The early morning on Misty Peak was thick, swallowing the black stone pillars in a sea of cold clouds. The suspension bridges creaked in the lonely wind, but the figure crossing the abyss toward the Serene Wind Plateau made no sound at all.
Lín Xiù did not fly on her silver sword. Fear of being detected by her grandfather's guards forced her to walk across the mortal bridges. Beneath the folds of her white and blue silk robe, the disc of black jade and silver was pressed against her chest. With every step, the eighty‑year‑old "genius's" heart hammered against her ribs, driven by the intoxicating illusion that she was about to deliver her very soul to a loving divinity.
When she finally reached the guest pavilion's entrance, the wooden door slid open before she could even raise her hand to knock.
Yù Qíng stood there. The dark goddess wore a light navy‑blue tunic, her bare feet hovering millimeters above the polished floor. The smile adorning her perfect lips was of a maternal, welcoming sweetness—the kind of smile that would make a mortal confess all their sins.
"I knew the Young Mistress would not disappoint," Yù Qíng murmured, her voice melodious and soft, stepping aside to let the girl enter.
Of course she wouldn't disappoint, the priestess's merciless, cynical mind completed, her black eyes gleaming in the dark. Fertilizer always finds its way back to the soil.
Lín Xiù did not perceive the abyss in her hostess's eyes. She was blinded by her own heroic narrative. Breathless, she clutched the artifact to her chest and followed Yù Qíng into the pavilion's main hall.
Zhì Yuǎn sat in the center of the room. The light of a single oil lamp illuminated the contours of his sculpted face. He was not meditating, nor sleeping. An Infinite Universe needed no rest. He was merely waiting. And when Lín Xiù entered, his eyes—unfathomable as the void between stars—lifted to her.
Lín Xiù's breath failed. The crushing pressure of his presence, previously indifferent, now focused on her for a fraction of a second.
With hands trembling in pure reverence, the blind guide withdrew the object from beneath her silks and extended it with both hands, falling to her knees on the wooden floor.
"Senior…" Lín Xiù's voice was a choked whisper, decades of arrogance completely melted by fantasy. "I understood your words. The Sword Dance is only wind. But Misty Peak possesses foundations the world has forgotten. I bring you the true roots of this mountain. The Astrolabe of a Thousand Bridges."
Zhì Yuǎn extended his hand.
The moment the god's long, pale fingers touched the disc of black jade and silver, the mountain's silence seemed to shatter. There was no sound, but the space around them rippled violently.
The artifact, which had spent centuries as a useless, dull paperweight in the Great Elder's hands, recognized the authority of one who understood the laws that had forged it. The silver inlaid in the disc's grooves began to shine with a blinding starlight. The black jade pulsed. Small cracks of rarefied air snapped around Zhì Yuǎn's hand, as the Wisdom of his Inner Universe instantly deciphered the three‑dimensional map of the dead Spatial Matrices scattered across the South.
For the first time since setting foot on that arrogant mountain, the aura of absolute indifference around Zhì Yuǎn receded.
The "Hunger".
The cosmic, devouring need to fill the void of his dantian with the Laws of reality surfaced in his eyes. He looked at the light lines of the Astrolabe, seeing not merely a map, but the thread that would lead him to devour the Law of Space embedded in the mountain's skeletons.
Slowly, Zhì Yuǎn lifted his gaze from the incandescent artifact to the stunned, flushed face of Lín Xiù. His voice resonated in the hall, deep, dense, vibrating directly in the bones of the kneeling woman:
"You understand the true weight of this world."
To Zhì Yuǎn, it was the literal acknowledgment that she had brought the gravitational engineering of a dead age into his lap. To Lín Xiù, however, it was the final blow of her romantic madness.
The girl's ego exploded in a symphony of fireworks. He recognized me!, the fragile mind of the eighty‑year‑old virgin screamed, tears welling in her eyes. He saw my dedication! He knows I am the only one worthy to stand beside him!
Beside her husband, Yù Qíng raised her teacup to her lips to hide the uncontrollable urge to laugh at the pathetic creature crying with happiness on the floor. The key was delivered. The Misty Peak Sect's usefulness had officially expired.
---
Hours later, the sun rose.
Golden light pierced the sea of clouds, illuminating the suspension bridges and the ceramic roofs of the upper pavilions. Misty Peak was awakening to its rigid routine of chants, meditation, and martial displays.
Until a scream tore through the morning's serenity.
It was a high, prolonged scream, laden with pure mortal terror. The sound echoed off the black rocks, amplified by the valley, coming directly from the lower terrace of the Guest Plateau.
Two patrolling disciples had found what Yù Méi had left behind the night before.
Tossed in the corner of the white‑stone courtyard, piled like a discarded sack of flour, lay Mù Chén, the Core Disciple. The patrolmen fell to their knees, vomiting their breakfast at the grotesque sight. The one who was supposed to be the pride of the younger generation was unrecognizable. His aristocratic face had been reduced to a pulp of torn flesh and crushed bone, his lips split into a mask of permanent agony.
But what drove despair into the disciples' souls was the neck. It was twisted at a loose, impossible angle. The foundation of an eighth‑stage cultivator, whose Refined Body should have been hard as iron, had been twisted and snapped in half with sheer, crushing brute force.
The alarm bells of the Misty Peak Sect rang for the first time in a hundred years. Three heavy, rapid tolls, announcing invasion. Announcing blood.
The Sect Master, Zhào Fēng, was meditating when the bells sounded. Within seconds, he was already flying toward the courtyard, accompanied by a dozen furious elders. A Core Disciple dead on the Honored Guest premises was no accident. It was an act of declared war.
While the alarm spread through the main peak, on the other side of the mountain, in the Record Hall, a very different kind of despair was being forged.
The Great Elder, Lín Wújiàn, was awakened by the three piercing tolls. The old cultivator, whose peak eighth‑stage power made him the strongest and most feared man in the sect, leaped from his bed with feline agility. Mù Chén's blood was already being shouted to the four winds by the panicked disciples outside.
Assassins? On the sacred mountain?, the old man thought, veins bulging in his neck. He needed to protect his precious granddaughter, Lín Xiù, and punish the invaders.
Before leaving his pavilion, Lín Wújiàn ran to the heavy doors of the inner sanctuary, unlocking the blood spells that protected the deepest treasures of his lineage. He needed his family's protective artifact.
He opened the door. And the world stopped.
The old man's eyes swept the obsidian altar in the center of the room. The light crystals were still lit, but the altar's center was shamefully and terrifyingly empty. The Astrolabe of a Thousand Bridges—the uncontested inheritance of ages, the invisible foundation that justified the Lín lineage's arrogance—had vanished.
Lín Wújiàn's legs gave way. He took a trembling step backward. There were no signs of forced entry. The blood spells on the doors were intact, designed to annihilate anyone not carrying the pure blood of his lineage.
The horror of realization struck him like a collapsing mountain. Only two people possessed the blood required to open that door without triggering the traps. Him. And his granddaughter, Lín Xiù.
"No…" the Great Elder's hoarse voice failed, commercial and familial despair merging into a pathetic amalgam of disbelief. "Xiù'er… What have you done?"
With bloodshot eyes and his chest heaving violently, the most powerful man in the sect ran to the courtyard, not as a relentless avenger, but as a terrified old man chasing after an incalculable loss.
---
The Serene Wind Plateau was surrounded.
Fifty elite disciples hovered in the air on their vibrating swords, blocking all escape routes. On the ground, the Sect Master Zhào Fēng, the Great Elder Lín Wújiàn, and a dozen other elders marched through the white‑stone garden, hostile auras and killing intent crushing the morning air's density. They advanced toward the pavilion's courtyard expecting to find brutal assassins ready to resist.
The expectation break was painful.
They did not find preparations for war. They found a scene of leisure.
On the main terrace, sitting on the stone railing with her legs crossed, Yù Méi distractedly chewed an apple, her leg swinging over the void. She looked at the floating army, swallowed the piece of fruit, and huffed—the purest, most crystalline expression of boredom. The sleeve of her emerald‑green tunic was still torn from the night's combat, and she had not even bothered to hide her knuckles, still swollen from beating the best disciple of that rabble.
At the center of the veranda, Yù Qíng served tea in fine porcelain cups, her black hair swaying gently in the morning breeze, her ethereal beauty grotesquely contrasting with the hostility of the army before her.
And, seated comfortably in a carved wooden chair, completely ignoring the powerful men demanding blood, Zhì Yuǎn spun the Astrolabe of a Thousand Bridges in his hand. The ancient relic floated a few centimeters above his palm, silver threads of Spatial Qi dancing around the black jade like planets orbiting a sun.
Seeing his family's inheritance idly spinning in the stranger's hand, the Great Elder Lín Wújiàn's face lost its color, then turned purple with pure apoplectic fury.
"DESPICABLE INVADER!" Lín Wújiàn roared, Qi exploding around his body, cracking the white stones of the garden. "You enter our mountain, murder our heir, and dare profane my lineage's sacred treasure?! RETURN THE ASTROLABE NOW, OR I WILL SCATTER YOUR CONCUBINES' ASHES TO THE SOUTHERN WINDS!"
The Sect Master raised his sword, and the fifty blades in the sky hummed in resonance, ready to descend in a rain of death upon the pavilion.
Yù Méi crushed what remained of the apple in one hand, her eyes gleaming in ecstasy. She was about to leap from the railing to dive into the midst of the elders when a familiar figure blocked the way.
"STOP! DO NOT DARE TAKE ANOTHER STEP!"
The indignant female voice cut through the courtyard. Lín Xiù stepped out of the guest pavilion, dressed in her immaculate silks, and spread her arms, placing herself as a human shield between the sect's army and Zhì Yuǎn. The young elder's face was flushed, not with fear, but with pure righteous fury. She lifted her chin, facing her own grandfather with the disappointment of a bride protecting her beloved.
The entire army froze. The advance stopped. The swords in the sky wavered, some nearly losing stability from the brutal break in concentration.
"Xiù'er?!" The Great Elder choked, his eyes nearly popping from his wrinkled face. "What… what are you doing there?! Step away from that monster! He robbed you! He took our foundation!"
Lín Xiù crossed her arms, offended to the marrow by her grandfather's ignorance.
"The Senior did not rob anyone, Grandfather!" Lín Xiù shouted, her voice shrill and blinded by the illusion of romance, echoing pathetically across the entire valley. "I gave him the Astrolabe! He is the only being worthy to wield it! You, stagnant old men full of mortal vanity, could never comprehend this man's greatness! He told me I understand the weight of the world! I belong to him now, and our family's foundation will serve as support for my future lord's ascension!"
The silence that followed was thick enough to cut with a butter knife.
Yù Méi, who had been ready to kill, blinked slowly. Her predatory instinct stalled. She looked at the girl with her arms spread wide, looked at her sister drinking tea with a hellish, contained smile, and finally understood. She covered her mouth with her bloodstained hand to keep the hysterical laughter from escaping.
In the sect's army, Sect Master Zhào Fēng slowly lowered his sword, looking at Lín Wújiàn with an expression of horror, disbelief, and indescribable pity. The old man had given the keys to the empire to a reclusive maiden who had just handed everything to a handsome man.
The Great Elder Lín Wújiàn opened his mouth. He tried to speak. Tried to shout. But the lethal understanding of what his own granddaughter had done—the monumental theft driven by a romantic illusion so stupid it would shame peasants—overwhelmed his aged heart. His face cycled from white to purple to a sickly gray. His hands, which had crushed the life out of countless enemies, now trembled like leaves in a storm.
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