The mountain breeze carried the faint, sweet aroma of toasted cinnamon and osmanthus dew across the shattered limestone path, contrasting sharply with the utter ruin of the fighters’ morale.
Young Master Yan Zixuan remained on his knees in the sharp gravel. He grabbed his chest with trembling, blackened fingers. Blood dripped steadily from his parted lips, sizzling faintly against his ruined silk lapels. His manicured hands reached upward, digging his fingernails wildly into his oiled topknot, tearing loose strands of hair that hung in disheveled tangles around his wild, bloodshot eyes.
“It ate it...” Yan Zixuan whispered, his voice cracking into a high, wheezing register that sounded nothing like the proud heir of a traditional sect. “It bent it... Like cold dough. It twisted the Crimson Flame Sword into a loop... And swallowed it down its throat.”
Perched quietly atop Xiao Hei’s crown, Lin Xiao tilted his blue dome slightly. His curved white eyes watched the young man with genuine curiosity.
Boy, he is taking this really hard, Lin Xiao thought to himself. I understand losing a prized possession stings, but it’s just a piece of metal. You can always forge another sword. Tie Shan broke his favorite copper ladle last week. Then, he just hammered out a better one by sunset. There’s no need to pull your own hair out over it.
Yet for Yan Zixuan, it wasn’t merely the loss of a valuable weapon. It was the total, permanent collapse of his entire worldview.
In the traditional training sects of the Eastern Domain, reality was defined by an unchanging hierarchy. Mortals served low-tier fighters. Low-tier fighters served foundation masters. Wild spirit beasts were slaughtered for their pelts and alchemy cores. And supreme ancient artifacts passed down by sect founders were unbeatable instruments of heavenly power. A Grade-4 spiritual sword forged with Fire Wyrm bone marrow was supposed to be a walking disaster—a weapon capable of cleaving rivers in two and reducing rogue clans to ash.
To see that unbeatable legacy treated as a casual afternoon snack. Chewed like a dough twist, swallowed with a wet slurp. Then he dismissed as ‘needing garlic’—shattered the delicate crystal lattice of Yan Zixuan’s mental mind.
His spiritual sea roiled wildly. In the deep core of his dantian, the invisible spirit vein framework known as the Dao Heart (Dao Xin) developed spiderweb fissures. It cracked like brittle fine china struck by an iron mallet.
“Hehehehe...”
A dry, cracked giggle escaped Yan Zixuan’s throat.
The young master rocked backward and forward on the gravel, his eyes darting wildly between Lin Xiao’s shiny blue surface and the empty mountain sky.
“It eats flying swords!” Yan Zixuan shrieked suddenly, spraying flecks of bloody foam into the wind. “It eats steel! It drinks dragon fire like sweet melon water! Look at it! It doesn’t have teeth! How does it chew without teeth?! It’s going to eat my fingers! It’s going to chew my ribs into toothpicks and turn my soul into a pancake!”
Gu Long, crawling backward through the moss on his elbows and knees, stared at his young master in sheer, frozen horror. “Young Master... Pull yourself together! Young Master Yan!”
“Don’t touch me!” Yan Zixuan shrieked, kicking wildly at the empty air and scrambling backward until his spine struck the iron-rimmed wheel of the sandalwood carriage. “Get away! It’s going to swallow the carriage! It’s going to slurp the crane! It’s going to fold us into dumplings and steam us over willow coals!”
A melodic chime sounded within Lin Xiao’s mindscape:
“Host,” the Dao Spirit’s voice rang out with dry, analytical calm. “The target single is exhibiting advanced mental sour note resulting in acute spirit vein destabilization. Having witnessed the total invalidation of his sect’s core martial doctrine, his subconscious has pulled back into severe infantilized hysteria. Cold and exact prognosis: the subject will need three to five years of meditative seclusion and herbal sedatives before regaining basic rational focus.”
Three to five years? Lin Xiao thought, feeling a twinge of sympathetic pity for the kid. Fighters are remarkably fragile mentally. You take away one toy, and their whole mind turns to jelly. And I should know what jelly feels like—I’m literally made of it.
Lin Xiao extended a small, fluid slime arm. He pulled a folded square of clean white linen from his frozen stillness pocket. The cloth was scented with wild mint and dried lavender, perfectly washed and pressed by Auntie Bai.
“Here, young master,” Lin Xiao said gently, floating the handkerchief forward through the air until it hovered a foot above Yan Zixuan’s lap. “Wipe your face. You’ve got blood and dust all over your collar. Nobody wants to eat your ribs. I certainly don’t have a steamer basket big enough for a carriage. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth, and calm down.”
The sight of the hovering white handkerchief didn’t calm Yan Zixuan.
To the hallucinating young master, the innocent square of white cloth looked like a funerary shroud sent by the King of the Underworld to wrap his cut head.
“AIEEEEE!” Yan Zixuan screamed, flailing his arms like an overturned beetle and burying his face beneath his shredded vermilion sleeves. “The shroud of death! Don’t wrap me! I haven’t had my twentieth birthday banquet yet! Father, save me!”
Protector Wu, still pinned to the cracked limestone by Xiao Hei’s choking gravity pull, managed to turn his neck by a fraction of an inch. Seeing his sect’s bloodline heir reduced to a sobbing, gibbering lunatic in the dirt filled the veteran warrior with icy dread.
If Yan Zixuan died here, or if his mind was permanently shattered, the Crimson Flame Sect Master would slaughter every protector and guard involved in the expedition. But far more right away: if this blue entity decided to finish them off, none of them would live to see sunset anyway.
“Senior Envoy Lu...” Protector Wu wheezed, his mouth filling with dirt as he forced the words out. “Speak... Speak to the Sovereign! In the name of Heavenly Sword Manor... Negotiate our departure! Before... Before the young master dies of qi deviation!”
Envoy Lu Yunzhi was barely holding himself together.
The Heavenly Sword envoy was clinging to the ornate railing of the carriage mounting step. His knees shook so wildly that his heels clicked like castanets against the wood. His floating sword lay dead and motionless on the stones, having lost all spiritual deep ring when the envoy’s golden core curled inward from sheer terror.
Envoy Lu swallowed hard, his throat clicking like a dry leather bellows.
He had arrived in this forest with the supreme swagger of a royal commissioner, treating wild beasts as livestock and mountain spirits as tax-dodging vermin. Now, he looked at the glowing sapphire slime and the eight-foot wolf king. He felt smaller than a flea resting on an elephant’s flank.
Slowly, painfully, Envoy Lu let go of the railing.
He fell to his knees on the mounting step. He pressed his forehead against the polished sandalwood planking in the formal kowtow of a humble student addressing an old family patriarch.
“Venerable... Venerable Primordial Sovereign,” Envoy Lu stammered, his high-born accent entirely abandoned in favor of desperate, begging on their knees respect. “This... This humble junior of Heavenly Sword Manor... Offers greetings to the Great Lord of Chaos!”
Lin Xiao blinked his white eyes in mild surprise.
Great Lord of Chaos? Lin Xiao thought, amused by the dramatic promotion. Five minutes ago, I was a ‘little blue puddle’ and an ‘aquatic bug.’ Now I’m the Venerable Primordial Sovereign. Fighters really are masters of rapid diplomatic turning.
“This blind junior had eyes but failed to recognize Mount Tai!” Envoy Lu pleaded, his voice trembling with genuine mortal terror. “Young Master Yan was young, foolish, and poisoned by arrogance! He didn’t recognize that this mountain gorge is the sacred seclusion domain of an ancient Dao Ancestor! His actions were the reckless folly of a spoiled child! We beg... We beg the Great Sovereign to show sky benevolence! Spare our unworthy lives! We swear by our heavenly oaths never to step within ten thousand li of this divine valley ever again!”
Xiao Hei let out a low, mocking snort that ruffled the hem of Envoy Lu’s silver robes.
“Master,” Xiao Hei whispered through their bond. “The two-legged bird-man begs for mercy now that his feathers have been plucked. Shall I bite off their carriage wheels so they have to crawl back to their sects on their bellies?”
No need, Xiao Hei, Lin Xiao replied softly. He extended a cool slime arm to stroke the wolf’s dark neck. A broken young master and a scared envoy are far better messengers than a pile of corpses. Let them go back and tell their masters that this valley is strictly off-limits to poachers, tax collectors, and loud people with fireworks.
Lin Xiao gave a gentle wobble, his voice ringing out across the clearing with calm, crystal-clear clarity that rang through the misty gorge like the chime of an ancient bronze bell.
“Envoy Lu,” Lin Xiao said, his curved white eyes fixing steadily upon the trembling envoy. “Take your young master. Take your injured protectors, and take your overgrown carriage. Leave this mountain before the sun dips behind the western ridge. Gather up your broken pride and tell your elders that the creatures in this valley aren’t their hunting game, nor their tax-payers, nor their desk ornaments. If any student of your sects crosses our boundary stones again with weapons drawn or nets unfurled... I’ll not stop at swallowing swords. Next time, I’ll swallow your flying carriages whole.”
The threat was delivered without a shred of anger, spoken with the calm certainty of an emperor issuing an unremarkable office directive. To Envoy Lu’s ears, however, that quiet, conversational tone was a thousand times more terrifying than any bellowing blood-oath. A monster that discussed consuming heavy aerial war-vessels with the same casual air as eating winter melons was a being running fully beyond mortal understanding.