Gu Chengming, of course, knew nothing about the alliance his own Sovereign and his own Deputy Director had just gone and formed.
What he had turned up was a fresh lead on the Delirium Jintian.
Honestly, hunting for that woman had been a headache from the start.
Her ability to speak a lie into truth happened to be a hard counter to the Red Dust Art. On top of that, she had laid down no small number of contingencies across the Capital in her bid to seize a Dharma-Station — which meant that if he wanted to trace her, those contingencies were the only thread he had to pull.
At the moment Gu Chengming sat in the Night-Watch Bureau duty hall with three registers spread open before him. On the left was the full personnel roll of the Bureau, copied out in his own hand when he first took over as Director; beside it, the personnel-transfer files of the past three months; and last, the newly submitted patrol roster.
And in them was the lead he had found.
A minor Night-Watch Bureau clerk named Chen Er, who had joined the Bureau three years ago.
Except the original roll he had copied when he took the post carried no such man. The transfer files of the last three months showed no trace of any late entry either. And yet the newest patrol roster had his name on it.
Gu Chengming suspected this was one of the arrangements the Delirium Jintian had buried. He had no idea why she would do something that amounted to a taunt, but there was no mistaking the flavor of it — the whole business reeked of the Delirium lineage.
Speak a lie until it is true. Wedge a man who does not exist into reality, and let the Bureau's own clerical apparatus fill in the fine details for you.
[The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula reminds you that if this person really is tied to the Delirium Jintian, spooking him now could snap the thread all over again.]
A fair point.
Gu Chengming turned it over. Best case, he took the man alive — and took him before he ever realized he had been found.
Which ruled out any open Bureau summons.
He called no one and did not touch the Director's token. He only stacked the three registers back together and tucked them into his sleeve, then scraped up the pinch of talisman ash "Chen Er" had left where he signed off on his patrol — enough for the Red Dust Art to follow.
He blew out the lamp in the duty hall and pushed the door open.
…
Night inside the Night-Watch Bureau always ran a shade darker than the night outside. Evil-warding talisman lamps hung beneath the eaves, shedding a cold white light; the night-patrol officers came and went without a sound. Only from the distant Hall of Punishment and Law came the occasional soft rattle of chains — very much in keeping with the atmosphere of the workplace.
Gu Chengming followed "Chen Er's" patrol route all the way out.
Willow-Robe Lane, in the southwestern corner of the Capital, was well off the beaten path. The people who lived around it were mostly craftsmen, rogue cultivators, and out-of-town caravan guards — dragons and snakes mixed together. Few lamps burned in the lane. Wind pulled at the tattered cloth banner at its mouth, setting it rustling.
Gu Chengming stood on a low wall, looking down at the small courtyard below.
It was an ordinary yard. Two bundles of firewood by the gate, a pot of half-dead orchid grass under the window, two strings of dried chilies hanging from the eaves. It really did look like the home of a petty clerk who came back after his shift to cook porridge.
Gu Chengming brushed the place lightly with divine thought. There was a figure inside, screened by concealment — but under the probing of the Red Dust Art, the truth came through anyway. Third Realm.
So there was something wrong here after all.
He raised a hand and unfurled the Ten Perfections Sword Formation, drawing one strand of Cling sword intent and coiling it into the yard. Then he flicked a finger, and the courtyard gate swung open without a sound.
Inside, the occupant seemed to sense something was off and started to rise.
Too late.
Gu Chengming was already standing behind her. Cling sword intent rose off the floor and bound wrists, ankles, shoulders and neck in a single beat, while the Red Dust Phantom Body Formula clamped down on her qi. The whole sequence was clean and practiced, like a veteran player walking into a room and backstabbing the NPC first thing.
Her hand had barely closed on the artifact in her sleeve before she was pinned against the edge of the table.
"Don't move."
As Gu Chengming spoke, his fingertips were already pressed to several spirit-apertures at the back of her neck. One wrong twitch out of her and he could seal her meridians outright.
The room went quiet for a beat. His captive did not struggle. She turned her head, slowly.
A pair of bright, lively eyes blinked at him. Blank at first. Then shocked. Then settling into the very particular embarrassment of being caught red-handed.
Gu Chengming looked at that familiar little face and went still himself.
"Nuo Tao?"
The girl's mouth twitched. "Brother Gu."
She fought to keep her composure, which was difficult with Cling sword intent trussing her to the table in a thoroughly undignified posture. "What a coincidence."
Gu Chengming looked at her. Then at the Night-Watch Bureau patrol map still lying open on the table. Then at the waist token hanging on the wall.
"Quite the coincidence." His tone was hard to place. He withdrew the hand at her neck, but did not release the Cling sword intent. "Explain."
Nuo Tao coughed and did her best to look like an unfathomable roving agent of the Myriad-Theft Gate. "It's a long story."
"Then make it short."
Nuo Tao: "…"
She hated men who wouldn't give a girl any room to build a little atmosphere.
She tested her wrists and found the Cling sword intent bound with maddening precision — not tight enough to hurt her, but exactly tight enough that she couldn't work her Dust Merging escape art. Professional enough to make any thief-cultivator swear.
"Untie me first, come on."
"You talk first."
"Brother Gu, you've changed." Nuo Tao puffed out her cheeks.
The whole mix-up went back two months.
Back then the Nameless Daoist had dealt with Gu Chengming over the matter of the Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank, and on returning to the Myriad-Theft Gate he had naturally recounted the entire affair to his final disciple: the sequence of events, their past cooperation, and everything Gu Chengming had achieved since.
Nuo Tao hadn't laid eyes on Gu Chengming since they parted at Snowfall Pass in the Northern Territory, and hearing her master talk woke the old craving right back up.
Her Gu-craving flared, so naturally she came to the Capital to find him.
She had rehearsed any number of reunion scenarios.
Say Gu Chengming was in the Night-Watch Bureau duty hall reviewing case files. She would come through the door with an armful of documents, eyes demurely lowered, and murmur, "Lord Director" — and then, the instant he glanced up in confusion, drop the disguise with a bang, plant her hands on her hips, and enjoy the astonishment on his face.
Or Gu Chengming would be out working a case, caught in some crisis, and she would make a dazzling entrance out of the shadows, resolve it for him without breaking a sweat, then say, with tremendous maturity, "Brother Gu. It's been a while."
All right. Given Brother Gu's cultivation, that second one was strictly a fantasy.
And that line she'd given him before they parted, about how she'd look out for him once she reached the Third Realm — recalling it now only made her face burn.
She had thought being left that far behind in cultivation was humiliation enough. Apparently there was worse.
The reunion plan had sunk before it ever launched, and here she was, trussed up like a landed fish.
The more she thought about it the more indignant she got — until it struck her that her first meeting with Gu Chengming hadn't gone much differently.
Back then, at the Barter Market in the Northern Territory, she had set her sights on the Azure Luan Token in his storage pouch. The theft had gone sideways, and he'd caught her with a flick of the wrist.
Now she had come a thousand li to the Capital meaning to give Brother Gu a grand long-awaited reunion — and gotten caught again.
Put that way, there was a damnably tidy symmetry to it.
Gu Chengming watched her expression travel from guilt to wounded grievance, from grievance to self-persuasion, and finally arrive at a strange serenity that seemed to say, this counts as a nostalgic callback, doesn't it. He was having some trouble keeping up with the way this girl's mind worked.
"Miss Nuo?"
Nuo Tao came back to herself and arranged her face into something serious. "Fine. I admit it. I used a Dharma-Station authority to forge an identity and slip into the Night-Watch Bureau."
Gu Chengming raised an eyebrow. "A Dharma-Station authority?"
"The boon the Patriarch handed down, obviously."
That gave her back a little of her footing. She even lifted her chin.
"The Patriarch may have played favorites with you, but I'm still the orthodox inheritor. Mine may not be as impressive as the boon he gave you, but faking my way into a Night-Watch Bureau? Easy enough."
The corner of Gu Chengming's mouth moved. "And your purpose in getting into the Night-Watch Bureau?"
Nuo Tao's gaze began to drift again. "Tempering myself."
Gu Chengming said nothing. He simply looked at her.
Under that look the pressure told. The tips of her ears went red, and her momentum sagged by half.
"All right, all right — I heard from Master that you were in the Capital, so I wanted to come see you. That's all."
Then she added hastily, "Not that I came all this way on purpose. I just happened to be passing through the Capital, and happened to think I'd take a look inside the Night-Watch Bureau, and happened to feel it would be more interesting to show up as a subordinate."
Gu Chengming: "And happened to forge an identity."
"Right. Happened to."
"And happened to live somewhere this remote."
"Thief-cultivator habit. Crowded districts aren't safe."
"And happened to edit the patrol roster while you were at it."
"If you're going to put on a play, you stage the whole production. That's professionalism."
Gu Chengming was silent a moment. "Professional enough that I nearly took you for one of the Delirium Jintian's contingencies."
Nuo Tao ducked her head guiltily. "Well, I didn't know that's what you were investigating."
Gu Chengming raised a hand and released the Cling sword intent.
Free at last, Nuo Tao rubbed her wrists and muttered under her breath, "Awfully practiced with those knots, aren't you."
Gu Chengming pretended not to hear. "This identity-forging method of yours — does it leave traces?"
Nuo Tao slipped straight into professional mode, her face turning much more serious.
"It does, but they're shallow. My authority leans toward borrowing gaps — places where something ought to exist but nobody remembers it — and wedging a false identity in. The longer it sits, the more the people around it fill in impressions of that identity on their own. But it can't conjure real experience out of nothing, so when it runs into someone like you, who has the original roll memorized down to the stroke, it breaks."
Gu Chengming considered that. It resembled the Delirium Jintian's methods, though not entirely.
Nuo Tao stole gaps. The Delirium Jintian rewrote the truth.
One was slipping through a door somebody had left unlatched. The other was announcing that the door had belonged to her family from the very beginning.
"Can you pick out traces like that left by the Delirium Jintian?"
Nuo Tao blinked. A moment ago she had still been smarting over her botched reunion — and now her eyes lit up.
"Of course I can!"
She cleared her throat, having finally found a reason to stand in front of Gu Chengming with her head held high.
"Brother Gu, you should have said you needed help. In a fight, sure, I'm no match for you. But forging identities, swapping out causality, hunting down the little loose ends buried in ledgers and rolls — there aren't many people in the whole Capital better at that than me."
That drew a laugh out of Gu Chengming. "Then I'll trouble you, Miss Nuo."
The last of her mortification evaporated the moment she saw him laugh. Her tail all but went up.
"Don't mention it, don't mention it." She clasped her hands behind her back and paced a couple of steps, putting on the bearing of a great expert. "But if I'm working cases for the Night-Watch Bureau, I'll need an identity, won't I? Chen Er's obviously out. Too embarrassing."
"What identity do you want, then?" Gu Chengming asked.
Nuo Tao's eyes turned. "How about the Director's personal secret agent?"
Gu Chengming looked at her. Nuo Tao amended at once, "Temporary secret agent works too."
"Fine," said Gu Chengming, resigned.
Nuo Tao brightened again. She fished a small copper coin out of her sleeve and flicked it with a finger; it spun three times in the air, and when it dropped back into her palm, fine golden threads had surfaced across its face.
"Then let me start by seeing whether there are any more holes like mine in these Night-Watch Bureau registers of yours."
"Be careful," Gu Chengming warned. "The Delirium Jintian's ability is a great deal of trouble."
"Relax." Nuo Tao lifted her chin. "I'm the orthodox inheritor of the Myriad-Theft Gate. What I'm best at is lifting things out of pockets other people have sewn shut."
"Are you, though? Because as I recall, a certain someone tried to steal something the first time we met and was in my hands before she managed it."
"That was an accident!" She held her ground even as she tucked the coin away — and stole a glance at him anyway.
After all this time apart, Brother Gu seemed to have grown stronger again. And more like the sort of protagonist out of a storybook that a person lies awake turning over and over in her mind.
This was bad.
Her Gu-craving seemed to have gotten worse.
…
They say every trade has its specialty. Where Gu Chengming's Red Dust Art struggled to find the Delirium Jintian, Nuo Tao took to the work with ease.
A few copper coins were all she needed to draw the anomalies and leads out of the Bureau files the Delirium Jintian had tampered with, and once those were combined with Gu Chengming's Red Dust Art, the whereabouts that had stumped him for days began to surface.
Guided by the Red Dust Art, Gu Chengming soon narrowed it down to an abandoned Daoist temple.
Inside, the temple was quiet past the point of comfort.
A battered plaque hung crooked from the door beam, the writing eaten away by rain until only one character could still be made out: "clear".
Weeds stood knee-high in the yard, moss filled the cracks between the flagstones from some long-past rain, and an incense burner lay overturned beside the steps — no ash inside it, only a few dead leaves.
Gu Chengming stood outside the gate. The strand of red-dust thread in his palm gave a faint tremble.
Nuo Tao hadn't come with him. He'd told her to stay at the Night-Watch Bureau and keep working through the files, and to watch for any other arrangements the Delirium Jintian might have left behind.
Not that he doubted her skill. But if this came to blows, a Third Realm cultivator was far too easy to catch in the backwash of a Fifth Realm cultivator's word-made-law.
He did not go charging in. However battered she was, the Delirium Jintian remained a Fifth Realm cultivator who had walked away from Infinite Love alive.
He probed the place first with his spiritual sense, and confirming that someone really was inside only sharpened his wariness.
As a rule, an enemy he had crippled — one who knew perfectly well she was being hunted — did not sit quietly at home unless she was either dying of her wounds or holding something in reserve.
Gu Chengming judged the second more likely, so he gave her no chance at an opening line.
The courtyard gate swung open without a sound. Gu Chengming stepped through with his sword formation trailing him, the Red Dust Art condensing into a dark red thread in his palm, the Hundred Bones Resonance's Primordial Imperial Aura already coiled and waiting inside him.
The Delirium Jintian sat at a table indoors.
She had changed into plain blue-green robes. Her face was far paler than it had been during that fight at the Joy Palace ruins, and the composure of someone with the situation in hand was gone from her eyes. At the sound of the gate she only lifted her head and gave him a look.
Then she sighed, like someone who had seen it coming.
She was, in fact, badly hurt.
One glance was enough for Gu Chengming to see it: the aura of her Dao foundation broke and stuttered in several places, and her word-made-law no longer ran as smooth and whole as it had that day at the Joy Palace ruins. Clearly that single line — "I am not here" — had spared her a direct hit from Infinite Love at an enormous price.
Wounds like that would have sent an ordinary Fifth Realm cultivator into three to five years of seclusion, and nobody would have called it excessive. Yet the Delirium Jintian, of all people, had not fled far.
[The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula grows tense at once. It believes this place very likely conceals formations, body-doubles, causality transfers, or word-made-law traps, and advises you to seal off the surroundings immediately.]
Gu Chengming did not strike. He looked at the Delirium Jintian and said, slowly, "You knew I was coming."
The Delirium Jintian sighed again. "Since Boss Gu has already traced me this far, going on pretending I don't know would be graceless of me."
His fingertips shifted, and Cling sword intent quietly took formation through the room. "Sounds like you prepared thoroughly."
At that, she gave him a very odd look.
His guard climbed higher. There it was — the contingency.
He had the "Endless War God" CG ready to call and was on the point of moving—
—and in the next instant the Delirium Jintian bent both knees, crisp and without hesitation, and dropped to the floor with a thump.
"What happened at the Joy Palace ruins — I was blind, I was possessed by devils, I failed to recognize Lord Gu's heavenly majesty and dared to set myself against you. I am willing to atone through merit. I ask only that Lord Gu spare my life."
"I swear it upon my Dao foundation — I will help Lord Gu raze the Eternal Life Sect to the ground!"
A flash of silver-white Dao light came and went inside the room, condensing into a tiny oath-seal that sank into her brow.
The sword hanging in the air paused, then finally withdrew.
Gu Chengming's expression was difficult to read.
In fairness, she hadn't been entirely without a contingency. He'd had no intention of letting her speak at all — he'd meant to blow her apart with a single punch.
But whatever she had set up in this place had kept him from striking in that first instant. Some unseen force had held his hand.
Gu Chengming had assumed she would use the opening to ambush him, or to run.
Instead, the first thing she did after stopping him was…
…show him the kneeling-and-begging-for-mercy CG?
All right. She was, after all, a "former" member of the Eternal Life Sect.
He might as well hear what chips she had to put on the table.
____
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