"Running for his life" was a phrase Gu Chengming had only ever encountered in novels.
He had never imagined he would one day be its subject.
The dark red wasteland streamed backward beneath his feet. Behind him, more than a dozen Fourth Realm pressures surged forward like a rising tide. Hundred Bones Resonance ran at his side, her white hair trailing a long afterimage in her wake.
She wasn't panicking. She wasn't slow, either.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu, those two on the left are about to catch us!"
"I see them."
Before the words were fully out of his mouth, the two figures on the left flank had already shifted formation to cut them off. He made the call at once: five flying swords tore free of his body, and the sword intent of "Entanglement" wove a pattern between the two projections that looked airtight enough to strangle the wind.
Sure enough, the projections stalled for a heartbeat.
Luckily, the terrain of the Fallen Immortal Abyss was complicated enough to work with.
Reading the Secret Realm's structure on the fly, Gu Chengming pulled Hundred Bones Resonance into a ravine that had been carved by a sword strike in some ancient war.
The ravine was narrow and winding, and the sword intent still soaked into the walls repelled anything that came close. The projections were no exception. It bought them a breath of room.
...
The two of them wove and leapt through the broken rock of the ravine floor for several hundred yards before finally stopping in a natural cave formed by a collapse. Fallen stone half-covered the entrance. Now and then the pressure of a patrolling projection washed past outside, but nothing showed signs of closing in.
Gu Chengming leaned against the stone wall and caught his breath.
He had already reached a conclusion. The projections were being controlled by someone. That much was obvious.
And if all of this was the Red Dust Immortal's doing, then in the timeline before the Returning River, he must have done something the man loathed him for.
Otherwise, why would a being of at least the Sixth Realm go to such elaborate lengths against a Third Realm cultivator?
More importantly, the man hadn't acted himself.
In other words, the Red Dust Immortal was most likely "trapped" within this Secret Realm, bound by some restriction that kept him from striking directly. But he could manipulate the projections, the spirit veins, the laws inside it, and reach his goal indirectly.
Gu Chengming ran the deduction through his head twice, confirmed it held together, and set it aside for now.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu." Hundred Bones Resonance spoke up suddenly, her tone a little odd.
Gu Chengming looked up. The cave was dim, but her eyes seemed to carry their own light source, unmistakable in the dark. "What is it?"
She scratched her cheek, apparently assembling the words. "So, um, Heavenly Emperor Gu. That knockoff version of me we fought earlier..."
She made a gesture the size of a fist, decided that was wrong, and switched to sketching a human shape in the air. "That one. The one that looks exactly like me and dropped me with one punch each time."
"Mm?"
"She seems to be gone now."
Gu Chengming blinked, and Hundred Bones Resonance's gaze drifted off to one side, looking faintly guilty.
He stared at her for two breaths. "You want to go fight her."
"No!" The denial came out on reflex. Then, in a much smaller voice, she added, "...Only a little bit."
Gu Chengming sighed. "Hundred Emperor, is this really the time for that? The hunters outside haven't even scattered yet—"
"No, Heavenly Emperor Gu." For once she sounded urgent, and tugged at his sleeve. "I mean she's actually gone. Go look and you'll see."
Skeptical, Gu Chengming sank his awareness into the system interface. The entrance to the [Love's Hundred Bones Resonance] room was still there.
The next second, the dark red training grounds unfurled across his vision as always. Wind howled. The iron-gray sky hung overhead, unchanged.
But the center of the training grounds was empty. No phantom.
Gu Chengming withdrew from the interface and opened his eyes.
"She really is gone."
He frowned and thought it over for two breaths, but no reasonable explanation came.
When Hundred Bones Resonance had taken physical form, her technique panel had been locked by the system. That meant the power of the entity called "Hundred Bones Resonance" had been drawn out of his Sea of Consciousness and turned into the living person in front of him.
So what about the phantom in the "Love's Hundred Bones Resonance" room?
That phantom represented the theoretical upper limit of what Hundred Bones Resonance could reach.
By the logic he had worked out before, it should exist as a challenge mechanism independent of the technique panel. In theory it shouldn't be affected by the main body taking physical form at all.
And yet it was gone. Gone where?
A guess stirred faintly at the back of his mind, but it was too absurd, and he kept it to himself for the moment.
"Let's set this aside for now."
Hundred Bones Resonance said, "Oh." Her face said quite plainly that she still cared very much, but she reined it in.
"Whatever Heavenly Emperor Gu says."
Deep in the Secret Realm. In the endless void, the Red Dust Immortal sat on a stone platform condensed from his own will, folding fan resting across his knees, eyes half-closed.
His condition was far more complicated than anything the outside world could observe.
To be precise, at this moment he did not entirely exist in this world.
The price of the Returning River was heavier than anyone imagined.
From the instant he reversed cause and effect and rolled time backward, he had fallen into an exquisitely delicate superposition. Living and dead. Here and not here. Belonging to this timeline and not belonging to it.
History and causality overlapped within him, like two sheets of transparent drawing paper forcibly stacked together, the outlines almost but not quite aligned, the colors blurred and indistinct.
This was not, of course, the consequence of a single Returning River. It was the consequence of a battle countless years ago.
He had changed the outcome of that battle, and in doing so had condemned himself to this.
As long as he did not act, the superposition could be barely maintained.
The moment he acted, it would collapse, and he would have to face a definite result: alive or dead.
And by his current calculations, the odds of dead far outweighed the odds of alive.
So he could not strike. But he could arrange his pieces through time and causality.
The historical projections inside a Secret Realm were, in essence, nothing but replicas of the spirit veins' memory. No independent consciousness. No soul. Just a recording played on endless loop. All he had done was switch that recording from loop playback to live control.
Grant them the instinct to act, designate a target, and let go.
As for that young man called Gu Chengming—
One of the side effects of the Returning River was that he could not directly observe Gu Chengming in real time.
The karmic threads on that young man had blurred after the Returning River, as though someone had deliberately smudged them.
He could only infer the boy's position and movements from the indirect information the projections fed back.
Still, that was enough. The Red Dust Immortal was in the middle of that thought when his brow twitched.
One projection had slipped his control.
He could sense that it existed. He could sense that it was moving. But every order he issued to it sank without a trace, as if an invisible barrier had shut his will out.
What troubled him more was that this projection did not belong to the batch he had awakened.
It had woken on its own.
The Red Dust Immortal opened his eyes and tapped his fingertips twice against the ribs of his fan.
He rose and set off in that direction.
When he found "it," the scene was nothing like what he had expected.
In the empty void, a single figure stood alone in a patch of darkness.
White hair. White training clothes. Her back turned to him.
The image was almost insultingly ordinary. No weathered Daoist robes of an ancient great cultivator, no ring of famous swords hovering in awe-inspiring array. She looked like some disciple from a minor sect who had finished practice and run outside before she had time to change.
Neither in the previous timeline nor in this one did his memory hold any trace of this white-haired girl. She belonged to none of the known historical projections in the Secret Realm, nor did she resemble some ancient residual will he had overlooked.
But his attention was quickly seized by something else.
—He couldn't see through her.
The Red Dust Immortal narrowed his eyes slightly.
With his grasp of the Dao, an ordinary Fifth Realm cultivator was practically transparent before him. Foundation of cultivation, lineage of technique, all of it laid bare at a glance. But this white-haired girl was like a light source wrapped in thick fog.
He could feel that something was in there.
He simply could not identify what.
No fluctuation of realm. No circulation of spiritual power. No trace of magic power. Not even the basic signatures of Dao techniques in operation.
What stood there seemed to be nothing more than an ordinary mortal body of flesh and blood, and yet every instinct the Red Dust Immortal had was telling him the person before him was dangerous.
He did not approach recklessly. Instead he drew on the residue of the Secret Realm's laws and sent a probing strand of causal inquiry toward that figure. What came back was a blank.
Not a blank that had been screened off. A blank where no karmic thread existed at all, as though this person had never left a single mark upon heaven and earth, had never formed a causal tie with any person or any event.
She was not a being of this world. She was a variable that had appeared out of nothing.
The Red Dust Immortal's composure finally cracked. He knew what could produce an effect like this.
The side effect of the Returning River. A variable birthed by the Heavenly Dao.
So this was where it had gone?
No. That wasn't right.
By his understanding, the variables the Returning River spawned amounted at most to trivial butterfly effects. Someone arriving a step early. One extra object where there should have been none. Two people who were never meant to meet crossing paths by chance.
Unpredictable, yes, but small in essence. Nothing that could shake the larger situation at its roots.
So what exactly was this?
"Who are you?" the Red Dust Immortal said. His voice wasn't loud, but in the void it carried a long way.
The white-haired projection turned her head at the sound. She didn't answer. She only looked him over, her gaze lingering a moment on the moon-white brocade robe and the folding fan in his hand, and then let out a short, derisive snort of laughter.
The Red Dust Immortal: "..."
What was funny?
Before he could press the question, she moved.
A white afterimage burst across his vision. His pupils contracted—
The sleeve of his moon-white robe split open in the backwash of that force, the edges of the fabric cut as cleanly as by a blade. He gave half a step of ground.
And when he looked again, he found that she had... yawned?
What in the world was this thing?
The white-haired projection settled back on her feet and tilted her head.
The Red Dust Immortal retreated to open the distance, then pointed his folding fan forward. The projections he had awakened answered the gesture and poured out of the void: one with a sword, one with a halberd, one with a bow at his back. Three Fourth Realm pressures bore down on the white-haired girl like a falling mountain.
The swordsman struck first, a vicious arc of sword qi sweeping toward her waist. She didn't even glance at it. She let it land on her.
Then the sword qi shattered. The swordsman was hurled back a dozen yards by the recoil, and the blade in his hand let out a mournful wail. The halberd-bearer and the archer rushed her at once.
She turned and caught the halberd on its downswing, five fingers closing around the blade. It crumbled in her grip, and another cloud of light motes scattered apart.
The archer loosed three arrows from thirty yards out, each one wrapped in spiritual power and the intent of the Dao.
The moment the three shafts entered her blood-qi domain, their speed visibly bled away, and finally, with three light little clicks, they fell against her shoulder and forearm. She didn't even bother changing her stance. She just crooked a finger and beckoned.
Without a word, the Red Dust Immortal raised his hand and summoned five more.
And the white-haired projection, as though she'd simply gotten bored, sat back down again. Then she snapped her fingers.
Every projection collapsed on the spot.
And when they reassembled, they quietly filed into place behind her instead.
The Red Dust Immortal: "?"
Whatever composure he had left finally deserted him. He snapped the fan shut and gave ground.
—Run first, think later!
The white-haired girl didn't chase.
She stood where she was, surrounded by the wreckage of projections she had punched to pieces or punched into submission, several surviving ancient heroic spirits standing in silence behind her, heads bowed, postures respectful.
The girl watched the direction of his flight, snorted with laughter again, and then her lips moved.
Across several hundred yards of void, there was no sound to hear.
But the Red Dust Immortal read the shapes of her mouth with perfect clarity.
Word by word.
"Get lost. This Emperor is taking over here."
His body went rigid. That line.
"This place shall be temporarily in my charge."
Those were his own exact words to the people of the Mohist Gate, spoken through the water mirror.
And now someone had swapped in a far more arrogant phrasing and thrown them straight back in his face, otherwise untouched.
And there was not a thing he could do about it. He cursed inwardly.
—What in your mother's name is going on now?
[Author's Note: This chapter is four thousand words.]
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