Of course, at this moment Gu Chengming had no idea that in some corner of Floating Isle City, the Second Imperial Princess of the Great Qian was busy conferring with a fist-sized black dragon over how best to strike up a conversation with him.
For him, right now, a far more pressing matter stood directly ahead.
The north gate of Floating Isle City was an arched gateway better than ten zhang high, carved from a single slab of some unknown blue-grey stone, its surface covered inch by inch in the formation patterns unique to the Mohist Gate. Four Mohist Gate disciples stood to either side of the arch, in black uniforms shot through with silver thread, identical tokens hanging at their waists, expressions solemn.
The Wenjian Sect party came to a halt before the north gate. Several other sects' columns were queued ahead of them.
Sect Head Shen Qianqiu stood at Gu Chengming's side, and seeing curiosity on the face of the disciple he valued most, he spoke up to satisfy it.
"Chengming. Do these entry procedures strike you as a touch overwrought?" Shen Qianqiu asked, hands tucked into his sleeves, voice level.
Gu Chengming inclined his head and cupped his hands. "I confess I am curious. The great sects are all gathered here, every one of them the pride of an orthodox lineage. Why should passing through a city gate require the Mohist Gate to haul out such elaborate heavy instruments and inspect us one by one?"
Seeing the doubt on his face, Shen Qianqiu slowed his pace to walk shoulder to shoulder with him, and began his explanation with a smile.
"Floating Isle City was once an ancient Secret Realm. That much you already know. What you may not know is that a Secret Realm — an independent domain split off from the main world — is by its very nature vulnerable to incursion by Otherworldly Heavenly Demons."
"Otherworldly Heavenly Demons?"
The concept wasn't unfamiliar to Gu Chengming. The classics of the cultivation world mentioned them now and then, though almost always in vague terms — evil aberrations from beyond the boundary of the world, formless, their methods strange.
"To be precise, the sort that most loves to fix its eye on places like Floating Isle City is a variety called the Heart Demon." Shen Qianqiu's tone turned graver. "The thing is exceedingly well hidden and has no physical body. It attaches itself, without sound or trace, to a cultivator's spirit soul and takes root deep in the consciousness. At first the host notices nothing. But as time passes, the Heart Demon gradually magnifies the stray thoughts and obsessions already in the host's heart, until it has eaten through the Dao Heart entirely. And the symptoms of Heart Demon possession are all but indistinguishable from those of a cultivator whose own mental state has simply grown unstable and cluttered with stray thoughts."
Shen Qianqiu glanced at him. "In other words, a cultivator on his own has almost no way to tell whether he has truly gone astray in his cultivation, or whether an Otherworldly Heavenly Demon has marked him."
Gu Chengming clicked his tongue. That sounded exactly like the standard-issue heart demon from every cultivation setting he knew.
Except here it seemed to manifest as an actual existence.
"Which is precisely why every arrival must be screened by specialized means before entering, to confirm no Heart Demon has taken hold." Shen Qianqiu pointed toward an implement standing in the inspection clearing ahead. "That is the testing artifact the Mohist Gate built for the purpose."
Gu Chengming followed his finger.
At the center of the clearing stood a black metal rod about half a man's height. Set into its top was a square banner, its face milk-white and bare of any word or design. The rod's base was a disc engraved edge to edge with formation patterns, several long thin metal needles jutting from its rim — the whole thing rather like an oversized compass. A Mohist Gate duty officer stood beside the pole, directing the disciples of the sect ahead to step forward one by one.
Gu Chengming watched with interest for a while. Each disciple who stepped up had to press a palm to the disc and pour in a little spiritual power. The formation patterns on the disc would light, then the banner at the top would glow faintly. If the banner's face stayed milk-white, the test was passed and no Heart Demon rode the man.
The duty officer would nod them through. So far Gu Chengming had watched twenty-odd disciples go through, all of them cleanly, the banner never anything but a clean, unmarked white.
"Sect Head, if I may — what is the principle behind it?" Gu Chengming asked.
Shen Qianqiu seemed to have expected the question. "Within an ordinary cultivator's spirit soul there exists only one unified consciousness. That consciousness may harbor stray thoughts, may swing with emotion, but in essence it is a single complete self. If a Heart Demon takes hold, however, the cultivator's spirit soul gains an additional, foreign consciousness that does not belong to the self. Such foreign consciousnesses almost always carry fierce obsessions — and the stronger the obsession, the harder the Heart Demon is to purge."
He pointed at the banner. "The artifact's function is to draw out those obsessions in the spirit soul that do not belong to the self, and make them manifest on the banner's face. If the face shows neither word nor color, the spirit soul is pure. If words appear and the color changes, then foreign obsessions are present — the telltale sign of Heart Demon possession."
Gu Chengming nodded, understanding at last.
He was hardly a stranger to the Mohist Gate. Back in the Capital he had seen no shortage of their spirit implements — those ingenious messaging devices shaped like birds, for instance, whose craftsmanship was frankly astonishing.
But those, in the end, were everyday trinkets. This thing before him, capable of probing anomalies at the level of the spirit soul, was clearly of a far higher order.
At last the Wenjian Sect's turn came. Shen Qianqiu, as Sect Head, went first, laying his palm on the disc. The banner glowed faintly, and after a few breaths returned to milk-white.
Han Che followed and passed just as smoothly. Then Yu Wenqiu, Su Qingmeng, and the other elders and disciples in the party, one after another, and the banner held its reassuring milk-white throughout.
Soon it was Gu Chengming's turn. He stepped up and pressed his right palm to the disc.
The instant his spiritual power flowed in, the formation patterns lit with that familiar glow.
The milk-white banner gave off its faint light right on cue.
And then the color changed. In the space of a heartbeat the banner flashed through several utterly different hues — first a crimson-gold so thick it was nearly solid, carrying an overbearing aura that sneered down at all the world; then a layer of pale pink; then a deep blue-black. Six colors, or more, flickered and alternated across the banner's face, and at the last they all existed at once, staining what had been a pure milk-white cloth into a lurid, chaotic abstract painting.
At the same time, words began to surface across it.
"Sweep flat the myriad ages, and be Heavenly Emperor once more." "To stay by a certain person's side forever, to watch a thousand sails pass and see all the world's splendor." "Master the self and return to ritual, that the great bonds of order be set right." "To become a sword worthy of that person."
More words kept rising. Gu Chengming stared at the gaudy, many-colored banner with a perfectly blank face, his skull buzzing.
Right on schedule, the unexpected had happened.
Obviously these obsessions came from his own cultivation techniques. Why the obsessions of a cultivation technique should register as the obsessions of a Heart Demon, he had no idea — but the present situation was going to be very difficult to explain.
The Mohist Gate duty officer in charge of the screening shot upright the moment the banner changed color.
His eyes went wide, fixed on that riot of colors, his face draining white, then going green, then flushing red.
He'd held this post for a good several decades. He'd seen plenty of poor bastards ridden by Heart Demons — but in the worst of those cases it had been a single Heart Demon. This one? Five or six colors on the banner at once, obsessions welling up line after line until there was barely room left on the cloth to write them.
Fuck me, is this thing even human? Don't tell me it's some kind of Heart Demon composite.
The duty officer's hands had started shaking. He snatched the message talisman at his waist, poured in spiritual power, and with a sharp hiss the talisman dissolved into a streak of light and shot off toward the interior of Floating Isle City.
"Quickly! Notify the Elder — we have an emergency!"
The mood in the inspection clearing snapped taut. All around, the queued disciples of the various sects turned to stare, and whispers spread through the crowd like a rising tide.
The Wenjian Sect's reaction was rather more nuanced.
Shen Qianqiu had turned the instant the banner changed color. Taking in the garish cloth, his expression went from shock to bafflement and settled at last into a kind of resigned there-he-goes-again.
Elder Han Che was far calmer. He stroked his beard, ran his gaze once down the banner, glanced at Gu Chengming's blank face, and understood.
It wasn't as if he couldn't sense the tangled mess of auras the boy carried around. The artifact had clearly misjudged them.
The Mohist Gate Elder arrived quickly.
Barely the time it takes to drink a cup of tea had passed before an old man in a black robe, hair shot with grey but bearing vigorous, came hurrying into the inspection clearing.
Judging by the more intricate silver formation patterns on his robe and the grade of the Mohist Gate token at his waist, he was plainly one of the Mohist Gate's senior figures stationed in Floating Isle City.
"What's happened here?"
His gaze swept the inspection area and landed first on the banner, still blazing with color.
The duty officer hurried up to meet him, his voice thin with nerves. "Reporting to the Elder — while this Wenjian Sect disciple was undergoing screening, the artifact produced a severe anomalous reaction—"
The Mohist Gate Elder's brow creased. He strode to the banner and studied it closely, reading down the obsessions line by line.
When he finished, his face showed none of the gravity and urgency the duty officer had braced for. Instead it acquired an enormous question mark.
He had spent half his life researching Otherworldly Heavenly Demons and knew the habits of Heart Demons inside and out.
A Heart Demon was one variety of Otherworldly Heavenly Demon, and in essence a pure aggregate of malice. The way it parasitized a cultivator's spirit soul was by magnifying the darkest emotions buried deepest in the host — greed, envy, hatred, fear, obsession.
Which meant the obsessions drawn out of a possessed cultivator were invariably extreme, twisted, brimming with the urge to destroy.
So what in the world was written on this banner?
The only one with even a faint whiff of Heart Demon about it was probably "Sweep flat the myriad ages, and be Heavenly Emperor once more."
The Elder stood before the banner for a long while, turning it over in his mind.
There had never been a recorded case of a single cultivator being possessed by multiple Heart Demons at once. Heart Demons repelled one another; two of them parasitizing the same host would tear each other apart fighting for control of the spirit soul. And Heart Demon obsessions could never, ever be this mild.
Weighing those two points together, the Elder had already formed a preliminary judgment. Still, for caution's sake, he decided to verify it himself.
"Fellow Daoist." He turned to Gu Chengming, who had been standing quietly to one side. "Forgive an old man's discourtesy — I would like to examine you personally, using our sect's own detection method."
Gu Chengming had been waiting for exactly that. He cupped his hands obligingly.
The Elder extended his right hand, and a ball of dark golden spirit-light kindled in his palm — exceedingly gentle, without the least edge of aggression — and drifted slowly into the space between Gu Chengming's brows.
This was the Mohist Gate's own proprietary detection art, far more precise than the banner artifact. It could reach directly into a cultivator's Sea of Consciousness and examine the integrity of the spirit soul and the presence of any external parasitic entity.
The dark golden light lingered at Gu Chengming's brow for perhaps ten breaths.
Then the Elder drew it back and let out a long breath.
"There is no Heart Demon."
At those four words, everyone present relaxed at once.
The duty officer wiped the sweat from his forehead, the relief of a man who'd survived a disaster tangling with the irritation of a man who'd panicked over nothing, until all of it came out as a single sigh.
"In that case, the anomaly on the artifact just now…" the officer ventured hesitantly.
The Elder was silent for a moment.
He knew perfectly well that those obsessions on the banner had not sprung from nowhere. An artifact does not conjure obsessions out of thin air; it only makes manifest what already exists.
But their source — that he genuinely could not explain. Perhaps they were simply the young man's own obsessions?
The look he turned on Gu Chengming grew a shade more complicated.
Then again — how does anyone come by an obsession like "sweep flat the myriad ages"?
He couldn't make sense of it, but he genuinely couldn't find a fault either, so he decided to set the matter aside for now, report it upward, and let judgment be made later.
Having settled on that, the Elder said, "The spirit veins within Floating Isle City have been fluctuating somewhat irregularly these past days. It may have affected the artifact's accuracy. We'll simply have it recalibrated afterward."
The duty officer nodded eagerly, plainly delighted to accept the explanation. Between "the artifact malfunctioned" and "a man is possessed by five Heart Demons at once," the former was vastly less trouble to process.
And so the whole affair ended as a false alarm.
Gu Chengming walked through the inspection area with his composure intact and passed through the north gate of Floating Isle City alongside the rest of the Wenjian Sect.
At the same time, a series of dialogue boxes popped up in front of him.
[Hundred Bones Resonance, righteously indignant: What Heart Demon?! This Heavenly Emperor is upright and aboveboard, open and honorable! What do you mean, Heart Demon!]
[Huiyuan Sword Formula, outwardly wounded: I only want to stay by Chengming's side always. Does that even count as an obsession…]
[Huiyuan Sword Formula, inwardly gloating: Yesss, another confession of love slipped in without him noticing!]
[Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method, gravely: To master the self and return to ritual is the correct principle of heaven and earth. To take this for the thought of a Heart Demon is absurd.]
[Clear-Heart Formula, quite at ease: So that's what my obsession looks like? It seems I like Chengming rather more than I thought.]
Gu Chengming closed the dialogue boxes one by one, face unchanged, and quietly let out a breath.
Only once the backs of the Wenjian Sect party had vanished completely into the bustling streets did the polite smile fade from the Mohist Gate Elder's face.
He turned and stood alone before the Heart-Gauging Disc, eyes deep as he studied the residual ripples of spiritual power on the artifact.
The public line was that the artifact had failed — a story to quiet the incident and preserve the Mohist Gate's face. But as a master craftsman of this very art, no one knew better than he did.
The Heart-Gauging Disc's formation patterns were flawless, its spiritual qi circulating smoothly. There was not the faintest sign of malfunction.
An artifact could not fabricate those specific sentences out of nothing.
The obsessions it had shown must have a definite source. The possibility of Heart Demon possession had been ruled out — yet those preposterous, outlandish obsessions on the banner plainly, genuinely existed inside that young sword cultivator.
Which meant the artifact had perhaps suffered some incomprehensible deviation and magnified the young man's own thoughts.
"But still…"
The Elder recalled the lines that had hung in the air, and grumbled inwardly.
Heart Demon or no Heart Demon, this sword cultivator called Gu Chengming was, in his own right, more than a little uncanny.
Standing where he was, the Elder began sifting his memory for what he knew about the young man.
"Gu Chengming. Wenjian Sect, Huiyuan Gate disciple. Supposedly a prodigy ranked near the top of the Hidden Dragon List."
Muttering the details over, he suddenly remembered the horrifying battle reports that had come out of the Northern Territory some time back — and the title that had been circulating quietly through the cultivation world ever since.
"That's right. The title was something like the Murderous Demon of Snowfall Pass."
At that thought his expression grew stranger still. A young man whose epithet contained the words "Murderous Demon" — and what he carried in his heart was "master the self and return to ritual"?
The Elder sighed and rubbed his throbbing temples.
He thought back carefully. The last famous Wenjian Sect sword cultivator he could recall was an elder renowned for cracking skulls with clubs, flinging lime powder in people's eyes, and general dirty dealing.
"Wencai, I think his name was…"
The Elder looked out over the thronged streets of Floating Isle City and shook his head.
These Wenjian Sect sword cultivators got stranger every year.
Strange or not, though, there was only so much he could do.
He had verified with his own hands that there was no Heart Demon possession, so as far as the safety of Floating Isle City went, he had something to report upward.
As for the true source of those bizarre obsessions — that was beyond what a stationed elder could uncover. Better to set it all down faithfully on record and submit it to the sect for judgment.
Decision made, the Mohist Gate Elder straightened his robes and turned toward the inner city.
He walked without hurry, composing the wording in his head as he went. Floating Isle City's main avenue was busy enough by day, but evening was drawing near now and most of the sect parties had already settled in, so the street held far fewer people than before.
He crossed two alley mouths and was about to turn onto the flagstone road leading to the inner city.
"Senior of the Mohist Gate."
A voice like warm jade came from the side. The Elder's step checked, and he turned his head.
In the shadow of the alley mouth stood a man who had not been there a moment ago — a young man, tall and slender, expensively dressed. He wore a moon-white brocade robe worked with intricate patterns, a jade belt of superb quality at his waist, and held a folding fan in one hand, closed.
Handsome features, an unhurried bearing, every inch the noble son of some great house.
Which house, exactly, the Elder found he could not place.
"Fellow Daoist is…?"
The Elder sized him up without letting it show. He had been stationed in Floating Isle City for years and had seen the faces of most of the great sects and clans — but this young man he was certain he had never laid eyes on.
He had cultivated a long time, and considered his perception of spiritual power fluctuations to be among the finest in the Fourth Realm. Yet facing this young man, he could not read the man's cultivation at all.
The young man merely smiled a little, at ease, like an ordinary passerby met by chance at an alley mouth.
"Only a wandering rogue cultivator who happened to be passing through."
His voice was pleasant, like a clear spring running over pebbles, carrying a gentleness that made a man relax before he'd decided to.
"Just now at the city gate, I saw that the Senior seemed weighed down by some pressing matter — worry on his face. It made me curious."
He tapped his own temple lightly with the closed fan as he spoke, the gesture casual.
"Though when you consider it, ninety-nine of every hundred troubles in this world are ones we make for ourselves."
The Elder's brows drew slightly together.
"Wouldn't the Senior agree?" The young man tilted his head, the last of the sunset caught in those mild-seeming eyes. "Some things simply aren't worth keeping in mind. Forget them, and there's peace instead."
The Elder parted his lips to answer.
And in that instant, something somewhere in his mind went blurred. He hadn't even time to register what he was losing; by the time the ripple faded, it was over.
The Elder stood at the junction of the alley and the flagstone road, the setting sun stretching his shadow long behind him.
Where had he just come from?
Ah — right. The inspection platform. A sect party had been going through screening and the artifact had given a bit of trouble, so he'd gone to look at it himself and confirmed there was nothing serious.
The Elder turned onto the flagstone road and ambled off toward the inner city.
Light of step. Nothing on his mind at all.
…
At the same time, similar things were happening, silently, in other corners of Floating Isle City.
A young disciple who'd been queued behind the Wenjian Sect was recounting the entry procedure to his fellows once they'd settled in, and when he got to the stretch of waiting before the inspection platform, he frowned.
"Odd. I feel like I've forgotten something."
"Forgotten what?" a fellow disciple asked.
The disciple thought about it, then shook his head. "Can't recall. Probably nothing important."
And so on, in a dozen variations.
Within the span of a single hour, nearly every cultivator who had witnessed the banner's anomaly with their own eyes had lost all memory of it.
Floating Isle City. The main avenue.
Dusk deepened. The spirit lamps along the street kindled one after another, plating the blue flagstones in a warm orange wash.
The crowds had thinned considerably. Now and then a cultivator hurried past on his way to supper at one of the restaurants, the small wind of his passing stirring the spirit-grass leaves in the flower beds by the road.
The young man in noble dress stood on a stone bridge over the main avenue.
Beneath the bridge ran one of Floating Isle City's distinctive spirit-spring channels, the water flowing without a sound, faintly luminous under the lamps.
He propped the fan against his shoulder, tipped his head back, and looked at the sky above Floating Isle City.
The city floated above a sea of clouds, and the sun had already sunk below the cloud layer. A last stroke of afterglow came through the gaps in the clouds, staining the horizon a gorgeous weave of deep violet and dark gold.
"Truly fine weather," he said softly.
After a moment the young man lowered his gaze.
He snapped the fan open. Painted across it was a landscape — but look closely and the composition was deeply wrong. The mountains hung upside down, the water flowed upward, heaven and earth were entirely inverted, as though the painting depicted some other world whose rules ran exactly counter to this one's.
Fanning himself, the young man walked unhurriedly down from the stone bridge.
His figure blended into the thickening dusk.
A few steps later, there was no trace of him left.
As though he had never been there at all.
Naturally, Gu Chengming had no idea that the little storm at the city gate had already been quietly wiped away.
After entering the city and settling in, he didn't begin cultivating right away. With daylight still left, he went out alone for a walk.
Floating Isle City's commercial streets and markets were extraordinarily busy during the Grand Tournament, stocked with every kind of spirit pill, elixir, spirit artifact and talisman. But Gu Chengming didn't browse the lively shops. He went straight to an unremarkable bookshop tucked into a corner of the market.
The shop's sign read Myriad Volumes Pavilion — a grand name for a very small storefront, without so much as an apprentice at the door to call in customers. Yet the range of texts on its shelves was remarkable: basic sword manuals published openly by the various sects, geographical gazetteers and biographies of the cultivation world, even a few fragments of ancient works of considerable age.
Gu Chengming searched the shelves for the better part of half an hour and finally picked out three volumes relating to Floating Isle City and the Mohist Gate. He paid in spirit stones and carried them back to the guest courtyards.
His interest in those two subjects traced back to the "Heart Demon" farce at the gate that day.
The matter had been closed with the "artifact malfunction" story, but Gu Chengming himself remained quite curious about "Otherworldly Heavenly Demons" and "Heart Demon possession." The mainstream texts of the cultivation world had always been tight-lipped on the topic; the rare mention was a single passing line, never anything expanded upon.
Which only sharpened his curiosity further.
He had no idea whether his own cultivation techniques really had anything to do with these so-called Otherworldly Heavenly Demons, but knowing more about them could hardly hurt.
Back at the guest courtyard, Gu Chengming brewed a pot of tea and laid the three books on the table in order of thickness.
The sounds of a neighboring sect's disciples drinking and roughhousing drifted in from outside, so he reached over and shut the window. The room fell noticeably quieter.
The everlasting lamp cast a warm halo across the room.
Gu Chengming settled back against the head of the bed and leafed through the Gazetteer of Floating Isle City, a chronicle of the city's history compiled officially by the Mohist Gate. It wasn't especially old — written perhaps a century ago — and covered the whole process by which Floating Isle City had been remade from an ancient Secret Realm into a city in the sky, along with a summary of every Grand Tournament held there. Twenty or thirty pages in, he found a chapter dealing with Otherworldly Heavenly Demons.
But, as he'd expected, the section was written with extreme brevity.
The whole of it came to a few hundred characters, the gist being that "Floating Isle City suffered an incursion of Otherworldly Heavenly Demons several thousand years ago, with grievous losses. Thereafter the Mohist Gate and the great sects jointly laid down wards, reducing the threat of the Otherworldly Heavenly Demons to a minimum."
As for the demons' actual forms, abilities, origins, or any detailed account of that catastrophe — nothing at all. Every place that ought to have held substance was fobbed off with lines like "it is not convenient to elaborate here" and "see the sealed archives for related records."
Gu Chengming finished the chapter and sighed to himself.
Where Otherworldly Heavenly Demons were concerned, those who knew wouldn't talk, and those who didn't had no way of finding out. He set the Gazetteer aside and picked up the second book, A Study of the Mohist Gate's Origins.
This one was far more entertaining than the last. Rather than a solemn sect history, it read more like the after-dinner jottings of some old Mohist scholar — light and wry in style, narration braided with commentary, and every so often an anecdote about some disciple of a bygone generation.
Turning the pages, Gu Chengming suddenly found one passage seizing his entire attention.
It wasn't about Floating Isle City, nor about Otherworldly Heavenly Demons, but about the Mohist Gate's "Dao." Every sect pursued a Dao of its own. Sword cultivators sought the Dao of the Sword, body cultivators the Dao of Martial Force, talisman cultivators the Dao of Talismans.
So what of the Mohist Gate?
A school devoted wholly to formations, architecture and machinery — what was the highest state they pursued?
The answer came down to a single word.
— Spirit.
The book read: "The founding basis of the Mohist Gate lies in creation. From the patriarch who opened the sect onward, that to which generations of disciples have devoted the blood of a lifetime is neither the forging of the mightiest artifact nor the laying of the finest formation, but the bringing into being of that which possesses an independent awareness — the Spirit."
"Now, the Spirit is the soul of an implement. Should an implement attain its own awareness, it is no longer a cold and lifeless thing, but an existence that stands alone and thinks. It may judge its own workings, extend its own arts, bond with a master and commune with him. This is the ultimate attainment the Mohist Gate seeks."
"Yet the difficulty of this path is harder than the climb to the blue heavens."
"Since the primordial chaos first parted, the spirit of all things has been granted by the Heavenly Dao; never has it been heard that a mortal frame could make a Spirit. This is the supreme principle of the Heavenly Dao — Spirit cannot be made by man."
"The Mohist patriarch exhausted a lifetime's effort and did not accomplish it."
"The grandmasters of every generation after him pressed on where others fell, holding this long-cherished wish as the standard of the sect's own law and passing the flame down. Gladly they forsook the road of war, poured out the whole of the sect's resources, and gave all of it to the Dao of creation."
"To this day the Mohist Gate's arts of formation, implement and construction have reached the realm of transformation, unrivaled beneath the heavens. Yet in the creation of the Spirit, they have still not glimpsed the inner hall."
"And yet no one in the Mohist Gate, high or low, has ever lost heart — for they believe deeply that where sincerity is absolute, metal and stone will yield. They wait for the day when their creation opens its own eyes, speaks with its own clear voice, and possesses of itself the seven emotions and six desires."
"On that day, and only then, will the Great Dao of the Mohist Gate be made whole."
Gu Chengming stopped turning pages.
He stared at the passage, and something in it sat oddly with him.
— Spirit cannot be made.
Come to think of it, in all his time in this world he had never once encountered a spirit artifact that possessed a Spirit.
Not even something on the order of the Sword Burial Tomb — a genuine Dharma-Station Wonder — had one.
In the cultivation games he'd played before crossing over, sword spirits and artifact spirits were practically standard issue. Every famed blade housed a sword spirit, aloof or tsundere, who bickered with the protagonist, sniped at him, and eventually became the partner he'd trust with his life.
Here, there was nothing of the kind — which meant "making a Spirit" was among this world's highest tiers of permission.
In that case… did the fact that his own cultivation techniques "had Spirits" mean he had already brushed against the highest layer of this world's rules?
Then again, his understanding of those techniques was still skin-deep, and drawing sweeping conclusions from a few paragraphs in one Mohist essayist's jottings would be reckless in the extreme.
He shook his head, stacked the three books together on the table, and stretched.
Outside, the sky had gone fully dark. Floating Isle City's night view came in through the half-shuttered window, ten thousand household lamps set against the moonlit sea of clouds.
Gu Chengming walked to the window, looked out at the view, then back at the everlasting lamp in the room.
Time to rest.
Tomorrow's meeting of team leaders and reading of the rules was no great affair, but it would still be the first time he attended a formal occasion as the Wenjian Sect's representative. Best to be clear-headed for it.
He shut the window, returned to the bed, sat cross-legged, and settled in to rest through meditation.
The night deepened, and the clamor of Floating Isle City subsided by degrees. The glow of distant spirit lamps slipped through the gap in the shutters and drew a thin line of light across the wall, creeping slowly along.
Around the guest courtyard there was nothing but the murmur of water in the spirit-spring channels, and now and then the low call of some unnamed spirit bird.
About an hour passed.
Gu Chengming's brow twitched faintly.
His spiritual sense hadn't fully drawn inward in meditation, so he caught the approach at once.
And the manner of that approach was distinctly unusual. An ordinary Third Realm cultivator, sunk in meditation, would almost certainly never have detected stealth of this caliber.
During the Grand Tournament, Floating Isle City was where cultivators from every great sect converged, and a mixed crowd was inevitable. The Mohist Gate's formations and the Great Qian imperial family's experts kept order, but there was no guaranteeing some sightless little thief wouldn't try his luck.
Or it might be some hostile faction taking advantage of the tournament's chaos to conduct business that didn't bear daylight.
Either way, someone climbing his wall and sneaking into his courtyard in the dead of night was not here to pay a social call over tea.
Gu Chengming didn't open his eyes. He held his meditation posture without moving a hair, but the spiritual power inside him had already begun circulating, ready to erupt within a single breath.
The intruder came over the courtyard wall and landed lightly on the flagstones. The footsteps were exceedingly faint — without the aid of the Red Dust Phantom Body Formula, even a Fourth Realm cultivator might not have caught them immediately.
Whoever it was had real cultivation, and considerable depth in concealment at the very least.
They paused in the courtyard for a moment, seemingly confirming the situation inside.
Then the footsteps resumed, moving slowly toward the bedchamber where Gu Chengming sat.
— The door pushed open.
A slender figure slid soundlessly into the room.
In the darkness, the figure seemed to let out a small breath of relief, then approached the "sleeping" target on the bed step by careful step.
The instant before that figure could touch the edge of the bed, Gu Chengming moved. He shot out of his cross-legged posture in a single burst, his left hand clamping around the intruder's wrist while his right brought out a spirit artifact he'd prepared beforehand — the one Elder Ren had once given him, the same one that had previously bound Nuo Tao and Yu Wenqiu.
By the time the everlasting lamp lit the room again, the uninvited guest was trussed up and pinned to the floor.
A muffled grunt came from the ground. The figure squirmed within the Immortal-Binding Rope, apparently trying to find a position that allowed for easier breathing. The rope had wrenched both her arms behind her back, and its spiritual power sealed the flow of qi through her meridians, leaving no room even to struggle.
He bent his head and studied his captive by the lamplight.
The pale blue palace robe had been crushed into a mess by her landing, but the distinctive fabric and cut were unmistakable in the light. A jade hairpin of superb quality had been fixed in her bun and now dangled crookedly by her ear, on the verge of falling.
And even bound hand and foot with an Immortal-Binding Rope and pressed against the cold floor tiles, that face showed not the slightest trace of expression.
As though being tied up, while admittedly outside her projections, wasn't so very far outside what she could tolerate.
Gu Chengming got a good look at the intruder's face and felt a headache coming on.
— Ji Yixi, Second Imperial Princess of the Great Qian.
"Forgive the late hour. I heard that Commander Gu had come to Floating Isle City, and came especially to pay a visit."
Level tone, proper phrasing — as though she hadn't just come over a wall and through a window, but had walked up to the front gate, presented a calling card, and been shown in by a servant.
"Your Highness." Gu Chengming's voice carried a mix of exasperation and annoyance. "Do you have any more normal way of visiting people?"
Recalling how unpleasant their last meeting had been, he was frankly lost for words.
Tied up on the floor and still able to say "came especially to pay a visit" without a flicker of embarrassment — was that thick skin, or was her mind simply wired differently from other people's?
Ji Yixi blinked, and realized she had apparently made him angry again.
Last time, she'd overdone it and left a terrible impression.
That time she had opened with "I know the dragon-qi in your body has yet to be roused," which had thoroughly spooked him.
This time, not only had she failed at "don't frighten him," she'd been mistaken for an intruder and tied up.
His tone was clearly displeased, and while the look on his face was restrained, it could not remotely be called friendly.
If she couldn't defuse his mood within the next few breaths, this hard-won chance at a meeting would end even more disastrously than the last one.
She searched the countless world-lines for: when you have angered someone you wish to befriend, what is the most effective response?
Countless scenarios across countless world-lines flashed through her mind at speed — apologizing, wheedling, crying, laughing, reasoning, shamelessness.
And among all these assorted approaches, one appeared with overwhelming frequency in the most effective outcomes.
The answer surged in, and she filtered out the option with the highest frequency of all.
Thud.
Gu Chengming witnessed something he would never in his life have predicted.
The Second Imperial Princess of the Great Qian, inheritor of the imperial family's hidden lineage and cultivator of the Record of the Myriad Worlds, a peerless genius capable of perceiving countless parallel world-lines all at once, dropped without the slightest warning — thud — flat onto the floor tiles in front of him.
Then she raised her head and gazed up at him piteously with those pale irises.
"Piteous," applied to most people, means reddened eyes, trembling lips, an air of fragile appeal.
Applied to Ji Yixi, "piteous" took the concrete form of staring at you and opening her eyes some fraction wider than usual. Even so, those slightly widened, nearly translucent eyes — combined with the angle of her kneeling on the floor looking up at him, the crumpled palace robe, and the crooked jade pin — did produce a picture with an indefinable pathos to it.
— Hang on. No. What is she doing?
Gu Chengming started to speak, his mind blanking, and reached down to pull Ji Yixi up.
The next instant, a knot of pitch-black qi shot out of Ji Yixi's sleeve.
It condensed rapidly in midair into a black dragon roughly two palms long.
The moment the little dragon appeared, that small dragon face was a study in sheer despairing exasperation.
It hovered above Ji Yixi's head, beating a pair of wings absurdly undersized for its body.
"Idiot! You actually knelt?!"
It had told her to befriend Gu Chengming the way a normal person would.
Climbing the wall was already absurd enough — it had wanted to burst out of her sleeve and start yelling right then, but it had held back.
It had held back when she got tied up. It had held back when she got interrogated.
But kneeling? You're an Imperial Princess of the Great Qian, damn it!
"And you—"
It whipped its head toward Gu Chengming, ready to deliver a thoroughly discourteous statement — and the words jammed in its throat.
Because the instant it turned its full attention onto Gu Chengming, it finally perceived his aura clearly.
And it recognized that aura. The little dragon froze rigid in midair.
Those black dragon eyes went as wide as they could go. Its mouth hung open. Whatever was supposed to follow "you" never came out.
An uncanny silence fell over the room.
And then—
Thud.
Three degrees more decisive than Ji Yixi's kneel a moment before.
The two-palm-long little black dragon dropped straight out of the air, all four claws forward, dragon head to the floor, and slammed down in front of Gu Chengming in a full prostration more textbook than Ji Yixi's own.
Ji Yixi, still kneeling, turned her head and stared blankly at the little dragon sprawled beside her.
Gu Chengming, still bent at the waist with his hand out to help someone up, stared just as blankly at the dragon flattened on the floor.
And the little dragon itself, shaking from snout to tail, quavered out:
"D-Dad…"
Even its whiskers were trembling.
"You're not dead?"
A question mark bloomed above Gu Chengming's head.
[Free and Unfettered Art snorts with laughter]
[Well I'll be damned. I knew tagging along with you would be a riot.]
[Free and Unfettered Art, thoroughly entertained, is currently drafting a new CG.]
"?"
No, seriously — and who are you supposed to be?
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