The jade slip smelled of stale bitter pine-resin and three hundred years of incense ash.
Lin Ke held the pale green tablet between his thumb and forefinger. He felt the cold, greasy residue of last elders’ spiritual imprints. His palms, freshly bandaged in linen strips by Apothecary He’s sour-faced apprentice, throbbed with a dull, rhythmic burn.
Outside the archive pavilion, the wind howled across the granite roof edges of Mount Lingxiao. He carried the faint, hungry screech of Grand Ancestor Kuang’s sky-borne scout hawks.
Elder Wu DeZheng stood two paces away, hovering like a nervous crane over an accounting ledger.
“That’s the True Spirit Infant Scripture,” Wu said in hushed, respectful tones. “The foundational traditional manual of the entire Central Province. Seven ages of sect leaders used this very signal to shatter their Golden Cores and birth their divine infants.”
Lin Ke didn’t answer. He closed his eyes and sank his divine sense into the crystal-clear lattice of the jade slip.
A vast, sprawling stone-built diagram unfolded across his Sea of Mind.
It was messy. Terribly messy. Thousands of energetic loops overlapped without clear scope delimiters, tangled like a bundle of wet twine discarded in a sewer. Qi flowed through ancient bypasses that served no living function other than ritual ornamentation.
