On the eve of the Grand Tournament, Gu Chengming found himself with a rare half-day of peace.
Su Qingmeng hadn't come today.
Word was that Elder Jingxuan had hauled her bodily back to the Daoning Gate, on the grounds that with the Grand Tournament so close, someone ought to give her foundations a thorough inspection for hidden flaws.
Gu Chengming suspected the truth was simpler: the Daoning Gate's elders had invented a pretext to keep their own Dao-Child pinned down at home so she'd stop running off to the Huiyuan Gate.
Just as well. It gave him a window to pay the Guizang Gate a visit.
Elder Han Che had sent word two days earlier — a Senior Brother of the Guizang Gate had returned to the sect, an old acquaintance of Gu Chengming's, and he wanted a meeting.
Gu Chengming ran the list through his head. Anyone who satisfied both "Guizang Gate disciple" and "old acquaintance of mine" came out to exactly one person, and not a soul more.
— Lu Che.
The Senior Brother who looked like a bandit cultivator off a wanted poster and who cultivated, of all things, the Passionate Sword Formula.
Gu Chengming walked the mountain path toward the Guizang Gate at an unhurried pace, turning over his memories of the last time they'd parted.
Back then the man had been agonizing over the bottleneck the Passionate Sword Formula had jammed him against. No telling whether those galgame techniques of Gu Chengming's had ever proven useful.
Guizang Gate territory was far more isolated than the Huiyuan Gate's. Fifty-odd people held thirty-six peaks between them, which averaged out to under two residents per mountain, and walking the paths one saw no living figure ahead, behind, or to either side. Gu Chengming rounded a hollow in the ridge and, from a good distance off, caught sight of the open ground before one of the Guizang Gate's cave-dwellings.
In the middle of that clearing stood a figure in black robes, hands clasped behind his back. Broad-framed, hard-featured, with a good three parts of murderous air resting naturally between his brows — a man who might have stepped straight down off a bounty notice as some bandit chieftain. Seven Dharma Swords, each a different shape, revolved slowly around Lu Che.
Every scabbard had a brightly colored silk ribbon tied to it, and every ribbon ended in a delicately worked tassel. And on those ribbons and tassels, if one looked closely enough, were painted anime girls, each in a wildly different style.
One was the gentle sort with long flowing hair. One was a twin-tailed tsundere. One was a short-haired, lively type. One ribbon even had a beast-ear girl on it. Seven ita-swords — blades decked out in anime decals — circling one black-faced demon of a man, ribbons and tassels streaming in the mountain wind. The scene was uncanny to the point of performance art.
Standing at the bend in the ridge, Gu Chengming's face traveled from confusion to shock and settled at last on acceptance. Honestly, it felt almost homey.
Lu Che had noticed his visitor. He turned, and on that perpetually ferocious face the eyes lit up the instant he recognized who it was. The corners of his mouth tugged upward. Since he was genuinely bad at smiling, the final effect landed somewhere between "euphoria at surviving a disaster" and "wolf encountering prey deep in the wilderness."
"Junior Brother Gu!"
Lu Che strode over, voice booming like a struck bell, and clamped a hand around Gu Chengming's wrist.
"Senior Brother, you've been well?" Gu Chengming said pleasantly, working his wrist free of the iron pincers without appearing to.
"Very well indeed!"
Lu Che showed no awareness at all that his grip might have caused anyone difficulty. He paced back and forth in front of Gu Chengming, face alight.
They hadn't seen each other in a long while, so a round of small talk was unavoidable.
Lu Che had clearly heard about everything Gu Chengming had been up to lately.
But unlike everyone else, he offered no awe or admiration at those glittering achievements. Not because he didn't care — in Lu Che's understanding, Gu Chengming had been, from the very first day, the peerless master who could casually pronounce such divine doctrines as "analyze the character profile," "event triggers," and "high-EQ dialogue options." That he'd go on to do earth-shaking things was simply how the world worked.
The pleasantries exhausted, Gu Chengming's gaze drifted, at last, to the seven ita-swords orbiting the man's body.
"Senior Brother Lu, these are…"
He weighed his phrasing, doing his best to sound like a man asking out of curiosity rather than out of some emotion difficult to articulate.
That question was exactly what Lu Che had been waiting for.
His eyes blazed, the excitement running three parts hotter than when he'd first laid eyes on Gu Chengming. He stepped back and bowed deeply, with great ceremony.
"Since you bring it up, I owe you my thanks, Junior Brother Gu!" Lu Che straightened and thumped his chest, his voice carrying real feeling. "If not for that revelation you handed me that day, I, Lu Che, would likely still be stuck at the peak of the Second Realm without an inch of progress to show for it!"
— Seriously? What did I have to do with any of it?
Reading something of that on Gu Chengming's face, Lu Che explained. "Ever since you imparted that theory to me, I turned it over night after night, testing it again and again, until one day the truth broke open in front of me."
"The core of the Passionate Sword Formula was never 'passion' at all. It's 'many.'"
Gu Chengming: "…"
Lu Che warmed to his subject. "I used to be fixated on entering the Dao through feeling — convinced I had to forge one bond of the deepest kind with a single female cultivator before my sword intent could reach completion. But think about it, Junior Brother. Why is this art called 'many-passioned' and not 'single-minded devotion'? Because its essence lies in universal love, in binding good affinities far and wide, in—"
He swept a hand out. The seven ita-swords trembled in unison, ribbons flying.
"Establishing emotional links with multiple targets at the same time!"
Gu Chengming looked at those seven Dharma Swords, each bound with an anime girl in a different style, and three words rose slowly in his mind.
Full harem route.
"That theory you passed on to me made one utterly crucial point clear."
"Different targets have different character profiles, and different profiles demand completely different response strategies. The gentle type must be answered with protection. The tsundere requires advancing by retreat. The airhead type you simply let follow her own nature—"
He pointed to each of the seven ita-swords in turn, naming a type with every gesture.
"These seven blades are vessels I forged to order, each one tailored to one of seven radically different archetypes, all in accordance with your theory. Every sword carries a unique emotional sword intent, and when all seven intents circulate at once—"
Lu Che clenched his fist, and the pressure around him surged.
The seven ita-swords hummed together, their sword intents weaving and tangling until the outline of an extraordinarily intricate sword formation took shape in midair.
Gu Chengming's brow rose.
Setting aside the blood-pressure-raising preamble, the resonance produced by those seven blades running in concert was genuinely impressive.
Seven utterly distinct sword intents collided with one another and, rather than clashing, formed a strange harmony. Like seven rivers of wildly different temperament emptying at last into the same sea — the more varied, the more embracing; the more embracing, the vaster.
The approach was absurd, but viewed purely as a mechanism of cultivation, the logic held together.
The Passionate Sword Formula really did put its weight on "many."
Gu Chengming was quiet for a moment, then spoke.
"Senior Brother Lu, this road of yours works."
He paused, electing to overlook the anime girls on the ribbons. "But let me ask one thing. The emotional vessels for these seven swords — every one of them is a character out of a storybook?"
Lu Che nodded as though nothing could be more obvious. "Naturally. Didn't you say it yourself, Junior Brother? Analyze the character profile. Storybook characters have the clearest, most complete profiles of anyone. Nothing could suit cultivation better."
Gu Chengming started to speak and swallowed several sentences back down.
Never mind.
For the life of him he could not recall which line of his had sent Senior Brother Lu down this heretical yet inexplicably successful road of cultivation.
But the result was good. Lu Che's cultivation had broken through, his swordplay had sharpened, and he'd even worked out a multi-sword coordination system entirely his own.
As for the process…
Gu Chengming glanced at the Dharma Sword bearing the beast-ear-girl ribbon and decided to leave the matter unexamined.
The Guizang Gate really did produce talent in abundance.
They talked a while longer. Lu Che enthusiastically shared several storybook characters he'd recently "cleared," drawing the corresponding Dharma Sword and running through a few flourishes with each. The emotional coloring inside those sword intents was vivid indeed — one tender as water, one stubborn and unyielding, and one blade whose intent carried an indescribable yandere quality.
Gu Chengming maintained a perfectly polite smile throughout, listening while offering a silent prayer for Elder Li Linfeng's blood pressure.
As they parted, Lu Che put away the carefree grin and, with rare gravity, cupped his hands toward Gu Chengming.
"Junior Brother, you go to this Grand Tournament as the Wenjian Sect's representative. Lu Che wishes you victory from the opening move."
The line was entirely by the book — and for once he sounded like a proper Guizang Gate sword cultivator.
Gu Chengming returned the salute with a smile. "I'll take your word as a blessing, Senior Brother."
Time flew, and the day of the Grand Tournament arrived at last.
Morning.
On the plaza of the Wenjian Sect's main peak, dozens of Dharma Swords engraved with the crests of the various gates and branches hung in neat ranks in the light of dawn.
Sect Head Shen Qianqiu and the assembled elders, in formal sect vestments, took their places one by one at the center of the plaza.
The departing disciples formed up on either side by affiliation, tension and anticipation mingling on their faces.
Gu Chengming stood at the very front of the column, Su Qingmeng calm-faced beside him, along with several inner disciples drawn from different branches.
This year's Grand Tournament was being held at an exceptionally peculiar site in the southeast of the Great Qian — Floating Isle City.
Floating Isle City was no ordinary city.
It had begun as an ancient Secret Realm — by legend, nothing more than an ownerless spirit-domain drifting above the East Sea, dense with spiritual qi but treacherous in terrain, the sort of place rogue cultivators flocked to for the thrill of exploration.
A thousand years and more ago, the Great Qian imperial house joined with several of the era's foremost sects and poured in enormous manpower and materials to remake that realm from the ground up.
They cleared out the savage beasts, leveled the perilous shoals, laid down formations, redirected spirit veins — and forced a barren Secret Realm into a city in the sky capable of housing tens of thousands of cultivators at once.
In that vast undertaking, the greatest share of the work fell not to the great sects famed for their combat power, but to a faction that kept a low profile in the cultivation world while being utterly singular in nature.
The Mohist Gate.
Put in mundane terms, the Mohist Gate was the cultivation world's premier construction contractor.
From the mountain-guarding grand formations of a sect's gates down to routine upkeep of the spirit implements in a cultivator's cave-dwelling — wherever "building" and "remaking" were involved, the Mohist Gate's craftsmanship was first under heaven and deserved the title.
Floating Isle City stood among their masterworks.
Seen from high above, Floating Isle City formed an irregular oval, the whole city drifting several thousand zhang above a sea of cloud, with the boundless expanse of the East Sea below. Its perimeter was no ordinary wall but a ring of translucent light-curtain raised by the Mohist Gate's own invention, the Floating Isle Formation, which from a distance resembled an enormous glazed bowl overturned upon the clouds.
The layout within was meticulously considered.
The main avenues radiated outward from a soaring octagonal tower at the center. That tower was called the Wavewatch Pavilion — both the landmark of Floating Isle City and the site of the main arena for every Grand Tournament held there.
Around the Wavewatch Pavilion, the districts were divided by function. There were clusters of guest courtyards to house the disciples of each sect, commercial streets and markets selling spirit pills and spirit artifacts, small training grounds set aside for sparring, and even several spirit-cuisine restaurants of considerable renown throughout the Great Qian — since the Grand Tournament and its surrounding affairs stretched over several months, and grain abstention alone could hardly satisfy that many cultivators' appetites.
Though Floating Isle City nominally fell under the jurisdiction of the Great Qian imperial house, its day-to-day operation and maintenance had always been the Mohist Gate's responsibility. The relationship between them was less superior-and-subordinate than long-term partnership: the imperial house supplied resources and political shelter, the Mohist Gate supplied technique and labor, and each took what it needed.
And precisely because the Great Qian imperial house held so pivotal a place in the city's construction and operation, every Grand Tournament brought important members of that house to the site in person.
By rights, the sects stood outside the dynasty, and the Great Qian court held no direct authority over their internal affairs.
But if one stopped viewing the Great Qian as a merely secular dynasty and saw it instead as an oversized power with a complete cultivation system of its own and the resources of countless cultivators at its command, then the role the Great Qian played in the Grand Tournament became easy enough to understand.
The format, the rules, and the prizes of each tournament were settled by joint deliberation among the sects — and the imperial house carried a considerable voice in all three.
Standing on the deck of the flying ship, gazing out at the outline of Floating Isle City, Gu Chengming heard Shen Qianqiu remark offhandedly that "the imperial house will be sending people to this tournament as well," and a subtle premonition stirred in him.
Surely he wouldn't run into another old acquaintance?
The thought flickered past, and Gu Chengming let it go without pursuing it.
The flying ship settled slowly onto the docking field outside Floating Isle City's north gate.
The field was already packed with flying ships, spirit boats, and beast-drawn flyers from every direction. Sect crests of every description caught and reflected the morning light, and the air swam with the intricate composite scent of dozens of different spiritual qi signatures.
The clamor of voices, the press of the crowd — the place was alive.
The Wenjian Sect's people filed into the city behind their elders. Passing beneath the north gate, Gu Chengming looked up at the three archaic, powerfully brushed characters above the lintel.
— Floating Isle City.
Bold and vigorous strokes, said to have come from the hand of the Mohist Gate's founding master.
He lowered his gaze, fell back in with the group, and stepped into the city that floated above the clouds.
…
At that same moment.
In the inner city of Floating Isle City, in a supremely quiet residence in the eastern district.
This was not one of the ordinary guest courtyards assigned to sect disciples, but one of the few independent dwellings in the city. Judging by the standard of the gate and the arrangement of the guards, whoever lived here was no ordinary cultivator.
In the inner chamber, the window lattice stood half closed, sunlight sifting through.
On a couch spread with plain gauze, a young woman sat cross-legged in silence. She wore palace robes of pale blue-green, her hair simply coiled and pinned with a single jade hairpin of excellent quality.
Ji Yixi, Second Imperial Princess of the Great Qian.
Before her hovered a knot of black vapor the size of a fist. It squirmed slowly, gradually condensing into the compact outline of a dragon.
Black from head to tail, roughly two palms in length, its four claws slender, its whiskers fine as thread.
It was not corporeal. It resembled more a spirit-body coalesced out of some exceedingly ancient breath of power, faint dark radiance curling around it.
This was the being Ji Yixi had awakened in the Azure Lotus Secret Realm. By the account it had pieced together from its own fragmentary memories, it was an offshoot of the source of the Great Qian's dragon lineage, a spirit-creature possessed of independent consciousness of a kind all but extinct between heaven and earth. In those broken shards of antiquity it dimly recalled standing shoulder to shoulder with the Great Qian imperial house's forebears, slaying demons from beyond the domain amid the primordial chaos.
Anything older than that, it could no longer make out.
As for why it had fallen into slumber, and why it had been woken in the Azure Lotus Secret Realm by some slip of a girl — of that it hadn't the faintest clue.
It remembered only the moment of waking: opening its eyes to find an expressionless face staring at it, and then that mouth opening and closing to say, "I need your help, Senior."
And then, in a fog of confusion, it had boarded the pirate ship. Not that it hadn't considered turning on her and walking away. But some pull it could neither name nor explain worked on it from somewhere unseen, making it feel that staying was what it ought to do.
The other reason was that it had learned what Ji Yixi's cultivation art, the Record of the Myriad Worlds, actually meant.
Within the Great Qian imperial house there was one lineage that cultivated the Record of the Myriad Worlds — the art that could observe parallel world-lines — and served as the "shadow pieces" secretly sustaining the dynasty's fortune and destiny. The authority and secrets that lineage held were sometimes not fully known even to the Son of Heaven himself.
Ji Yixi was that lineage's living inheritor: a girl with pitifully few expressions who periodically made one wonder whether her mind ran along normal channels at all.
The little dragon had followed her for some time now, and reckoned it had her measure in every respect but one.
Ji Yixi had mentioned a certain person more than once.
More precisely, someone she called a "variable."
It had been an ordinary night when Ji Yixi, in a rare turn, spoke first. She said she had gone to call on that variable once before, hoping to probe him for aid.
"And?" the little dragon asked idly.
"I botched it."
That was one of the few times it had ever read regret on Ji Yixi's face — and given how well it knew her, that amounted to weeping openly.
It had been puzzled at the time. What sort of variable could leave the inheritor of the Record of the Myriad Worlds regretful to this day?
One question later, it learned he was nothing but a Third Realm junior.
The little dragon scoffed on the spot.
In what remained of its memory, it had seen far too many so-called "variables."
The cultivation world lumped together everyone whose karmic threads were blurred and whose fate could not be scried under the label "those without destiny." Such people were rare, true, but nowhere near as rare as the world imagined.
It had laid eyes on plenty of them itself.
At the start they were all invested with great hopes, named as the crucial pieces who would stir up wind and cloud across heaven and earth. The endings were usually a disappointment. The overwhelming majority of them either lacked the strength to match and were ground to powder before the great current, or else simply faded into the crowd without raising so much as a ripple.
No destiny did not mean invincible, still less that success was assured.
In the end, whether a man could change his fate came down to what he himself could do.
"A Third Realm boy," the little dragon had said then. "Even if you really do have some connection with him, what use is it? On this board, a Fifth Realm piece can be set down without stirring a wave. Third Realm?"
It waved a claw, signaling that she shouldn't squander more energy on the matter.
"He has already altered a great deal of karma," Ji Yixi countered.
The trouble was that the Record of the Myriad Worlds imposed its own limits, and Ji Yixi had no way of telling anyone — not even the little dragon — what those specific karmic changes were.
So as the little dragon saw it, this was simply a girl whose judgment the Record of the Myriad Worlds had taken hostage, projecting excessive expectations onto an unremarkable Third Realm junior.
It couldn't be bothered to argue, either. Once this girl fixed her mind on something, nobody alive could pull her back.
Now.
The little dragon coiled in the air before Ji Yixi, tail flicking back and forth, plainly out of patience with the conversation underway.
"Girl who carries the Record of the Myriad Worlds — don't try to fob This Venerable One off."
Its voice was low and carried the peculiar oppressive weight of an ancient spirit-creature, but its body was so small that after that pressure was halved and halved again, the effect came out roughly equal to a cat baring its teeth at you.
"What do you mean, he is the only variable in this? With that many karmic threads interwoven, that many figures entering and exiting the stage, not one thread, not one person can avert this ending you speak of?"
Ji Yixi didn't answer at once.
Her gaze passed through the window lattice to the deep blue vault of sky above Floating Isle City.
The little dragon knew that expression.
Whenever she sank into the perceptive state of the Record of the Myriad Worlds, those pale irises turned more transparent still, as though they could see through every barrier and stare directly into some dimension no ordinary person could reach.
A moment later, Ji Yixi drew her gaze back.
"I have looked. A thousand deductions, a thousand different courses." She paused. "The result is the same every time."
The little dragon fell silent for the space of a breath.
It still didn't believe her — not because it doubted what the Record of the Myriad Worlds could deduce, but because it doubted a Third Realm cultivator could carry karmic weight of that magnitude.
The point of a variable was to break an established trajectory, and breaking a trajectory required more than an unusual karmic constitution. It required strength to match.
A young man in the Third Realm — however blurred his karma, however unscryable his fate — what could he possibly do against the board laid out by powers of the Fifth and Sixth Realms?
On the board, a pawn that crosses the river can move sideways, true — but only if there's room enough to maneuver. What if the board itself was about to be flipped over?
"You think too highly of him," the little dragon said at last.
"Perhaps…"
It was the first time the little dragon had heard uncertainty in any answer out of her mouth.
But then Ji Yixi added one more line.
"I have no other choice."
The little dragon started to speak, then let the argument go.
It understood her position all too well.
Those who cultivated the Record of the Myriad Worlds were fated to struggle among countless endings that all meant ruin. They could see the calamity coming and could seldom find any way to avert it, because the overwhelming majority of karmic threads led to the same terminus.
A "variable" capable of deviating from that terminus — even at one chance in ten thousand — was, to her, a lifeline worth throwing everything behind.
Quiet settled over the room for a while.
Then Ji Yixi turned her head, her eyes coming to rest on the sheaf of scrolls on the low table.
It was the roster of entrants for this Grand Tournament, compiled in advance by the Great Qian imperial house and distributed to all parties. She reached out and turned a few pages.
Disciple registers of the great sects — skimming past — Tianji Pavilion, Myriad Dharma Sect, Wenjian Sect, Tianding Sect, Harmonious Joy Sect…
At the Wenjian Sect's entry, her fingertip stopped.
Competing representative. Team leader.
— Gu Chengming.
Disciple of the Huiyuan Gate. Third Realm, middle stage.
The remarks column was crammed with a long string of entries: Third on the Hidden Dragon List. The Murderous Demon of Snowfall Pass. Foremost contributor of merit in the Tianque Secret Realm. Dharma-Station Refiner…
Titles like those appended to the name of a Third Realm cultivator looked flatly absurd. Ji Yixi stared at that name for several breaths.
Then she closed the register, lifted her head, and looked at the little dragon hovering before her.
"Senior."
"Mm?" The little dragon had been dozing with its eyes shut. At the word it lazily peeled back one eyelid.
"Come with me to make the acquaintance of this Gu Chengming."
The little dragon was baffled. "I have to go too?"
"Mm."
"Didn't you say last time that you came on too strong and scared the man off?"
"So it won't happen this time."
"And how exactly do you intend to befriend him? You can't very well hand over two flower-boat invitations again and open with something like, I know the dragon-qi in your body has yet to be roused."
Ji Yixi went uncharacteristically silent for two breaths, and the little dragon confirmed that this was the reaction of someone whose sore spot had been jabbed.
"This time, I will do it the way a normal person would."
"Are you certain you know what the way a normal person would do it looks like?"
After a long pause she said, with a trace of doubt, "That is why I need you to come along, Senior."
"And if he refuses to befriend you?"
"Then I will kneel and beg him."
The little dragon opened its mouth, looked at the girl who had just announced she'd be doing this the way a normal person would, and finally managed to squeeze out one question:
"Do I have to kneel too?"
"Mm."
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