Setting aside the matter of Little Sister Zhou's pent-up feelings, the pressing business was still condensing a Jiahao.
After all, as Zhou Qingmu had just said, in the days ahead the Capital would be flooded with Fifth Realm cultivators — and Sovereigns from every direction besides — all of them coming for the wild Jiahao.
"Well then. The Night-Watch Bureau's affairs from here on will have to trouble Director Gu." Zhou Qingmu withdrew the hand that had just topped off his tea, dropping the line half in jest.
Gu Chengming sighed and decided not to correct his own Director on the form of address.
When he stepped out of the side hall, the sun was slanting across the palace walls, and from somewhere down one of the Capital's streets came another burst of Jiahao declamation, shouted at the top of some household's lungs.
Gu Chengming quietly moved his gaze away from it.
The way things were unfolding made no sense to him — but they were unfolding in his favor, exactly as that Jiahao Sovereign had said they would.
Even now, though, Gu Chengming had not managed to work out what the Jiahao Sovereign's true purpose was.
By the Master's account, this whole affair had been the Great Qian's arrangement from the start; even without the Jiahao Sovereign, the ending would not have changed much.
And yet the Jiahao Sovereign had played a genuinely critical part in it. Without his borrowing a body to seize the Jade Dao-Supplementing Dharma-Station, the Great Qian's move on the board would have run into no end of needless trouble.
The man had said he was "doing an old friend a favor." But that old friend clearly did not belong to the Great Qian's side of the table.
Gu Chengming followed that thread slowly.
If it came down to those two words — old friend — then among everyone involved in this affair, the only one worth a Sovereign taking so dangerous a step for seemed to be the Wanton Joy Sovereign, who had just been invited into the Capital's earth veins along with everything else.
He filed the possibility away and pushed the line of reasoning half a step further.
If that was so, then the Capital's present state — Jiahao spilling out of every doorway — was very likely the Jiahao Sovereign's own handiwork.
Even granting that, he still could not fathom why the man would want it.
So he stopped trying.
Gu Chengming set the question aside and turned back toward his own residence.
He had barely stepped through the gate when he found a guest in the courtyard he had never expected to see there.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign.
That moon-white robe was seated on the old stone stool in his courtyard, a plain white jade storage pouch resting by her feet. The pouch was swollen enough that a single glance told you it held rather more than a change of clothes — it looked more like the weight of someone moving house.
Gu Chengming said, "Senior?"
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign glanced up at him. "You're back, little friend."
"Senior, what is this?"
She tilted her head and answered without the least hesitation. "I'm moving in for a few days."
"?"
She did not wait for him to catch up, carrying on at her own pace. "I'm not on close terms with the people here in the Great Qian, and I've no wish to be in their debt. I know no one else in this place, so I can only impose on you for a while, little friend."
For a moment Gu Chengming had no reply ready.
The question came out before he could stop it. "Why does Senior wish to remain in the Capital?"
The instant it left his mouth he realized how badly it had landed.
Whatever she had come for, that was as good as showing her the door.
He scrambled to patch it. "This junior was merely curious. Senior may stay as long as she pleases. The courtyard is small, but it's quiet enough — and if Senior finds it uncomfortable, this junior will go and find another."
Only then did the faint aggrievement in the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's eyes settle down.
Why remain in the Capital? For you, obviously, you heartless Little Gu.
She ran the sentence through her mind once. Naturally, there was no world in which she could say it aloud.
She thought for a moment and picked a reasonable-sounding pretext instead. "The Great Tribulation has come. The world outside is not necessarily as safe as the Capital. I lingered a long while outside the Yunyue Sect as it was, so I may as well take the chance to stay here and see whether anything of opportunity can be found in the rules left behind by the Wanton Joy Sovereign's remains."
Getting the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign settled took until the sky had gone dim.
Afterward, curiosity got the better of Gu Chengming. He had never seen the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's Jiahao.
They said a Jiahao's outward form was a kind of expression of its owner's own hubris. What would hers look like?
Gu Chengming watched this Sovereign senior sitting in his courtyard, unhurriedly peeling the skin off a grape, and asked the question out loud.
"Might this junior take a look at Senior's Jiahao?"
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign visibly struggled with it. "Must you?"
"This junior is only curious," Gu Chengming said honestly. "If it's inconvenient for Senior, then treat the question as never asked."
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign sighed and raised a reluctant hand.
An instant later, a phantom bearing some resemblance to her took slow shape in the air.
"The glow of a firefly—"
"—how dare it contend with the radiance of the bright moon!"
Rather cute, Gu Chengming thought.
Condensing a Jiahao was not an easy process.
By the Master's account, one first had to call forth the whole of one's own wild fervor and desire, then use that fervor and desire to fill an empty shell sketched out beforehand in the depths of the heart.
Gu Chengming tried several times. Every attempt failed.
Still, through those failures he had more or less grasped one pattern.
The more outrageous the line a Jiahao spoke, the more formidable the person it belonged to.
The Master's "I say an autumn day surpasses a spring dawn" was Jiahao enough, but short on sheer domineering weight, so the pressure it brought to bear was not especially strong.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's "how dare the glow of a firefly contend with the bright moon" was a cut above the Master's — but only a cut.
The one that had pressed down on him hardest, oddly enough, was Zhou Qingmu's: "Had Heaven not given birth to me, Zhou Qingmu, the Great Qian would lie in eternal night."
And yet, tasted carefully, that line quietly hemmed itself in with a qualifier — the Great Qian. If Zhou Qingmu's Jiahao were amended to "the cultivation world would lie in eternal night," the pressure would surely be several degrees heavier.
Such lines, however, could not simply be rewritten at will.
Wherever a cultivator's wild fervor and desire reached, that was exactly where the Jiahao's words fell.
Gu Chengming worked the logic through in his head, and halfway along, his brows rose.
By that reasoning — if the Jiahao he condensed were filled with the wild fervor and desire of the Hundred Emperor, would that Jiahao not stand sole arbiter of all the ages?
[The Hundred Bones Resonance looks at you piteously: Heavenly Emperor Gu, you'll choose me, won't you?]
[The Hundred Bones Resonance says with great anticipation: If you choose me, I'll absolutely be the strongest Jiahao!]
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula badly wants to make her presence felt too, but even she has to admit that when it comes to Jiahao specifically, the Hundred Bones Resonance does have the edge.]
Gu Chengming could only sigh. It was not as though the Hundred Bones Resonance route had never occurred to him.
In fact, his very first attempt at condensing a Jiahao had followed the Hundred Bones Resonance's hubris exactly — and nothing at all had come of it.
Never mind. This was not a thing to be rushed.
He closed the file and resolved to try again tomorrow.
And it was in the middle of days like these that a few new "old acquaintances" arrived in the Capital.
The inspections at the Capital's gates were stricter than usual these days.
The Night-Watch Bureau had recently received instructions: any cultivator who had come for the wild Jiahao was to be entered into the register.
Jiang Lu stood on the bluestone paving of a side street in the Capital, head raised, looking around.
Spring had gone and autumn come, and the day had arrived for Jiang Lu — now a Second Realm inner disciple of the Wenjian Sect — to descend the mountain and temper himself in the world.
The back of Senior Brother Gu, whom he had once resolved to follow and look up to, had grown ever more distant. He was not discouraged by it.
Senior Brother Gu's back was simply too hard to chase. Even at his utmost, he could barely keep it in sight.
But there was no question he had surpassed the person he used to be. By the sect's own standards, reaching the Second Realm and entering the inner sect at his age already made him something of a minor prodigy.
Six or seven female disciples of the Daoning Gate trailed behind him, all of them sent down the mountain to temper themselves in the same batch.
The girls had barely entered the inner sect before being dispatched to broaden their horizons, and they had chattered the whole way, each voice louder than the last.
"Junior Brother Jiang, that pastry shop up ahead looks good!"
"Sister Ning, don't fix on pastries the moment we're through the gates. Settle the inn first!"
"The inn's long settled — the Falling Wild Goose Tower. They say an elder of the sect picked it himself."
"Oh, oh, the Falling Wild Goose Tower? Then it's just around the turn of this street. Junior Brother Jiang, lead the way!"
At the crossing, a senior sister wearing a pink silk hair ribbon stopped short and turned to the others.
"Come to think of it." Her eyes blinked. "Couldn't we go find Senior Brother Gu?"
"That's right! Senior Brother Gu is in the Capital!"
"I heard Senior Brother Gu is Commander of the Night-Watch Bureau now!"
"Oh, oh — Commander was years ago, wasn't it? By now it's probably something higher—"
The Wenjian Sect's Daoning Gate had always produced female sword cultivators in abundance.
The sisters of the Daoning Gate differed from one another in temperament, but they shared one unspoken trait: every last one of them harbored improper designs on Senior Brother Gu.
That shared trait traced back specifically to the stretch of time Gu Chengming had spent comprehending the Sword Domain on the back mountain of the Wenjian Sect.
Ever since, if you grabbed any female disciple at random within the Daoning Gate and asked her, "Over these past few years, have you ever sneaked up the back mountain to watch Senior Brother Gu practice his sword?" — eight out of ten would answer honestly, "I have."
The remaining two would insist stubbornly, "I certainly never did." But press once more and their faces would color half an inch before they quietly conceded, "Fine. Only once, really."
The impact Gu Chengming had made while comprehending the Sword Domain at the Wenjian Sect had been enormous — enormous enough that nearly every female disciple of the Daoning Gate had turned into a girl who dreamed of Senior Brother Gu.
So the moment this particular disciple brought up Gu Chengming, the rest of them broke into excited chatter.
Something stirred in Jiang Lu as well. It had, after all, been a very long time since he had seen Senior Brother Gu.
Word from within the sect lately said Senior Brother Gu was already Commander of the Night-Watch Bureau.
Now that he had arrived in the Capital, paying Senior Brother Gu a visit first was not a bad choice at all.
The matter settled, the group wasted no more time.
They dropped their luggage at the Falling Wild Goose Tower in a rush, the sisters each straightening robes and hair, and hurried Jiang Lu along toward the Night-Watch Bureau.
Dusk came especially slowly to the Capital in late spring, and the bluestone road glowed with a warm, mellow light beneath the slanting sun.
The cultivators they passed were either talking in low voices or striding quickly along — and every so often, from somewhere among them, a line of especially Jiahao declamation rang out.
Jiang Lu found this baffling at first, right up until he watched a tea-stall owner tallying his accounts suddenly bellow at his own abacus, "One catty of tea cake from this stall sweeps the whole world of cultivation and nothing more!" — and then go straight back to work as though nothing had happened. Only then did he begin to dimly grasp what this Jiahao craze sweeping the Capital actually looked like.
The Daoning Gate sisters, meanwhile, grew more excited with every step, their voices climbing several notches without their noticing.
Before long, that vermilion-lacquered gate stood before them.
Outside the Night-Watch Bureau.
Gu Chengming had just given himself a headache trying to condense a Jiahao in his own courtyard when the gatekeeper reported that several Wenjian Sect disciples had come asking to see him. Only then did he set the Jiahao business aside.
He changed into plain clothes and strolled toward the side hall — but before he had even crossed its threshold, he discovered someone had gotten there ahead of him and was already seated inside.
Purple-gold official robes; a saber worn horizontally at the waist.
Zhou Qingmu had only meant to say hello and leave, but she had come in carrying a freshly brewed pot of Cloud-Clear White from her own tea room, and so she had poured a cup for each of the guests about to arrive as well.
Ever since that one occasion, Zhou Qingmu had rather taken to "doing small things for Director Gu" — topping off his tea in passing, refilling his water, occasionally handing over some miscellaneous Night-Watch Bureau file or other.
In her eyes, this was nothing more than what colleagues of the Night-Watch Bureau owed one another.
In an outsider's eyes, however, it was quite a different picture.
The moment Jiang Lu pushed open the door, this was precisely the picture he saw.
In the side hall of the Night-Watch Bureau, Senior Brother Gu sat squarely in the seat of honor.
And the legendary Director of the Night-Watch Bureau — she whose saber art stood first in all the Capital, whom rumor said only the imperial house could rein in even slightly, whose name the entire cultivation world had heard — that Lady Zhou was bending down with a smile, pushing a cup of tea toward Senior Brother Gu.
And afterward she waited patiently a moment, making sure Senior Brother Gu meant to take it, before straightening and stepping aside.
A hundred old stories about Senior Brother Gu came flooding through Jiang Lu's mind at once.
With a scene like this in front of him, only one explanation held together.
— Senior Brother Gu had secretly taken control of the entire Night-Watch Bureau! And that Lord Zhou — nine times out of ten, Senior Brother Gu had gotten his hands on her first!
Gu Chengming himself, at this moment, was thoroughly puzzled.
He glanced up at Jiang Lu frozen in the doorway, then at the several sisters wearing distinctly odd expressions, then at Zhou Qingmu standing beside him holding the teapot with nothing in particular to do. He smiled and waved Jiang Lu in. "Junior Brother, you've come?"
Jiang Lu's throat bobbed. "Sorry to intrude, Senior Brother!"
Gu Chengming had no idea what exactly his junior brother was misreading, but warmth stirred in him all the same at the sight of an old friend. He led Jiang Lu and the Daoning Gate sisters into the side hall.
Over a cup of tea, Jiang Lu heard Gu Chengming mention offhandedly that "the Bureau has been busy of late" — and only then learned the earth-shaking news that his Senior Brother had been promoted to Director of the Night-Watch Bureau. The hand holding his teacup shook.
"Senior Brother has become Director?" Jiang Lu's expression grew stranger still.
The eyes of the sisters behind him shifted in subtle ways as well. They looked at that face, as gentle and unchanged as ever, and their admiration slowly acquired a filter labeled my Senior Brother is so incredible.
Gu Chengming knew nothing of any of this. He simply pushed down the still-unsolved business of condensing a Jiahao and asked after his junior brother's recent affairs.
Jiang Lu gathered himself and recounted half a year of cultivation progress point by point: advancement to the Second Realm, inner disciple, descending the mountain to temper himself.
Gu Chengming offered his congratulations, then, carried along by the mood, raised a hand and drew Jiang Lu out into the courtyard. "Since you've come to the Capital, let your Senior Brother pick your swordplay apart a little."
Warmth welled up in Jiang Lu at that. He cupped his hands and agreed.
In the side courtyard, the way Jiang Lu drew his sword was steadier than Gu Chengming remembered.
His wrist turned, and sword-light traced a slanting arc out from between his fingers — plain enough on the surface. But halfway through that arc the stroke shifted, the sword's momentum plunging sharply downward.
Gu Chengming lifted his own sword and braced. The next instant Jiang Lu's blade was knocked clean out of his grip, and he stumbled back several steps before steadying himself, wrist still trembling faintly.
Breathing hard, he looked up — and smiled anyway. "Thank you for the guidance, Senior Brother."
Gu Chengming smiled back and was about to lay out the details of that parry when something occurred to him.
Jiang Lu's sword path followed the orthodox lineage of the Wenjian Sect's Huiyuan Gate — clean and austere in its forms, prizing pursuit without pressing. Sea-Overturning, the technique he had created himself, had been built on exactly that principle.
Yet the stroke just now had carried far more weight than before. Gu Chengming studied his junior brother's honest, unassuming face.
"Has Junior Brother come to some realization in the sword Dao recently?"
Jiang Lu blinked, then laughed and scratched his head. "Senior Brother has a sharp eye."
He bent down, pulled his sword out of the grass, and wiped the blades of grass clinging to the edge.
"I did grasp one shallow bit of Dao lately. I've named it the Severed-Hand Sword."
Gu Chengming: "?"
Jiang Lu lowered his head and laid the second-grade sword flat across his palms.
"My aptitude has always been ordinary. Some days ago, while practicing on the back mountain of the Huiyuan Gate, I tried putting a shackle on myself."
"I imagine I have only one hand left. The other has already been cut off."
"That way, every single stroke has to be thrown with everything I have. And a stroke thrown with everything you have carries force far beyond the ordinary."
"I call that state the Severed-Hand Sword."
Gu Chengming looked at this plain, earnest junior brother standing before him, and something complicated stirred in him.
For Jiang Lu to have come this far, staking everything on a single throw had already become a cornerstone of his sword Dao.
They talked and traded pointers for another quarter hour, and then Gu Chengming saw them to the gate.
Just before the vermilion-lacquered threshold outside the Night-Watch Bureau's main gate, Jiang Lu stopped, turned, and bowed once more, very respectfully.
"Take care of yourself, Senior Brother."
That sudden take care amused Gu Chengming. "You take care as well, Junior Brother."
He watched Jiang Lu's group cross the long street and turn the corner. Only once the chattering flock of sisters had reached a point where the Night-Watch Bureau's gate was out of sight did one of them finally squeeze out: "Senior Brother Gu really is—"
Gu Chengming assumed the Daoning Gate sisters were about to gossip about him behind his back. What followed instead was: "Honestly, one look at him and you just want to go ■ yourself."
Gu Chengming's face went dark.
By the time he returned to his own residence, the sky had gone dark as well.
He had barely reached the courtyard gate before he sensed something off. Sweeping out with his spiritual sense, he found several heads poking over the courtyard wall one after another, all craning toward his bedchamber.
Gu Chengming had reasonable grounds to suspect that these Daoning Gate sisters had set up their ambush from the moment they left the Night-Watch Bureau's gate, then used the cover of night to slip through a few alleys and feel their way straight here.
He was about to pretend he had seen nothing, shut the gate, and shove the whole annoyance off onto tomorrow.
He had not counted on the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign lifting her head from the other side of the courtyard and shooting the Daoning Gate girls a single glare.
Those girls had no hope of withstanding the pressure of a Sixth Realm Sovereign. They scattered off the wall like a startled flock of sparrows.
Jiang Lu was waiting at the street corner outside for his sisters to regroup when he heard a rush of wind, and one after another they came tumbling down off the wall, gasping for breath.
"Wh-who was that?"
"Ugh, that was terrifying!"
A flurry of hurried footsteps receded into the distance. The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign gave a soft snort, threaded through with something like a kitten's displeasure over its food being eyed.
It looked rather like a possessive cat hissing to drive off a pack of impertinent strays that had come sniffing after its treats.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign withdrew her gaze and settled back onto the stone stool, as though that glare had been nothing more than an idle gesture in passing.
She raised a hand, peeled another grape into her mouth, and muttered something indistinct. Gu Chengming did not catch it and did not intend to press.
He cupped his hands toward the senior, then turned and went back to his study.
Night sank down inch by inch, and the business of condensing a Jiahao still stood jammed in front of Gu Chengming, impassable.
He had tried the hubris of the Hundred Bones Resonance, the hubris of the Huiyuan Sword Formula, the hubris of the Free and Unfettered Art, the Qingxin Formula, the Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula. Every one of them failed.
Gu Chengming pinched the bridge of his nose and turned it over for a long while. The Hundred Bones Resonance's hubris was more than sufficient. If nothing condensed, then hubris was not the problem — something else in the process had gone wrong.
He shifted his angle of approach and looked instead at the cases where a Jiahao had successfully formed. The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's "how dare the glow of a firefly contend with the bright moon." And the Master's.
Gu Chengming chewed over the Master's line — "since ancient times, autumn has brought sorrow and desolation" — again and again. By any reasonable measure, its hubris fell far short of the Hundred Bones Resonance's.
And there, all at once, a flash went through his mind, and he finally realized he had been making an error of basic common sense the entire time.
He had been trying to strip a technique's hubris out and stuff it into a shell that belonged to Gu Chengming.
But a Jiahao was, in essence, the projection of a cultivator's own subconscious self — and this set of rules, drawn from the Wanton Joy Sovereign's remains, was rigid, and recognized only its master.
The point was never how thick the hubris ran. The point was whether that hubris was sufficiently his own.
Gu Chengming let out a long, murky breath, and the knot between his brows loosened bit by bit. If he could not haul out any single one of them to stand in for the whole, then he would simply stop drawing lines between them.
All those thoughts, once so clearly separated from one another, converged the instant Gu Chengming threw his heart fully open — a hundred rivers running home to the sea, every one of them pouring into his life-bound spirit soul.
The assembled hubris boiled and fused within him, surged backward up the meridians, and slammed without a moment's hesitation into that shriveled, empty shell.
Boom.
Like parched earth meeting a downpour, the shell greedily swallowed that vast, tangled torrent of hubris whole.
The air behind Gu Chengming began to warp, and a figure sketched itself into shape at his back, point by point — none other than the Hundred Bones Resonance in its guise of "Primordial Boundless Myriad-Dao Source True Sovereign Sole-Honored-of-the-Nine-Heavens-and-Ten-Earths."
At that very moment, on the other side of the Capital.
Deep within the Imperial Academy, the lamps had not gone out.
The study was steeped in the scent of aged ink. The Master stood at the window with a yellowed old volume cradled in one hand. His fingertip had just caught the edge of a page when the motion stopped.
He raised his head, his aged gaze passing beyond the window lattice, through layer upon layer of palace walls and ward markets, to settle on the sky above a side courtyard of the Night-Watch Bureau.
The Master was not, in the ordinary sense, a man of great curiosity. But there was one matter he had genuinely kept an eye on.
That being Gu Chengming's Jiahao.
After all, this set of Jiahao rules was exceptionally particular about a cultivator's nature. The more flamboyant, the more singular the cultivator, the more outrageous and formidable the Jiahao he condensed.
And by the Master's observations these past days, the boy's hubris was not conspicuous — but that knack of his for picking fights without ever picking his targets was the genuine article.
The Master had reckoned beforehand that, given the boy's grounding as a sword cultivator, he would most likely condense a Jiahao of keen sword intent — something along the lines of "I am the Sword Immortal; I put down all foes."
And the Master also remembered quite clearly that one thread laid down for the future.
Gu Chengming was the key to breaking a certain calamity yet to come.
There was no sense waiting idly in the Imperial Academy.
The Master laid the old volume down on the desk and flicked the wide cuff of his sleeve.
One step out. Shrinking the Earth to Inches.
A moment ago he had been in the Imperial Academy; the next, the old man's feet came to rest, without a sound, outside Gu Chengming's little courtyard. Strange phenomena were already thick within.
The Master lifted his eyes a fraction and looked over the low wall into the yard.
The phantom had finished taking form and stood firmly at Gu Chengming's back.
Mm. Something stirred in the Master, more or less as he had expected — the boy's Jiahao was indeed of that domineering strain so rare among his generation.
He could very nearly guess what sort of line was about to come leaping out of that phantom's mouth. And then the phantom opened its mouth.
"Those who recite my true name—"
"—shall find eternal life within the cycle of reincarnation."
The Master: "?"
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