the Dharma-Station naturally selected this appearance as its vessel.]
[The explanation is coherent enough, yet the Record of the Myriad Worlds reserves her opinion on the matter of "why, of all husks, mine."]
—The Dharma-Station you spent ten thousand years gestating picked your own skin for a shell. Congratulations, madam, it's a daughter.
Gu Chengming considerately kept that one to himself.
A frail female voice, thick with sobs, cracked across the plaza.
In the center of it, that "Little Junior Sister" had reddened eyes, tears pattering down one after another, her thin sloping shoulders shaking like a sieve. She lifted a trembling jade finger and pointed it dead straight at Gu Chengming, who had only just stepped into the outer edge of the square.
"Elders, Senior Brothers, Senior Sisters…" the girl hiccupped through her tears, "you have to get justice for me!"
Her words were still hanging in the air when the Dharma-Station in human form raised her head.
Her eyes were rimmed scarlet, teardrops smashing onto the flagstones, her voice thin and soft and brimming with grievance.
"It was him!"
Across the plaza, disciples at their morning drills and stewards hurrying past all turned their heads in unison.
The next instant, an elder's voice rang out in fury. "Gu Chengming! Why did you steal our Yunyue Sect Little Junior Sister's Second Realm Rank-Breaking Pill?!"
"…?"
Steal a Second Realm Rank-Breaking Pill?
This plot direction. This scalp-crawlingly brain-dead setup conflict. This absolute textbook classic of "Little Junior Sister got her feelings hurt so the whole sect must avenge her"…
Was this still a story written for guys? Where the hell had he landed?
But Gu Chengming worked out the cause and effect quickly enough.
The Dharma-Station's emergence was warping reality. Every last person in the Yunyue Sect had been contaminated, without knowing it, by this IQ-lowering meme.
And the drama currently on stage was, without question, The Innocent Little Junior Sister, Cruelly Bullied by an Outside-Sect Thug, and the Whole Sect's Elders Who Stand Up For Her.
The thought had barely landed when an old man in ink-green Daoist robes on the left slammed the table and shot to his feet, beard bristling with rage.
"Gu Chengming! The witness and the evidence are both here — why do you not submit to justice at once?"
Before Gu Chengming could get a word of internal commentary in, another elder on the right picked up the thread with perfect fluency.
"The whole world praises the Hunyuan Sect's Holy Son as bright as wind and moon — who would have thought that in private you nursed such a filthy heart! Do you truly think our Yunyue Sect has no one in it?!"
Gu Chengming: …
A third elder, indignation and grief warring on his face, pounded his own chest in bitter sorrow.
"This old man saw long ago that the boy's heart was crooked! That day on the arena he shattered our sect-guarding spirit artifact with a single punch — even then this old man felt his character was wanting, and today proves it beyond doubt!"
—Ah, so that's what you've been waiting to bring up.
But before Gu Chengming could work out how to break the situation, the whole affair escalated another notch.
An elder in a long ink-green robe stepped half a pace forward.
"What a fine beast in human clothing the Wenjian Sect has raised!"
He leveled a finger at Gu Chengming, his voice shaking leaves loose from the trees at the plaza's edge.
"Our Yunyue Sect has never had a quarrel with the Wenjian Sect, and yet you commit theft inside our own gates! If Little Junior Sister had not found the courage today to name you before everyone, who knows how many years you would have kept us in the dark!"
Gu Chengming raised an eyebrow and looked over at the girl weeping like pear blossoms in the rain at the center of the plaza. She met his eyes precisely then, and the tears in hers thickened another three degrees on the spot.
The girl flinched, the picture of someone too frightened to speak, and shrank half a step behind the elder.
"Elders… I, I'm all right…" Her voice was thinner than a mosquito's whine and trembling with hurt. "The pill… if it's lost, it's lost, three more years of cultivation and I can refine one myself… don't, don't start a conflict with the Wenjian Sect over me, I, I'm not worth it…"
Hearing that, the elder's heart broke all the harder.
"This old man recalls the day Little Junior Sister first entered the sect — thin as a rail, she was, and this old man carried her a bowl of spirit-rice porridge himself to warm her stomach… and now she suffers this undeserved calamity. Truly, this old man cannot bear it."
"Gu Chengming, for the sake of your sect's face, this old man grants you one last chance. Bow your head and confess before all present, atone with merit, and our sect may yet be lenient!"
Before he'd finished, an elder at his side lost patience and cut in, hot and hasty.
"Behavior this vile — how can leniency simply wipe it away? By our sect's iron law, one who trespasses in the pill vaults and steals a fellow disciple's property is at the least stripped of cultivation and expelled, and at the worst executed on the spot as a warning to others!"
More astonishing still: after a pronouncement that outrageous, not one of the other elders so much as blinked. They all nodded along in agreement.
At the edge of the plaza, the faces of the outer disciples shifted with it. Even the handful of young ones who had privately admired Gu Chengming for shattering the bell on the arena now looked at him with genuine loathing welling up in their eyes.
An innocent, blameless Little Junior Sister — how could they allow this outside-sect thug to trample her?
The memetic contamination was spreading across the plaza at a visible rate, as if someone had pressed fast-forward.
The Nameless Daoist stood quietly at Gu Chengming's side. Late Fifth Realm cultivation guarded his mind easily enough, as a matter of course. Even so, he could feel a soft, persistent current working away deep in his Sea of Consciousness, patiently "tidying up his reasoning" for him, trying to cram him too into some pre-written character shell — the loyal, honest elder coerced by force from a villain, say.
The old Daoist snorted, swept one broad sleeve, and beneath it the Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils turned with a graceful flow of light, shedding that hidden current without visible effort.
"Tch." He lowered his voice to a mutter. "Young friend, this little thing certainly knows how to claim a mountain and crown itself king."
The elder in the ink-green robe took another step forward, his sword intent drawing suddenly tight around him — the unmistakable prelude to violence.
"Gu Chengming. Have you anything to say in your defense?"
"If you do, say it now. If not—" The old man's voice dropped half a note, and the ring of an ancient sword came faintly from his sleeve. "—then by the laws of the Yunyue Sect, you will be executed where you stand."
Across the plaza, the assembled Yunyue disciples sucked in a collective cold breath.
Gu Chengming's inner commentary: You've stolen even our collective gasp of horror? You've stitched a lot of pieces into this thing, haven't you.
[The Hundred Bones Resonance is so incensed that smoke rises from the crown of its head: This suicidal witch! She dares climb onto Heavenly Emperor Gu's head and frame him! This Emperor will make an example of her today!]
That's exactly the line I was waiting for, Hundred Emperor.
Gu Chengming made his decision.
The next moment, his figure blurred.
The elders on the field saw only a smear of motion — and when they looked again, that "Wenjian Sect thief" had vanished.
The old man in ink-green paled. "Bad! He's fled—"
He never finished.
The Little Junior Sister lifted her tear-filled eyes, mouth opening mid-sob, her next line not yet out — and a familiar figure was already standing in front of her.
Silver-grey eyes flew wide.
THUD.
One [Infinite Love], no flourishes attached, planted directly in the "Little Junior Sister's" stomach.
And that pitiful, delicate "Little Junior Sister"—
"Guh—!"
A very familiar strangled grunt was forced out of the girl's throat.
And then her body sailed off in a straight line, like a sack of torn rags.
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