The sky above the Southern Cloud Mountains tasted like burnt copper and sulfur.
Fifty Blood War Skiffs hung in the upper thermals like black iron vultures. Down below, corpse-fire catapults thumped in steady, sickening cadence, hurling greasy bundles of rotted marrow, demonic pitch, and curdled bile against the translucent blue shell of the Nine-Peaks Mountain Barrier.
*BOOM. CRACK. BOOM.*
The ancestral ward groaned. Three thousand years of celestial engineering, buckling like cheap tin under a hydraulic press. Shockwaves tore through the valleys, ripping ancient ironwood pines out by their root-balls and blasting topsoil into choked grey squalls. Across the grand blue dome, jagged fracture lines spiderwebbed from peak to peak, hissing with escaping spiritual pressure.
High above the cloud deck, riding the three-hundred-foot fossilized ribcage of the Nether-Dragon Flagship, Patriarch Nether-Ghost leaned over the dragon-bone prow. His scarlet silk robes snapped like whip-cracks in the rising thermal gale. His hollow sockets burned with oily green corpse-fire, wild and rabid.
"FIRE THE NINE-NETHER CANNON!" Nether-Ghost snarled, slamming his clawed bone staff into the deck plating. "Punch through their parlor glass! Butcher the elders! Strip the marrow from their whelps!"
*WHUUUUUUU-THUMP.*
The petrified dragon skull mounted at the flagship's cutwater unhinged its jaw.
A thirty-foot column of pressurized blood-plasma detonated from its throat. Viscous. Acidic. Heavy as mercury. The kinetic hammer struck the barrier’s apex at three times the speed of sound.
The ancient formation shrieked, sagged thirty yards inward, and popped.
It blew out like a cathedral skylight under a wrecking ball. Millions of jagged, sapphire-tinted spirit shards rained through the valleys, slicing through tiled gables, shredding bamboo groves, and hissing into the mountain streams like hot slag.
"THE SHELL IS BROKEN!" "CARVE THEIR DANTIANS!" "SPIKE THEIR HEADS ON THE GUNWALES!"
Three thousand demonic disciples vaulted the timber bulwarks. Dropping on screaming ghost-bats, serrated bone kites, and rust-pitted flying daggers, they crashed into the lower courtyards like locusts hitting ripe wheat.
At the Heavenly Sword Pavilion pass, the defense was already soaked in blood.
*CLANG-WHAM!*
Elder Mu Chen wasn't running. His Peak Golden Core cultivation blazed like an unhooded furnace, emerald celestial flame roaring three fathoms off his shoulders. He kicked his three-legged bronze alchemy cauldron through the air with a savage roundhouse, sending the five-ton bronze pot hurtling through the sky like a green meteor.
*CRUNCH.*
The cauldron tore clean through the keel of an oncoming seventy-foot war skiff. Cedar timbers shattered. Ballista crews tumbled into the abyss. The ruined hull spun sideways, trailing greasy smoke, and pulverized a second skiff before both vanished into the pine canopy below.
"COME ON, YOU BARKING HYENAS!" Mu Chen roared, spitting a red gob of blood into the dirt, his knuckles smoking with solar-tinted emerald plasma. "WHO ELSE WANTS A TASTE OF PEAK CORE PILL FIRE?!"
He was magnificent. He was also completely outnumbered.
The Blood Wolf Sect had committed fifty warships, twenty hardened Golden Core commanders, and three thousand cutthroats raised on poisoned meat. Mu Chen’s cauldron was fast, but the sky was choked black with arrows.
High on the flagship bridge, Nether-Ghost watched Mu Chen’s rampage with cold contempt. He flicked his skeletal left wrist.
A hundred-yard claw of condensed, necrotic blood-qi plunged through the clouds, fast as grease on hot iron. It bypassed Mu Chen entirely, striking Sect Master Gu Qing square in the sternum.
*CRACK.*
Gu Qing’s violet sword-barrier shattered into purple sparks. The Sect Master vaulted backwards forty yards across the shattered flagstones, his spine snapping against a granite memorial pillar. He hit the stone and coughed a heavy glob of black, coagulated blood onto his embroidered lapels.
"Sect Master!" Chief Elder Zhao barked. His heavy iron punishment staff blurred in a frantic circular guard, knocking five poisoned bone-javelins out of the air before sliding in to haul Gu Qing upright. "The outer courtyards are wiped out! Pavilion roofs are collapsing into the gorges! We've lost forty disciples in the first two minutes! We can't hold this ridge for thirty seconds, let alone ten breaths!"
Gu Qing wheezed, one hand clamped over his cracked ribs, his breath whistling through bruised lungs.
He glanced around with dull, grief-numbed eyes. Screams echoed up from the residential grottos. Black smoke rose from the herb gardens. Ancient mahogany library halls were folding into ash. Overhead, thirty more war skiffs circled like fat crows over fresh carrion, their bronze rams dripping with gore.
Then Gu Qing’s gaze drifted toward the far western ridge.
There sat Sunset Peak.
Clean. Quiet. Untouched.
The mid-morning sun cast long, peaceful golden rectangles across its slopes. No black smoke. No screeching bats. Just calm pines, the sweet scent of cedar, and the distant, rhythmic tap of a wooden mallet.
A wild, desperate gleam lit up Gu Qing’s eyes. It was the frantic spark of a drowning man spotting an iron anchor to grab onto.
"Sound... sound the horn," Gu Qing gasped, his bloody fingers bunching the collar of Zhao’s robe. "Sound the retreat. All elders, deacons, outer boys... fall back to Sunset Peak."
Zhao’s jaw went slack. "Sunset Peak?! Have you gone stark raving mad, Brother Gu?! We took a blood oath under the high sun! Never disturb the Senior's mortal seclusion! If we drag three thousand butchers onto His doorstep, His divine wrath—"
"We aren't dragging anything onto His doorstep, Zhao, you thick-skulled donkey!" Gu Qing snarled, coughing through blood-stained teeth. A terrifying, manic grin split his pale face. "We’re setting up on His curb! The Blood Wolf dogs don't know what sits on that ridge! They think it's an abandoned junk peak! The second those illiterate swamp rats track dirty boots across His yard... the Senior won't have a choice! He’ll swat them like houseflies just to keep His grass neat!"
Elder Mu Chen froze, his cauldron hovering mid-air, his soot-streaked face suddenly breaking into a wide, shameless grin.
"Merciful heavens," Mu Chen cackled, rubbing blood off his chin. "That is the most unprincipled, shameless, brilliant piece of cowardice I have ever heard in three hundred years of cultivation! SOUND THE BRASS! EVERYBODY TO THE LAWN! GET ON HIS GRAVEL!"
*TOOOOOOOOOOOOT.*
The low, cracked bawl of the brass retreat horn tore through the roar of falling masonry.
Two hundred bloodied survivors—scuffed apprentices, limping deacons, and white-faced elders—broke formation in an all-out, frantic sprint. Boots pounded the narrow western goat paths, scrambling up the loose shale ridges with the demonic vanguard breathing sulfur down their collars.
Gu Qing sprinted at the front, clutching his cracked ribs, his voice roaring through the sect's spiritual communication band:
"Listen to me, every last one of you! When we hit the plateau, HALT AT THE DIRT LINE! Nobody touches the black mirror stone! Do not drag red clay onto the finished flagstones! If your legs give out, collapse in the wild scrub weeds! I swear by the founding ancestors: DO NOT TRACK MUD ONTO HIS PATIO!"
The disciples ran for their lives, eyes bulging in frantic confusion.
"Sect Master!" an inner-court sword disciple wailed, leaping over a burning spruce stump. "They're firing soul-piercing ballistas into our rear guard, and you’re giving us a lecture on doormat etiquette?!"
"You blind whelp!" Gu Qing bellowed back over his shoulder, dodging a falling crossbow bolt. "A demonic ballista will merely punch a hole in your guts! But if you track red clay across coordinate fourteen-eight, the Sun Sovereign will unmake your soul and level nine generations of your bloodline to an absolute grade of zero point zero degrees! Keep your damn boots in the weeds!"
***
Aboard the vanguard of the pursuit, three high-speed Blood War Skiffs skimmed fifty feet over the treetops, chasing the survivors like feral curs running down crippled sheep.
At the helm of the lead vessel stood Captain Sha Yan.
He was an Early Golden Core brawler with a face stitched in venomous snake tattoos and teeth filed to jagged points. He chewed dried betel nut, spitting red juice onto the cedar floorboards, grinning as he gripped the steering oar.
"Look at the noble Clear Sky dogs!" Sha Yan laughed, the sound like gravel rattling in an iron bucket. "Tucking their tails and sprinting up a blind cliff! They've boxed themselves into a dead-end ridge! Full trim on the sails! Ram the stragglers into paste!"
The three skiffs dropped into the draft, surging at eighty miles an hour just over the pine boughs. Iron rams clipped branches, showering the forest floor in shredded needles.
Ahead of them, the thick timber dropped away. The flat, open crest of Sunset Peak opened up under the midday light.
Sha Yan squinted through the grease-stained goggles strapped over his temples.
He expected an ancient fortress. A hidden grotto. An emergency teleportation array.
Instead, he saw a four-room cabin built of honey-colored pine. Behind it, an orderly little chicken coop and a neat, waist-high vegetable pen. In front of the porch stretched a glossy, mirror-smooth black stone courtyard that looked as flat as still water.
And standing in the red dirt off the southern flagstones was a skinny mortal kid in a faded grey hemp shirt.
The kid held a wooden folding ruler, a carpenter's pencil tucked behind his ear, and a spool of braided string. He was kneeling in the dirt, tapping a pine stake into the ground with a wooden mallet, sighting down the cord with the squint of a tired carpenter checking for bow.
Sha Yan barked a laugh so loud it startled the archers on the forecastle.
"A cabbage farmer!" Sha Yan roared, slapping his leather-wrapped thigh. "The grand Sect Master of Clear Sky, crawling five miles uphill to hide his bloody nose behind an outer-sect ditch digger!"
Malice, petty and vicious, twisted Sha Yan’s mouth.
"Drop the trench anchor!" Sha Yan shouted down the deck hatch. "Full chain! Drag the irons right through the dirt! Scrape that wooden coop into matchsticks! Tear up his little bean patch and let's see how flat that black porch looks under two tons of pig iron!"
*CLANK-CLANK-CLANK-CLANK!*
From the belly of the seventy-foot hull, a massive, double-fluked iron anchor forged from raw, impure pig iron dropped on twenty fathoms of heavy ship's chain.
*CRACK-THUMP.*
The five-foot iron flukes slammed into the mountain earth.
At eighty miles an hour, the anchor didn't just drag—it plowed. A five-foot-deep trench ripped through the mountain turf, spewing broken granite, shattered roots, and rich loam thirty feet into the air.
The iron monster screamed across the slope like a run-away locomotive plow, throwing dirt and rock directly toward Austin's boundary pegs, his taut chalk line, and his mathematically graded zero-degree garden bed.