The soup tasted like boiled cabbage and wet copper, but the wooden bowl was warm against my palms.
I set the chipped spoon down on the uneven timber of the council table. The black scroll from Zhao Feng still sat exactly where I had dropped it. The dark red wax seal looked like a fresh, wet bloodstain against the grain of the wood.
The dining hall had emptied out. Yanfen had marched outside to aggressively hit a wooden training post in the dark. Xiaoliu had gone to check the pH balance of her soil. Zhou Bao was in the kitchen, scrubbing the cooking pot with the frantic, manic energy of a teenager trying desperately not to think about his impending death.
I sat alone in the drafty room. I looked at the empty wooden chairs lining the table.
My eyes snagged on the third chair to the left. The dust on the armrest was slightly less thick than the others. Chen Tian's seat, my inherited memory supplied, entirely unprompted. The other disciple. The one who had left two months ago when the grain silos ran empty.
A rhythmic, scratching sound broke the silence. Swish. Pause. Swish.
I looked toward the dark corridor.
An old man was pushing a broom made of bundled, dried twigs across the cracked floorboards. He wore robes that might have been gray a decade ago, but were now the color of accumulated ash. He moved with a slow, deliberate economy of motion. You could feel the Foundation Establishment aura in him, but it felt hollowed out, like a well that had run dry a long time ago.
Elder Tan.
He had survived the sect's total collapse three months ago by simply refusing to leave his shack near the outer wall. He was the one who made the terrible soup. He was the one who occasionally, silently corrected Zhou Bao's atrocious footwork in the yard.
Since I woke up in this body a week ago, he hadn't asked me a single question. He hadn't asked about the debt collectors, or the Glacier Sect prodigy freezing the courtyard, or the screaming redhead currently destroying a training dummy outside.
I stood up. My left thigh gave a sharp, agonizing throb where the muscle was still torn. I ignored it.
"Elder Tan," I said.
The old man stopped sweeping. He didn't jump. He leaned his weight on the broom handle and looked at me. His eyes were obscured by heavy, drooping folds of skin. He smelled faintly of the cabbage soup and old, dry linen.
"Sect Master," his voice sounded like dry leaves rubbing together.
I looked at the clean, swept floorboards trailing behind his broom. "Why are you still here?"
It was a blunt, ugly question. It violated basic martial etiquette.
Elder Tan didn't seem offended. He looked down at his broom. He picked at a loose twig sticking out of the handle.
"I figured whoever came next would need a clean floor," he said.
He didn't elaborate. He didn't offer a tragic backstory or drop to his knees in a pledge of undying loyalty. He just turned back to the wood and resumed sweeping. Swish. Pause. Swish.
I stood there for a long moment, watching the dust motes dance in the moonlight filtering through the broken window shutters.
I didn't say thank you. Thank you felt incredibly small for what that sentence actually meant.
I turned and walked toward the back of the ancestral hall, heading for the heavy, iron-bound door that led below the mountain.
"You are going to the vault," Old Geezer noted in my mind. The ancient god sounded alert. The simmering, constant irritation was gone, replaced by a heavy, cold focus.
"We need capital. We need resources," I thought back, pushing open the heavy door. The rusted hinges screamed in the quiet hall. "If we're going to fight a territorial war against sixty cultivators, I need to know exactly what I inherited."
The stairwell was pitch black. It smelled aggressively of preserved bitter herbs and damp, dead earth. I grabbed a flickering oil lantern from the wall bracket.
I took the first step down. The air grew significantly colder.
I took the second step.
My boot hovered over the third step. I froze.
The lantern light cast long, shifting shadows across the stone. The stairs were coated in a thick, completely undisturbed layer of gray dust. Except for the right edge of the third step.
Right on the lip of the stone tread, the dust was disturbed. It was a partial boot-print. Just the ball of the foot.
I didn't move my lantern. I didn't lean in to inspect it. I just looked at it from the corner of my eye.
It was far too small to belong to Zhou Bao's heavy, dragging tread. It was too fresh to belong to the dead Wei Liang. And it was far too light to belong to an armored scavenger. Someone had walked down these stairs recently, stepping with terrifying, almost weightless precision.
Someone who only makes a mistake when they're rushing, I thought. My heart executed a sudden, hard rhythm against my ribs.
I stepped cleanly over the third step. I didn't look back.
The bottom of the stairs opened into a circular stone antechamber. Directly in front of me was a massive, solid rock door inscribed with deep, complex runic patterns. The grooves pulsed with a faint, dormant blue light.
"The bloodline lock," Old Geezer said. "Your predecessor was paranoid. With good reason. I cannot see past this door. The formations restrict even soul-sense."
I walked up to the stone. I pressed my palm against the center of the runic circle.
The half-healed sword cut on my hand flared with sudden, searing heat. The rock recognized the biological signature of the blood flowing through the body I was wearing. Deep within the mountain, heavy gears ground against each other.
The door slid open with a heavy groan. A curtain of ancient, suffocating dust rained down onto my shoulders.
I held the lantern up and stepped inside.
It wasn't a treasure room. There were no mountains of spirit stones or racks of glowing weapons. It looked like an abandoned archive. Heavy wooden shelves lined the circular walls. On the nearest shelf, a single, dried-out ink brush lay snapped in half next to a stack of cracked jade slips. It looked like someone had broken it in a moment of extreme frustration.
I brushed the dust off a heavy, blue jade slip and pushed a microscopic trace of my lingering, residual Qi into it.
Text flooded my mind. It was dry and clinical. Land deeds. Foundational charters. Territorial maps from three centuries ago.
But as I read the margins, the context shifted violently.
The Azure Void Sect wasn't just a random faction that settled on this mountain. The charter documents were written in a dialect that Old Geezer's inherited memories instantly translated.
"This isn't a sect," I whispered into the damp dark. "It's a sanctuary."
"Yes," Old Geezer said softly. "The original founder was the last surviving disciple of my lineage. When the Celestial Court erased Soul Bond cultivation from the world, they fled here. They built this sect as a shell. A mundane, unremarkable disguise to hide the bloodline until the array chose a new host."
The air in my lungs suddenly felt too thick to exhale.
Wei Liang wasn't just an arrogant young master who picked the wrong fight. He was the warden of a three-thousand-year-old secret, guarding a prison he didn't ask to be born into.
I walked toward the center of the room.
Sitting alone on a raised stone pedestal was a single, flawless white crystal. It didn't have dust on it.
I reached out. My fingers trembled slightly. I touched the smooth surface.
Light fractured outward. It didn't project a screen. It projected a voice directly into my auditory nerve.
It was a voice I knew. It was the voice I heard every time I spoke. But it sounded incredibly tired, ragged at the edges, stripped of all the aristocratic arrogance I had been weaponizing for a week.
"If you're reading this," Wei Liang's voice echoed in my mind, "I failed."
I stopped breathing.
"I don't know who you are. The array wouldn't pull you across the boundary unless you had the capacity to survive what's coming. I didn't. The curse is already in my veins. I'm running out of time."
A wet, ragged cough interrupted the recording. The sound of a man literally drowning in his own black blood. It was a hideous, wet, gurgling sound.
My stomach lurched violently. I looked down at my own hands. The hands that belonged to the man making that sound.
"I couldn't form the bonds," the voice wheezed. "You can't fake it, and I was too afraid of them to ever be honest. But you didn't fail yet. The array chose you for a reason."
A long, heavy pause. The sound of shaky, agonizing breathing.
"I prepared everything I could in the lower chambers. Read everything. Trust the old monster in your head, even when he insults you. And..."
The voice cracked.
"I'm sorry about the debt. I tried to buy us time. It wasn't enough. Survive for us."
The light snapped off. The crystal went dark.
The underground vault was completely, absolutely silent.
I stood with my hand resting on the cold stone pedestal. The lantern flickered, casting long, distorted shadows against the circular walls.
I had been treating this world like a novel. A game I had to beat. I had been wearing this man's face like a mask, using his reputation as a shield, laughing internally at the sheer, stupid absurdity of my situation.
I swallowed hard. My throat felt like sandpaper.
He was twenty-four. He died terrified, choking on his own blood, trying to buy enough time for a stranger from another world to inherit a broken promise.
The phantom spike behind my right ear throbbed, but it wasn't painful. It was just a heavy, steady pressure.
"...He was a good host," Old Geezer said.
The ancient god didn't sound arrogant. He didn't sound condescending. He sounded like an old man standing over an open grave.
I closed my eyes. I let the silence hang for a long time.
Then I picked up the lantern. I turned away from the pedestal. I didn't check the other shelves. I had what I needed.
I walked out of the vault. I watched my boots step carefully over the third stair on the way up.
When I pushed the heavy iron door open and stepped out of the ancestral hall, the morning sun was just beginning to break over the eastern ridge, cutting through the mountain mist. The light stung my eyes.
I stopped on the top step.
The courtyard wasn't empty.
Zhou Bao was sitting by the well, clumsily wrapping a fresh bandage around a scrape on his arm.
Wen Xiaoliu was kneeling in the dirt near the shattered gate, aggressively repotting a crushed fern with her tiny brass trowel.
Luo Yanfen was leaning against the wooden post of the training yard. Her arms were crossed tightly over her chest. She was glaring at the horizon, aggressively pretending she wasn't waiting for me to come back up.
And standing near the edge of the shadow cast by the main hall, perfectly still, was Shen Yuebing. She didn't have her disciples with her. She just happened to still be here.
Four people. In a ruined courtyard. Surrounded by enemies.
I looked at them.
This is my sect, I thought. The thought didn't come with a joke. It didn't come with a cynical pop-culture reference. It just arrived, heavy and absolute. Two runaways, an ice sculpture, and a crying kid. And a shadow on the stairs.
I will protect this.
I walked down the stone steps. My dark silk robes caught the morning wind.
Yanfen turned her head. Zhou Bao looked up, his eyes widening. Yuebing's pale gaze locked onto mine.
I didn't use Wei Liang's cold, unfathomable mask. I just looked at them with my own face.
"Tomorrow," I said, my voice carrying cleanly across the cracked stones. "We begin rebuilding."
I folded my hands behind my back, hiding the fact that my left thumb was trembling.