"How many."
Zhu Tiesheng was sitting on an overturned crate in what used to be the sect's main supply hall. The hall was on Level 3. It smelled like dust and the kind of damp that comes from stone walls that nobody has bothered to maintain because maintaining them required spiritual energy and spiritual energy was something this mountain didn't have much of anymore.
"How many what, Master?"
"Disciples. How many do we have."
Zhu blinked. Patted his belly. Small pat. He wasn't nervous about this answer, which meant it was bad but not catastrophically bad.
"Four hundred and twelve. Give or take."
"Give or take."
"Some of them leave, Master. Not formally. They just stop showing up. The outer disciples especially. They go to Thornwatch, or the mining towns past the southern ridge. Places where being associated with the Nine Ruin Sect doesn't mean an Alliance bounty hunter shows up at your door on a Tuesday."
Ren Shikai stood in the doorway of the supply hall doing his best impression of a man surveying his domain with quiet authority. He'd walked down two flights of stairs. He needed a moment. His body was eight hundred and forty-seven years old and running on a cultivation base that couldn't power a candle, and apparently two flights was the limit now.
His legs worked now. That was something.
"The inner disciples?"
"Sixty-three. Loyal. Or scared." Zhu tilted his head. "Same thing, mostly."
"And the outer?"
"Three hundred and forty-nine as of last week's count. But the count is a week old and three of them owe money to my network, which usually means they've either left or they're about to, because people who owe money to the Copper Vein tend to solve that problem by not being findable."
Ren Shikai filed that away. Four hundred disciples. Down from ten thousand at the peak. The mountain used to hum with bodies and qi and the sound of training. Now it hummed with failing formations and the occasional bird in the rafters.
He walked into the hall. The supply shelves lined both walls. Most of them were empty. Or not empty exactly. Worse than empty. There were still things on the shelves, just wrong things. A jar of dried herbs that had expired a year ago. Spiritual stones so low-grade they'd be worthless at any reputable market. Formation plates cracked down the middle. A box of incense. Another box of incense. A third box of incense.
"Why do we have so much incense?"
"Elder Feng ordered it before the embargo. Six months' supply. He said the sect required proper ceremonial materials for the annual purification rites." Zhu's voice went flat. "We haven't held purification rites in four years. Elder Feng left three years ago. The incense remains."
"Sell it."
"Nobody wants to buy incense from the Nine Ruin Sect, Master. The brand association is, uh." Belly pat. Medium. "Challenging."
Ren Shikai picked up one of the incense sticks. Cheap wood. The scent was gone. It smelled like a stick.
He put it down.
The spiritual vein under Ashenmoor Peak was dying. He couldn't feel it directly because feeling spiritual veins required at minimum a Foundation Forging cultivation base, which was seven full tiers above where he currently was. But he could see it in the walls. The stone had a particular quality when a spiritual vein was healthy. A warmth. A faint luminescence that most people didn't notice consciously but that made a place feel alive. The walls of Level 3 looked like dead teeth. Grey. Chalky. The luminescence was gone and what was left was just rock being rock.
Zhu was watching him. Trying to read the silence. Ren Shikai let the silence do what it always did. Let the fat man fill it with his own fears.
"The formations," Ren Shikai said. "Status."
Zhu's belly pat went bigger. Here it came.
"The outer perimeter array is functional. Barely. It'll detect anything at the Core Formation level or above entering the Ashlands within a fifty-mile radius. Below Core Formation, nothing. A mortal army could walk right up to the front gate and we wouldn't know until someone looked out a window."
"The defensive array."
"Ah." Zhu looked at the ceiling. Then at the floor. Then at a specific spot on the wall that was interesting to nobody. "The defensive array is complicated, Master."
"Uncomplicate it."
"It's operational. Technically. In the same way that a cart with one wheel is operational if you accept that it only goes in circles." He straightened up. Belly pat. Big one. "The primary barrier can absorb direct attacks from Nascent Soul cultivators. Maybe. For about ten minutes. Against anything at Spirit Severing or above, the barrier would hold for approximately the time it takes to have a short thought about regret."
"And against Tribulation Crossing."
Zhu Tiesheng looked at him. The laughter was gone from the Laughing Butcher's face.
"Master. Against Tribulation Crossing, the barrier might as well be a curtain."
The Grand Elder of the Orthodox Alliance was Tribulation Crossing, Stage 7. He had three fellow elders at Tribulation Crossing. He had an army of ten thousand cultivators, the majority at Qi Condensation and Foundation Forging, with a core of Nascent Soul officers.
The barrier was a curtain.
Ren Shikai looked at the shelf of expired herbs and worthless stones and six months of incense nobody wanted and thought about the fourteen days he had left.
"How much to fix it."
"Fix it to what level?"
"Enough to survive a siege."
Zhu did the math. You could see him doing it, his eyes going somewhere else for a few seconds, working through numbers that had too many zeros.
"Eight hundred high-grade spiritual stones for the primary barrier. Another four hundred for the detection array upgrade. Two hundred for the emergency teleportation circle, which hasn't worked since before I was born, and I'm four hundred and thirty-seven. Plus labor. We'd need at least twenty Foundation Forging cultivators working around the clock for a week."
He paused.
"Master. We have forty-three low-grade stones in the treasury. We do not have twenty Foundation Forging cultivators. We have six. Two of them are Elder Gao, who has a hip problem, and Elder Mei, who refuses to work with Elder Gao because of something that happened at a banquet in the Year of the Crimson Ox that nobody will explain to me."
"Find a way."
Zhu Tiesheng looked at him. The wanting was there. Always the wanting. The hope that this time, Master would say something more. Well done. Good work. I noticed. Anything.
"Yes, Master."
Ren Shikai turned and walked toward the door. The hallway outside was empty. Level 3 was mostly empty. The lower levels of Ashenmoor Peak had been gradually abandoned as the sect shrank, the disciples migrating upward toward the stronger formations and the warmer stone. Levels 1 and 2 were ghost floors now. Dust and closed doors and the occasional sound that was probably a rat but might have been a formation plate finally dying.
He made it to the stairwell before his legs decided they'd had enough.
Not a collapse. Nothing dramatic. His right knee just stopped doing its job for half a second and he caught himself on the wall with his left hand. The stone was cold. No. Cold was wrong. The stone was absent. That was the word. It had no temperature at all. The spiritual vein underneath was probably barely there.
His hand pressed flat against it and he stood there for maybe five seconds, breathing.
The drain from Duan Haori was still pulling at him. The boy was two levels down but the distance didn't matter as much as it should have. At this cultivation level, even residual ambient drain from a Nascent Soul body cultivator was enough to make his bones feel thin.
He straightened up. Checked the hallway. Empty.
Good.
He kept walking.
Lin Suwan was waiting at the top of the stairs to Level 5. She didn't say anything. She never said anything when she appeared. She was just there, the way a shadow was there. You noticed it when the angle changed.
"Suwan."
"Master."
Her eyes moved over him. Quick. Clinical. The kind of assessment that catalogued everything and stored it in a place he couldn't access.
"Have you eaten," she said.
It wasn't really a question.
"A master does not eat when his disciples hunger."
That sounded good. It sounded like something a Void Ascension cultivator would say, all noble suffering and transcendent willpower. Except his body had been rejecting food for three days. Something about the failing cultivation base was wrecking his stomach. Food went in. Food came back up. He was not going to think about it in more detail than that.
Lin Suwan looked at him for exactly long enough to make her silence noticeable.
"I'll bring tea to your chambers, Master."
"That won't be necessary."
"Yes, Master."
She would bring the tea anyway. He knew that. She knew he knew that. The exchange was a formality that neither of them had agreed to discontinue.
He continued up the stairs. His body complained about every step but it did the steps, which was all he could ask of it at this point.
Level 7. His chambers. He sealed the door.
The Ledger was waiting.
Not literally. It wasn't floating in the room or anything that obvious. But the moment the door closed and the silence settled and his body finally stopped performing for an audience, the black pages reappeared. Behind his eyes. In that space that wasn't sight but wasn't thought either.
New red ink. Fresh since this morning.
The Sovereign is diminishing. External drain. Ongoing.
He stared at that word. Diminishing. Below it, three words. Reduce the source.
Reduce the source. Meaning Duan Haori. Meaning tell the boy who killed his own mother with his body's curse that his Master, the only person who had never flinched in his presence, needed him to go away.
Ren Shikai stared at the entry.
"No."
He said it out loud, which was stupid because there was nobody here and the Ledger probably didn't care. But it felt like the kind of thing you had to say out loud or it didn't count.
The Ledger didn't respond. It just sat there with its red ink and its formal language and its complete disinterest in his feelings about the recommendation.
Below the new entries, the loan types were still visible. Flicker. Facade. Others he hadn't looked at closely enough to read. The costs column was there too. He'd avoided it this morning. He didn't avoid it now.
He skimmed the first few. A Flicker Loan gave him thirty seconds of borrowed power, one tier above wherever he currently stood. Cost 0.8 credit. Fail the repayment and he'd get three days of migraine. Thirty seconds at Qi Condensation Stage 2. Upgrading from a housecat to a slightly larger housecat. He moved on.
The others were variations on the same idea. Borrow power, pay it back, suffer if you don't. He was about to close the page when one entry caught his eye.
Facade Loan.
He read the description twice because the first time he thought he'd misunderstood it.
No actual power. None. Zero combat ability. What it gave was the aura. One to three hours of spiritual pressure at whatever level he claimed, heavy enough to put Foundation Forging cultivators on their knees and make Nascent Soul cultivators sweat. The weight in the air that said the most dangerous thing in the room just woke up. Cost: 1.2 units. Default penalty was losing his sense of taste for a month.
An aura with nothing behind it. The biggest bluff he'd ever been offered, and someone had written it down in a contract with a straight face.
His hands had stopped shaking. That was interesting. Something about the math of survival was steadier than the panic of hopelessness. Numbers he could work with. Terror he couldn't.
7.3 units of credit. A Facade Loan cost 1.2. That gave him six uses, roughly, before the well ran dry. Six times he could pretend to be a god.
Fourteen days until the army arrived. Maybe less, depending on what the scouts reported back.
Duan Haori was on Level 3. Standing alone in a room. The air around him was killing the stone and he probably knew it and couldn't stop it.
Zhu Tiesheng was down there too, trying to build a wall out of incense and expired herbs, and he'd do it somehow because that's what Zhu did. He'd build it and he'd present it and he'd wait for the two words that were never coming.
Outside the mountain, two Core Formation scouts were drawing maps that would tell the Orthodox Alliance exactly where to hit. And Lin Suwan was making tea he hadn't asked for. Because she'd seen something in his face that he thought he'd hidden.
The Ledger pulsed. New ink, red and wet and urgent in a way the drain entry hadn't been.
Approach detected. Two. South-southeast. Before nightfall.
Ren Shikai sat very still.
Before nightfall. The scouts weren't mapping from a distance. They were inside the Ashlands. He counted backward from sunset.
Six hours.
Not fourteen days. Six hours. They were coming to the mountain. Coming to look. Coming to report back exactly how weak the Nine Ruin Sect had become.
And when they got close enough, every cultivator on Ashenmoor Peak would feel them. And every cultivator on Ashenmoor Peak would look to the summit. To the throne. To the Ashen Sovereign.
Waiting for him to do something about it.
He looked at the Facade Loan entry.
1.2 units. An aura with no power behind it.
Six hours.