The silence that followed her words was not the peaceful quiet of the deep sea. It was the choking stillness of a graveyard when the wind dies down.
Yan Zhiqiu pulled the yak wool blanket tighter around her chest, shivering despite the blasting heat spilling from the open mouth of the salt-kiln. The physical fever had left her veins. But the cold memory of the outer world was an infection that no willow bark or gentian decoction could purge from her spirit.
“The Great Withering,” she said, her eyes fixed upon the glowing scarlet embers of the peat fire. “In the outer texts, the high sects called it The Great Purification of the Heavens. They claimed that the lower cosmos was shedding its corrupt, mortal waste scum so that the pure, refined Dao could climb to the Ninth High sky. But in our secret archives, we called it by its true name: The Starvation of the Gods.”
Qiao Ming did not speak. He sat with his hands resting open upon his knees, his bare soles anchored firmly against the soapstone apron, providing the quiet, unbending foundation that allowed her words to take form without collapsing into hysteria.
“A mortal fighter who reaches the Golden Core needs five hundred pounds of spiritual grain a year to maintain his spirit veins,” Yan Zhiqiu explained, her voice steadying into the cold and exact, analytical register of a royal record-keeper. “A Nascent Soul elder needs ten thousand. A Soul Formation patriarch needs the annual…
