Looking at the fiend in front of her, Zhou Qingmu was already working out how to interrogate it.
The Night-Watch Bureau had an old set of rules for questioning Eternal Life Sect members that worked well enough: beat the subject half to death, then hook the information out with a specialized secret art. Two or three out of every ten would spill what they knew. All things considered, the efficiency was rather good.
She had some concern that the subject might not survive the process — but this was the only Eternal Life Sect member who had walked into their hands, so it was a gamble they had to take.
Just as she was about to begin, Gu Chengming moved first and stopped her, giving her a small nod to indicate that he had a method of his own.
Half-doubting, Zhou Qingmu watched Gu Chengming sit down in front of the fiend and do something that looked like the casting of an art.
The fiend's eyes went vacant. It had clearly dropped into some kind of illusion.
At that same moment, inside the Hat Tribunal.
Yu Xinji's head was already stacked high with hats. Usurper of the Heavenly Order. Trampler of Law and Discipline. Ruiner of Others' Cultivation!
He had meant to hold out, at least once. Among the Eternal Life Sect's rules was a simple one: die before you talk.
The fiend's body could be destroyed. The sect's arrangements could not be leaked!
Then came the first stroke of the brass-buckled belt.
A brass-buckled belt landing on the spirit platform felt nothing like an ordinary beating of the flesh. It was more like someone grinding his spirit soul under a hammer — one stroke, one white weal, the pain so complete he could not even assemble a whole scream.
After that one stroke, he turned obedient.
"I'll talk, I'll talk! I'll tell you everything!!"
What Zhou Qingmu saw was this: a few breaths after Gu Chengming set that secret art in motion, the fiend shuddered from head to foot as though it had just lived through something unspeakable, and then began pouring out information all at once — the sect's placement points in the Capital, the hour the Osmanthus Assembly opened its banquet, the master copy of the sect's Edict Name register, the hidden sentries in Old Locust Lane in the southern quarter—
Gu Chengming leaned down. "Anything else?"
"The rotation hours at the imperially sealed Osmanthus Garden in the western suburbs! The seventh, the fifteenth, the twenty-third — they enter at the hour of chen and change shift at noon—"
Yu Xinji sagged beneath the spirit talisman, breath rasping. At last Zhou Qingmu asked, "Can it be trusted?"
"It can."
Gu Chengming smiled, guessing that she was worried his secret method might not hold, and offered a brief explanation.
Zhou Qingmu started to say something, then decided to trust him. As for Gu Chengming, having squeezed the intelligence dry, he showed no mercy whatsoever.
One punch came down. Yu Xinji's plea for mercy never left his mouth; he became a smear of pulp splattered across the center of the table.
Zhou Qingmu stared at the thing on the tabletop, words dying in her throat.
In her years in the Capital she had often heard people say that the Murderous Demon of Snowfall Pass never left an Eternal Life Sect member a whole corpse. She had even gone so far as to ask Liu Batian exactly what degree of "not whole" was meant. Vice Commander Liu had hemmed and hawed, held it in for a long while, and finally managed, "As for precisely how not-whole it is, this humble officer cannot describe it."
At the time she had simply thought her subordinate poor with words. Now, having seen it with her own eyes, she understood roughly why he had been unable to describe it.
Luo Jinyao sat at the far end of the cabin, entirely at ease, and drew a handkerchief from her sleeve to pass over. "Wipe."
Gu Chengming took it and cleaned his knuckles. "My thanks, Senior Sister Luo."
Zhou Qingmu's gaze traveled between the two of them, and only then did a small regret surface. Back in the Capital, when she had first heard the name Murderous Demon of Snowfall Pass, she had never once thought to ask Luo Jinyao about it. Had she known this day was coming, she would have made up that page of homework long ago.
Meanwhile, having just finished dealing with the fiend, Gu Chengming had run into a new problem.
Truthfully, something had been puzzling him for a long time.
How exactly did the Eternal Life Sect manage to be this pathetic in a straight fight and still keep pieces placed all through the Great Qian, and through every major sect besides?
What was known so far: the Eternal Life Sect possessed eight Jìntian, a number of Stewards, and, on the surface at least, no Sixth Realm cultivators at all.
Which meant a power built on eight Fifth Realm cultivators — and those eight only came out for major operations. Under those conditions they had somehow slipped every encirclement mounted by the Great Qian and the various sects, and were still alive and well to this day.
He laid the whole tangle of doubts out, and Zhou Qingmu laughed when she heard them. "Little Gu thinks they're easy to kill?"
Gu Chengming considered it a moment. "They really haven't been as troublesome as I'd imagined."
"That's because they ran into you." Zhou Qingmu shook her head. "Put anyone else in your place and the situation would be reversed."
She paused, then went on. "Every Eternal Life Sect member carries some means of preserving his life. An ordinary cultivator can't run one down. And even catching one is no guarantee of keeping it."
Speaking of that reminded her of an old affair. "I killed one of their Jìntian once. By the end of that fight her Sea of Consciousness had been beaten dry — by any reasonable standard she was already dead. In the last instant before her breath stopped, she crammed her entire set of spirit bones, Sea of Consciousness and all, into a broken sword. It cost me an enormous amount of effort to finish her off for good."
Gu Chengming turned that over in silence.
Put that way, it did track. The very first Eternal Life Sect member he had ever killed had been formidable with escape arts — and back then he'd only been at the Second Realm.
Then there was the one he had killed just after unlocking [Hundred Emperor, lend me your strength!]. If that one hadn't been so fixated on recruiting him, killing it outright would have taken real work; the thing had more than one life to spend.
And later, Sorrow-and-Joy, the Eternal Life Sect Jìntian — the same story. If he hadn't happened to possess the exact means of countering an aggregate of emotion like that, an ordinary cultivator hoping merely to wound it would have been dreaming.
So was the truth simply that Eternal Life Sect members were very, very good at running away?
Following that thread through, Gu Chengming found the taste of it a little odd.
He had cut his way through them from the beginning without a single real setback, and somewhere along the line "Eternal Life Sect members are easy kills" had hardened into a stereotype in his head. Seen from this angle, an organization that could hold its footing in the cultivation world this long clearly had some genuine skill behind it.
[The Qingxin Formula, thoroughly amused: These Eternal Life Sect members really do have a grievance. A whole arsenal of skills and they get beaten to death by wild punches before they can use any of it. Still, Little Gu had better remember — you've never come to grief over this, but a little caution never hurts.]
Fair point.
Gu Chengming filed the lesson away, lifted his cup, and drank his tea by way of digesting it.
The ship's prow broke through cloud and the Capital region came into view. The day they arrived happened to be clear, sunlight pressing down onto the grey-green tiles of the Imperial City. Gu Chengming stood at the prow and looked at that familiar outline of walls and gates.
He felt none of the traveler's sentiment about coming home. What rose in him instead was a faint, particular wrongness.
The Capital looked unchanged — and that "unchanged" was precisely what was off.
The strongest impression from his first stretch of time here had been that the place had an absurd number of fiends in it.
The royal city of the Great Qian, the site of the richest spiritual qi under heaven. By rights it should have been water for whales and sharks, with no room for mudfish — and yet the mudfish were everywhere. Walk three steps outside after dark and you'd collide with two threads of yin qi. Later, serving in the Night-Watch Bureau, he had swept up seven or eight parts out of ten of the fiends in the Capital worth catching. For a while it had genuinely been quiet. When he left he'd even been rather pleased with himself, feeling he had at least left this imperial city a measure of cleanliness.
Now he was back. He spread out his spiritual sense and swept once, and found yin qi coiled in the corners, foul qi surging underneath, three and five to a cluster in every back alley.
Like pushing open the door of an old house you hadn't visited in ten years: the roaches were the same batch of roaches, and the moment the door opened they scattered in every direction, thoroughly irritating to look at.
As though she had sensed something, Zhou Qingmu turned her head toward him. "Little Gu?"
"Director." Gu Chengming smiled. "I'll go into the city and walk around a bit first. You two head back to the Bureau. Give it one night and we'll talk."
Zhou Qingmu blinked, then agreed.
What she had not anticipated was how much noise this so-called walk around the city would end up making.
In the span of a single day, Gu Chengming made the Capital remember the name Murderous Demon of Snowfall Pass.
— But that comes later. For now, back to the day he entered the city.
Gu Chengming did not go straight to any one place to make trouble. He went up to the high tower of the Night-Watch Bureau's duty hall, pushed open a window, and looked out toward the Imperial City as far as his eyes would carry. A single stirring of thought, and his spiritual sense unfurled like a thin net across the whole of the sky.
The Red Dust Art rose. Every evil cause and evil effect within the Capital took shape upon that net.
Wherever a point lit up, he tapped a white jade talisman. The talisman stirred, and a flying sword tore out of his sleeve into the open air.
Before noon, across the city.
In a narrow alley the sun never reached, the withered corpse of a beggar, abandoned there for days, was sitting up inch by inch. Threads of black qi crawled out of its eye sockets. Its mouth opened; it meant to find some unlucky soul's life first, to wet its throat.
A line of sword-light flared in midair.
Soundless, weightless, shooting straight in from some rooftop in the southern quarter. It bent through three hairline turns, rounded two awning poles, grazed past the ear of the old man selling candied haws, and then buried itself squarely between the corpse's brows. The corpse did not even get out a single cry before it scattered into a puff of black ash.
The flying sword hung there half a breath, as if surveying the surroundings for further work, then swung its point around and drifted off toward the next street.
In the cellar of an abandoned house, several strands of yin spirits were clustered around a lump of corpse wax, repairing their own bodies. They were the sect's lowest rung of Guests of Joy, the sort that ordinarily padded their numbers with unclaimed wandering souls — a trade of accumulating little into much.
In the very next instant, a hole tore open in the cellar roof and four flying swords came down together. The first three took the three yin spirits apiece; the last drove into the center of the corpse wax and, on the follow-through, split the lump in two.
The Eternal Life Sect member's face darkened. He was about to shout a challenge when he felt a chill at the back of his neck. His head tumbled off his shoulders, rolled down the steps of the Dharma altar, and came to rest at his own feet, eyes still open, the shock in them not yet faded.
Several low-ranking Stewards beside him nearly lost their souls in fright and turned to flee. Above the Dharma altar, sword-light burst out.
Ten flying swords left their sheaths at once and sealed every man in that shrine off without a gap.
The Cling sword intent came dense and unbroken. No matter how those Stewards whipped their escape arts, it was like running in deep mud — they could not shift an inch.
In the instant the swords withdrew, all that was left inside the shrine was pulp on the floor.
Sword-light like that had not stopped since the first hour of chen.
Some burst out through broken eaves in the west of the city. Some plunged down wells in the north. Some grazed past the old man selling candied haws, who yelped that he'd seen a ghost.
The sword-shadows came and went in silence. Most passersby simply assumed some sword cultivator or other was flying overhead, exclaimed a couple of times, and put their heads back down to hurry on.
Toward evening, above the Imperial City.
In the Night-Watch Bureau's duty hall, Gu Chengming sat at the tea table by the western window, a freshly steeped pot at his elbow.
Ten small white jade talismans were laid out in a row on the table, each corresponding to one of the flying swords outside.
His eyes were closed. His spiritual sense lay over the Capital like a net, and the karmic filaments dredged up by the Red Dust Art settled onto it one by one. Anything wound about with evil cause and evil effect lit as a small point of light in his Sea of Consciousness.
Wherever a point lit, he tapped a white jade talisman.
The talisman stirred, and on some street, in some manor, down some well, beneath the roots of some withered willow, a flying sword fell out of the sky.
— Without setting foot outside, cut down the swarm of fiends by flying sword!
At the hour of xu, all through the Capital, the night markets were opening and the streets were thick with people.
Someone looked up, saw a long sword sweep across the sky, cried out, and grabbed a companion's arm to point.
The companion glanced up in irritation — and then froze as well. The sword traced a slow arc overhead, point angled down as though sighting on something. In the next breath the sword-light dropped hard and plunged into a dark side alley, and out of the alley came a shriek that was not a human sound.
Then dead silence. The sword-light lifted from the alley mouth and continued north.
Talk broke out on every side.
"...what was that just now?!"
"A flying sword!"
"Whose flying sword? Who's bold enough to fly one around over the Imperial City?"
"Hush, keep your voice down."
"What is it?"
"Didn't you see? The thing it cut down just now was a fiend!"
"That alley — I passed by it a few days back. Gave me the shivers, I didn't dare walk through. Doesn't feel cold at all today."
The flying sword went further and further, skimmed the upswept eaves of the city's bell tower, and vanished into the night.
At the hour of hai, at the Capital's south gate, the guards on the wall were yawning, about to change shift.
A rush of wind sounded overhead. They looked up to see ten flying swords sweep in formation over the gate tower, heading from inside the city out. One guard stood stunned a moment, then elbowed the man beside him.
"Brother, look at that—"
"I see it."
"Whose sword immortal is that? Has to be Fifth Realm at the least. How does anyone dare carry on like that inside the Capital?"
The ten swords cleared the wall, circled through the woods outside as if hunting for the last few that had slipped the net, then wheeled unhurriedly back, made half a turn around the gate tower, and each returned to its place.
Out on the street the gong sounded three slow strokes.
The night watchman came ambling out from under the gate tower with his lantern, his voice drawn long, carried on the night wind into every alley of the city.
"—Sky clear and moon bright, sleep — well — tonight—"
By the next morning the teahouses and wine shops all over the city were boiling with it.
There were those who had seen the ten flying swords go out the south gate with their own eyes. There were those who said the narrow lane they'd never dared walk had lost every trace of yin qi when they went through it that morning. And there was a peddler working the streets who swore up and down that he'd pushed his cart past that abandoned house in the east of the city yesterday and plainly heard swords singing in the cellar — and this morning the place was swept empty.
Within the Night-Watch Bureau it was taken at first for common street gossip, until several stacks of reports from all over the city, filed overnight, landed on Zhou Qingmu's desk. Several of the Deputy Commanders on duty read them through and looked at one another.
Someone remembered the figure who had stood shoulder to shoulder with Zhou Qingmu at the prow the day before, and had a fairly good idea of the answer.
The Eternal Life Sect really did not dare show its head for a while after that.
In truth, Gu Chengming had estimated the job would take him ten days to half a month. Instead, one night of ten flying swords loosed on a circuit, plus one more sweep of his spiritual sense at the hour of chen the following day, and there was no evil cause or evil effect left worth picking out anywhere in the Capital region. The situation had handed him several free days.
Over the days that followed, Gu Chengming settled in at the Night-Watch Bureau.
Zhou Qingmu had meant to accompany him to the place where the Wanton Joy Sovereign was sealed, and there was a great deal to arrange before setting out.
It was in that stolen pocket of leisure amid the bustle that something stirred in Gu Chengming: to this day, he had never pushed open the door to Love's Qingxin Formula's room.
It wasn't that he had deliberately avoided it. He'd simply been tangled up in one thing after another, and it had gotten set aside.
Now, with nothing urgent in hand, it would be poor form to keep putting it off.
He turned it over and decided the moment suited.
Love's Huiyuan Sword Formula, Love's Hundred Bones Resonance — with every lineage he opened, his grasp of that one word, love, ran a layer deeper. The CGs were named for love, but every one of them was a road for seeing one's own true heart, and none of them permitted the slightest shortcut.
So what, then, did the Qingxin Formula test?
Gu Chengming drew a long breath and pressed his scattered thoughts flat. Having decided, he would not hesitate.
He turned into the room, shut the door, and settled cross-legged on the bed.
His breathing slowed, his spiritual sense sank, and grey mist came rolling in from every side. Beneath his feet appeared that familiar arched corridor, stretching away until it passed beyond the reach of sight.
He did not stop, walking straight for the door deep in the corridor that he had never opened. The grey mist that had always hung over its lintel had dispersed at some point, revealing several pale golden veins in the wood, winding and curving, shaped like clouds and smoke tangled together.
Gu Chengming raised a hand and pushed. What lay inside was not what he had expected.
Unlike the rooms of the Love Huiyuan Sword Formula and Love's Hundred Bones Resonance, behind this door was a small courtyard.
Grey brick underfoot, a six-paneled lantern hanging from the corner of the eaves. An old plum tree leaned half a branch out into the yard, a few late-blooming red plums weighing down the twig ends. A stone table stood in the middle, half a cup of cold tea on it, and an open storybook lying face-down at chapter one hundred ninety, the pages yellowed and curling slightly at the edges — plainly a volume someone read often.
Gu Chengming stood in the doorway a moment, and a thread of fragrance rose at his side.
"Little Gu finally saw fit to come."
The voice came from beside him. He turned his head, and the Qingxin Formula was standing there. A plain unadorned robe, purple hair caught up loosely with a single green bamboo pin.
Her face was exactly as he had always imagined it — still and composed, with a faintly provoking lift at the brows, the corners of her mouth curved, so that being looked at by her felt like a fingertip pressed lightly to the chest.
There was more than a little reproach in her voice. "I've been waiting a very long time."
Warmth moved through Gu Chengming, and he was about to speak when a second voice sounded from the other side of the courtyard.
"Welcome..."
The voice was all but identical to the Qingxin Formula's, only with a heavier drop at the end of the phrase. A figure came around from behind a corridor pillar. The same plain robe, the same purple hair pinned with green bamboo, the features pressed from the same mold. Only the Qingxin Formula frowned.
Gu Chengming had already worked it out. This, presumably, was Love's Qingxin Formula.
Uninterested in whatever Gu Chengming was thinking, Love's Qingxin Formula simply spoke on her own account.
"Make the correct choices, and you pass."
— Make the correct choices.
To a veteran Galgame player, there was no line in the world more familiar.
Every option is a minefield. Pick wrong and, at best, you wander onto the wrong character's route; at worst you trigger the forever-alone bad ending, the entire cast vanishes, and the progress bar resets to zero.
The single most important thing for a serious player clearing a Galgame is telling apart the hidden lines buried beneath the options that look irrelevant — the favorability swings, and the one "correct answer" that decides the direction of an entire route in a single instant.
In a certain sense, this whole skill set of his had been drilled into him through round after round of save-and-load.
And now he was being asked to make choices? That was squarely his own art.
— Is this a test of my abilities as a Galgame master?
The thought flashed through Gu Chengming's head, but his expression did not shift a hair.
Beside him, the Qingxin Formula raised her eyes to him, and a trace of unease showed through. Gu Chengming noticed. He reached over and pressed lightly on the back of her hand, saying nothing.
She glanced up at him, asked nothing further, and pushed that thread of feeling back down.
Only then did Gu Chengming look at Love's Qingxin Formula. "How does the test work?"
Love's Qingxin Formula pressed her lips into a smile and swept a hand vaguely through the air before him.
Courtyard, lantern, old plum, storybook — the color drained out of all of it.
The scene in front of Gu Chengming dimmed inch by inch until nothing was left but darkness.
— He had fallen into the Veil of the Womb.
On the other side, that is, outside the illusion, the Qingxin Formula stood braced as though facing a mortal enemy.
Love's Qingxin Formula, unhurried, explained. "You ought to understand what making the correct choice means."
She seemed to have endless patience. Seeing that the Qingxin Formula's expression had not changed, she went on by herself. "Inside this illusion he will be born, age, sicken and die like any mortal. He will suffer for his low birth. He will give way because his strength falls short. He will be bullied, humiliated, looked down on."
She paused, tilting her head, as if savoring some interesting turn of phrase.
"A mortal life is seven or eight parts in ten what cannot be kept, cannot be done, cannot be had. He will fall ill. He will grow old. He will find himself powerless before far too many things. You and I are both arts born out of the red dust; we should know that the cruelest thing in this world is exactly that day-by-day grinding away."
The Qingxin Formula stayed silent and did not answer.
"No talent. No backing. No one to catch him when he falls." Love's Qingxin Formula's voice came steady and unhurried. "If he were only an utterly ordinary mortal, facing predicaments where no choice is the right one — would he still be able to make the choices he once made?"
"Or else..." She turned her head and looked into the Qingxin Formula's face. "Would he be like the Reef Stone Daoist, and pretend he had never lifted that sword at all?"
The Reef Stone Daoist...
That name was the root of the knot in the Qingxin Formula's heart.
She had been born of hatred and sustained by fear, and for many years before that she had not even been willing to face the reason for her own existence — not until Gu Chengming brought that sword down and shattered a cage a century old for her.
After a long moment, the Qingxin Formula turned to stand face to face with Love's Qingxin Formula.
"I trust him."
Love's Qingxin Formula looked into her eyes, and the smile thinned. The angle of her words shifted, naturally. "Trust is trust. But aren't you curious?"
She dropped her voice softer still.
"Suppose he were born into the meanest of households. Mother dead young, father sickly, cold looks from the clan since childhood, aptitude thoroughly average — not even qualified to enter a sect's gate. At thirteen he saves three years of silver to beg for an iron sword, and the shop's owner turns around and sells it to the clan's main line instead. At sixteen the girl he likes marries the son of a merchant house in town, and comes to the alley to see him once before the wedding, only to tell him he is a good man."
"At twenty he falls sick and can't scrape together the medicine money, and squats by the river in the southern quarter counting the seven or eight copper coins in his palm. At thirty he is still doing odd jobs in that same small town, and hears a storyteller in the tavern tell how the Murderous Demon of Snowfall Pass crossed ten thousand li to take a dragon's head, and he claps and cheers, then turns around and refills a customer's pot of cheap wine."
"At fifty he coughs blood all night, and as he dies he looks out the window at that one old plum tree and wonders whether, in this whole life of his, there was ever a single moment that could be called his own."
She spoke without haste. "Tell me — by that point, facing someone untouchable, someone like Ao Qing back then, would he still draw a sword?"
The Qingxin Formula's expression cooled. "You're trying to shake me."
"I am telling you," Love's Qingxin Formula said, "that the suffering of mortals is beyond what a cultivator can imagine. What we call the true heart is, for a genius, no more than a boat pushed along by the current. For an ordinary man it means defying heaven and defying his own fate."
She lifted a hand and laid it against the image of the illusion. "Which is why, in this trial, he can only be a mortal."
Light seeped into the image of the illusion, inch by inch.
Grey brick and tiled roofs, carved beams and painted rafters. In his ears, the low chatter of maidservants in the outer room, birdsong from a courtyard further off, and, fainter still and further away, the beat of drums. Gu Chengming lay under a brocade quilt embroidered with twining lotus, fingers curled, a plump little bundle of a thing.
Standing outside the void, watching that first-forming scene, Love's Qingxin Formula arched one brow. Why was this not what she had planned for?
A voice from beyond the picture came through.
[Hahahaha! Our main Gu line has produced another monstrous talent — born with double pupils, no less?!]
Hearing that voice, an ominous premonition rose in Love's Qingxin Formula.
The Qingxin Formula had been on the point of swallowing that last thread of worry. She looked up. "...Hm?"
The voice went on. [Clan Head, decide quickly! Now we can dig out the Supreme Bone of that little bastard Gu Haiming from the collateral branch and give it to the young master! If he can carry two holy signs in a single body, then heaven truly favors our Gu family—]
At that, the Qingxin Formula choked, and for a good long while could not react at all. Her face was a study.
Above Love's Qingxin Formula's head, a question mark materialized out of thin air.
"?"
Hold on. What happened to the tale of a mortal seeking immortality?
What the hell is this?!
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