Riding his flying sword home, Gu Chengming looked down at the scenery below with considerable satisfaction.
The jiao was slain, the old account settled, and the knot of gloom in his chest had scattered clean away on the sea wind.
Below him, ranges of mountains rose and fell, appearing and vanishing through gaps in the sea of clouds, and a great river wound off to the east — enough to give him the feeling that heaven and earth were wide, and there was nowhere he could not go.
A fresh wind came chasing up from behind him, brushing first his sleeves, then the empty wine gourd at his waist, and in that moment it stirred up a great many memories.
The high spirit of youth surged up out of his chest, over his throat, flooding his spiritual platform — and at that very instant the sea of clouds parted in a single seam.
Heaven's light poured down and lit him through from crown to sole, and even the waves of pine below the flying sword darkened and brightened for a breath.
All at once the clear wind turned to sword intent, and cut clean through twenty years of a young man's spirit.
The Fourth Realm — attained!
Gu Chengming lowered his head and looked at his own hands.
Going from the Third Realm to the Fourth had been, for him, like stepping over a threshold; only when he looked back did he realize how laughably low that threshold was. All it had ever lacked was the right turn of heart.
He tried circulating his spiritual power. Fourth Realm true essence flowed through his meridians exactly as he willed it, and even his sword-riding speed climbed a notch, until the retreating shadows of the mountains below stretched into near-straight lines.
"Time to write that letter."
He settled cross-legged on the flying sword, drew a blank jade slip from his sleeve, and gathered qi at his fingertip to write.
The letter was for the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign, so the wording didn't need much polish. For all her cool remoteness, she was in truth an easy person; the less he stood on ceremony, the happier she was. Straightforward was better.
"For the Senior's own eyes: The jiao is slain, the account is settled. My remaining affairs are concluded for now, and in a few days I return to the Wenjian Sect to report my safety to my elders. Since we parted at the Emerald Screen Range I have been in your care, and I have benefited greatly from the Cloud-Moon true intent. Also, the cakes the Senior gave me were very good; should the chance come again, I would like to taste them once more. Respectfully, Chengming."
He laughed a little at himself when he got to the line about the cakes. A dignified Sixth Realm Sovereign, pinching up pastry to feed someone by hand like a village granny teasing her grandson — there was something genuinely funny in that.
He sealed the jade slip and sped it off with a thread of moonlight; it turned into a streak of white and vanished into the sky.
That done, he stretched, then set the sword flying faster.
It was a full day later before the outline of the Wenjian Sect's mountain gate appeared at the far edge of his vision.
The noon hour had just passed, and the sun was at its fiercest.
A blade of Fourth Realm sword intent, wrapped around a flying sword, drove straight in from the direction of the mountain gate without the slightest attempt at restraint or concealment.
It wasn't that he was showing off on purpose. He had only just broken through, and that newborn sword intent was like water through an opened sluice — he couldn't have reined it in if he tried.
So before the sword-light even reached the main peak, word had already spread through the whole sect.
As he flew over the outer disciples' training grounds, seven or eight youths holding horse stance all snapped their heads up at once. The one in front worked his mouth soundlessly, and the wooden sword in his hand hit the dirt with a clatter.
"That — that's not —"
"Senior Brother Gu?!"
"Senior Brother Gu's in the Fourth Realm?!"
"How long has it even been? Wasn't he still Third Realm last time he went down the mountain?"
The seven or eight outer disciples stared at each other, abandoned their stances entirely, and swarmed toward the message hall. But before the duty disciple there could pass the news along, the main peak had already stirred first.
Outside the council hall of the Sect Head's main peak.
Ren Wencai sat across from Shen Qianqiu, deliberating over important business.
Important business, in name. In practice it was mostly minutiae — disbursing the monthly spirit stone stipends for the disciples, repairing the old registers in the Hidden Sword Pavilion, matters of middling weight that in ordinary times would never have required the personal attention of a Sect Head and an enforcement elder.
But at the moment there weren't many people in the sect's upper ranks who could actually take charge. Some were sealed in closed-door cultivation, some had been sent out on assignment, and of those left, half lacked the seniority and the other half couldn't stand the sight of each other. So the two of them ended up huddled together handling the odds and ends.
Ren Wencai had just gotten to the point about reinforcing the formation around the spirit herb fields when a familiar sword intent came pressing in from the direction of the mountain gate. He stopped short, exchanged one glance with Shen Qianqiu, and the two of them rose and swept out of the hall together.
From a long way off they saw a streak of sword-light breaking through the clouds, the man atop it in a green robe that snapped in the wind, his spirit whole and his qi full.
Ren Wencai's habitually stiff, upright face went blank for a moment — and then the corners of his mouth pulled up entirely without his permission.
He hurried to lock it down. Out of the corner of his eye Shen Qianqiu caught the whole performance and thought: Old Ren, when exactly are you planning to get that mouth under control?
Gu Chengming brought the sword down, and the instant it touched the ground he was already covering two steps at a time, bowing low and properly before the two elders.
"Master. Sect Head. Your disciple has returned."
That "has returned" landed in Ren Wencai's ears sweeter even than the news of the Fourth Realm.
"Good lad." He clapped Gu Chengming on the shoulder, not lightly, pride bleeding through every word. "One trip down the mountain and you come back Fourth Realm?"
The unspoken half of it was obvious enough: of course, he's my disciple.
Shen Qianqiu coughed, pushed down whatever had been turning over in his mind, and let his face return to normal.
"Good that you're back." He paused, then added, "Come inside first. We'll talk there."
The three of them sat. The tea was freshly steeped, steam curling off it.
Gu Chengming didn't waste time circling the point.
Starting from the Hunyuan Sect's Yuanzhu acknowledging him as master, to his investiture as Holy Son, to leading the delegation to the Yunyue Sect, then the induced birth of the Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank in the abyss beneath the Emerald Screen Range, the peril of being hunted by Fifth Realm powers, the Record of the Myriad Worlds, the Nameless Daoist, the history between himself and the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign, and finally the slaying of the jiao at Tide-Listening Town and the Great Tribulation the Sovereign had mentioned before they parted — he laid all of it out.
"The Great Tribulation?" Ren Wencai set down his cup.
Gu Chengming repeated the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's words exactly as she had spoken them. The Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth. The Heavenly Dao clearing out the Dharma-Stations. Sixth Realm and Seventh Realm cultivators surfacing one after another.
The hall went quiet for a while. Ren Wencai's expression shifted slowly from pride to gravity. Shen Qianqiu, however, showed very little surprise.
"This matter… I know a little of it." Shen Qianqiu's voice dropped a few degrees. "The Wenjian Sect does have several Sixth Realm forebears of its own, and over these years they have made certain preparations."
He didn't specify what preparations, but the meaning was clear enough.
— The Sixth Realm cultivators had not stayed hidden because they had all fallen or gone into seclusion. Some had stepped onto the board deliberately, as pieces.
"I'll explain the details to you properly later."
Shen Qianqiu looked at Gu Chengming, and there was gratification in his gaze, and no small amount of complication.
This Little Gu hadn't even had time to warm up his title as Holy Son of the Hunyuan Sect before turning around and dragging in the affairs of a Sixth Realm Sovereign, and slaying the East Sea's Fubai Dragon Lord besides. Every single time he came back to the sect, he seemed to bring news capable of turning the whole cultivation world upside down.
Shen Qianqiu sighed inwardly, glad and helpless in equal measure.
"You've only just gotten back. Rest a few days first." He smiled and gently steered the conversation away, refusing to let it drift back toward the Great Tribulation. "None of this has to be settled in a single day. The road ahead is long."
"The Sect Head is right," Gu Chengming said, nodding.
When Shen Qianqiu got up to refill the tea, Ren Wencai held his cup and looked at Gu Chengming's face over the rim, and then, out of nowhere, said:
"While you were away from the sect, Elder Little Yu has been remarkably diligent."
Gu Chengming blinked. "Elder Yu?"
"Mm." Ren Wencai lifted his cup and took a sip, tone perfectly offhand. "Something about you leaving must have spurred her on. She's been running off to the Scripture Repository nearly every day of late."
"The Scripture Repository?" Gu Chengming thought about it. "What would Elder Yu want there?"
"Studying cultivation techniques, she said." Ren Wencai spoke with unhurried deliberation. "I thought I might ask whether there were any gaps in her cultivation, so I had the disciple who keeps the pavilion pull the list of her borrowings."
He paused.
"And when I looked it over — twenty-odd volumes, every last one of them on Dual Cultivation."
Gu Chengming was baffled, and looked at Ren Wencai and Shen Qianqiu with a distinctly odd expression.
The two old men seemed to have belatedly registered that quietly abusing their authority to check what books one of their own elders had been borrowing from the Scripture Repository was not, strictly speaking, dignified conduct.
Shen Qianqiu especially. As Sect Leader Shen, he still found it hard to let go of his dignity over this — and he genuinely did hope that Gu Chengming and Yu Wenqiu might make a little more progress.
It was the same way any elder hopes their own child's romance goes smoothly, which was precisely why he had let Ren Wencai talk him into doing something like this. Being asked about it to his face still cost the old man a certain amount of dignity.
"Ahem… the Scripture Repository's borrowing records are all a matter of registry."
Ren Wencai, on the other hand, had considerably less shame to lose. He reached for the nearest available excuse. "I'm merely showing proper concern for the recent cultivation progress of a core elder of my own sect."
Gu Chengming looked at one of them, then at the other, and felt a headache coming on.
He understood exactly what these two were up to, of course. It was nothing more than the old generation, having seen the younger take a proper Dao-companion, being unable to resist… fussing over the next step.
Ren Wencai went without saying. He had always found those old friends of his who chased their own children around nagging about marriage to be unbearably vulgar. Now that it was his turn, he was doing exactly the same thing.
"You're the man. In this sort of matter you ought to take the initiative."
Hearing that, Gu Chengming could only sigh inwardly. He understood his master's feelings perfectly well, but if the conversation stayed on this subject much longer he was going to have trouble sitting still.
He found an opening to excuse himself. After he left, the two old men were still faintly disappointed.
With only the two sworn brothers left in the hall, Ren Wencai broke the silence first.
"Young people are thin-skinned," he said with feeling. "They're never willing to come at it head-on. Somebody has to give them a push."
Shen Qianqiu didn't answer. He only lifted his cup and sipped, his gaze resting on the doorway, in the direction Gu Chengming had gone.
The stone steps leading from the Sect Head's main peak to the disciples' quarters gleamed under the moonlight, and autumn insects crouched in the cracks between them, singing their hearts out.
At that same hour, at Yu Wenqiu's residence.
A layer of green vine had crawled all over the courtyard gate, and the gateposts still bore the couplet Gu Chengming had written for her the previous Mid-Autumn Festival —
"If the sky falls, the tall ones will hold it up. With nothing to do, just slack off."
Gu Chengming had been quite pleased with it at the time, feeling it captured Elder Little Yu's temperament exactly. Yu Wenqiu had complained about it out loud — and then turned right around, peeled off the old couplet, pasted this one up, and had never been able to bring herself to take it down since.
When Gu Chengming arrived, the courtyard gate stood half open.
He pushed it open and went in, rounded the spirit screen, and found Yu Wenqiu curled up on the bamboo couch under the eaves reading a storybook — though for some reason her attention had wandered off entirely, the pages lying open across her knees untouched for a long while.
Today she wore a loose set of plain house robes, her hair unbound, hanging soft and untidy over her shoulders. A freshly picked sprig of flowers was tucked at her temple.
Gu Chengming's footsteps came down on the flagstone path. Yu Wenqiu's ears twitched, and she shot bolt upright.
"Elder Yu?"
At the sound of Gu Chengming's voice, Yu Wenqiu froze — and then the storybook spread across her knees hit the ground with a slap.
"Eh? Eh?! Little Gu, how did you —"
She scrambled up off the bamboo couch, jammed her bare feet into her shoes and started down the steps, her strides so hurried and disordered that she nearly tripped over the hem of her own robe.
Gu Chengming put out a hand to steady her. Once she'd found her footing, Yu Wenqiu was delighted and aggrieved at once. "You didn't say a word about coming back."
She was complaining, but her voice pitched half a note higher than usual. "I'm your Dao-companion, aren't I? You couldn't even write me one letter."
"Well, I'm back now."
"Back without any warning at all —"
Gu Chengming didn't let her finish. He simply stopped up the rest of that muffled string of complaints with his mouth.
By the time Yu Wenqiu caught up with what was happening, she had lost the ability to speak. Her ears went red first, then her cheeks, then her neck, the heat traveling all the way down until even her toes curled. Every thought in her head turned to paste in that instant, leaving nothing but a blank white cloud of steam hissing out the top of her skull.
Gu Chengming let her go and stepped back, studying her reaction with interest.
Yu Wenqiu stayed where she was, so dizzy she could barely keep her feet, her face as red as an overripe persimmon, lips slightly parted, eyes gone misty and unfocused.
Gu Chengming thought: Master said she'd studied no fewer than twenty treatises on Dual Cultivation, that she'd done all her mental preparation. This is it?
There wasn't a trace of preparation in this. One kiss and she was in this state — if they actually did Dual Cultivation, could she even manage not to faint?
He started laughing. Yu Wenqiu came back to herself, saw him laughing, and went from embarrassed to furious in one step, shoving him with both hands.
"Wha — what are you laughing at!"
"I'm not laughing."
"You obviously are!" Yu Wenqiu glared at him and turned to go, took two steps, then doubled back and said in a voice thin as a mosquito's whine:
"…Come in and sit."
Gu Chengming followed her inside.
They talked about this and that. Gu Chengming gave a brief account of what he'd seen out in the world, leaving out anything too heavy. Yu Wenqiu asked whether he'd eaten; he said he'd managed a few mouthfuls on the road.
She got up to go heat something for him, and he caught her sleeve.
"No rush." Gu Chengming looked at her, and Yu Wenqiu sat back down.
The room went quiet for a while, nothing but the scent of osmanthus drifting in on the wind through the window, faintly sweet.
Later, when Gu Chengming rose to take his leave, Yu Wenqiu saw him to the courtyard gate.
She stood inside the threshold and watched his back until it disappeared at the far end of the flagstone path.
The autumn wind blew, stirring the osmanthus at her temple.
Yu Wenqiu sat alone on the threshold for a time.
— Looking back on it, this urgent desire of hers for Dual Cultivation had been foreshadowed for quite a while.
It began one evening not long after Gu Chengming had gone down the mountain.
An uninvited guest arrived outside the Wenjian Sect's mountain gate.
The Sect Head of the Harmonious Joy Sect — Fu Xiaoxiao!
She had come looking for Gu Chengming, naturally. But Gu Chengming wasn't there, and by rights, having come up empty, she should simply have left. Instead, to everyone's astonishment, she went and sought out Yu Wenqiu.
A Harmonious Joy Sect disciple at her door — Yu Wenqiu braced as though facing a mortal enemy.
She was well aware, of course, that Fu Xiaoxiao's relationship with Gu Chengming was no ordinary one.
She straightened her collar, fully prepared for a war of words. And then the very first thing out of the other woman's mouth was:
"Have you and Little Gu done Dual Cultivation yet?"
Yu Wenqiu nearly sprayed out a mouthful of tea.
After a long, stunned pause, driven by something close to pure instinctive competitiveness, she gritted her teeth and answered, "Of course we have!"
In response, the other woman fixed her with a look of profound pity — which wounded Yu Wenqiu's pride quite badly!
She knew the lie had been seen through, and braced herself for this pint-sized demoness of the Harmonious Joy Sect to press the humiliation further.
Instead — of all things — Fu Xiaoxiao proceeded to instruct her on what sort of thing Gu Chengming liked.
She even advised that if Yu Wenqiu meant to attempt Dual Cultivation, she'd do well to think of an outfit he might enjoy. Cat ears, for instance.
Damn her. This wasn't instruction, this was gloating.
She'd been right after all: the woman had come to humiliate her!
The humiliation was potent, but it also gave Yu Wenqiu both a reminder and a motive.
At this point she was forced to admit that the demoness of the Harmonious Joy Sect had a point. They'd been formally together for this long already — it was time for Dual Cultivation!
And after all her mental preparation was done, she had to admit the other woman's suggestion really was useful.
Cat ears, though, were far too crude and common. If she was going to do it, she'd do it better!
Because when it came to researching Little Gu's tastes, she happened to possess a secret weapon.
— Namely, the Clairvoyant Eye!
Beyond observation and displacement, the Clairvoyant Eye also had a branch given to divination.
That branch was severely limited, however: it required a clearly defined point of entry before a reading could be cast. An ordinary person might have racked their brains over what to use. Yu Wenqiu had no such trouble.
The heart method a cultivator practiced most often mirrored the true inclinations of their heart — and the technique Gu Chengming practiced, Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method, was the very one she had helped him pick out of the Scripture Repository back in the day.
If she divined through the heart method, she was certain to turn up something!
She closed her eyes, and the Clairvoyant Eye's array unfolded at her brow. The divination ran for roughly a quarter hour, and at the ends of all its branching paths, everything converged into a single image.
Yu Wenqiu opened her eyes. Her expression turned exceedingly complicated, and she swallowed.
Little Gu really likes this sort of thing?
But Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method was something the two of them had chosen together. There was no possibility of an error there.
Which meant the problem could only lie with Gu Chengming himself.
— This Little Gu. Who would have guessed you were into that!
Yu Wenqiu drew a deep breath, her face settling gradually into the look of someone marching to her death.
The stranger the preference, the more it proved the divination had been correct — after all, what would be the point of divining an ordinary person's ordinary tastes?
Anything the Clairvoyant Eye deigned to solemnly produce had to be something out of the common run!
With that settled, Elder Little Yu spent the whole night making preparations.
The next day, at Gu Chengming's residence, the hour of Zi.
Gu Chengming sat cross-legged on his bed, his mind anything but idle. He had a rough map now of how the road ahead would go.
— The Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth was coming. Monsters of the Sixth and Seventh Realms were about to queue up and crawl out of the ground. There was still an unfinished bond quest for the Qingxin Formula in the Love Laboratory, and the Dharma-Station pit needed filling too.
This business of the map upgrading was, to put it politely, opportunity. Put less politely, it was "the newbie protection window has expired, everything after this is a curbstomp." He needed to hurry and prepare.
He was in the middle of that thought when a string of noises broke out beyond the door.
Thump. Thump. Thump!
It didn't sound like walking. It sounded more like someone hopping.
Gu Chengming turned his head toward the half-open door.
Under the moonlight, a figure had appeared outside the threshold.
A white quilt was wrapped around it from crown to ankle, wound tight and airless — and beneath that layer of white silk, the color of the clothing was green. A green skirt, maybe?
— Where in the world did this rice-dumpling mummy come from?!
Yu Wenqiu stopped outside the threshold, both arms bound up in the quilt and immobilized, her face red enough to bleed.
A question mark rose slowly above Gu Chengming's head.
"…Elder Little Yu, what exactly are you dressed as?"
Yu Wenqiu saw that Gu Chengming was not wearing the expression she had imagined, and her stomach dropped.
The divination was wrong?! But Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method as the point of entry was clearly —
Her face burned scarlet. Her lips worked several times, and for a long while she stammered without managing to assemble a single sentence.
But it was at exactly that moment that an unexpected presence recognized the origin of Yu Wenqiu's costume.
[Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method: A scallion rolled in a pancake?!]
The question mark above Gu Chengming's head became two.
— Scallion rolled in a goddamn pancake!
He gave the scene in front of him a second, more thorough inspection.
Thin translucent white on the outside, crisp emerald green within. It really did look rather like a scallion rolled in a pancake.
Gu Chengming looked at her — red-faced, swaddled in white silk, wearing emerald green underneath, hopping in place under the moonlight — and finally couldn't hold it in. He laughed out loud.
Seeing him laugh, Yu Wenqiu panicked at once. Her hands, trapped under the white silk, had nowhere to go and hung stiffly at her sides, and the whole rice dumpling wobbled violently.
She hopped one step, the silk too long, and caught her own foot. The entire package pitched over onto the steps outside his door, rolled twice, and came to rest neatly against his feet.
One corner of the white silk had come loose, exposing the edge of the emerald green clothing beneath and a stretch of her scarlet neck.
She lay flat on the ground without moving, intent on playing dead.
"I'll never be able to hold my head up in this sect again."
"I'm the only one who saw."
"That makes it worse!"
Gu Chengming gathered up the scattered lengths of white silk, then looked down at her, smiling. "How about getting up first?"
Yu Wenqiu made a sullen "mm" and got to her feet. The white silk trailed across the ground; she bent to straighten it, made it worse the more she fussed, and eventually gave up and let the whole layer hang off her however it liked.
— Don't go wrinkling my wrapper.
Elder Little Yu did look thoroughly ridiculous just then, but Gu Chengming picked her up anyway. With Gu Chengming's face suddenly inches from her own, Yu Wenqiu's head started buzzing again.
No way, no way — is it happening?!
The mortification hadn't faded yet, and anticipation was already rising up over it.
After that, everything followed as naturally as water finding its channel.
Whether the Clairvoyant Eye's divination had been accurate stopped mattering entirely.
When the door swung shut behind them, it let out a very small "mm."
Moonlight came in through the window paper.
Elder Little Yu, served up: a total success!
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