The Corpse-Loosed Hundred Plays Sovereign stared at the hand that had punched through his own chest.
"A Dharma-Station… Free Heaven? How is that possible?"
The words forced their way out of his throat one grinding syllable at a time.
Free Heaven. One of the most primal Dharma-Stations on the main trunk of the Sentient Beings Bough, attained ten thousand years ago by Jiahao Sovereign, reverted to Heaven upon his fall, and never proven again since.
By rights, a masterless Dharma-Station either returns to Heaven of its own accord or waits for the next Sovereign to prove it. Either way, news of that magnitude could never be hidden from the whole cultivation world.
So what, exactly, was this?
When that palm had gone through his chest, he had felt the aura of Free Heaven with perfect clarity — a Dharma-Station a full rank above his own Floating Life Painting. That was precisely why he had not been left even a sliver of room to strike back.
Then a flicker of lucidity crossed the Corpse-Loosed Hundred Plays Sovereign's dimming eyes.
No. That wasn't right.
A mere Fourth Realm junior — how had he strolled so casually into the depths of the Royal Court, a place only the Son of Heaven of the Great Qian and the inheritor of the Record of the Myriad Worlds could enter? He himself had needed the special properties of his Dharma-Station just to barely manage it. So what had the boy relied on?
Under pursuit he had looked wretched, hunted — yet every single step had landed exactly on the line between life and death without ever crossing it. And that Sovereign who had proven a Dharma-Station on the Unfettered River had arrived far too conveniently, had struck far too perfectly on time.
All the little doubts strung themselves together into a single thread.
At last he tasted the truth of it. The boy had feigned weakness on purpose, coaxing him into dropping every guard, and had chosen the exact instant when he was about to lay hands on the Dao-Mending Jade — the instant his mind was most at ease — to strike.
But this "senior cultivator" had laid out so vast a scheme. To what end?
What virtue, what worth did he possess, that a being who had proven Free Heaven would go to such trouble over him?
That question chased his spiritual sense all the way down, and when the last thread of his consciousness finally scattered, it still had not caught an answer.
The Corpse-Loosed Hundred Plays Sovereign's "body" swayed, then crashed to the ground.
A Sovereign's blood sprayed out, soaking into the green tiles of the palace ridge in a spreading patch of dark red.
When a Sovereign falls, there should be an omen — the Dharma-Station reverting to Heaven.
Yet the Corpse-Loosed Hundred Plays Sovereign's death made no sound at all. His Floating Life Painting Dharma-Station had not even worked free of the shell of his body before some force crushed and devoured it along with him, leaving not so much as a residue behind.
In that moment, the silence on the palace ridge was almost eerie.
"Gu Chengming" withdrew his hand, brushed it lightly against his cuff, and the thin line of blood-stink at his fingertips vanished cleanly.
He tilted his head and looked, smiling, toward the other two Sovereigns not far off.
For some reason, those two felt a chill of genuine apprehension, and for a moment neither of them knew what to do next.
Inside Gu Chengming's Sea of Consciousness, the uninvited guest who had arrived so belatedly finally deigned to present his calling card.
A man's voice sounded, carrying a trace of laughter. "Haha. Young friend, my sincere apologies. One who lets himself in uninvited, as I have, must be a considerable nuisance."
Gu Chengming thought: You're certainly quite self-aware about it.
The voice seemed to catch the silent complaint. After half a breath it went on, "This was entrusted to me by an old friend. Borrowing your body was a matter of necessity, nothing more."
"But believe me, young friend — I mean you no harm."
"For a while yet, matters will run in a direction favorable to you. You need only sit back and enjoy it."
There was a distinct smile in that last line, and Gu Chengming heard it.
As a sword cultivator who also practiced the Red Dust Art, Gu Chengming understood the workings of karmic affinity in this world rather better than most.
After learning the Unfettered Freedom Formula, and after being helped once by this Jiahao Sovereign in Floating Isle City, he really should have realized that the man intended to borrow him for something eventually.
He simply hadn't expected the fellow to surface at a moment like this.
Which meant that his suspiciously smooth acquisition of the Unfettered Freedom Formula back in the Tianque Secret Realm had been arranged by this Jiahao Sovereign from behind the curtain all along.
Gu Chengming felt rather helpless about it. On the other hand, seen from a certain angle, Jiahao Sovereign had just avenged him.
After all, this Corpse-Loosed Hundred Plays Sovereign had hunted him for a good long while, and had opened with violence without a word of explanation.
If he hadn't been holding so many trump cards, and if the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign hadn't arrived in time, he would have gone down on the spot.
Framed that way, sitting back and enjoying it wasn't entirely out of the question.
Still — what was this Jiahao Sovereign actually after?
Before Gu Chengming could think it through, his body moved on its own.
The hand that had just crushed a Sovereign's heart rose slowly and gathered the pale-golden Dharma-Station hovering in midair neatly into its palm.
At the far ends of the palace ridge, the two remaining Sovereigns finally shook off their shock at how instantly Corpse-Loosed Hundred Plays had died.
And then they saw "Gu Chengming" close his fist around the Dao-Mending Jade.
The same thought surfaced in both their minds at once.
Take it, or not?
The question itself was absurd on its face. Two Sixth Realm Sovereigns, hesitating over whether to move against a Fourth Realm junior.
But that was the fact of it. The Corpse-Loosed Hundred Plays Sovereign's corpse was still lying right there, his blood not yet cold, dripping down the eave-tiles of the palace ridge one drop at a time.
The wreck of the cart ahead was too close at hand. They could not help but waver.
The two of them may have been slow, but someone else was not.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign displayed the finest traditions of the older generation of cultivators.
She did not care in the slightest which great power was currently riding Gu Chengming's body. All she saw was that Gu Chengming had picked up a scalding coal that would get him killed — and her response was a textbook demonstration of protecting one's own, decisive and without a single wasted word. She simply brought out her Dharma-Station.
Moonlight poured like water. The long sword at her waist never left its sheath; a single sway of sword intent was enough, and under her Dharma-Station's power this stretch of space and time was forcibly brought to a halt.
The withered peach branch at the Delirium and Delusion Sovereign's temple shook violently as she moved to spit out an incantation that would twist reality — only to find her words frozen in time.
The Death-Saving Foul Physician Sovereign lifted a suppurating arm to spread a plague-haze that would corrode the formation's foundations, but the poison mist was crushed back into her body by reversing time before it could even take shape.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign stood in front of Gu Chengming and, with Moon Within Clouds — the most mechanics-driven, least stat-reliant, most execution-dependent Dharma-Station on the Unfettered River — flatly suppressed two enraged Sixth Realm Sovereigns.
"Gu Chengming" looked at the back shielding him, spared no attention for the two pinned Sovereigns, and raised the Dao-Mending Jade in his hand.
"Revert to Heaven."
In the next instant, Gu Chengming felt the void before his eyes churn like water stirred by a hand, and an aura that did not belong to this world came dragging toward them, inch by inch, from somewhere too far away to measure.
That aura was vast, chaotic, insane — like the mad laughter and wailing of countless living things stirred together in a cracked begging bowl.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's sword momentum faltered. Her head snapped up toward the sky.
"The Wanton Joy Sovereign?!" There was a note of alarm in her voice.
By some method or other, Jiahao Sovereign had forced the instant of the Dharma-Station's reversion to Heaven to overlap exactly with the instant the Wanton Joy Sovereign's remains broke their seal — using the former to replace the Dragon-Qi Seed, and the latter to fill the vacancy the former left behind.
The next moment, veins of blood-red spread out from beneath the earth, weaving into an enormous net that draped over the whole of the Capital.
And then a mass of raw, indistinct flesh rose slowly from the center of that net.
It was a body's remains, with no fixed shape. From a distance it looked like a monster stitched together out of countless scraps of flesh, bone and organs.
The remains spread until they covered the entire Capital, and the sky went utterly dark.
…
Over toward the Night-Watch Bureau, Zhou Qingmu came running with her saber drawn, and this was the sight that met her.
The instant the Heaven-Honoring Grand Formation stirred she had understood, and yet, half-step Sixth Realm as she was, however fast she ran she was still a fraction too late.
Saber-light dragged an afterimage behind her. She did not slow, but her eyes had already taken in the whole ruin below.
Gu Chengming stood at the center of the wreckage, his left hand closed around a husk of dragon-qi that had already been emptied out, his right hanging at his side, fingertips still wet with a Sovereign's blood.
Zhou Qingmu's mind went white.
"Chengming—"
She was already lunging forward without thinking, the words half out of her mouth, when her gaze caught on the ruined body sprawled across the entire sky.
Her saber stopped dead in midair.
— The Wanton Joy Sovereign's remains… how are they here?
Zhou Qingmu's mind emptied completely.
At the other end of the Imperial City, Ji Yixi arrived almost at the same moment as Zhou Qingmu.
She looked at the hollowed-out husk of dragon-qi in Gu Chengming's hand, then at the Wanton Joy remains swallowing the Capital overhead, and her mouth opened soundlessly.
The little dragon coiled on her shoulder mumbled, "Ancestor… what exactly are you trying to do…"
Above the Royal Court, Delirium and Delusion and the Death-Saving Foul Physician finally tore free of the layer of temporal binding Moon Within Clouds had left on them.
The two exchanged a glance. Neither bothered with so much as a parting threat.
The Dao-Mending Jade was gone. The whole scheme had rotted through. Stay any longer and the Hundred Plays Sovereign would prove to be the lesson of the overturned cart ahead.
Both Dharma-Stations flared at once, and two figures shot toward the outskirts of the Capital together.
Thud. Thud.
Two muffled impacts, identical in every respect.
The bodies of two Sixth Realm powers struck an invisible barrier and were bounced solidly back, tumbling in disarray into the sky above the Imperial City.
The entire territory of the Capital had been sealed shut without a sound.
The Death-Saving Foul Physician Sovereign froze in place and looked down at her own palm.
The wisp of plague-haze that should have answered her every command was steaming away outward beyond her control, as though something were drawing it out of her inch by inch.
Fear surfaced on that half-rotted, half-living face.
"The Great Tribulation…"
"It's the Great Tribulation?!"
A rolling boom.
The Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth is, at bottom, a sweeping-out the Heavenly Dao arranges for cultivators.
Whenever cultivators occupy too many Dharma-Stations and the Heavenly Dao's authority is obstructed, the Tribulation descends, wiping out those beings squatting on its Dharma-Stations one by one.
It has never been a single event, but a long process strung together out of countless entangled causal troubles. Every incident within that process is naturally crowned with the same two words: Great Tribulation.
And what a Sovereign relies on to judge whether he stands inside the Tribulation has never been celestial omens or the sound of bells and drums, but whether the Dharma-Station he carries has genuinely been affected.
Being unable to escape the Capital meant that all of them were, at this moment, standing squarely inside the Great Tribulation.
Only then did Gu Chengming notice, belatedly, that control of his borrowed body had quietly been handed back to him.
He hadn't even had time to flex his knuckles before an armful of moonlight enveloped him.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign reached out and drew him against her, and one sweep of her wide moon-white sleeve tucked him completely and securely beneath her.
The Moon Within Clouds Dharma-Station sank hard around her, moonlight condensing into a thin cocoon that carved this one square foot of the world bodily out of the collapsing void.
In his Sea of Consciousness, Jiahao Sovereign watched the scene with evident delight. "Well then, I won't intrude on my young friend's good fortune any longer."
The instant the words fell, Jiahao Sovereign's aura receded like an outgoing tide, and Gu Chengming had full control of his body again.
But before he could so much as register the softness of the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's embrace, the world around him twisted utterly under some irresistible power.
The curtain of night was torn open from top to bottom in one long rent, and ghastly white daylight poured through the crack like a waterfall.
Heaven and earth turned over. Day and night reversed.
Gu Chengming's head went suddenly heavy, the scene before him crumpling like something crushed carelessly in a fist, and he sank into unconsciousness.
In the next moment, a voice rang out and carried across the whole Capital.
"Return to order."
Two words, landing like a palm pressed flat and steady on a drumhead that had been beaten into chaos.
In the same breath those two words touched down, the overturned world drew itself back into the position it was supposed to occupy.
Night flooded back over the flying eaves of the Capital. The vast ruin of flesh still hung above the city, but the inch-by-inch crawl with which it had been swallowing the Imperial City had been pinned flat by those two words.
At the top of the vermilion steps of the Imperial City, a figure had appeared at some point.
An old man, thin-featured, hair gone frost-white at the temples, dressed in a half-worn robe of blue cloth whose cuffs had frayed into fine fuzz. At his waist was nothing more than a plain white cloth sash; on his feet, a pair of old cloth shoes with a film of dust picked up from who knew where.
He looked like a man who had wandered out of one of the study rooms of the Imperial Academy on a whim.
Zhou Qingmu recognized him first.
— The Master?!
The Master stood at the top of the steps with his hands behind his back, offered a bow toward the Gu Chengming cradled in the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's arms, and then smiled — apparently in thanks.
A ripple ran through the air to the southwest of the Imperial City, and a figure riding starlight descended from the direction of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau into the sky above the Capital.
The newcomer had the look of a middle-aged scholar: a square kerchief on his head, a long ink-blue robe with a border of constellation patterns embroidered along the hem. At his waist hung a palm-sized bronze armillary sphere — none other than the Director of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau.
The instant he landed, the Director inclined his head slightly toward the Master, then drew from his sleeve a thin bronze scroll of slips, densely carved with star-tracks and bearings that had been fixed in place who knew how many years ago.
He flicked the scroll lightly with a fingertip, and the Heaven-Seeing Earth-Hearing Grand Formation ran at full capacity for the first time since it was laid down.
The Heaven-Seeing Earth-Hearing Grand Formation — with the Capital for its eye, and the nine tiers of palaces for its bones!
The Wanton Joy remains that had blanketed the greater part of the night sky over the Capital were seized all at once by a vast power surging up from below.
Before they could struggle, they were crushed down inch by inch into the Dharma-Station vacancy far beneath the Capital — a vacancy that had already been swept clean and left empty.
Only then did the Director of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau raise his eyes to the two Sovereigns still hanging above the Imperial City with disbelief written across their faces.
"Fellow Daoists," he said mildly, "stay a while."
The withered peach branch at Delirium and Delusion's temple shuddered, and the incantation that time had nailed in place for so long finally came loose. She started to speak on reflex.
Before a word was out, the armillary sphere in the Director's palm turned a fraction, and the aura around her was dragged bodily out of that half-withered, half-living shell.
On the other side, the Master lifted a finger and pointed lightly at the Death-Saving Foul Physician Sovereign, and she too lost every capacity to resist.
The Master and the Director exchanged a glance. The rest needed no discussion.
The sky-spanning remains of the Wanton Joy Sovereign were pressed down into the earth inch by inch, and the great net woven of interlaced star-tracks and moonlight slowly drew closed.
The night settled back into stillness.
And Gu Chengming, wrapped snugly in his cocoon of moon-white, had passed out the instant heaven and earth turned over, and knew nothing at all of how any of it ended.
An unfamiliar ceiling.
All right, the joke was admittedly rather worn out by now.
But when Gu Chengming pried his heavy eyes open and what met them was a canopy board of red sandalwood carved with intricate patterns, that classic line still surfaced in his mind on pure instinct.
The scent of aloeswood hung at the tip of his nose, mixed with a faint, cool trace of osmanthus. The brocade couch beneath him was soft to the point of unreality.
Gu Chengming rubbed his head, sat up slowly, and ran back through everything that had happened before the world went black.
A gathering of Sovereigns scheming to seize a Dharma-Station. Himself blundering into the middle of it.
Then Jiahao Sovereign borrowing this body of his to send the Dao-Mending Jade back to Heaven — and, while he was at it, drawing the Wanton Joy Sovereign's remains down over the Capital.
That might have been slightly too large a mess to make.
At the thought, Gu Chengming's vision went dark again.
[Hundred Bones Resonance hurried to console him: It's fine, Heavenly Emperor Gu! We did everything we could!]
[Hundred Bones Resonance: If we hadn't pitched in, that Dharma-Station would've been swiped by that Sovereign fellow ages ago!]
[Huiyuan Sword Formula chimed in right behind: Exactly!]
Thanks, Hundred Bones. Thanks, Little Huiyuan.
Talking himself around like that might be a touch too optimistic, but at the moment he couldn't think of anything better.
In a game played by Sovereigns of the Sixth Realm, there was only so much a Fourth Realm junior could do.
As his thoughts gradually gathered, sensation began seeping back into his body.
Only then did Gu Chengming realize that his right hand felt oddly heavy.
He turned his head, followed the line of his arm, and found someone slumped over the outer edge of the bed.
A moon-white robe spread across the brocade quilt like flowing water. Her face was turned sideways, half buried in the crook of her arm, and a cascade of black hair had fallen loose — a few strands lying mischievously across the back of Gu Chengming's hand, tickling faintly.
Even after witnessing heaven and earth turn upside down the night before, Gu Chengming still found this a little absurd.
As if sensing that he had woken, the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's lashes stirred. She rubbed her eyes and sat up unhurriedly.
When her gaze finally focused and she saw Gu Chengming propped against the headboard, eyes open, watching her, the relief that went through her was plain to see.
"Young friend. You're finally awake."
What followed was a stream of scolding.
"Do you have any idea how close a call last night was?"
"How many times have I told you — in any matter touching a Dharma-Station, you examine its source first. Don't go charging in. Your own safety comes before everything."
"However precious the Dao-Mending Jade may be, it is still a thing outside the body. Why is this the one time you wouldn't listen?"
Gu Chengming swallowed quietly.
Only once the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's pace slowed a little, and the urgency in her eyes had settled somewhat, did he speak.
"Senior Flowing Cloud is right to reprimand me. I know I was wrong."
He considered for a moment, then cupped his hands and bowed.
"Senior Flowing Cloud — what exactly is the situation now?"
Honestly, all of this was too strange by half.
If he hadn't still had Love's Qingxin Formula in reserve as a trump card, he would have half suspected he'd been dropped into some illusion.
One moment he'd been in the middle of heaven and earth flipping over, day and night inverted; the next he was waking up perfectly ordinarily in a strange bed with a Sixth Realm senior keeping watch beside him.
And more to the point, this senior had sat watch until she fell asleep.
That was the truly unreasonable part. Cultivators achieve grain abstention from the Third Realm onward, and by the Fourth Realm meditation replaces sleep entirely.
At the level of a Sixth Realm Sovereign, the body has long since been remade, breathing in step with heaven and earth. There was no scenario in which such a person simply dozed off.
Unless the outside environment, or the rules themselves, had changed somehow.
Hearing his question, the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign registered the confusion in his eyes.
She smoothed the loose strands of hair at her temple and was about to explain.
From beyond the door came an aged voice.
"Allow this old man to explain instead."
An aged hand lifted the curtain aside. The visitor wore a blue cloth scholar's robe, his hair frost-streaked at the temples — the Master of the Imperial Academy.
Gu Chengming had never met this Master before. He only found the man's aura too placidly even to be real, and couldn't get a read on his intentions.
The Master gave him a gentle smile first and introduced himself. "This old man is the Master of the Imperial Academy."
At that name, understanding clicked into place.
— The Great Qian's Sovereign who plays with his cards face up.
One of the handful of old-guard powers the cultivation world could actually name, and a Sovereign who still dared to trouble himself with worldly affairs in the middle of the Great Tribulation without flinching from it at all. That alone said enough about his weight.
Gu Chengming got down from the couch and cupped his hands. "This junior greets the Master."
The Master raised a hand to stop him, then turned his gaze to the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign, who had not risen from the edge of the bed, and spoke with a smile.
"I wonder whether Senior might…"
He weighed the word "Senior" carefully, likely meaning to ask if she would care to withdraw for a moment.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign only snorted. She clearly had nothing whatsoever to say to this crowd who schemed over the world from behind curtains and had dragged Gu Chengming into mortal danger in the process.
The Master went blank for a beat, then shook his head with a laugh and let the matter drop.
He found a low stool, sat down, and turned his attention back to Gu Chengming.
"Since my young friend asks, this old man will tell him."
The Master spoke without hurry.
This particular arrangement of the Great Qian's traced back several hundred years.
In those days the ancestors of the Ji clan had already glimpsed, through one branching timeline of the Record of the Myriad Worlds, an inevitable juncture: the exhaustion of the dragon-qi.
Since the Heavenly Dao would eventually reach out to reclaim the Dharma-Station of the Dragon-Qi Seed regardless, rather than wait for the Great Qian's own root to be cut out and fed into the Heavenly Dao's appetite, it was better to move first and prepare a more serviceable patch for that vacancy.
The Imperial Astronomical Bureau's Heaven-Seeing Earth-Hearing Grand Formation had been the first stone laid on that board.
Gu Chengming blinked.
The Master went on. The plan was sound, but the difficulty lay in this: once the Great Qian's Dao-Mending Jade had been transformed into the Dragon-Qi Seed, it could no longer be triggered actively.
So the real problem was making it revert to Heaven on its own.
At that, Gu Chengming's expression turned complicated.
So all that uproar earlier — that had been you people fishing.
As if guessing exactly what Gu Chengming was thinking, the Master nodded without embarrassment.
"To achieve the aim, one Dao-Mending Jade was naturally not enough. Other Dharma-Stations were required as nourishment."
— So those three Sovereigns had all been lured in to serve as fertilizer for the Great Qian.
Seeming to catch that private complaint too, the Master smiled again.
"For this, my young friend has our thanks."
Gu Chengming waved a hand. "The Master flatters me."
The Master's tone curved off in another direction.
"Since this matter owed so much to my young friend's help, this old man is not afraid to be frank with him."
"This new rule is indeed more than a hundred times stronger than the old dragon-qi."
"Should any fiend enter the Capital hereafter, there will be no need to trouble the Night-Watch Bureau at all. The rules of the city will strangle it where it stands."
Gu Chengming had just started to relax.
The Master spoke again.
"By rights everything should be looking up. The only problem is that a few accidents cropped up along the way."
He sighed, and for the first time his expression grew a shade heavier.
A bad feeling rose in Gu Chengming — and then he heard the man continue.
"That senior, the Wanton Joy Sovereign, left the Great Qian a few little presents."
The Master said no more. He drew a blue cloth case file from his sleeve and spread it flat on the small table in front of Gu Chengming.
"See for yourself, young friend."
[One. Cultivators of the Sixth Realm and above have their Dharma-Stations replaced with Jiahao.
Two. The more Jiahao a Jiahao is, the stronger it becomes.
Three. Dharma-Stations may be exchanged by dueling with Jiahao.]
Looking at those three lines on the document that had been pushed in front of him, a question mark rose above Gu Chengming's head.
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