The alleyway smelled of rot, damp earth, and the faint, coppery tang of Ma Bo's recently erased existence. Yet, as the woman in immaculate white robes stepped into the narrow passage, the foul odors of Cloud Edge City's slums vanished. They were replaced by the crisp, freezing scent of high-altitude snow.
Ye Xiyue, Saintess of the Fallen Moon Palace, did not walk; she seemed to drift. Her feet hovered a fraction of an inch above the muck, her white silk boots utterly unblemished. A translucent veil obscured the lower half of her face, but her eyes—twin pools of liquid silver—were locked dead onto Lu Chen.
Lu Chen stood motionless, the wooden eaves of a crumbling shack casting half his face in deep shadow. His heart maintained a slow, even rhythm. Panic was a luxury the dead could not afford. Inside his Dantian, the Void Root spun silently, devouring the last remnants of the Three-Century Sword Heart Grass and the golden Qi Yun he had just plundered from the arrogant Azure Cloud disciple.
She found me, Lu Chen thought, his gaze lowered to present the image of a terrified rogue cultivator. How? My Void Sword Intent erased all spiritual fluctuations. Ma Bo's death shouldn't have left a single ripple in the natural order.
"A man died here," Ye Xiyue spoke. Her voice was like chiming crystal—beautiful, resonant, and utterly devoid of warmth. "I felt the thread of his destiny snap. It was a heavy thread. Arrogant. Golden. Suddenly, it was simply gone. Swallowed."
She took a step closer. The temperature in the alley plummeted, frost creeping up the brick walls.
"But what truly disturbs me," she continued, her silver eyes narrowing slightly, "is not the dead man. It is you."
Lu Chen hunched his shoulders, keeping his face angled toward the mud. "Fairy, I... I am merely a scavenger. I heard a noise and came looking for scraps. I know nothing of destiny or dead men."
He layered his voice with just the right amount of a tremor, channeling the pathetic demeanor of the 'Chen Lu' persona he had crafted.
Ye Xiyue did not blink. She didn't even seem to hear his words. Her hand, slender and pale, rested on the hilt of a sword sheathed in white jade at her waist.
"The 'Heart of the Sword' allows my sect to perceive the harmony of the world," she murmured, almost to herself. "Every mortal, every beast, every blade of grass possesses a note in the grand symphony. A thread in the tapestry of providence. Even the lowest beggar in these slums carries a dim, gray spark of existence."
She drew her sword an inch. The soft *shing* of metal against jade echoed like a thunderclap in the confined space.
"But you," Ye Xiyue said, her voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "When I look at you, I see... nothing. No past, no future. No luck, no misfortune. You are a tear in the tapestry. A black hole in the symphony. You cast no reflection in the river of Heaven."
Lu Chen's blood ran cold, though his expression remained a mask of bewildered fear.
She couldn't see the Luck-Binding Mirror. But her unique cultivation technique allowed her to perceive the symptoms of his condition. The Mirror had bound itself to his soul after Fang Tianyou had violently ripped out his Innate Spirit Root and stolen his providence. Lu Chen had no luck of his own; he was an absolute void that could only survive by consuming the providence of others.
She sees the Void, Lu Chen realized. She is the first person in this world who can perceive my true nature without seeing the Mirror itself.
Deep within his sea of consciousness, the Luck-Binding Mirror hummed violently, reacting to an external stimulus. Lu Chen allowed a fraction of his spiritual sense to peer through the ancient artifact.
What he saw made him mentally stagger.
Above Ye Xiyue's head floated a manifestation of Qi Yun so immense, so breathtakingly pure, that it eclipsed the very sun. It was a flawless, radiant silver moon, casting beams of dense, silvery providence into the surrounding world. Where Ma Bo's luck had been a muddy yellow stream, and the Azure Cloud enforcers had possessed mere wisps of orange, Ye Xiyue's providence was an ocean.
She wasn't just a genius. She was a Beloved of the Heavens. A true Child of Destiny.
If I could plunder even a tenth of that... a dark, predatory hunger surged from Lu Chen's Void Root. His Dantian ached with the urge to manifest the Void Sword Intent, to reach out and devour that pristine silver moon.
He violently suppressed the urge. To attack her now would be suicide. Her cultivation was unfathomable—at least Peak Foundation Establishment, perhaps even a Half-Step into the Golden Core realm. He was still forcibly suppressing the energy of the Sword Heart Grass to stave off his own breakthrough to Foundation Establishment.
"Fairy jests," Lu Chen said, taking a deliberate, stumbling step backward, keeping his hands visible and empty. "I am but a lowly Qi Refinement cultivator. Perhaps my spiritual roots are simply too trashy for your noble eyes to perceive?"
"Do not insult my intelligence," Ye Xiyue replied. Her sword slid another inch from its scabbard. The frost on the walls thickened into solid ice. "Nature abhors a vacuum. An existence without providence is a heresy against the Great Celestial Sunder. What are you? A remnant spirit possessing a corpse? A demon from the Abyss?"
She moved. It was a casual step, yet it crossed ten feet of distance in an instant. The tip of her white-jade scabbard lightly tapped Lu Chen's chest, directly over his heart.
To any onlooker, it was a gentle gesture. To Lu Chen, it felt like a mountain pressing against his sternum. A terrifying, pure Sword Intent pierced through his skin, attempting to map his meridians.
She's probing me, Lu Chen realized, his mind racing. If her Sword Intent reaches my Dantian, she will find the Void Root. She will find the stolen Imperial Providence. I will be hunted by the entire Eastern Province by nightfall.
Lu Chen prepared to detonate the reservoir of plundered purple-gold Imperial luck he had taken from the ancient skeleton in the Abyss. It would severely injure him, perhaps cripple his newfound cultivation, but the resulting blast of pure heavenly energy would blind her 'Heart of the Sword' long enough for him to escape.
He gathered the Void Intent into his fingertips, ready to strike.
"WHO DARES?!"
A thunderous roar shattered the tense silence of the alleyway.
Three figures descended from the sky, landing heavily on the tiled roofs of the surrounding shacks. They wore the azure and gold robes of the Azure Cloud Sect's inner court. Their leader, a man with a fierce scar across his jaw, held a shattered jade slip in his palm.
"Junior Brother Ma's life slip just shattered!" the scarred man bellowed, his Foundation Establishment aura flaring violently, tearing away the frost Ye Xiyue had laid down. "Seal the slums! Nobody leaves! The one who killed the Heaven-Blessed Son's disciple will face the Nine Extinctions!"
Ye Xiyue's silver eyes flicked upward toward the shouting Azure Cloud cultivators. A faint crease of annoyance appeared beneath her veil.
For a cultivator of her caliber, the distraction lasted less than a tenth of a second.
But for a predator accustomed to the Abyss of Despair, a tenth of a second was an eternity.
Lu Chen didn't just run. He invoked the absolute peak of his Void Sword Intent, turning the power inward. He erased the friction between his boots and the earth. He erased the sound of his breath. For a span of exactly three seconds, he used the Void Intent to literally erase his own physical reflection from the ambient light.
By the time Ye Xiyue's gaze snapped back to the space in front of her, the unremarkable rogue cultivator was gone.
There was no displaced air. No lingering spiritual trail. He hadn't fled; he had simply ceased to occupy that space.
Ye Xiyue stood alone in the alleyway. The Azure Cloud cultivators dropped down into the mud, their swords drawn, barking orders and demanding answers.
"You there!" the scarred cultivator pointed his blade at Ye Xiyue, not immediately recognizing the Saintess in the dim light. "Did you see who killed Ma Bo?"
Ye Xiyue slowly sheathed her sword. The soft *click* of the jade scabbard seemed to freeze the blood of the three enforcers. A wave of suffocating, moonlit pressure washed over them, forcing them to their knees in an instant.
She didn't look at them. She looked at the empty space where Lu Chen had stood.
"A shadow that casts no reflection..." she whispered to the wind. For the first time in her life, the flawless surface of her 'Heart of the Sword' rippled with an emotion she hadn't felt since childhood.
Fear.
***
Three miles away, deep in the labyrinthine network of Cloud Edge City's abandoned aqueducts, Lu Chen violently reappeared.
He slammed against the damp stone wall, coughing up a mouthful of black blood. Using the Void Sword Intent on his own physical form was a suicidal gamble. It had temporarily fractured his meridians, but it had saved his life.
Ye Xiyue... Fallen Moon Palace, Lu Chen thought, wiping the blood from his chin. His eyes burned with a dark, terrifying resolve. So long as she lives, my disguise is utterly useless. She is a natural enemy to the Sovereign of the Void.
He forced himself to sit in a lotus position, attempting to circulate his Qi to heal his internal injuries. But as he looked inward, a spike of pure panic shot through his mind.
The Dantian was boiling.
The exertion of escaping had shattered the seal he had placed on the Three-Century Sword Heart Grass. The ancient, pure medicinal energy was now violently merging with the heavy, yellow providence he had plundered from Ma Bo.
The Void Root was devouring it all, expanding, mutating, forcing his cultivation base past the absolute pinnacle of Qi Refinement.
No, no, not now! Lu Chen grit his teeth, sweat pouring down his pale face. Not in the middle of the city!
Foundation Establishment was a major hurdle for any cultivator. It required drawing upon the world's spiritual energy to forge a solid foundation within the Dantian. For a normal cultivator, this process attracted a small blessing from the Heavens—a shower of spiritual rain or a minor phenomena.
But Lu Chen was not a normal cultivator. He was the Sovereign of the Void. He had no providence to offer the Heavens in exchange for a Foundation, save for what he had stolen.
Above Cloud Edge City, the afternoon sky suddenly turned a sickly, bruised purple. The ambient spiritual energy in the air didn't gather into a blessing; it fled, as if terrified of something in the aqueducts.
In the center of the city, at the Azure Cloud Sect's branch pavilion, the newly crowned 'Heaven-Blessed Son' Fang Tianyou stepped out onto his balcony, his golden robes fluttering. He looked up at the unnatural sky, a frown marring his handsome face. He touched his chest, where Lu Chen's stolen Innate Spirit Root pulsed warmly. For a fleeting second, the stolen root throbbed with a phantom pain.
Down in the slums, Ye Xiyue looked up as well. She watched as the thick clouds began to swirl, forming a massive, pitch-black vortex directly over the northern district.
It was not a blessing.
It was a Heavenly Tribulation.
And it was black.
In the darkness of the aqueduct, Lu Chen's eyes snapped open. The sclera of his eyes had turned completely black, void of all light. The Luck-Binding Mirror floated out of his chest, spinning wildly as it projected a shield of stolen luck around him.
The Heavens had sensed the Void breaking through.
And the Heavens intended to eradicate the anomaly.
"You took my luck..." Lu Chen snarled, looking up through the hundreds of feet of stone, his gaze piercing the heavens themselves as the first black lightning bolt began to form. "You took my destiny. And now you dare try to deny me my Foundation?"
He slowly drew a rusted iron sword he had taken from a dead man in the Abyss. Black, absolute Void Intent coated the blade, turning it into a shard of nothingness.
"Come then," Lu Chen whispered, a maniacal grin spreading across his blood-stained lips. "Let's see whose will is stronger. The Heavens... or the Void."