The central peak of the Astral Rock Clan cracked from the inside out with a boom that sent half the glacier sliding down the slope.
Blocks of black granite the size of houses plummeted through the night mist, uprooting century-old pines while dozens of red alarm arrays burst in the cold sky like war fireworks. Deep in the mountain, the bronze bells of the internal courtyards began to ring all at once, mixing with the furious shouts of the guardians rising from the underground galleries.
From the middle of the cloud of smoke and crushed stone rising from the crater of the vault tower, ten silhouettes tore through the wind in a rush.
"Have you lost your mind, Méi?!" Huáng Bìyǔ's voice cut the gale as the red-haired woman burned three wind talismans in sequence, pulling Qīng Yǔ by the arm to dodge a spear of light fired from below. "There was one single layer left! One!"
Three lengths ahead, flying close to the snow-covered treetops, Yù Méi carried under her arm a raw block of dark stone ripped directly from the chamber floor, with an ancient bronze astrolabe still embedded in the center of the rock. Her knuckles were scraped and stained with fresh blood, but she did not look back.
"That damned line never moved!" Yù Méi shouted back over her shoulder, twisting her body in the air when a beam from an array struck the slope beside her and raised a rain of gravel. "I spent almost half the day planted in that damp hole without being able to move a single toe! My legs were already taking root!"
"I spent three entire weeks turning the ancient scrolls upside down to discover how to open that lock without triggering the mountain vein!" Bái Wǎn's face was pale and her breath short as she sped through the air supporting Lín Jié, her fingers still trembling from the effort of manipulating the threads of the formation. "I had already released thirty-five knots of the anchor! I only needed two more breaths for the pedestal to descend on its own!"
"Two breaths of mine or two breaths of a turtle?!" Yù Méi retorted, slapping her free palm against the side of the stone block she carried under her arm. "You said 'just a little more' three times since the moon rose! And the thing is still in one piece right here, isn't it?!"
"Right here with half the elders of a hidden lineage on our trail!" Mò Yán cut in, white hair whipping in the wind as she launched a handful of dark needles backward, detonating two tracking birds that tried to pierce the mist. "When you drove your fist into that column to tear out the base, you handed our position to the entire mountain!"
"If my Law of Rupture were working, there wouldn't even be a column left to give the alarm!" the youngest huffed, gritting her teeth as she looked at her own scraped hand.
Leading the group by two steps, Yù Qíng did not enter the discussion. The First Wife kept her lips pressed into a thin line and her black eyes fixed on the stone throat that opened at the end of the valley, the dark cloak torn at the hem by a shard from the explosion.
"Spare your breath," Lín Jié ordered, her cold voice cutting the sisters' bickering as she looked back, where dozens of Qi beams were beginning to rise from the fortress crater like a swarm of wasps. "Their patriarch has just left the isolation chamber. Lóu Jiàn, Wúshuang, activate the transfer array now! Do not let them close the sky of the valley!"
At the rear of the formation, Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang already had their hands joined over a jade disc engraved with long-distance coordinates. Beside them, Xú Lán ran on the wind with silver eyes fixed on the darkness.
"The passage is opening, My Ladies!" Jiàn Wúshuang warned, injecting the Qi of the Third Stage of Immortal Establishment into the disc.
A silver rift began to draw itself in the cold air, ten zhang ahead of the group.
Yù Méi opened a wide smile, already gathering momentum in the air to cross the tear first.
She never made the leap.
Three steps from the opening, the silver rift stopped growing.
There was no explosion nor clash of arrays. The portal's glow simply yellowed in mid-air and crumbled with a dry crack, like old bone breaking under a boot. In Jiàn Wúshuang's palm, the jade disc cracked into pieces and turned to white powder between his fingers.
The storm wind died instantly.
The snowflakes falling on the pines stopped suspended in the air. Even the sound of the bronze bells far behind, in the destroyed mountain, became muffled and distant, as if an iron lid had descended over that fold of the range.
Xú Lán drew the short sword from her waist in an instant reflex, throwing her body in front of Yù Méi and Yù Qíng.
"Stop!" the Silver Huntress hissed.
The entire group braked on the frozen bed of the gorge, feet scraping on gravel and ice.
Ahead, where the stone trail narrowed between two dark walls, the mist opened slowly.
The dry and rhythmic crack of polished bones striking one another came before the figure.
A skeletal man, wearing worn yellow robes that seemed far too loose for his dry shoulders, walked down through the empty air as if stepping on an invisible staircase. The lower half of his face was covered by a fan made of white centipede ribs, and his small, sunken eyes passed from one woman to another with a patient and viscous calm.
Upon seeing that silhouette, the color drained from Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang's faces at the same time.
"Lǐ Jìngzhī…" the name left Lóu Jiàn's throat between his teeth. "The Bone Counter."
The skeletal old man stopped fifteen paces from the group, floating half a zhang from the ground without making a single stone tremble.
"Forty-nine days," Lǐ Jìngzhī's sibilant voice trickled from behind the ribs of the fan, soft and drawn-out. "I confess that you knew how to hide the tracks well after that earthquake opened the ground of the Bifront Empire. I had to spread eyes among the few clans that guard spatial relics and wait for necessity to bring you to me."
The Ancestor's small eyes passed over the three servants and swept the empty space behind the seven women, checking the shadows of the walls one last time.
No one emerged from the darkness. There was no gray tunic, nor that apathetic gaze that had made him break into a cold sweat in the snow.
Behind the bone fan, the corners of Lǐ Jìngzhī's dry lips pulled upward.
"When I returned to that canyon in the north and saw that your husband had torn the entire Immortal Qi rift from the folds of space, I thought it more prudent to keep my distance," the old man continued, in an almost courteous tone. "But curiosity is a difficult disease to cure in one's twilight years. I wondered why a man of that caliber would let his own house collapse in the capital and disappear for seven weeks."
He inclined his thin neck, pointing the closed fan at Yù Méi's scraped fingers and at the astrolabe embedded in the stone block.
"Today, you dispelled my final doubt. Seeing the wives of that monster going to such lengths merely to steal an astral-search relic… means that not even you know where he is."
The silence in the gorge grew heavy.
Yù Qíng took half a step forward, placing herself beside Yù Méi.
"Get out of the way," Yù Qíng said, voice cold and clean. "Or when my husband returns, not even the bones of that fan of yours will remain to be remembered."
The threat made Lǐ Jìngzhī's eyes narrow, but immediately afterward the old man released a hoarse laugh that sounded like gravel being ground.
"I do not care in which hole of the Void he got lost. That world of Immortal Qi did not evaporate into the air, and at least one of you must know where he hid the entrance. Today there is no one here to stay my hand."
Lǐ Jìngzhī closed the fan.
The instant the bone ribs struck together, the domain of the Seventh Stage of Immortal Establishment collapsed over the gorge.
It was not a gust of wind, but the entire weight of an Animic Ocean crushing the air from above. The rocks of the ground sank three cun at once, opening long fissures that ran from one wall to the other.
"Flee, My Ladies!" Lóu Jiàn roared.
The three servants of the Third Stage launched themselves forward in unison, burning their own essence without hesitation. Xú Lán raised a thick wall of silver ice that covered the entire width of the canyon, while Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang crossed their blades in a double cut to try to cleave through the Ancestor's pressure.
Lǐ Jìngzhī did not even remove his left hand from his sleeve. He merely moved the closed fan in a short gesture from top to bottom.
Xú Lán's wall of silver ice shattered like cheap glass at the first touch. The recoil struck straight into the chest of the white-haired woman, tearing her tunic from shoulder to shoulder in a jet of hot blood and throwing her body against the stone wall, where she fell to her knees trying to draw breath.
Immediately afterward, the two swords of Lóu Jiàn and Jiàn Wúshuang bent with a sharp metallic groan. An invisible palm of yellow Animic Qi struck the backs of the two former Hegemons, driving both face-down into the frozen gravel with the dry sound of ribs breaking, while blood ran dark from their open mouths.
"Xú Lán!" Yù Méi shouted, trying to advance.
She could not lift her foot from the ground.
Even with flesh forged in Primordial Qi, the difference between the peak of the Transcendent Realm and the Seventh Stage of Immortal Establishment was an unbridgeable abyss without Zhì Yuǎn's Laws. The air around the seven women turned to solid lead. Huáng Bìyǔ drove the sheath of her sword into the rock so as not to bend her knees, blood running from the corner of her cracked lip, while Mò Yán and Bái Wǎn held the arms of Qīng Yǔ and Lín Jié, whose faces were already white under the suffocating weight that crushed their lungs.
Lǐ Jìngzhī walked through the air past the three fallen servants without even looking at them.
The old man stopped two steps from Yù Qíng.
He looked at the First Wife's pale face, remembering perfectly that, back in the ice gorge, it had been at that woman's waist that the man in gray had kept his hand until the last moment.
"How good that he has seven," Lǐ Jìngzhī murmured, raising his skeletal right hand. At the tips of his five dry fingers, yellowish threads of Animic Qi condensed like long needles, ready to pierce the skull and search the soul by force. "Searching memories usually ruins the mind very quickly. If the first one's head cracks before I find the coordinates of that rift, I still have six more attempts."
"Take that filthy hand away from her, you damned corpse!" Yù Méi roared beside her sister. The veins of the youngest's neck jumped in the desperate effort to raise her free arm, the skin of her shoulders tearing under the invisible pressure that held her in place. "If you lay a single finger on my sister—"
Lǐ Jìngzhī's skeletal hand descended without haste toward Yù Qíng's forehead.
Yù Qíng did not close her eyes.
Blood ran in a thin thread from her nostril due to the concentrated pressure, and her lungs ached with every attempt to draw breath. But while she looked at those yellowed nails arriving a palm's width from her face, panic did not enter her mind.
There was only one thing in there.
Her husband was alive. He was alone somewhere far from here, waiting for her to find him. And that sack of old bones was trying to stop her from returning to him.
No one will stop me from being with him.
The tip of Lǐ Jìngzhī's Animic Qi needle arrived a hair's breadth from the skin between Yù Qíng's brows.
Then the light in Yù Qíng's black eyes went out.
There was no explosion of Qi, nor light, nor wind. Her pupils simply lost the reflection of the distant flames, opening into a dark, smooth, and motionless void.
In the next instant, the world around them became completely mute.
The hiss of blood dripping from Yù Méi's hands stopped. The sound of Huáng Bìyǔ's labored breathing vanished. Even the wind howling high on the peaks was cut.
Two steps away, the scream caught in Yù Méi's throat.
For the first time since she was born, Yù Méi felt the hairs of her entire nape stand on end at being beside her own sister. Around them, Mò Yán, Huáng Bìyǔ, Qīng Yǔ, Lín Jié, and Bái Wǎn froze with pupils dilated in pure instinctive terror—because, for the span of one heartbeat, the woman standing before them did not seem human, nor cultivator, nor part of that sky, but a cold and ancient presence.
Before Yù Qíng's face, the Seventh Stage Qi needles in Lǐ Jìngzhī's hand did not break.
They withered.
In the blink of an eye, the dense energy of an Animic Ocean Ancestor lost its yellow glow, faded to an opaque gray, and crumbled in the still air like rotten paper that had crossed millions of years in a single instant.
Lǐ Jìngzhī's smile died on his face.
The old man's small eyes widened when the gray stain did not stop at the Qi: the tip of the nail of his right index finger dried, cracked in half, and turned to white powder before it even touched her forehead. In his other hand, two of the centipede ribs of his ancestral fan snapped on their own, crumbling into dry ash.
Lǐ Jìngzhī did not even try to understand what that was. The old man severed the tip of his own index finger with a blade of Qi before the gray rot could climb the phalanx and tore the space at his own back with all the force of his Dantian, fleeing through the rift without even looking back.
Yù Qíng did not take a single step after him.
She merely blinked once.
A silent wave spread half a step around her shoulders before the dark void vanished from her eyes—and grazed the stone block that Yù Méi held beside her.
Crack.
Under Yù Méi's arm, the black rock and the ancient bronze astrolabe—the only relic of that world capable of tracking the rift through which Zhì Yuǎn had disappeared—lost their color all at once. The millennial metal rusted, fractured from end to end, and dissolved into a handful of dead gray sand that ran between the youngest's bloodstained fingers, spreading across the ice while Yù Qíng's knees bent slowly forward into the silent darkness of the canyon.