The ancient jade slip was giving me a migraine. Or maybe it was my left thigh. It was getting genuinely difficult to tell where the structural failure of my body ended and the headache began.
I sat at the heavy wooden desk in the sect master's quarters, staring at the glowing characters hovering above the stone surface. My left leg, stretched out stiffly beneath the table, was wrapped in bandages smeared with a pungent, thick green paste Wen Xiaoliu had enthusiastically mashed together yesterday. It smelled like crushed pine needles, wet dirt, and something faintly resembling garlic. It stung terribly, which presumably meant it was working.
"You are reading it wrong," Old Geezer's voice vibrated against the inside of my skull. It had the texture of grinding stones. "The third meridian node does not route through the liver. You are going to spontaneously combust if you keep trying to parse the spiritual flow like a mathematics equation."
"I don't have any Qi to combust," I muttered, pressing the heels of my palms against my eyes. "I'm just trying to understand the theory."
"Theory without application is the pastime of dead scholars," the ancient god retorted.
Before I could point out the profound irony of a three-thousand-year-old ghost lecturing me about dead scholars, the wooden window shutters violently shattered inward.
BOOM.
It wasn't a knock at the gate. It was the sound of something incredibly heavy and incredibly dense impacting the outer courtyard stones from a great height. A wave of oppressive, suffocating heat rolled through the open window, carrying the distinct, acrid smell of burning hair, scorched earth, and ozone.
My heart hammered against my ribs, but my body didn't jump. Mostly because my torn left hamstring seized the moment my adrenaline spiked, locking my leg into a rigid line of white-hot agony.
I leaned heavily on the edge of the desk, dragging myself upright, and limped to the window.
Standing in the center of the cracked courtyard was a girl who looked like she had just walked out of a collapsing burning building, and was very annoyed about it.
She was maybe twenty. Her fiery red hair was pulled back into a tight, fraying battle braid, and her dark leather armor was scored with fresh, blackened gashes. She wasn't just standing there; she was practically vibrating with aggressive, kinetic energy. The Foundation Establishment Stage 9 aura rolling off her wasn't suppressed. It was screaming outward, aggressive, blunt, and entirely unsubtle. The air around her physically distorted from the heat.
"WEI LIANG!" she bellowed. Her voice echoed off the ruined buildings, loud enough to make a flock of crows abandon the dead willow tree. "Sect Master of Azure Void! I am Luo Yanfen of the Crimson Phoenix Army! I invoke the Rite of the Iron Threshold! Come out and prove this ruin is worth the dirt it sits on!"
Down by the well, Zhou Bao dropped his wooden bucket. It clattered loudly against the stones. He stood perfectly frozen, staring at the screaming woman, his round face rapidly draining of all blood.
I stared down at her from the second-floor window.
She punches through brick walls, my brain supplied, highly unhelpful. I literally cannot walk down the stairs without wincing. She smells like a structural fire.
"Old Geezer," I thought, locking my jaw so my teeth wouldn't grind. "Legal advice. Now."
A brief pause. I felt the ancient god sift through his encyclopedic knowledge of cultivation law, brushing past centuries of dead empires.
"The Rite of the Iron Threshold is an old martial challenge," Old Geezer noted, sounding mildly entertained by my impending doom. "You can accept and fight her. You will die instantly."
"Skip to the loophole."
"You are a Sect Master. She is a wandering challenger. You are legally permitted to refuse the challenge without losing face if you claim her foundation is too shallow to warrant your personal attention. Tell her she is beneath your notice. Send the disciple to deliver it."
I looked at Zhou Bao. The fat boy was currently trying to merge his physical mass with the masonry of the stone well.
"Zhou Bao," I called down. My baritone voice was smooth, heavy, and completely untroubled. The dead man's vocal cords were the only thing working correctly today.
The disciple flinched, looking up at me with wide, terrified eyes.
"Tell the guest I decline the Rite," I instructed, injecting a note of profound, aristocratic boredom into the syllables. "Inform her the challenge is beneath my attention."
Zhou Bao swallowed hard. He nodded frantically, his extra chin wobbling. He turned to face Luo Yanfen, who was glaring at him with amber eyes that looked entirely too much like a starving hawk's.
"M-my..." Zhou Bao stammered. His voice cracked into a high squeak. He squeezed his eyes shut, panicking completely under the crushing weight of her Foundation Stage 9 aura. "My master says... your challenge bores him! He says he has better things to do!"
My left eye twitched.
That is not what I said. That is the most inflammatory possible translation of what I said.
Luo Yanfen went completely, absolutely still.
The heat in the courtyard suddenly spiked. It wasn't a metaphor. The ambient moisture in the air literally sizzled above the stones.
"Bores him," she whispered.
She didn't draw a weapon. She just slammed the heavy, iron-shod heel of her boot into the paving stones.
A ring of pure, orange-red fire erupted outward from the impact point, crawling rapidly across the dry moss and creeping hungrily toward the wooden posts of the training yard.
"I'll show him boring!" she screamed, her voice cracking with a sudden, raw edge that sounded less like anger and more like deeply wounded pride.
I couldn't stay by the window. The fire was moving left. It was moving directly toward the soil beds Wen Xiaoliu had spent the last three days meticulously cultivating with her tiny brass trowel.
I turned away from the window. I forced my left leg to bear weight. It was agonizing. A sharp, white-hot line of pain shot up my hamstring with every step. I locked my jaw, smoothed the front of my dark silk robes, and walked down the main hall stairs. I didn't rush. Rushing was for mortals.
I stepped out into the courtyard.
The heat was suffocating, making my sweat stick to my collar. The fire was licking at the outer edge of the herb garden. Luo Yanfen stood in the center of it, breathing hard, her hands clenched into fists at her sides, soot smudged across her cheek.
I walked toward her. I stopped exactly ten feet away. I didn't look at the fire. I looked at her.
"Please put that out," I said. My voice was quiet, flat, and completely devoid of inflection. "Xiaoliu just planted those."
Luo Yanfen stared at me. She opened her mouth to yell something, her amber eyes blazing with challenge.
But before she could speak, the fire simply... stopped.
It didn't burn out naturally. The orange flames closest to the herb garden suddenly choked, as if an invisible, freezing hand had suddenly clamped down over them, smothering the oxygen. The ambient temperature in that specific corner dropped by exactly three degrees in a fraction of a second.
It wasn't just Shen Yuebing's residual frost in the stone. This was active, precise, and completely untraceable.
I noticed the shadow stretching from the roof overhang. I didn't look at it.
Yanfen blinked, looking down at the smoking, dead grass. She looked back up at me. I hadn't moved a single muscle. I hadn't even raised a hand to cast a spell.
Her aggressive posture faltered for a microsecond.
"You're not afraid of me at all," Yanfen said. It wasn't a question. It was a statement of profound, deeply unsettling confusion.
I looked at the soot on her cheek. I looked at the fraying, burnt edges of her battle braid.
"...Should I be?" I asked.
It was a genuine question. I was absolutely terrified of her, but I didn't understand why she was here. She wasn't a scavenger. She wasn't a debt collector. She was a soldier who looked like she was running from something much bigger, and much worse, than this ruined sect.
Yanfen's face flushed—a sudden, violent red that matched her hair. She crossed her arms over her chest, digging her leather-gloved fingers into her own biceps.
"I'm staying," she announced loudly, glaring at a spot on the stone wall directly to my left. "I need to... evaluate whether this sect is even worth crushing. Give me a room."
She marched past me, intentionally bumping her shoulder against mine. It felt like being hit by a small, angry truck. I managed not to wince until she was out of sight.
"She is completely unhinged," Old Geezer observed.
"She's moving in," I corrected mentally.
She stayed.
She didn't burn anything else. Instead, the sect smelled like stale smoke for four days. She spent her time aggressively sweeping the training yard, loudly complaining about the structural integrity of the roof, and demanding Zhou Bao run laps until he threw up in the weeds. Zhou Bao was terrified of her, but he did the laps.
On the evening of the fourth day, we were sitting in the dining hall.
The term 'dining hall' was generous. It was a drafty, cavernous room with a long wooden table that leaned slightly to the left. Elder Tan—the quiet, retired Foundation cultivator who had apparently survived the sect's collapse by simply refusing to leave his outer shack—had brought in a large wooden bowl of soup.
It tasted exactly like boiled water and sadness.
Zhou Bao was eating eagerly. Xiaoliu was meticulously picking out the root vegetables with her chopsticks. Yanfen was sitting at the far end of the table, arms crossed, glaring at her bowl as if it had personally insulted her honor.
A sharp, high-pitched whistle cut through the damp evening air.
A messenger bird—a mechanical construct of brass and crimson feathers—flew through the open window and slammed heavily onto the center of the wooden table. It dropped a black scroll sealed with dark red wax.
The room went dead silent.
I recognized the wax. Crimson Scale Sect. Zhao Feng.
I reached out and picked up the scroll. The wax broke with a loud, cracking sound that echoed off the bare stone walls. I unrolled it.
I read the contents.
It was a formal declaration of territorial war. A demand for total surrender of the Azure Void lands by the end of the month, or complete annihilation. It wasn't a threat. It was an administrative notice of impending death.
Zhou Bao stopped chewing. Xiaoliu lowered her spoon. Yanfen uncrossed her arms, her amber eyes locking onto my face, waiting for the reaction. Waiting for the panic, the rage, or the mobilization orders.
I looked at the black ink. I thought about the four thousand spirit stones of debt, the absolute zero Qi in my dead veins, and the Heaven-sent executioner currently hunting me from above.
I rolled the scroll back up. I set it neatly beside my chipped ceramic bowl.
"Pass the soup," I said.
Zhou Bao blinked. "M-Master?"
"The soup, Zhou Bao," I repeated gently.
He numbly pushed the heavy wooden bowl toward me. I took the ladle and poured a serving of the sad, watery broth into my cup. The liquid splashed softly in the quiet room.
Down at the end of the table, Luo Yanfen was staring at me. Her mouth was slightly open. The aggressive, defensive anger that usually radiated from her shoulders had completely vanished. She looked at the black scroll. Then she looked at my completely calm, unbothered face.
She didn't say a word.
I picked up my spoon. I didn't feel ready.
I took a bite anyway.