High above the northern canopy of the Grand Desolate Forest, the wind blew fierce and cold across the razor-sharp crags of the boundary ridge.
Slicing through the upper heat drafts with easy grace, Da Peng tilted his golden-feathered wings, adjusting his flight vector by a fraction of an inch. His thirty-meter wingspan, glowing with the burnished bright glare of molten gold, cast a swift, silent shadow over the pine forests four thousand feet below. With vision keen enough to spot a field mouse burrowing beneath snow from three miles away, the Golden-Winged Wind-Storm Roc locked his piercing amber eyes onto five brilliant streaks of crimson light cutting aggressively through the tree line.
Down below, five human fighters dressed in matching scarlet-and-gold brocade robes were riding low-height flying swords.
They moved with blatant disregard for the wilderness, snapping pine boughs with their spiritual wind shields and scorching patches of moss with trailing fire-sparks. Stitched prominently upon their left breasts was an insignia depicting a three-clawed dragon coiled around a raging bonfire—the mark of the Crimson Flame Sect, one of the five dominant traditional factions of the Eastern Domain.
“Keep your formation tight, junior brothers!” shouted the scout leader, a haughty young man with an angular chin named Gu Long, hovering three feet above a cedar branch. “The Young Master’s twentieth birthday banquet is in four days! Master Yan specifically demanded three Tier-3 Moon-Wolf pelts and five cores of rare spiritual serpents for his celebratory banquet robes! If we return to the pavilion empty-handed, the Sect Master will have us flogged with fire-whips!”
“Senior Brother Gu, look at that valley ahead!” one of the younger students called out. They pointed toward the basin between the five crescent peaks. “The spiritual qi in this region is unusually packed! Look at the thick white fog rolling over the ridge—could there be a hidden spirit herb garden or an ancient beast warren down there?”
Gu Long sneered, adjusting his jade sword sheath. “A natural fog hollow in the deep mountains? Perfect. Savage beasts always den near thick water vapor. Dive in and flush them out! Kill any beast above Tier-1, extract their blood cores, and burn the scrub!”
The five Crimson Flame students banked their flying swords. They dropped in a steep dive toward the outer boundary of the safe hall.
They expected a simple slaughter. Charging in with blazing fire-magic charms, setting the trees ablaze, and netting any fleeing wildlife like scared fish in a pond.
Instead, the moment their iron boots breached the pale white mist surrounding the sixty-four boundary giant pillars, reality began to warp.
Gu Long felt his flying sword suddenly shudder beneath his soles. The crisp autumn air turned strangely thick. It carried a faint, sweet aroma of toasted cedar and wild jasmine that made his fiery spiritual qi feel unusually sluggish. He pulled his sword’s flight control runes to bank sharply right toward the valley floor, yet the landscape around him didn’t shift.
The towering iron-bamboo stalks on either side of the mountain path seemed to drift in endless, matching rows. No matter how much spiritual qi he poured into his sword’s forward thrust array, the thick white mist remained exactly ten paces ahead of him.
“Senior Brother!” a student cried out from behind, his voice laced with sudden dizziness. “My aimed compass is spinning! The needle won’t settle north!”
Gu Long pulled a bronze feng-shui compass from his spatial pouch. To his mounting horror, the magnetized sky needle was whirling around its brass pivot like a drunken water bug, fully unable to lock onto the magnetic leylines of the earth.
“Impossible!” Gu Long snapped, his face darkening with frustrated arrogance. “This is just natural mountain fog! We’re students of the great Crimson Flame Sect—how could mere wilderness mist blind our spiritual senses? Follow my spiritual bright light!”
Igniting a burst of scarlet fire around his left fist, Gu Long sped up forward at top speed, following what he believed to be a dead-straight heading toward the heart of the valley. For three whole minutes, his flying sword roared through the dense forest mist at over sixty miles per hour.
Then, with a sudden whoosh, he burst through the edge of the fog.
Gu Long slammed his spiritual brakes, skidding to a halt on a mossy boulder. He looked around, panting heavily, expecting to see the scared faces of trapped beastfolk.
Instead, he was staring at the exact same lightning-blasted pine stump he had passed fifteen minutes ago on the outer mountain trail.
Beside the stump, his four junior brothers were already standing in a circle, looking pale, nauseous, and thoroughly disoriented.
“Senior Brother... We just flew in a complete circle,” one student stammered, holding his stomach. “Every time we turn toward the valley, the ground seems to tilt! It’s like the trees are deliberately steering us back to the highway!”
“It’s a formation!” Gu Long hissed, his teeth grinding in humiliation and sudden fury. “An ancient hiding ward! Some cowardly beast clan or rogue fighter hermit must be hiding in this valley, using cheap illusory tricks to protect their hoard! Do they think a bit of damp steam can keep out the Crimson Flame Sect?!”
He reached deep into his spatial ring. Then he pulled out a heavy metal tube of carved sky bamboo bound with scarlet brass wire—a Grade-2 high-sky Sect Bright light.
“Senior Brother, are you calling the main party?” a junior whispered nervously. “Young Master Yan is resting at the border post with Protectors Wu and Zhao. If we summon them for a mere fog bank...”
“This isn’t a mere fog bank!” Gu Long roared, twisting the base of the bamboo metal tube with vicious force. “There’s an ancient master’s cache or a high-tier beast nest hidden beneath this ward! When the Young Master sees the treasures waiting here, he will reward us with Core Condensation pills!”
THWUMP!
With a bone-shaking blast of tightly packed spiritual gunpowder, a blazing rocket of packed crimson spiritual fire shot into the sky. It rose three thousand feet above the mountain peaks before exploding with an ear-splitting boom that shook the autumn leaves from the trees for ten miles around. In the clear blue sky, the explosion unfurled into a massive, three-hundred-foot flaming dragon insignia that burned with blinding scarlet bright glare.
High above, Da Peng watched the fiery emblem burn against the clouds. Letting out a soft, sharp raptor whistle that sounded like the crack of lightning, the golden roc folded his wings and dove silently toward the valley below.
Down in the residential plaza beneath the Primordial Spirit Willow, Lin Xiao was sitting comfortably on a polished cedar bench beside the central dining pavilion.
Resting on a small woven bamboo tray on his lap—or rather, on the flat top of his azure jelly mantle—was a steaming clay pot bowl filled with braised mountain lotus root. The thick, circular slices of crunchy lotus root had been slow-simmered in a dark glaze of rock sugar, wild osmanthus flower syrup. A splash of stalactite spring water, giving them a rich, ruby-amber luster and a heavenly floral sweetness that made his internal core hum with delight.
Lin Xiao extended a small, semi-clear blue spoon-slime arm, ladling up a glistening slice of lotus root and slurping it into his body with a contented squish.
Crisp, sweet, slightly chewy, and the osmanthus fragrance clears the head better than an espresso, Lin Xiao thought blissfully, savoring the caramelized crunch. Auntie Bai really outdid herself with this batch. Cooking with wild flowers is an art form.
CRACK-BOOM!
The thunderous blast of the sect bright light echoed across the mountain peaks, rattling the shingles on the nearby dining hall roof edges and startling a flock of wild blue-jays from the willow branches.
Lin Xiao looked up at the sky, watching the giant flaming crimson dragon burn among the clouds.
“Fireworks in the middle of the afternoon?” Lin Xiao murmured, tapping his squishy belly with a pseudo-finger. “How wasteful. Do fighters have no sense of fire safety? One stray spark in dry pine woods and we’ll be fighting brush fires until midnight.”
Before he could take another bite of his lotus root, a huge gust of wind flattened the grass across the plaza.
Xiao Hei bounded into the clearing. He skidded to a halt on all four paws beside Lin Xiao’s bench. The eight-foot wolf king’s midnight fur bristled with crackling arcs of dark-silver lightning. His ruby eyes glowed with lethal battle-readiness.
“Master,” Xiao Hei growled across their telepathic soul link, lowering his great head so that his velvet snout was level with the blue slime. “Da Peng reports from the sky. Five human students from the Crimson Flame Sect tried to penetrate the mist ward at the northern gorge. Unable to break the maze, the lead insect fired their sect’s sovereign summoning flare. A heavy spiritual palanquin and two high-tier fighters are moving toward the outer pass at rapid speed.”
Lin Xiao sighed, extending a fluid slime arm to wipe a stray speck of osmanthus syrup from his rim.
“Why can’t people ever just knock on the door?” Lin Xiao muttered with an aggrieved little wobble. “We have tea. We have sweet buns. If they wanted some mountain herbs, they could have just traded a few iron metal bars or some paper for them. Why do they always have to start with fireworks and flying swords?”
A crisp chime sounded in his mind:
“Well, no sense in letting them burn down our boundary trees,” Lin Xiao said.
He finished the last sweet slice of lotus root, swallowed the baked-clay bowl into his void dantian frozen stillness pocket for safekeeping. Then he gave a firm, rubbery hop.
Boing.
Lin Xiao landed square between Xiao Hei’s broad, muscular ears. He flattened his azure body into a comfortable, water-flow saddle-cap across the wolf king’s crown. He anchored his fluid surface with gentle non-Newtonian adhesion so he wouldn’t slide off during full sprint.
“Let’s go greet our neighbors, Xiao Hei,” Lin Xiao said, his voice fully calm. “Keep it polite at first. Maybe they just need directions to the nearest town.”
Xiao Hei let out a low, rumbling huff that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. “As you command, Master. But if they touch so much as a single cedar twig in your presence, I’ll bite their heads off.”
With a single, explosive push of his powerful hindquarters, the Starry Shadow Gale Hound surged across the terrace. It melted into the northern tree line like a streak of pure midnight lightning.