When the Master walked into the courtyard with his hands clasped behind his back, several rather delicate thoughts did indeed pass through his mind.
The Road of Reincarnation was, in this cultivation world, an actual concept.
Certain Dharma-Stations could reverse life and death, or part yin from yang. Yet if there were no medium waiting after death, the reversal of life and death became a paradox with nothing to attach itself to.
And so, in this world, the dead mostly went on to some other place — and that other place was what cultivators, passing the word from mouth to ear, called reincarnation.
As to what that road actually looked like, and how it differed from the legends, the Master had no idea.
The Dharma-Station he himself had proven did not sit upon that particular trunk, after all.
If one wanted the matter explained properly, there were perhaps one or two people in the entire cultivation world who could do it — and one of them was the Wanton Joy Sovereign, who had lately become the Capital's earth veins.
For that senior's proven Dharma-Station trunk had been tangled up with reincarnation by a thousand threads from the very beginning.
The thought turned over in the Master's head.
No, wait. The Wanton Joy Sovereign?
He looked at Gu Chengming standing before him, then at the white-haired phantom behind him, and his expression grew strange.
Surely this wasn't another piece of the Wanton Joy Sovereign's handiwork?
By rights, the Wanton Joy Sovereign had gone cleanly enough back in the day. His flesh body had long since been refined into a spirit artifact and buried in the Capital's earth veins, and every last stray intention he had left behind had been gathered up tight by the Heaven-Seeing Earth-Hearing Grand Formation.
And yet this particular Jiahao opened its mouth and spoke of finding eternal life on the road of reincarnation.
Was that a thing an ordinary cultivator — anyone below the Seventh Realm, in fact — would dare to say aloud?
The Master's thoughts spun on.
He even began to wonder whether his earlier judgment, that Little Gu was the key to breaking a certain calamity, might itself be no more than one stone laid down in some far deeper game.
Could Senior Wanton Joy have calculated this far ahead? Could that body-borrowing by Senior Jiahao have been about more than simply escorting a set of remains into the Capital?
Gu Chengming, naturally, had no notion of how many corners the Master's mind was turning. He merely bowed and said, quite politely, "Forgive me for disturbing you, Master."
The Master waved a hand and wiped away a bead of cold sweat. "This old man only felt a Dharma-Station fluctuation and came to have a look. I hardly expected..."
He paused, as though weighing his words. "My young friend's Jiahao is... quite astonishing."
Something stirred in Gu Chengming as well. This was as good a chance as any to ask about the few things that had puzzled him while he was condensing the Jiahao.
Watching the boy come forward with questions, the Master felt a fresh twinge of confusion.
Was the lad feigning ignorance on purpose, to get him to drop his guard?
Then again, if this really were Senior Wanton Joy's handiwork, why bother staging such a performance for his benefit? Why let the phantom shout a phrase as loaded as "those who recite my true name shall find eternal life" straight into his face?
If Little Gu genuinely knew what that phantom was tied to, then he wasn't playing dumb at all.
The Master was an old scholar who had lived through a very long span of years, and his thoughts moved fast.
He pressed down his speculations about the Wanton Joy Sovereign's designs, smoothed his face back to calm, and decided to first explain the whole business of the Jiahao properly to this junior.
As for whether some deeper calculation lay behind that "road of reincarnation" — pressing the matter now would gain him nothing. Better to watch and wait.
The old man cleared his throat softly and began. "Then this old man will explain the nature of the Jiahao for my young friend."
The Master spoke at unhurried length. A Jiahao, in essence, was a phantasmal transformation of a Dharma-Station's rules. A Sixth Realm Sovereign's Jiahao was ordinarily converted straight out of the Dharma-Station that Sovereign had proven, which was why the phantom's shape, its spoken line, and its methods all ran through with the Sovereign's own Dharma-Station.
The Fifth Realm was different. A Fifth Realm cultivator had proven no Dharma-Station at all, so the Jiahao he condensed was in fact borrowing that portion of Dharma-Station rules the Wanton Joy Sovereign had left behind.
Which meant that a Fifth Realm Jiahao's abilities were generally hooked into the Wanton Joy Sovereign's Dharma-Station.
Gu Chengming turned that over.
So the Fifth Realm was essentially running trial characters — the free weekly rotation the Wanton Joy Sovereign had prepared in advance.
[The Hundred Bones Resonance puffs out its chest: This Emperor is an SSR!]
Yes, yes, you're an SSR.
Amused, Gu Chengming placated the Hundred Bones Resonance and went on listening.
The Master continued. The Wanton Joy Sovereign's Dharma-Station trunk had borne any number of Dharma-Stations, large and small.
Under normal circumstances, Dharma-Stations on the same trunk varied in strength, each with its own rank. But because of the peculiarity of the current rule-set, the boundaries between them had been deliberately blurred.
In other words, a Fifth Realm cultivator's condensed Jiahao was a nightmare-stitched chimera of dozens, even hundreds, of Dharma-Stations from the Wanton Joy Sovereign's proven trunk, all kneaded together — and the larger the share of high-ranking Dharma-Stations in the mix, the greater the authority that Jiahao could wield.
As for how that share was apportioned, it likely came down to the cultivator's own realm, nature, and root.
Hearing this, Gu Chengming picked up the thread. "So the Master means that between one Fifth Realm cultivator's Jiahao and another's, there's a suppression effect much like the one between Dharma-Stations?"
Everyone knew that among Dharma-Stations on the same trunk, the higher could, in a certain sense, wholly counter the lower.
By that reasoning, the Jiahao projected out of them would work the same way.
"Just so." The Master nodded.
So this so-called Dharma-Station scramble in the Capital came down mainly to whose Jiahao was better?
A bit of a winner-takes-all flavor to that.
While Gu Chengming was thinking it over, the Master walked him through a few more small details.
At the end, the old man looked as though he wanted to say something more. But whatever question it was turned over twice on his tongue and, in the end, he swallowed it himself.
He cupped his hands in farewell, used Shrinking the Earth to Inches, and was back at the Imperial Academy in the blink of an eye.
Gu Chengming watched him go, let his gaze drift across the stretch of night beyond the gate, and turned back into the courtyard.
Under the eaves, the moon-white robe stood beside the potted osmanthus in a very relaxed pose — though the way she pretended to read while her ears were plainly cocked toward the gate rather gave the game away.
She had meant to come out with the Master, but the thought of the stiff formality that always cropped up between herself and that old scholar had made her stay under the eaves instead, waiting for him to leave before she drifted over.
Hearing Gu Chengming's footsteps, she shifted a step closer to the osmanthus without changing expression, as though she had been admiring the flowers all along.
Gu Chengming didn't know whether to laugh or sigh. He let it pass and walked over. "Senior heard all that?"
"Mm." The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign wore a look that said she had merely happened to be passing by, and yet she picked up the Master's thread as naturally as breathing. "He wasn't wrong."
She paused, her tone unhurried. "Though a Sixth Realm Sovereign's advantage in the Capital lies in exactly that same Jiahao business."
Gu Chengming considered that.
By the Master's account, the Jiahao rules had in a sense narrowed the gap between the Sixth Realm and the Fifth. Yet the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign was saying the Capital still favored Sovereigns.
Seeing his confusion, she explained patiently.
A Sovereign's Dharma-Station came from another trunk entirely, with a complete set of rules and structure behind it. So a Sovereign's condensed Jiahao was internally coherent — and even if it wasn't sufficiently Jiahao, it had her own Dharma-Station propping it up, which meant no high-ranking Dharma-Station on the Wanton Joy trunk could counter it.
In other words, a Sixth Realm Sovereign's Jiahao was a complete character: skills that chained into one another, mechanics and numbers both.
And a Fifth Realm cultivator's Jiahao? Nothing but raw numbers. No skill synergy, no follow-up. However high the realm's numbers ran, put it face to face with a complete Sovereign's Jiahao and all it could do was run.
She paused and added, "The rule the Wanton Joy Sovereign left behind grants a Fifth Realm cultivator one thing only: the strength for a single fight. Enough to crash into a wild Jiahao. Enough to chase an opportunity. Not enough to trade blows with a true Sovereign."
Gu Chengming filed all of that away. They had been talking a while when the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign spoke up again.
"By the way, Little Gu."
"Hm?"
Her gaze settled on the thread of red-gold phantom behind him, and she plucked up a single osmanthus petal, unhurried.
"Little Gu got to see mine just now, didn't he?"
There was a coaxing lilt in her voice as she said it.
"I'm curious too. What is Little Gu's Jiahao like..."
The girlish you-saw-mine-so-I-get-to-see-yours air behind those words was impossible to hide.
[The Flowing Cloud Moon-Following sighs: This old woman is such a drama queen.]
Miss Flowing Cloud, Gu Chengming thought, she is, after all, your founder and the compiler of your own art. Round it off and she's practically your mother. That's a vicious thing to say.
The Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign, of course, could not hear the word "affected" being pronounced on her in a dialogue box.
Seeing Little Gu's expression turn odd, she paused, assuming she had laid the coaxing on too thick, and was about to walk it back — when Gu Chengming raised a hand and the phantom behind him slowly took form again.
This time, its line had changed.
"At the peak of the immortal path, proud above the world—"
"Where Chengming stands, there stands Heaven!"
A question mark popped up over the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's head.
"?"
Aside from being altogether too Jiahao, the thing really had no flaws.
Gu Chengming tested the phantom's abilities in his own courtyard and quickly discovered that the Dharma-Station rules it carried were badly broken up.
Just as the Master had said: a Fifth Realm Jiahao was all surface. Reasonable enough.
If merely condensing a Jiahao were the same as genuinely occupying a Dharma-Station, that would be absurd.
Gu Chengming saw nothing wrong with the brokenness.
For him personally, the strength this Jiahao added was limited — but limited for him meant limited for everyone else too, which meant he could still bring his own methods to bear and profit from the coming scramble.
In other words, none of the advantages he already carried had been dulled.
Thinking it through, he felt as though this whole Capital Dharma-Station game had been laid out specifically for him.
With the board tilted this heavily in his favor, surely the Eternal Life Sect wouldn't come along and muck it up?
Then again — after all this time, the Eternal Life Sect was still the standing villain. Couldn't the world provide two fresh faces for a change?
The thought flickered past and he shook his head.
Never mind, never mind. No sense inviting trouble. Kicking around those Eternal Life Sect scrubs suited him fine.
With that settled, Gu Chengming set to studying the two new abilities his Jiahao had brought him.
Broken rules or not, there were in fact two usable skills.
The first was Lethality. Under its effect, Gu Chengming could see the health bars hanging over other people's heads, and once a bar was emptied he could kill the target regardless of conditions. In a sense, that made it a rule-tier skill.
It was also by far the more formidable of the two.
The other skill was considerably less impressive.
Gu Chengming pointed a finger at the half-withered osmanthus in the corner of the yard. In the next instant the plant went from drooping to flourishing, its branches bursting into full bloom overnight.
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula, delighted: So pretty!]
[Qingxin Formula: Huh?]
As demonstrated, the ability was: make flowers bloom.
So he'd picked up the magic that makes flower fields bloom, Gu Chengming reflected. He just wasn't sure whether he owed back royalties on it.
Still, borrowing the gimmick was one thing — he wanted nothing to do with any lifespan-as-the-price theory. If it came to that, he much preferred the "the power of love is infinite" school of thought.
The magic that makes flower fields bloom would probably never find a use in his whole life.
Time passed, and word of the upheaval in the Capital spread through the entire cultivation world.
Fifth Realm cultivators arrived beyond counting. No fewer than ten registered their entry at the Capital's various gates, to say nothing of those who slipped in without a word to anyone.
The Night-Watch Bureau was run off its feet, though Zhou Qingmu shouldered most of it. Deputy Director was her title now, but the old routine duties still fell to her personally. Gu Chengming, the new Director, had the simpler task: sit on the one or two who wanted to make trouble, and keep up the Capital's dignity.
He hadn't forgotten that his actual purpose was helping Zhou Qingmu obtain a Dharma-Station.
Unfortunately, all these days later, not a single Dharma-Station had sloughed loose from the Wanton Joy Sovereign's remains of its own accord.
The Master had sent word to him: a Dharma-Station's sloughing had its own preconditions — an imbalance of qi within the remains, say, or an external tug of causality, or some wildly improbable "coincidence." In short, it was not a thing to be rushed.
Then, on this particular day, news from the Imperial Astronomical Bureau came into the Night-Watch Bureau's side hall.
The minor official sent down by the Bureau's Director was careful in his bearing and careful in his words. "Reporting to the Director. The Imperial Astronomical Bureau has observed a Dharma-Station upon the Wanton Joy Sovereign's remains, one named the Folly-Joy Gu, beginning to tremble. It shows signs of sloughing free."
Ah. Here it was at last.
Gu Chengming set down his teacup.
He exchanged a glance with Zhou Qingmu, who was already on her feet.
The Folly-Joy Gu would fall in the southeast of the Capital, at an old site called the Joy Palace.
It was an abandoned garden estate from the founding years of the Great Qian, sprawling across a good deal of ground and long since empty of inhabitants. By the time Gu Chengming and Zhou Qingmu arrived, no fewer than ten Fifth Realm cultivators had already gathered inside and out.
Every one of them was a figure from somewhere in the cultivation world: Wandering Swordsman of the Eastern Reaches, the Frost Cloud Immortal Maiden of the Western Territory, the Sect Head of some mid-sized sect out of the Central Province. The air was strung tight.
Gu Chengming swept his gaze across them from a distance and, while he was at it, read off the health bars hanging above their heads.
Well now. The numbers were all rather high.
The Joy Palace had lain derelict for years, but its patch of earth veins ran in quiet accord with a filament of the Wanton Joy remains, and today the whole garden gave off a faint Dharma-Station tremor.
The stone lions flanking the gate had been weathered featureless. Only the faded Joy Palace plaque above the main entrance still held a trace of its old grandeur.
The cultivators loitering about heard Gu Chengming and Zhou Qingmu arrive, and every gaze turned at once.
Gu Chengming knew perfectly well that few of them took the Night-Watch Bureau's signboard seriously. He was in no hurry to speak. He simply waited to see which of them would break first.
As expected, less than a quarter hour after their arrival, the first clash came. The Central Province sect head, in a blue robe with his hands behind his back, stood before the main gate of the old Joy Palace and let his gaze slide toward Gu Chengming, his voice neither warm nor cold.
"I hear the Capital's new rules are rather peculiar. Any cultivator entering the city to contest a Dharma-Station must have the Night-Watch Bureau's nod first?"
Gu Chengming raised his eyes. "There is no such rule."
"Then a Dharma-Station sloughs loose, each man uses what methods he has, and the strong take it?"
Gu Chengming neither agreed nor denied it.
The sect head laughed softly, and his eyes moved from Gu Chengming to Zhou Qingmu. "Then since everyone here has come for this single Folly-Joy Gu — Lord Zhou, Lord Gu—"
He leaned deliberately hard on the word Lord. "If the two of you intend to enter the field, you must stand level with the rest of us. Otherwise, if you two attend here purely under the name of Night-Watch Bureau Directors, I fear you leave yourselves open to the charge of leaning on your office to bully the rest."
"We have heard, after all, that Lord Zhou has been planning her assault on the Sixth Realm for some time." He smiled. "The cultivation world's rules have always been thus. What Heaven gives returns to Heaven, and a Dharma-Station being taken by another after its master's death is common understanding among all of us."
"I trust the two esteemed lords of the Great Qian would not destroy that understanding."
That was one enormous hat to clap on his head straight out of the gate, Gu Chengming thought.
All the man wanted to say was that he and Zhou Qingmu were abusing their office. Yet he had to drag out the grand principle of what Heaven gives returns to Heaven.
The debating style of this crowd descended in a direct line from certain forum posters he'd known in his previous life.
Open with a hat, then make up the rest as you go.
Gu Chengming was about to answer when he caught Zhou Qingmu quietly signaling him.
Once the sect head had spoken, several other Fifth Realm cultivators picked up the thread.
"If Lord Zhou truly means to enter the field, she might start by shedding that purple-and-gold official robe."
"We in the cultivation world speak of fairness, and of methods. How can the Night-Watch Bureau come here brandishing official authority and simply take?"
For a while they traded remarks back and forth, turning those four words — what Heaven gives returns to Heaven — over and over between them.
Gu Chengming laughed coldly to himself.
Fairness had nothing to do with it. They were here to sweep Zhou Qingmu — plainly the contender with the best odds — off the board. As for himself, the Director of the Night-Watch Bureau, they clearly had no intention of letting him stand there and quietly watch either. While they were at it, they meant to pull down his intimidating signboard too.
Such a standoff. Such careful groundwork. Such a steady escalation of feeling.
Everyone settled in patiently to see what act this fine drama would reach next.
It was then that a woman in a white Daoist robe embroidered with silver walked slowly out from behind the vermilion-lacquered gate of the old Joy Palace.
She stood just inside that door with its peeling lacquer, and the moonlight slanted across her, drawing the moon-white robe out of the shadow. But the white was not like the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign's — not that clear, frost-pure, dustless white. It was more as though someone had steeped a plain garment in water and let a single drop of blood fall in.
The Delirium lineage.
The Delirium lineage had long ago been a side branch of the Eternal Life Sect, skilled in the Dao of word becomes law, turning lies into truth. Later a portion of them defected from the Eternal Life Sect, carrying off a Jìntian title with them, and from that day forward the Delirium lineage had occupied a place neither black nor white.
When an ordinary cultivator ran into someone of the Delirium lineage, a single casual sentence from her could make a thing that had never existed become fact.
If she said, "There is an unsealed counterfeit pill in your robe," then there truly would be one in your robe — and every crime attached to that pill would land squarely on your head.
And this "Jìntian" before them stood at the very summit of that lineage.
Rumor in the cultivation world held that she had been in seclusion within the Delirium lineage for centuries and had never shown her face at any event of consequence.
In truth, this Delirium Jìntian had begun laying her stones months ago.
Months earlier, before the first stirring of the Wanton Joy Sovereign's remains in the Capital's earth veins had even been caught by the Imperial Astronomical Bureau's star-discs, this Jìntian, ten thousand li away, had already opened her eyes.
What the Delirium lineage cultivated was word becomes law, and the power it borrowed was Inverted Causality.
Others observed the workings of Heaven by deduction and divination. What she did was simply speak a working of Heaven aloud.
On that day she had sat in a dim, silent chamber, and with blood from the tip of her tongue she wrote a single character on a blank talisman scroll — Gu — and murmured, "The Folly-Joy Gu shall slough from the Wanton Joy remains on the seventh day after the Beginning of Summer, and fall upon the old Joy Palace site in the Capital."
From that day, the Delirium lineage's hidden pieces filtered into the Capital like ants.
One posed as a traveling peddler and remarked idly in a teahouse in the southern quarter that the earth-qi around that derelict garden at the Joy Palace had been off lately. Another, in the guise of a down-at-heel cultivator, let slip at the gate registry that some rogue cultivator of the Western Territory had seen a shaft of radiance shoot skyward from the Joy Palace's direction. Others still spread word in the black markets that the Folly-Joy Gu was one of the destiny Dharma-Stations the Wanton Joy Sovereign had refined with his own hands, and that whoever won it could step straight into the Sixth Realm.
Some of it true, some false, some solid, some empty — but with the Delirium lineage's particular arts layered over each rumor, every one of them took root in the listener's heart and grew into "fact."
She had even calculated the Night-Watch Bureau's response.
Zhou Qingmu and Gu Chengming would certainly come. And she had judged that, hobbled by their official standing, the pair would be pinned down by the rogue cultivators under the righteous banner of what Heaven gives returns to Heaven.
This crowd of Fifth Realm cultivators was behaving exactly as she had predicted, serving her purpose.
From loosing the rumors that guided the Dharma-Station's fall, to stirring the rogue cultivators into hemming in the Night-Watch Bureau, to her own entrance in the posture of an utterly overwhelming Jiahao — all of it was going to plan.
The Delirium Jìntian let her gaze drift over and settle on the Central Province sect head, the one who had been shouting loudest.
"Enough." Her tone was as flat as an order to a servant. "Crude brute. Get out."
She said it carelessly, but the moment the words landed, the sect head felt his shoulders sink. His body lurched, blood and qi churned in his chest, and his feet carried him backward against his will, staggering step after step toward the gate of the old Joy Palace, the flagstones grinding under his heels.
Astonishment crossed his face first, then a flush that darkened to liver-red. The head of an entire sect, unable to stop so much as a single sentence, driven out like a dog in front of every peer present?
He clenched his teeth and seized his sword hilt. "You go too far—"
Sword light flared. The draw itself was sharp enough.
But the blade was only half out of the scabbard when his wrist locked. The point wrenched around in midair and came to bear on his own throat.
His eyes went wide, veins standing out on his forehead. He fought to open his hand, and the hand did not so much as twitch, as though another will had taken it over.
The tip rested less than an inch below his Adam's apple, its cold edge denting the skin. Half a finger's push further and blood would spray across the ground.
Everyone present recognized the signature of Dharma-Station suppression, and a chill ran through them. This Delirium lineage bandit's Jiahao was formidable indeed.
In the next moment the Delirium Jintian slowly raised a hand, and a phantom took shape behind her.
"If I do not speak, the world holds its tongue."
Every face in the courtyard changed at once.
A Jiahao's line was never empty bluster.
As a rule, the wilder the line, the harder the authority behind it.
If your Jiahao phantom could bellow "the mountains and rivers shall be overturned," then it most likely could overturn mountains and rivers. If all you could manage was a mumbled "may the winds be mild and the rains timely," you would do well to read the room and withdraw from the contest early.
And what did four words like the world holds its tongue mean?
That single line was enough to establish its worth. Few present had a Jiahao that could match it.
Only then did the Delirium Jìntian's gaze fall on Zhou Qingmu and Gu Chengming. The corner of her mouth curved, as though she were announcing something utterly unremarkable.
"Very well, everyone. I will be taking charge of the Dharma-Station here."
Several of the rogue cultivators who had been so bold in their righteous speechmaking a moment ago were now sweating cold, unable to produce a word of objection.
Because they knew: a Jiahao that could shout a line like that was simply beyond them.
Her tone stayed level. Among the other Fifth Realm cultivators, a few had already begun quietly edging backward.
And then—
Behind Gu Chengming, a phantom snapped into shape.
The instant it settled, it opened its mouth entirely of its own accord.
"I would have this Heaven veil my eyes no longer!"
The Delirium Jìntian's expression shifted.
"I would have all living beings understand my will."
Something was wrong. She felt it.
"I would have every immortal scattered like smoke!"
Cold sweat broke out across her back.
"I would have this Heavenly Dao held entire in my palm!"
The Delirium Jìntian went white with shock.
What the hell kind of monster had just come charging in?
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