The motes of light scattered and faded, and the wasteland went still.
Gu Chengming sat cross-legged on a slab of bluestone that had somehow survived intact, eyes half-shut, digesting the insights into the sword he had taken from the Withered Bone Sword Immortal.
About a quarter of an hour later, he opened his eyes.
The Withered Bone Sword Immortal's understanding of the sword ran along a road utterly unlike his own, but the underlying logic of how a Sword Domain turned had done him real good.
—So the beating hadn't been for nothing.
Digestion complete, Gu Chengming rose and turned to look at Hundred Bones Resonance.
The white-haired girl was perched on the shoulder blade of some colossal beast's skeleton a short distance off, legs swinging, tossing a chunk of rubble she'd picked up somewhere out into the distance out of sheer boredom.
"How was the digesting, Hundred Emperor?"
She had clearly gained more than he had. She'd done most of the work in that fight, after all.
Though she didn't seem to care much about the haul.
"This Emperor gave the matter serious contemplation."
Hundred Bones Resonance hopped down off the giant bone and planted her hands on her hips. "The conclusion is that the old man's swordsmanship was all show and no substance."
"If one punch doesn't kill him, throw two. If two don't kill him, throw three. Why tie yourself in all those knots? That's just making trouble for yourself."
She lifted her chin, utterly matter-of-fact.
"Prove the Dao through strength. The Great Dao is simple. That is the road a Heavenly Emperor ought to walk."
Gu Chengming started to answer, looked at her face—so sincere there was no chance she was joking—and swallowed the words back down.
—Fine. The wiring of a body-refinement art wasn't something he could rewire, and anyone who hadn't refined their body wouldn't get it anyway.
Besides, as a body-refinement art, the Hundred Emperor wouldn't get much use out of sword insights even if she did absorb them.
But just as he was preparing to change the subject, something happened on the ground where the Withered Bone Sword Immortal had come apart. The ash-grey, cracked earth there sprouted, in the space of a few breaths, one spirit flower after another.
The blooms were a dull silver from stem to petal, the petals thin as cicada wings, their edges tracing faint patterns of sword intent. They pushed up out of the fissures and clustered together, giving off a cold, ghostly light beneath the dark red sky.
Hundred Bones Resonance's eyes lit up. She crossed the distance in a few bounding steps, dropped into a crouch, and reached for the nearest bloom without a moment's hesitation.
The instant her fingertip brushed a petal, the flower withered fast enough to watch.
In a single breath the silver petals bleached to grey-white, curled, shriveled, and crumbled into a pinch of dust that blew away on the breeze.
Her hand froze in midair.
She turned her head slowly toward Gu Chengming, her face one enormous question mark.
He worked it out quickly enough.
The Sect Head had explained some of this beforehand. The historical projections inside a Secret Realm weren't conjured out of nothing. They were built on the memories stored in the Secret Realm's spirit veins and copied from the residual will of ancient great cultivators' arts, used as a template.
When a projection was broken, part of the leftover essence of its arts became motes of light that fed back to the victor—and part of it soaked into the ground underfoot, giving rise to companion spirit-objects tied to the will the projection had carried in life.
To harvest one, you had to wrap it in a will of the same origin as the projection's. Otherwise the spirit-object read the toucher as an alien thing and instantly withered itself to nothing.
In other words: you had to understand the Withered Bone Sword Immortal's Dao before you could pick his flowers.
Gu Chengming didn't bother explaining. He simply walked over, used the Free and Unfettered Art to draw out the thread of withered sword intent he'd just absorbed, wrapped it around his right palm, and reached for a flower still whole.
The moment his fingers met the petals, the bloom didn't wither. It opened a fraction wider instead, silver radiance welling out of the heart of it and flowing, docile, into his palm.
He plucked it up by the root. The broken end of the stem showed no sign of rot at all.
Hundred Bones Resonance watched all this with visible shock, then shuffled over to crouch beside him, her gaze wandering everywhere but his face.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu. This Emperor has reconsidered the matter carefully, and finds her earlier appraisal may have been somewhat unbalanced."
That said, she shut her eyes and copied him move for move, trying to simulate that dry, decaying sword intent.
The silver light hesitated a moment—then flowed into her palm as well.
"Got it!"
She shot to her feet, holding the flower aloft, grinning brilliantly.
Gu Chengming looked at her and let out a small laugh.
—Weren't you just calling the man all show and no substance?
The two of them picked the remaining spirit flowers clean and bagged them. A decent bonus on top of everything else.
The Mohist Gate's main hall.
No one had any clear idea what the origins of those two supposed Wenjian Sect disciples actually were, and the whole business did look odd—but the point that occupied everyone was whether outsiders would be interfering with this Secret Realm run.
After all, Gu Chengming and Hundred Bones Resonance had cleared the Withered Bone Sword Immortal strictly within what the rules allowed, and both carried tokens granting entry, which meant their identities had been registered.
Even so, a Third Realm pair appearing in the core area of the Fourth Realm zone and clearing a Fourth Realm projection was very much worth digging into.
But another matter sitting in front of them deserved their attention far more.
On the right-hand side of the water mirror, one of the panels had begun to go wrong not long after the Withered Bone Sword Immortal was shattered.
At first it only dimmed slightly, as if a spirit vein node had hiccuped in its power supply. That was hardly rare during a Secret Realm's operation. An occasional swell in the spiritual tides could distort a monitoring image for a moment, and it usually corrected itself within a few breaths.
This time it didn't correct. That panel, corresponding to some outlying region of the Fourth Realm zone, dimmed further and further, grey deepening to black, until it was nothing but a dead, lightless void—as though that whole stretch of territory had been scooped out of the Secret Realm entirely.
"Reporting to the Grand Elder. The spirit vein node in Zone Jia, Seventh Subdomain, has lost contact completely." Steward Zhao stared at the divination plate before him, brows knotted tight. "It's as if the node itself no longer exists."
Liu Chongji set down his teacup, his gaze darkening.
"Has anyone been sent?"
"Someone was dispatched to inspect it half a quarter-hour ago." Steward Zhao paused, and his voice dropped a notch. "He hasn't returned."
The hall went quiet for a beat.
Half a quarter-hour was more than enough for a Mohist Gate disciple running a routine check. The rules of the Secret Realm were plainly laid out: no true bodies entered, only projections of the spirit soul, and even a crippling wound meant nothing worse than being ejected.
Even facing something entirely beyond him, a disciple only had to strike himself once to force an exit.
Yet that disciple had neither come back nor been spat out by the Secret Realm.
Liu Chongji stood before the water mirror a moment longer, and was about to issue fresh orders—
"Grand Elder!"
Another steward's voice cracked upward.
Liu Chongji followed the sound. The man was staring, rigid, at the lower left quadrant of the mirror.
A second panel had gone black—far from the first, and belonging to an entirely different branch of the Secret Realm's spirit veins. Which meant this wasn't one vein malfunctioning. Multiple regions of the Secret Realm were being eaten away at once.
"Subdomain Three is dimming as well."
Report after report rose and overlapped across the hall, the strain in the voices impossible to hide now.
Liu Chongji strode to stand directly before the water mirror, pressed both hands to the control dais, and poured spiritual power in, switching the mirror's view to full overview mode.
In overview, the Secret Realm's entire spirit vein network rendered across the mirror's surface as an enormous web of light, every node a shining point, the nodes strung together by luminous vein-lines.
Under normal operation the web should have been an even, unbroken pattern, pale blue light circulating through every strand.
At this moment, several black holes gaped in it.
They weren't large, but each was expanding outward—slowly, and without pause—devouring the light and the nodes around it. Like ink dripped onto white paper, silently bleeding wider.
Something was gnawing at the foundations of the Secret Realm.
He was on the verge of ordering the emergency lockdown mechanism engaged across the whole Realm when the image on the mirror changed again.
The black voids accelerated.
The ink that had been seeping so gently now spread as though a bucket of water had been hurled across the page, swallowing over half the web in less than three breaths. Nodes winked out one after another, vein-lines snapped one after another, and the lit portions of the mirror shrank at a rate the eye could follow.
At the end—
a single point of light remained on the entire web.
The mirror's view was dragged forcibly toward that lone survivor. The image showed some space inside the Secret Realm with no identifiable bearing, the background blurred, the terrain unreadable.
But dead center in the frame stood a man.
Moon-white brocade robes, a jade belt at the waist, a folding fan in one hand.
A young man, standing with his hands behind his back—handsome features, unhurried bearing.
He tilted his head slightly, as though he could look through the Secret Realm's barrier of law, through the transmission patterns of the spirit vein nodes, through the imaging art of the water mirror, through all of it—straight into the Mohist Gate's main hall on the other side.
Straight at Liu Chongji, and at every single person present.
Then he smiled, and his lips moved—
The water mirror carried no sound. But all five Mohist Gate Elders in the hall read the shapes of his words with perfect clarity.
"Gentlemen. I'll be taking custody of this place for now."
Liu Chongji's pupils shrank.
The next instant, that last point of light went out too.
The entire mirror was black.
Liu Chongji stared at that black surface, cold sweat already breaking across his palms.
—This was not something a Fifth Realm cultivator could do.
Before he could get a word out, the whole of Floating Isle City shuddered.
"Otherworldly Heavenly Demons!"
A steward lurched to his feet, the divination plate in his hands blazing with a sheet of alarming crimson warning light.
"Large-scale heart demon fluctuations detected outside the walls! The Floating Isle City protective formation is under assault!"
Liu Chongji's face went grim in an instant. The Secret Realm seized from within, Otherworldly Heavenly Demons invading from without—a pincer attack, and one long in the planning.
"Pass down the order." His voice recovered its steadiness inside a single breath. "Activate Floating Isle City's Grade-A defensive formations. All Mohist Gate cultivators to their wartime stations."
He paused. "And relay the Secret Realm anomaly and the Otherworldly Heavenly Demon incursion to the Sect Heads and Elders of every sect in the city. At once."
"Yes!"
Several message talismans shot from the main hall almost simultaneously, dissolving into streaks of light that vanished toward every quarter of Floating Isle City.
In truth, an event on the scale of Otherworldly Heavenly Demons invading Floating Isle City needed no talismans to announce it. When the first wave of the heart demon tide crossed the formation wall and poured into the city, every cultivator at Third Realm or above felt that nauseating, alien pressure with perfect clarity.
The Sect Heads and Elders who hadn't yet dispersed after the opening ceremony gathered in emergency session in the council hall of Wavewatch Pavilion in under the time it takes to drink a cup of tea.
The atmosphere could not have been heavier.
Shen Ganqiu spoke first, spare and direct. "Whatever's happening inside the Secret Realm will have to wait. The demons in the city are the pressing matter. Our disciples' true bodies are all here."
The implication was clear enough. The disciples competing inside the Secret Realm had projected only their spirit souls. They couldn't die there.
But the flesh sitting in Floating Isle City was entirely real, and if an Otherworldly Heavenly Demon's corrosion of the spirit soul reached back to the body itself, that meant a true death—Dao extinguished, body destroyed.
The other Sect Heads nodded one after another. On this point there was no disagreement at all.
No tournament, however grand, outweighed the lives of their disciples.
"Hold the city first. The Secret Realm after." In the end, they were unanimous.
The Sect Heads and Elders split up and moved at once. Fifth Realm great cultivators anchored the core districts to suppress the main body of the demons; Fourth Realm cultivators dispersed through the wards to clear out the infiltrating heart demon remnants; every disciple below Third Realm was pulled back to their own quarters under dedicated guard.
Within a quarter of an hour, Floating Isle City went from the festival mood of the Grand Tournament to a city at war.
Spirit lamps went dark, wards came fully online, and the roar of the great city-protecting formation rolled endlessly out above the sea of clouds.
Deep in the Secret Realm.
In that space now wholly severed from the Mohist Gate's control, the young man in moon-white brocade folded his fan shut.
He stood in the middle of an emptiness with neither sky above nor earth below, only endless darkness spread out quiet as the surface of a deep pool.
"There we are," he said softly, as though to himself.
"The audience has gone home, and the idlers all have somewhere else to be."
The fan turned a half-circle between his fingers.
"Time to sing the next act properly."
The upheaval in the Secret Realm came without the slightest warning.
The first to notice were the competing disciples scattered along the outskirts of the various regions, observing the historical projections.
They all knew the rules by heart. Historical projections were replicas struck from the residual will of ancient great cultivators' arts, and under normal conditions they stayed put in fixed locations, endlessly replaying the techniques and sword intent of their living years.
Leave one alone and it left you alone. Every participant took that as given.
And just now—less than a quarter of an hour after the Secret Realm's monitoring mirrors went dark across the board—that understanding was smashed to pieces.
The projections scattered throughout the Secret Realm started to move, as if someone had poured a will into all of them at the same instant.
As if they had genuinely come back to life.
The Secret Realm dissolved into chaos.
Fourth Realm zone. A certain canyon.
Yu Wenqiu was sprinting flat-out down the canyon floor in the most undignified state of her entire cultivation career.
The left sleeve of her robe had gone missing entirely, most of her hairpin arrangement had come down, and the loose strands at her temples were plastered to her cheeks with sweat. The gap between her current appearance and the words "Elder of the Wenjian Sect" was roughly the length of one whole canyon.
About twenty yards behind her, a projection wreathed head to foot in dark green spirit light pursued at an unhurried, unbothered pace.
It was a Fourth Realm projection. In life the man had evidently been an ancient cultivator specializing in entrapment formations, and his methods were revolting in the extreme.
It wouldn't meet her head-on. It laid formations, sealed her routes, and herded her toward dead ends.
It had been chasing her for the better part of a quarter-hour.
At the start she'd tried to fight it properly. She was an early Fourth Realm cultivator, after all; in raw cultivation she wasn't far behind the thing. The problem was that this projection refused to play by any recognizable script.
A normal projection only ran through the signature techniques of its living years, mechanically. There were patterns to trace, gaps to exploit.
This one moved as though someone were steering it in real time from behind the curtain. Every time Yu Wenqiu spotted an opening and readied a counterattack, it shifted its formations early and sealed that opening airtight.
And what really made her blood boil was that the thing had no intention of killing her.
The longer she ran, the angrier she got.
Angry at the humiliation of being chased up and down a canyon by a projection—and angrier still that she, an Elder of the Wenjian Sect, had been reduced to getting kited by an NPC.
She vaguely recalled that before the tournament she'd sworn to herself she'd put on a proper showing inside the Secret Realm and make Little Gu see her in a new light.
Some showing.
If Little Gu could see her right now, he'd probably wonder whether his Elder had been purchased secondhand.
Another entrapment formation flared to life off her flank. Yu Wenqiu was forced into a hard turn, her foot skidded on loose gravel, and she nearly pitched headfirst into the ravine beside her.
She caught her balance by a hair. Fury was already climbing in those peach-blossom eyes.
"Enough—!"
She slammed to a halt, swept her Dharma Sword level, spiritual power surging, and hurled a full-strength sword technique packed with every ounce of her Fourth Realm cultivation at the projection that would not leave her alone.
The sword qi tore through three entrapment formations and plowed a trench thirty-odd yards long into the ground. The projection at the far end took the strike full on, its dark green light guttering and flaring.
It did not come apart.
It merely paused for one breath.
Then it laid out a fresh round of entrapment formations, faster than before.
Yu Wenqiu drew a deep breath, turned around, and ran again.
—What in the world is wrong with this rotten Secret Realm?!
The exact opposite of Yu Wenqiu's misery.
At this moment Gu Chengming and Hundred Bones Resonance were having what could only be described as a leisurely time.
On the wasteland of the Fallen Immortal Abyss, where the Withered Bone Sword Immortal had come apart, the two of them had stripped the silver spirit flowers bare.
Hundred Bones Resonance sat cross-legged on a flat boulder, cupping a flower in both hands, processing it exactly the way Gu Chengming had taught her.
The method wasn't complicated. Crush the bloom, then guide the essence within along a specific sequence until it soaked into the meridians and converted into pure blood-and-qi force to temper the flesh.
Spirit-objects of this kind were vanishingly rare outside a Secret Realm, and priced accordingly—absurdly.
Inside, they were merely a byproduct of a shattered projection. First come, first served.
For Gu Chengming, the blood-and-qi boost from these flowers was marginally better than nothing.
His path centered on the sword and on cultivation systems; strengthening blood and qi had its uses, but the returns had long since flattened out. For Hundred Bones Resonance it was another matter entirely.
She crushed the flower in her hand, and the silver essence became a thread of light that sank into her palm. The effect was immediate and visible.
A single bloom didn't give much, but there were a great many blooms.
After working through more than ten of them one by one, she flexed her fist, felt the blood-and-qi force swelling inside her, and looked ready to burst with satisfaction.
"Not bad!" She clapped her hands, eyes curving into crescents. "Very nearly the equal of that Dragonblood Grass."
Still hung up on your Dragonblood Grass, then.
Gu Chengming watched her thoroughly contented face, grumbling internally, and glanced at the system panel out of habit.
[Hundred Bones Resonance favorability: 410 / Unto Death, Unwavering]
Huh? Another ten points.
Hundred Bones Resonance had already taken physical form, and the cultivation-art panel had been locked by the system. In that state the favorability could still climb?
Gu Chengming turned the information over quietly.
Which meant that although she'd left the form of a cultivation art behind, the favorability system itself hadn't gone offline with it.
Her attributes as a "romance target" were still running. The trigger conditions for gaining favorability had simply shifted from "compatibility with and use of the art" to "living alongside her and interacting in the real world."
Picking spirit flowers raised favorability. Fighting together raised favorability. Making her happy raised favorability.
Put that way, it wasn't really any different from clearing a normal gal game.
Except the target had climbed out of the screen and was standing next to him.
So did changing her outfit count as unlocking a new CG?
Gu Chengming let his mind wander.
He was starting to want a maid CG of the Hundred Emperor.
Deep in the Secret Realm.
Beneath the boundary of light and dark, every rule was being rewritten.
The young man in moon-white brocade walked through an endless void where only thick darkness spread out like the water of an abyss. Where his foot came down, the darkness withdrew of its own accord and congealed into exactly enough solid ground for one step.
Ahead of him, a figure hung suspended in the emptiness.
It was a projection, shrouded head to foot in dark gold spirit light—tall, armored, a halberd in hand. The pressure coiling around it lay heavy across the whole space. Even existing only as a projection, that peak Fourth Realm presence warped the air for dozens of yards in every direction.
But the projection's condition just now was not normal.
There was no light in its eye sockets. Its limbs were rigid, like a clay figure with the soul drawn out of it.
The young man stopped in front of it.
"Jiangluo Wang. Born in the twenty-third year of Xuanyuan, of a poor family on the northern frontier. Drove back three southward invasions of the Otherworldly Heavenly Demons by his own strength alone, and was enfeoffed as a king for the accumulated merit."
"Peak Fifth Realm. Ended half a step from the Sixth. Died in the fourth demon invasion of the south—killed in battle with his strength spent."
He tilted his head slightly, studying the silent figure. "In his last battle he held the rear for three days on a ruined body, covering the southward retreat of a hundred and seventy thousand soldiers and civilians. The enemy broke his formation, snapped his halberd, shattered his armor—and still he didn't give a single step. Not until his breath ran out."
He smiled at that. "He'll make a rather fitting toy."
As the words fell, the dark gold light erupted. Peak Fourth Realm pressure rolled outward like a tide, the long halberd came level across the chest, and with a single flicker the figure vanished into the depths of the void.
The young man watched it go, the smile never leaving his face.
Then he turned and kept walking.
More projections hung in the emptiness ahead, and every one of them had been a famous great cultivator of the ancient age.
The young man walked among them at an unhurried pace.
At each one he stopped, recited in a low voice the name that person had carried in life and the deeds attached to it, and then sent the point of light at his fingertip into their brow.
Spirit light kindled through the darkness one after another, like a row of lamps being lit in sequence.
Dozens of Fourth Realm pressures existed in that space at once, stacking and interweaving into a horror of oppression enough to make even a Fifth Realm cultivator's heart stutter.
The young man stood alone in the emptied darkness, spread his fan, and waved it twice, lightly.
The landscape painted across it—a world turned upside down—gave off the faintest suggestion of a glow in the dark.
"In life each served his own master. In death each returned to dust."
He spoke quietly, with no emotion in it—no lament, no sighing—only a statement bordering on indifference.
"And now they're sealed in this scrap of space for people to gawk at. Another kind of restlessness, I suppose."
The fan snapped shut and tapped lightly against his palm.
"Better that they serve me."
The Fallen Immortal Abyss.
Gu Chengming and Hundred Bones Resonance ran into a second projection out on the wasteland. This one was somewhat weaker than the Withered Bone Sword Immortal—mid Fourth Realm—and it specialized in splitting mountains and pulverizing peaks with a great hammer, a path of pure brute strength.
The opponent might as well have been tailor-made for Hundred Bones Resonance.
She had an absolute blast.
No Sword Domain to fight through, no vicious corrosion or entrapment formations. Just fist against hammer, force against force, hardest wins.
Gu Chengming barely got involved this time—not for lack of wanting to help, but because from the very first punch Hundred Bones Resonance dropped straight into a state of pure exhilaration. He'd barely set up the Ten Perfections Sword Formation before she was already in the thing's face, and the formation's containment function never had time to take effect.
So he dismissed the sword formation and quietly took up the role of spectator and safety officer from the rear.
It ended faster than the first fight. The projection's hammer swung for less than twenty breaths in front of Hundred Bones Resonance before an uppercut blew hammer and wielder alike into a sky full of drifting light.
There were fewer spirit flowers afterward than last time, but she still crouched happily on the ground and picked them one by one, crushed them, and took them in.
Blood-and-qi force flooded her again, and the toughness of her physical body climbed another small step.
Hundred Bones Resonance stood, rolled her wrists, and her joints cracked crisply.
She turned to Gu Chengming, golden eyes startlingly bright.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu! This place is truly a blessed paradise!"
She planted her hands on her hips, unable to keep the delight out of her voice.
"Opponents like that one—send ten of them, and This Emperor still wouldn't have her fill."
Seeing how thoroughly pleased she was, Gu Chengming was about to offer something along the lines of a compliment to the Hundred Emperor's might.
The words never made it out. A jolt of foreboding hit him, and his head snapped up toward the far edge of the wasteland.
Beneath the dark red sky, along the distant horizon, the void had begun to warp in dense, crowded ripples.
A figure stepped out of the distortion.
Then a second. A third. A seventh.
More and more of them, thicker and thicker, welling up from every side of the wasteland at once, each one carrying the heavy pressure of a Fourth Realm cultivator.
[Red Dust Phantom Body Formula, gravely: Fellow Daoist Gu, ten at the very least.]
Hundred Bones Resonance had sensed them too. The smile was still hanging on her face. She just blinked.
Gu Chengming started to speak, sighed inwardly instead. "Hundred Emperor, that mouth of yours really is—"
She sounded a touch guilty. "Heavenly Emperor Gu, so what do we do now?"
"We run!"
With that he grabbed Hundred Bones Resonance, invoked the Red Dust Phantom Body Formula, and bolted for his life.
____
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉