In a certain sense, the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign was beyond dispute a founding-era ancestor of the Yunyue Sect.
If the Yunyue Sect's current Sect Head had been present and run into this living, breathing Sovereign, he would have had no choice but to kowtow and call her Grand-Master.
The strange thing, though, was that with all the earth-shaking commotion the Emerald Screen Range had produced, that Sect Head had not shown so much as a shadow of himself from beginning to end.
As for the news that the Sovereign had climbed back out of the grave and returned to the light of day, it stirred no great waves in the cultivation world either. The number of people who knew the truth of it could be counted on one hand.
With the Grand Elder already executed, the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign tossed the whole riddled, rotting mess of the Yunyue Sect to the Deputy Sect Head to clean up.
East side of the side hall, in a wing room hastily cleared out for the purpose.
Gu Chengming sat cross-legged on the couch, a panel of light spread quietly open before him.
[Flowing Cloud Moon-Following CG: I Will Love You Until the End of Time]
[Woven together by the Flowing Cloud Moon-Following, which forcibly anchors its own future self — the self that has shed the body of a cultivation technique and attained a corporeal form — and borrows that self's origin-power across the long river of time.]
[Effect: Upon activation, the future corporeal aspect of the Flowing Cloud Moon-Following descends into the present world as a semi-transparent phantom. Constrained by the current laws of heaven and earth, this phantom is visible to the host alone, one-way. The phantom hovers behind the host, the real and the unreal interlaced, fingers laced through the host's ten fingers, the two of them holding the sword together.]
[For the duration, the host's attainment in swordsmanship is temporarily raised by one realm. Every stroke he draws carries the momentum of flowing cloud and the majesty of the bright moon, and his spiritual power circulates without the slightest hitch.]
— This Little Flowing Cloud, really…
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth without his meaning it to. He was thoroughly pleased.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign sat on the opposite side of the low table, a shallow plain-porcelain dish in her hand, a small heap of green-husked melon seeds piled in it. Her movements were remarkably gentle: a deft little hook of one fingernail and the shell cracked open with a crisp snap. A light pinch after that, and a plump kernel dropped into her palm.
She opened her hand and, with something close to eagerness to please, held that single kernel out toward Gu Chengming.
"Little friend."
Gu Chengming froze for a beat, then swallowed and reached out to take it, faintly overwhelmed by the honor.
Still, an opportunity like this was rare. All the doubts he had been carrying could be aired and settled here and now.
"Senior," he said, chewing on the seed, "this junior presumes to ask — across these ten thousand years, how did you endure it?"
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign answered a little vaguely. "Little friend has likely guessed already. That capacity has everything to do with my Dharma-Station, the Moon Within Clouds."
"The authority of that Dharma-Station can hide a stretch of not-yet-settled history away from the world. If I happen to be inside that stretch, I enter, together with the history itself, a superposed state of being and not-being. Someone must supply the missing stroke to that suspended history, make it truly settle into fact — only then can I return out of that superposition."
"Thanks to little friend's help that day, I was finally able to kill the Red Dust Immortal."
"While you were in that superposed state, Senior, could you still perceive matters outside?"
"A glimpse here and there." The Sovereign settled back into her seat, her expression tightening slightly. "And it was precisely through those glimpses that I came to learn of a rather important matter."
She paused. "Has little friend ever heard of the Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth?"
Gu Chengming shook his head. Seeing that, the Sovereign began, slowly, to explain.
The Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth was a calamity the Heavenly Dao set for cultivators. Whenever cultivators occupied too many Dharma-Stations and the Heavenly Dao's own authority was obstructed, it sent down this tribulation as a deliberate culling. Those who bore the brunt were the great cultivators who had already proven a Dharma-Station. But the fish in the pond suffered along with them; juniors who had proven nothing were hardly spared either. Hence the name — the Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth.
"That battle between myself and the Red Dust Immortal, all those years ago, was one episode within the last Great Tribulation." The Sovereign's voice was level. "Thanks to my Dharma-Station, I barely came through it."
Gu Chengming did the arithmetic quietly. So the moment Senior woke, she was due to walk straight into the next one?
He turned that over and decided that life for a high-realm cultivator was genuinely miserable. Barely out of the grave, and already obliged to climb back in.
"If it is a thing of that magnitude, how is it that not half a word of it can be found in twenty thousand years of records?"
"Few knew of it to begin with." The Sovereign sighed and traced an arc in the air with her fingertip. "Beyond that, the Great Tribulation does not come down like a landslide or a tidal wave, toppling everything overnight. It is a slow process. Cultivators caught up in it merely assume their own fortune has run thin. Very few can string a scattering of separate misfortunes together into one whole."
Her finger came to rest at the low point of that arc. "Only once the number of cultivators has been pared down to a certain figure does the tribulation end. After that, Dharma-Stations come loose one after another, and the cultivation world enters a new golden age."
So there's a K/2 in this too. Cultivators have to observe ecological balance now?
Gu Chengming felt his old middle-school biology lessons launching a direct assault on his brain. He pushed the complaint back down. "So the reason that Sixth Realm cultivators, and those above the Sixth Realm, can hardly show themselves in the cultivation world at present — that's the cause of it?"
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign seemed to read the guess behind the question, and shook her head gently. "Not entirely. There is a class of cultivator whose Dharma-Station is rather special, able to use its authority to evade the Heavenly Dao's inspection. That one from the Eternal Life Sect just now, for instance. And for another instance —"
She paused. "Me."
"Some hide themselves out of time. Some hide themselves out of causality. Others can drape everything they do in a veil of causality unconnected to themselves, and so accomplish what they wish."
"What that Eternal Life Sect Perfected One cultivates sets his own self as a 'death' within time, which is why he may do certain out-of-bounds things under that rule."
"His Dharma-Station is called the Counterflow Gu."
She dipped her fingertip in tea and drew a main trunk on the low table, then two side branches forking off it. "Such a thing is never born alone. The main branch is named the Unfettered River. The Counterflow Gu is one side branch upon the Unfettered River."
She tapped a point on the other branch. "My Moon Within Clouds also lies upon the Unfettered River."
"At a rank above his."
At those words, understanding broke over Gu Chengming.
No wonder the Sovereign had pinned that Eternal Life Sect Perfected One down in two or three strokes. All his methods for swimming against time and inverting cause and effect, set before her, were an apprentice taking his own master's brush and trying to argue the ledgers with the master. The brush was the same brush. But the master knew the ledgers best.
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds spoke up at the appropriate moment: Where two things spring from one source, the higher can wholly suppress the lower.]
[Record of the Myriad Worlds: This is the rule that governs Dharma-Stations among themselves.]
Gu Chengming nodded, then thought of something critical. "Then… the Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth. It has already begun?"
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign inclined her head. "The preparations certain Sixth Realms made have failed in the end."
"In the days ahead, across every region of the Great Qian, across the whole cultivation world, no small number of Sixth Realms — and Seventh Realms — who hid themselves away long ago will surface one after another. If little friend intends to act, he had best add a few measures of caution."
Isn't this just a map upgrade, Gu Chengming thought.
Main storyline enters a new chapter, every mob's level goes up twenty across the board. The good days in the newbie village are officially over.
Still — before the map upgraded completely, there was time to take care of a few pressing items of business.
His accounts with the Eternal Life Sect, for example, were nowhere near settled. And that old jiao-dragon who had slipped away by sheer luck — he had yet to pay that one a house call, either.
He would have to use this window, while his opponents hadn't yet gathered their wits, to collect every debt owed him, one entry at a time.
The abacus in Gu Chengming's head clacked away furiously; not a flicker of it showed on his face. He clasped his hands respectfully toward the Sovereign. "Many thanks for Senior's guidance."
The Sovereign opened her mouth, hesitated, and changed the subject.
"Little friend." She lifted another kernel to his lips, and something long and hard to name had entered her voice. "Beneath the Moon Within Clouds there is another, more obscure side branch, called Mutual Illumination. Every Dharma-Station proven upon that branch comes in pairs, each mirroring the other, each beholding the other, never parted and never scattered."
Gu Chengming made a noncommittal sound and accepted the kernel, missing the thread of it entirely.
"Dharma-Stations on that branch are, for the most part, exceedingly difficult to prove." The Sovereign's tone remained placid. "For that Dao requires a person of one heart with you to prove it alongside you. One alone can hardly succeed. Two succeed easily."
Gu Chengming's chewing slowed by half a beat. Why did the wind suddenly feel like it was blowing from a strange direction?
"Beneath my Moon Within Clouds I too left a Mutual Illumination root-branch. It has never taken firm hold." The Sovereign lowered her eyes, plucked another kernel from the porcelain dish, and this time did not offer it, only rolled it gently between her fingers. "Ten thousand years, proving it alone. It is, in the end, a little lonely."
Then she smiled.
"That stroke of little friend's, the one that made my 'Mutual Annihilation' fact — it admits of another reading."
"The word 'mutual' need not be read entirely as dying."
The half a kernel in Gu Chengming's mouth suddenly had nowhere to go. He no longer knew whether to swallow it or spit it out.
He forced himself calm, and kept his tone modest. "Senior's words are profound. This junior's learning is shallow. I fear I cannot fathom the deeper meaning in them."
The corner of the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's mouth lifted. "Little friend is far too humble."
"You fathomed sword intent as flowing cloud clearly enough. I imagine you won't do too badly fathoming the word 'mutual,' either."
She brought that kernel she had been rolling between her fingers steadily to his lips.
"Care for a taste?"
Only then, belatedly, did it land: the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign was flirting with him.
Which left him rather unequipped to respond…
I'm a Galgame master — but with no dialogue box, how am I supposed to fight this?
The words were at his lips and not yet out when the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign rose, unhurried. A moon-white robe leaned slightly forward over the low table, the cold clear breath of moonlight trailing from her sleeves, and two fingers came to rest lightly on his shoulder.
Gu Chengming's instinct was to lean back. His spine hit the hard wooden back of the armchair with a thud and went no further.
The Sovereign pressed in. Her wide sleeve fell and brushed across Gu Chengming's knee, and then her other hand came past the side of his face and slammed flat against the chair back beside his ear.
A century of solid ebony gave out one deeply suppressed, muffled groan.
But Gu Chengming caught something off about it all the same. The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's small hand was trembling, faintly and beyond her control. She had come close — close enough that he could feel her slightly ragged breath stir past the tip of his nose.
He lifted his eyes a fraction and ran straight into the Sovereign's gaze, which was trying and failing to cover its own panic. At the pale root of her ear a rouge-colored flush was spreading down her long neck at a speed the eye could follow. She had even bitten down on her lower lip without noticing. Inside she was plainly a tangled knot of fluster, and yet out of sheer stubborn pride she was holding up the blunt, forthright manner of an elder-generation cultivator, copying the form of it stroke for stroke — mounting this overbearing offensive that even she had no idea how to bring to a conclusion.
And in that same instant, a pale sword intent surfaced silently behind him, and the future phantom of the Flowing Cloud Moon-Following took shape, inch by inch.
— The Flowing Cloud Moon-Following had triggered its own CG, entirely on its own initiative!
The phantom leaned in from behind him, its right hand sliding slowly down along his arm, its ten fingers lacing through his an inch at a time.
"I want in on this too…"
In front of him, the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's Dao-companion offensive with its breath of moonlight. Behind him, the future phantom of the Flowing Cloud Moon-Following pressed flush against his back.
A thread of moonlight, a thread of flowing cloud, and neither one willing to yield an inch.
Alarm bells went off all through Gu Chengming's head.
What — what is the meaning of this?!
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