The underground war room of the Blood Wolf Sect smelled of rancid fat, burnt copper, and old blood.
Thirty demonic elders sat around a long black table. Nobody spoke or moved. On the dais, Patriarch Nether-Ghost stood rigid beside the shattered Ancestral Soul Altar.
Seven neat piles of pale jade dust rested on its velvet cloth.
Seven life tablets had turned to powder in less than a third of a second.
“Explain,” Nether-Ghost said.
His quiet voice made the room colder. Half of the green corpse-lamps went out beneath his Half-Step Nascent Soul aura.
“Seven Late Foundation killers. Our best shadow operatives in two hundred years. Sent to murder an exiled invalid on an abandoned peak.”
He turned toward the council with his fingers curled like claws.
“Where is Xue Sha? Where are the emergency blood signals? Why did all seven tablets break before one man could send back a thought?”
The elders stared at the table, afraid to meet his eyes.
At last, Elder Pei Hai shuffled out of a dark corner. He was hunched and gray-skinned, with half his teeth missing. A necklace of seventy dried ears knocked against his chest. As the sect’s chief strategist and an expert in corpse curses, he was the only person willing to speak.
“Patriarch, this was a planned ambush.”
“On Sunset Peak?”
“Consider the timing.” Pei Hai bowed. “Xue Sha trusted no one. Yet all seven veterans died before one could bite an escape talisman. No lone fighter could do that. Even Gu Qing could not kill seven Foundation masters at the same instant without shaking the entire valley.”
His milky eyes narrowed.
“Clear Sky discovered our plan months ago. They leaked the story about Sunset Peak being undefended. They placed a fake cripple in a rotten shack and hid their ancestral Nine-Heavens Void-Extinguishing Array beneath it. Then they waited for us to walk in.”
A fearful murmur spread around the table.
“The Founder’s god-killing formation?”
“If our main fleet had entered that trap, we would have lost everything.”
Nether-Ghost’s rage cooled into caution.
“A formation that large must consume cartloads of spirit stones. We will not feed more men into it. Pei Hai, take the Blood-Eye Spirit Mirror from the third vault. Scout the western ridge from five miles away. If Clear Sky has hidden an army there, we go around them and burn their eastern storehouses instead.”
“Understood.”
***
An hour later, Pei Hai crouched in a thicket of nettles five miles west of Sunset Peak.
He pulled a heavy bronze mirror from his sleeve. A swollen, bloodshot eye filled its center. It had been taken from a deep-sea roc three hundred years earlier.
Pei Hai bit his thumb and smeared black blood across the eye.
“Nine nether currents, open.”
Purple smoke leaked from the mirror. The dead eye twitched and projected a clear image into the morning fog.
The view raced across five miles of ravines and settled on Sunset Peak.
Pei Hai expected sword elders, war banners, and a golden killing formation.
Instead, he saw a tidy homestead.
There were no runes or soldiers. Only a clean pine cabin with a small porch facing the sun.
A young man in gray hemp sat on a three-legged stool. He wore a white work apron and held a pine dowel in one hand and a small knife in the other. He whistled off-key while wood shavings gathered around his sandals.
“Quarter-sawn scrap, and the grain still runs sideways,” the young man muttered. “Keep this up and the joint won’t seat flush. I may as well burn the whole batch.”
Pei Hai blinked.
“A mortal boy? Where is the army?”
He pushed more corpse qi into the mirror and narrowed the view.
Then he saw the three birds on the roof.
Their feathers shone like flowing sunlight. The largest hen yawned and coughed a thin jet of white fire into the sky.
Three miles above her, a two-hundred-yard hole burned through a cloud.
Golden Sun-Crows, sleeping on the roof like common hens.
The mirror’s view drifted to the courtyard.
A skinny outer disciple swept the black ground with a frayed bamboo broom.
Shhk. Shhk. Shhk.
Each stroke released thin waves of sword intent. They sliced falling pine needles in half before fading harmlessly into the courtyard.
A reincarnated Sword Saint? Using Ninth-Tier Void Intent to sweep dirt?
Pei Hai’s rotten teeth began to chatter.
The view moved behind the cabin and settled on the garden.
Fourteen dark hook swords stood in a straight row, eighteen inches apart. Hemp twine ran from blade to blade. Healthy peas and beans climbed the metal.
Pei Hai leaned so close that his nose touched the mirror.
He recognized Xue Sha’s twin swords and the twelve signed blades of his strike team. They had been pushed into rich garden soil and used to support vegetables.
On the porch, Austin stood and stretched.
“That pig compost did the trick. Those vines will flower by Tuesday if the frost holds off.”
Black blood spurted from Pei Hai’s mouth.
The three Sun-Crows turned toward the west. Their golden eyes fixed directly on the mirror’s distant viewpoint.
The largest bird gave one sharp cry.
Solar fire raced back along the scrying link. The dead roc eye shrieked, glowed orange, and exploded.
BANG!
White fire washed over Pei Hai’s hands. In an instant, the skin and nails burned away, leaving bare bone.
He screamed, dropped the mirror, and fell backward off the ledge. He tumbled through thorns and loose shale into the ravine.
He landed in a freezing mud puddle. Sobbing, he dragged himself downstream on his elbows.
It wasn’t a formation. There is no Clear Sky army. An ancient star sovereign caught Xue Sha’s squad in his sleep and used their blades to grow peas!
“DEMON!” Pei Hai howled. “RUN! SOUND THE RETREAT! GET BACK TO THE SWAMP!”