The subterranean war room of the Blood Wolf Sect smelled of scorched copper, rancid mutton fat, and old blood.
Thirty demonic elders sat along the edges of an elliptical obsidian slab, their breathing thin and shallow. Scarlet robes rustled against cold stone. Nobody moved. Nobody coughed. Up at the dais, standing over the shattered fragments of the Ancestral Soul Altar, Patriarch Nether-Ghost had gone completely rigid.
On the black velvet altar cloth sat seven neat, pale piles of powdered jade.
Not chips. Not splinters. Just fine, powdery talc, soft as river silt. Seven life tablets had been pulverized down to raw dust in less than a third of a second.
"Explain," Nether-Ghost said.
The word barely carried past his teeth, but it dropped the temperature in the vault by twenty degrees. A suffocating Half-Step Nascent Soul aura rolled off his shoulders like a wet winter fog, snuffing half the green corpse-lamps flickering along the rib-bone pillars.
"Seven Late Foundation shadow assassins," Nether-Ghost rasped, his parchment-dry skin tightening over his cheekbones. "The finest covert operatives this sect has bred in two centuries. Men who could hold their breath inside a burial mound for three months. Dispatched to gut an exiled invalid on an abandoned weed patch."
He spun on his heel, fingers hooking like dried vultures' claws.
"Where is Xue Sha? Where are the emergency blood glyphs? Why did seven life tablets turn into baking flour without a single stray wisp of soul-qi drifting back across the valley?"
Silence hung heavy in the room. The elders pressed their chins into their collars, staring hard at the table grain, terrified that catching the Patriarch's eye would get their marrow extracted for his ghost staff.
From the dark back corner, leather boots scraped the floor. Elder Gu Hai shuffled into the dim green torchlight. He was hunched, grey-skinned, and missing half his teeth. A grisly necklace of seventy mummified ears bounced against his breastbone with every step. As the sect’s chief strategist and an old hand at corpse-curses, Gu Hai was the only man in the fortress who didn't immediately pee himself when the Patriarch started hissing.
"Patriarch," Gu Hai murmured, bowing with his twisted knuckles held flat. "We're looking at an ambush. A deep, pre-planned slaughterhouse."
"An ambush?" Nether-Ghost spat. Green embers flared behind his sunken sockets. "On Sunset Peak?"
"Follow the mechanics, Patriarch," Gu Hai said, tapping a claw against his withered collarbone. "Xue Sha was suspicious of his own shadow. For seven veterans of his caliber to be erased simultaneously—erased so fast that not one man could crush a Blood-Fleeing Talisman between his teeth—is impossible for a lone cultivator. Even Sect Master Gu Qing, with all his Peak Golden Core posturing, couldn't drop seven Foundation masters in three-tenths of a second without blowing out the eardrums of every mortal within thirty miles."
Gu Hai’s milky eyes narrowed, gleeful in their own paranoia.
"The Clear Sky Sect sniffed out our vanguard months ago. They leaked that sob story about Sunset Peak being an abandoned exile dump, planted a fake invalid in a rotting shack, and quietly laid down their ancestral **Nine-Heavens Void-Extinguishing Array**. They built an invisible abattoir. They sat there in the dark, sipping tea, waiting for our best bloodhounds to stick their heads into the bandsaw."
A dry murmur went through the council table.
"The Void-Extinguishing Array?" "The founder’s god-killer formation?" "By the ancestors... if the main battle armada had drifted into that airspace, the whole forward fleet would've been milled into chum!"
Nether-Ghost’s green eye-flames flickered. The initial rage went cold, replaced by hard, defensive grease-fire calculations.
"Running an ancient slaughter array of that scale eats high-grade spirit stones by the cartload," the Patriarch muttered, pacing behind the bone throne. "We don't throw meat into a meat grinder. Gu Hai! Take the **Blood-Eye Spirit Mirror** from the third vault. Run five miles out to the western ridgeline. Scout their perimeter. If they’ve hidden three thousand sword elders and an ancestral formation under those pine trees, we detour around the western flank and burn their eastern storehouses to the bedrock."
"Understood," Gu Hai croaked.
***
An hour later, Gu Hai was wedged deep into a thicket of stinging nettles five miles west of Sunset Peak.
The limestone ridge was damp, cold, and smelled of rotting hemlock. Gu Hai didn't care. He sat on his haunches like a starved crow, pulling the heavy bronze scrying mirror from his quilted sleeve. The center of the bronze plate was dominated by a swollen, bloodshot eyeball, harvested three hundred years ago from the skull of a deep-trench sea roc.
Gu Hai bit the tip of his thumb to the bone, smearing a thick glob of black, coagulated corpse-blood across the iris.
"Nine nether currents, strip the fog. Open."
The bronze disc wheezed. Greasy purple smoke poured from the venting holes along its rim. The preserved eye gave a wet, twitching shudder, its slit pupil dilating wide as a copper penny before projecting a crisp, shimmering aerial pane of glass right into the morning fog.
The visual focus streaked five miles east, skipping over jagged ravines and morning mist, locking directly onto the clear crest of Sunset Peak.
Gu Hai tensed, waiting to see three thousand sword cultivators hovering on lightning banners, ancestral flags snapping in the wind, golden barrier domes humming with slaughter-intent.
The smoke cleared.
A tidy, sun-washed homestead filled the lens.
No glowing runes. No formation banners. Just clean yellow pine, tight roof shingles, and a small porch facing the morning light.
Sitting on a three-legged pine stool on that porch was a young man in coarse grey hemp. Clean straw sandals. White cotton work apron tied at the hip. He was holding a six-inch pine dowel pin in his left hand and a short paring knife in his right, whistling a lively, off-key tune while thin yellow shavings curled off the timber and piled around his ankles.
"Come on now," the youth grunted softly, his voice carrying through the mirror's audio resonance. He squinted down at the end grain, running a thumb over the wood. "Quarter-sawn scrap, and the grain still runs sideways. Keep this up and the mortise won't seat flush. Got half a mind to turn the whole batch into kindling."
Gu Hai blinked, scraping yellow crust from his eyelashes. "A... a mortal boy? Where's the defensive screen? Where are the grand elders?"
He pushed more corpse-qi into the bronze casing, ratcheting the magnification tight against the cabin’s overhanging eaves.
Gu Hai's throat seized.
Sitting along the roof purlin, perched on the fresh timber right above the youth’s head, were three fat chicks.
Feathers didn't cover them. Their coats were solid, blinding rivers of liquid sunlight that pulsed with rhythmic solar flare ripples. While Gu Hai watched, his jaw unhinging like a hinged cellar door, the biggest chick puffed out its chest, cracked its golden beak in an idle yawn, and coughed.
A pencil-thin jet of white-hot solar plasma spat into the sky.
Three miles up, a thick, drifting cumulus cloud vanished. One second it was water vapor; the next second, a clean, circular hole two hundred yards wide burned straight through the troposphere, glowing with blue ozone before collapsing into empty sky.
*DIVINE SUN-CROWS!* Gu Hai’s brain screamed against his skull. *First-Epoch celestial beasts... roosting on rough-sawn pine like barnyard hens?!*
Before his stomach could finish crawling into his mouth, the scrying projection drifted toward the central courtyard.
A scrawny kid in outer-disciple grey was sweeping the black obsidian flagstones with a frayed bamboo broom.
*Shhk. Shhk. Shhk.*
Every time the bamboo bristles skimmed the volcanic glass, the air around the broom gave a high-pitched, metallic shriek. Translucent crescent waves of pure, unadulterated void-cutting sword intent peeled off the broom head, slicing fallen pine needles cleanly in half before dissolving into the flagstone grain without leaving a mark.
*A Reincarnated Sword Saint?!* Gu Hai's rotten teeth clattered together with a wet clatter. Blood trickled from his gums. *Sweeping dirt with Ninth-Tier Great Void Intent?!*
Then the mirror’s viewpoint drifted past the woodpile, past the stone kiln, and settled on the small fenced garden patch behind the cabin.
Gu Hai’s eyes bulged so hard the lids tore.
Driven straight into the black mountain dirt, spaced precisely eight inches apart in a mathematically plumb twenty-foot row, were fourteen dark, curved blades.
Coarse jute twine was knotted between the hilts, forming a neat little trellis. A lush, healthy tangle of climbing snap peas and runner beans was winding happily up the metal.
Gu Hai leaned until his nose hit the bronze glass. His spiritual perception brushed against the steel.
The serrated gut-hooks. The abyssal corpse-iron alloy. The three-inch screaming wolf skulls chiseled into the bronze counterweights.
Xue Sha’s personal twin hook swords.
And the twelve signature blades of his entire phantom strike team.
They hadn't just been looted. They’d been jammed hilt-first into five wheelbarrows of aged pig manure to keep green bean vines off the wet mulch.
"Look at that root growth," the youth on the porch muttered, brushing wood shavings off his apron as he stood up to stretch his back. "Told the kid that composted pig dung would do the trick. Those runners'll be flowering by Tuesday if the frost holds off."
*SPURT.*
A thick fountain of black blood erupted from Gu Hai’s mouth, spraying the brambles.
Up on the porch roof, the three Golden Sun-Crows suddenly snapped their heads toward the western ridge. Their molten gold eyes locked directly onto the tiny optical aperture of the scrying mirror five miles away.
The biggest bird let out a harsh, territorial chirp.
Solar radiance flooded backward down the spiritual line like a tidal wave of molten lead. The mummified roc eyeball on the bronze disc let out a wet, human shriek, turned bright fiery orange, and exploded!
*BANG!*
White fire washed over Gu Hai's hands. The skin, fat, and fingernails peeled away in half a heartbeat, cooking the meat straight down to the white wrist bones.
"GYAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
Gu Hai dropped the smoking slag, threw himself backward off the limestone ledge, and went cartwheeling thirty feet through thorn bushes, sharp slate, and loose scree into the bottom of the ravine.
He landed in a freezing mud puddle, choking on gravel and bile.
Tears of pure, bladder-emptying madness washed through the soot on his cheeks. He dragged himself through the creek bed on his elbows, broken knees bumping against the rocks, screaming at the hemlock branches above.
*It wasn't an array...* Gu Hai’s mind shredded like wet parchment. *There's no Clear Sky army! There's an ancient star sovereign sitting on a stool! He swatted Xue Sha's whole squad while sleeping in his bunk... and used their ancestral corpse-steel to grow snap peas!*
"DEMON!" Gu Hai howled, clawing blindly through the creek mud with his raw, exposed hand-bones. "HE TURNS SOULS INTO BEAN TRELLISES! RUN! BLOW THE HORNS! RETREAT TO THE SWAMP!"