Gu Chengming decided to call it quits on the evening of the fourth day.
It wasn't that he'd gotten bored of fighting. Every extra Son Coin nudged up his odds of winning over his beloved Hundred Bones Resonance, so naturally the more the better.
The problem was that he had badly underestimated the destructive power those four words — Loser Calls Me Daddy — held over the young generation of the cultivation world.
The turning point came that afternoon. He had just withdrawn from the Inner Mirror as usual and was about to pour himself a cup of tea when Yu Wenqiu draped herself lazily against the doorframe, a skewer of candied haws in hand, waggling it at him to ask if he wanted any.
Getting a no, she muttered something under her breath, took a bite herself, and then remembered the rather entertaining rumor making the rounds in Floating Isle City lately.
"By the way, Little Gu, have you been paying attention to the talk around the city about the Grand Tournament?"
"No. Why?"
"Word is the Floating Heaven Mystic Spirit Mirror is haunted." She bit off another haw and spoke around it. "They say there's some Third Realm monster in there killing everyone he sees, unbeaten across every major sect. And the name he uses is outrageous — something like Loser Calls Me Daddy."
"Several sect commanders got together over wine to draft a joint petition to the Mohist Gate demanding his real identity be made public. Supposedly Zhongli Yuan — the Sect Head of the Taiyi Sword Sect — already went to the Mohist Gate's main hall in person to pound the table."
Gu Chengming's hand paused a fraction around his teacup. "Oh? Is that so. Maybe he was just lucky."
"Lucky enough to win dozens of matches straight?"
Yu Wenqiu paused, as though a thought had just struck her, and eyed Gu Chengming with open suspicion.
Gu Chengming smiled, nodded, and took a sip of tea.
Mm. Nothing to do with me.
Once Yu Wenqiu left, Gu Chengming went straight back to his room and, with a faint pang of regret, deleted the account named "Loser Calls Me Daddy."
The name had existed for a grand total of four days, and in that time it had painted itself across Floating Isle City in the boldest of strokes.
[Hundred Bones Resonance, stricken to the core: Why would Heavenly Emperor Gu strip away his own title!]
[Qingxin Formula, giggling: Merit achieved, name concealed. Very tasteful.]
—Don't blame me. Blame the punching bags from the other sects.
"Loser Calls Me Daddy" vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. The prodigies of every sect, who had swallowed their pride and come back in for a rematch, poured into the Inner Mirror and could no longer find the name anywhere.
As if the man had never existed at all.
When the news reached Mu Chen of the Taiyi Sword Sect, he was silent for a long time. He couldn't put a name to what he felt. Relief? Frustration? Both, perhaps? He had even prepared an entire strategy tailored to a ten-blade flying sword formation, running it through his mind a hundred times over, confident he could last at least thirty breaths — and then the man had run.
"Just like that? He's gone?" Chen Ming stood behind Mu Chen, his tone complicated. "Without so much as an explanation?"
"What explanation do you want?" Mu Chen countered.
Chen Ming thought about it and found he couldn't say. He could hardly chase the man down and ask, "Excuse me, who are you? I'd like to call you Daddy so I can sleep at night," could he?
And so the disciples of the Taiyi Sword Sect were left with a bellyful of questions and grudges, forced to accept the fact that this debt could never be repaid.
But once the disciples' heated arguments died down, the legend of "Loser Calls Me Daddy" didn't die with them. It took root and grew through Floating Isle City faster than ever, evolving into a fully fleshed-out urban legend.
The storyteller at the Cloud-Gazing Tower worked it into his routine: in ancient times there had been a supreme master of the sword who, before his fall, sealed a lifetime of cultivation into the Floating Heaven Mystic Spirit Mirror, becoming a single strand of sword-soul that waited there for the heroes of later ages to test their blades against him.
Anyone who could last a hundred breaths under his hand would inherit the supreme master's mantle.
Someone in the audience called out, "So has anyone lasted a hundred breaths?"
The storyteller cracked his wooden block down on the table. "To this very day — not one man has passed ten!"
The hall erupted.
Of course, a rumor is only ever a rumor, good for a laugh over tea and nothing more.
Beneath Floating Isle City's blaze of lantern-light, however, not everyone was swept up in the excitement of the coming tournament.
Floating Isle City, eastern district, a secluded residence.
Late at night, Ji Yixi sat cross-legged behind a low desk. Spread before her was a map drawn in spiritual power, marked with the fluctuations of every spirit vein node in Floating Isle City, along with every anomaly she had gathered through various channels over the past seven days.
Ji Yixi closed her eyes and sank her consciousness into the perceptive state of the Record of the Myriad Worlds.
Countless parallel world-lines crisscrossed through her awareness. She swept through them one by one, all the lines that ended in collapse, searching for a shared trigger. In every one of those lines, the Grand Tournament of Floating Isle City had proceeded normally.
Disciples dueled, sparred, and prepared in the Secret Realm; everything ran in perfect order. And then, at some utterly unremarkable point in time, catastrophe fell without a single warning sign — as though that stretch of time had simply been deleted.
In every world-line where Floating Isle City met disaster, a span of time had been erased. Only one clue remained.
A name, spoken aloud.
In the instant that name was triggered inside the mirror, every cultivator who had ever established a spirit soul link with the Floating Heaven Mystic Spirit Mirror became a sacrifice.
Ji Yixi opened her eyes.
A name…
The Eternal Life Sect's hidden hand was anchored to a name.
But which name, exactly? Whose name?
She tried to push the derivation further, and the feedback the Record of the Myriad Worlds gave her at that node was as vague as a bank of heavy fog.
That in itself was deeply abnormal. As a rule, the more critical a causal node, the sharper the perception.
There was only one condition that could blur it: the causal node itself was still in an undetermined state. Which meant the name might not yet be fully activated.
Did the Eternal Life Sect need to uncover the true name of one specific person, to use as the medium for triggering the effect?
Or did the Eternal Life Sect intend to plant a name inside the mirror, so that every cultivator who spoke it or formed a causal tie to it would be contaminated?
Or was it the true name of the Red Dust Immortal, about to resurface in the world by way of this Grand Tournament…?
Overhead, the little dragon had woken from its doze at some point and was peering down with its head tilted.
"Fretting again?"
Ji Yixi let out a long breath.
"Fret your way to an answer yet?"
"I have a direction. The answer's still one step off."
The little dragon yawned and scratched its chin with the tip of its tail.
"So what do you plan to do?"
Ji Yixi didn't answer. She closed her eyes again and sank back into derivation.
The little dragon watched her a moment longer, then withdrew onto the roof beam.
It was used to this. Once the girl entered that state, the sky could fall and she wouldn't spare it a glance. Still, that clue — a name — had caught its attention too.
Binding a true name through the Law of Causality. Only an understanding of the Dao that had reached some nearly absurd height could accomplish a thing like that.
—Let it not be what it suspected.
Meanwhile.
At the north gate of Floating Isle City, a flying skiff settled slowly onto the docking ground. The party numbered a little over twenty, red robes like fire, skirts flaring in the wind.
The girl at their head wore the formal red robes of a Sect Master, her hair bound up neat and proper — none other than Fu Xiaoxiao.
She glanced over the city with the Red Dust Art out of habit. The mood inside Floating Isle City was every bit as lively as expected.
The will to win, nerves, excitement, itching eagerness — every vivid emotion belonging to young cultivators, woven thick together. But beneath that ordinary base tone, Fu Xiaoxiao caught something slightly off.
Those threads of causality, which should have been pure red, looked as though some invisible hand had quietly plucked at them, bending their courses just a little askew.
Fu Xiaoxiao frowned.
That Tianji Pavilion crowd really was getting less and less scrupulous.
As she understood it, Tianji Pavilion's divination arts carried a mild causal-interference effect by their very nature.
Every tournament, they meddled behind the scenes to one degree or another. It was an open secret among the great sects; as long as they didn't overdo it, nobody bothered to make an issue of it.
So Fu Xiaoxiao chalked the anomaly up to Tianji Pavilion's usual operations and dug no deeper.
After all, her mind was thoroughly occupied by something else.
—Gu Chengming was in Floating Isle City too.
The thought had refused to leave her alone from the moment she boarded the skiff. Along the way she had forcibly crushed it down no fewer than a hundred times with This Venerable One is here for the Grand Tournament, not to chase after a man, and every time she crushed it once it sprang back twice, leaving her distracted the whole journey — she'd even picked up her teacup upside down.
Still, as Acting Sect Master, duty came first.
The post-arrival procedures were tight and efficient.
Fu Xiaoxiao personally led her party to the Mohist Gate's main hall to register and collect their shard mirrors, then went without a pause to inspect the guest courtyards assigned to the Harmonious Joy Sect, checking the specifications of the protective formations room by room, confirming no eavesdropping spirit devices had been left behind, and laying down a fresh set of the Harmonious Joy Sect's own privacy wards.
After that came the routine meetings with the other sects' commanders, confirmation of the match schedule, an inventory of logistical supplies, and lodging arrangements for the disciples.
By the time the round of business was done, several days had passed.
Only then did Fu Xiaoxiao summon the two core disciples the Harmonious Joy Sect had brought to the tournament into her room.
Su Xiashao and Su Qiuzhi stood side by side before her.
Su Xiashao waited quietly for instruction. Su Qiuzhi stood straight enough, but her eyes had already begun drifting toward the window, wearing the expression of someone who knew exactly what was coming and whose heart had long since flown out of the room.
Fu Xiaoxiao gave her a look, and Su Qiuzhi's eyes snapped back at once.
"For this Grand Tournament, the Harmonious Joy Sect's priority is observation; competition is secondary." Fu Xiaoxiao's tone was strictly official. "The two of you fight as representatives of the sect. Your first task is to display the bearing of Harmonious Joy Sect disciples. Placement comes after that."
Su Xiashao nodded in acknowledgment.
"However—" Fu Xiaoxiao's gaze lingered half a breath longer on Su Qiuzhi. "For the duration of the tournament, preparation takes precedence over everything. Don't go where you shouldn't go. Don't go looking for who you shouldn't look for."
It could hardly have been put more plainly. Su Qiuzhi's mouth twitched, but she nodded obediently all the same. "Yes."
"Good. You may withdraw."
The two saluted and left. The room fell quiet.
Outside the window, dusk was sinking away bit by bit, and the lanterns at each sect's encampment came alight one after another, sketching Floating Isle City into the shape of a river of stars reflected in still water.
Listening to those footsteps recede, Fu Xiaoxiao decided she had done everything an Acting Sect Master ought to do today. Which meant, surely, that the hours after this could afford to be a little self-indulgent?
A cup of tea's worth of time later, once she had confirmed Su Qiuzhi's footsteps were well and truly gone, Fu Xiaoxiao shot to her feet.
The dignity of an Acting Sect Master shattered in that instant. She crossed to the bronze mirror in two long strides, unbound her hair, changed out of her Sect Master's red robes, pushed the window open, and stuck her head out to check the sky.
Night had fallen. Good.
Fu Xiaoxiao climbed out the window and melted into the dark, grinding her teeth all the while.
That infuriating Little Gu. Every single time, he waits for me to make the first move.
Last time at the Harmonious Joy Sect, she had been the one to go to him. Now she had come all the way to Floating Isle City and she was still the one going to him. A dignified Acting Sect Master, the Fish-Warden Elder of the Harmonious Joy Sect, and in this one matter she carried on like a sixteen-year-old girl. Truly humiliating.
But complaints aside, her feet never slowed a step.
The guest room's window was left ajar. Fu Xiaoxiao eased it open a crack and slipped in sideways.
The first thing she did on landing wasn't to say hello. She raised a hand, and a ward unfurled soundlessly to blanket the entire room — against it, any divine-sense probe below the Fifth Realm would sink away like a clay ox into the sea.
Only when that was done did she let out a long breath and turn around.
Gu Chengming was sitting on the couch watching her, faintly surprised and plainly pleased.
And on her side, all the resentment Fu Xiaoxiao had stockpiled over the whole walk evaporated the moment she saw him, replaced by a thoroughly undignified sort of delight.
"How did you know I'd come?" she asked, keeping her voice low.
"The Harmonious Joy Sect entered the city today. I saw your registration record at the Mohist Gate's main hall."
The tips of Fu Xiaoxiao's ears went red. "Couldn't you come find me first, just once?" she grumbled.
"You'd only just settled in. I was planning to call on you tomorrow."
"Really?"
"Really."
Fu Xiaoxiao studied him a moment or two, half believing, and let it go.
She sat down across from him and took the tea he poured.
"Is this Hundred Flowers Brew from the flask I packed for you?"
"Mm. More than half of it's still left."
The corners of Fu Xiaoxiao's mouth curled up, then flattened again at once.
"How have things been lately?"
"Not bad."
"Any other wicked women been leading you astray?"
It was word for word how Yu Wenqiu asked it. Gu Chengming answered with some amusement, "No."
Fu Xiaoxiao stared at him for several breaths, confirmed it, and finally let her shoulders drop.
"I missed you."
Gu Chengming reached over and pressed lightly on the top of her head.
Exactly the same gesture as when they'd parted at the Harmonious Joy Sect.
Fu Xiaoxiao huffed, and didn't bother smoothing the strands he'd mussed.
"Did you miss me?"
"Every day I've been thinking about when the right time to write back would be."
"I got your letters. Three of them." Fu Xiaoxiao pulled three jade slips from her sleeve and set them on the table. "I replied to every one. So why didn't you reply to my replies?"
"Because by the time I finished answering the third, you were already in Floating Isle City."
Fu Xiaoxiao counted back the dates. It did seem to line up. She tucked the jade slips back into her sleeve and huffed again.
They talked the whole night about small, ordinary things. Fu Xiaoxiao reported on the Harmonious Joy Sect's cleanup efforts, Su Qiuzhi's performance, Elder Jingxin's condition; Gu Chengming explained the Grand Tournament's format and the sights and customs of Floating Isle City.
When the talk turned to the tournament, something occurred to Fu Xiaoxiao.
"Oh — when I entered the city, I felt something strange."
"What?"
"The causal threads inside the city have been tampered with." She frowned. "At first I assumed Tianji Pavilion was up to its tricks, but thinking about it now, the method doesn't much resemble theirs."
Gu Chengming didn't respond, but he was already stringing that piece together with Ji Yixi's clue. This was not something to explain to Fu Xiaoxiao in detail just yet.
Until he had firmer intelligence, he didn't want her dragged into it.
"I'll keep an eye out," he said.
The night deepened.
[Yin-Yang Creation Strategy favorability +5]
…
Not until the eastern sky turned fish-belly white did Fu Xiaoxiao rise, reluctant to the last.
"I have to go."
She bound her hair up again and straightened her clothes, recovering some measure of the Acting Sect Master's poise. The faint red at the tips of her ears gave her away regardless.
"Next time you don't have to climb through the window. I'll come to you," Gu Chengming said.
"You said it." Fu Xiaoxiao pointed a finger at him. "No lying to me."
She pushed the window open and swung out, her figure vanishing into the thin mist of dawn. The Red Dust ward withdrew with her, that veil of concealing power ebbing away like a receding tide.
Floating Isle City at daybreak still lay under a thin haze. Most cultivators were asleep, and only the sound of water in the spirit-spring channels carried clearly through the stillness. It all looked no different from any ordinary dawn.
But no technique can ever be withdrawn one hundred percent cleanly. The Red Dust Art rides on emotion and breath, and its dispersal inevitably leaves the faintest residue.
That residue was so slight that the overwhelming majority of cultivators would never sense it at all.
As luck would have it, one person did.
Yu Wenqiu's drowsiness evaporated in an instant. She bolted upright, eyes going wide and round in the dark.
Residual Red Dust Art? Drifting out of Little Gu's courtyard?
Alarms blared through her head.
Harmonious Joy Sect! Wicked woman! The dead of night! Little Gu's room!
She had always known that something had most likely happened while Little Gu was away on assignment at the Harmonious Joy Sect.
That crudely made wrist guard, those subtle shifts in his aura — she wasn't blind.
But knowing and seeing with your own eyes are two different things.
With the first, she could still lie to herself that it might be a misunderstanding. The second tore away the last scrap of covering cloth.
Yu Wenqiu stood at the window, staring at that pale strip of dawn on the horizon, and urgency welled up in her.
Her original plan had been to wait until the Grand Tournament was completely over, pick an auspicious day, brace herself thoroughly, and confess her feelings to Little Gu in some dignified, graceful manner.
That whiff of Red Dust Qi had just wrecked the entire plan.
Hesitate any longer and the plump, dewy cabbage of her own household would be rooted up completely by the wild boars outside!
No — it was already being rooted up!
Yu Wenqiu set her teeth. She had to move faster.
Then again, moving faster was one thing; her nerves were another matter entirely.
Her lifetime experience in the field of confessing to another human being stood at exactly zero. She had spent so many more hours with swords than with people that the ratio didn't bear thinking about. Asking her to stand in front of Gu Chengming and say I like you—
Just imagining it made her knees go soft.
What to do?
Calm down. Calm down. When in doubt, cast a divination.
Yu Wenqiu's eyes lit up.
She thought of someone. Years ago, during her wandering days, she had befriended a woman in a small city who was a master of divination — a Tianji Pavilion disciple who, in their last exchange of letters, had mentioned coming to Floating Isle City to watch the spectacle.
If she could get her to cast a hexagram, she would at least have something solid to stand on: whether this grand confession plan boded fortune or disaster, whether to advance or retreat.
Mind made up, Yu Wenqiu moved at once.
She dug an unremarkable set of rogue-cultivator robes out of the bottom of a trunk, changed into them, and wrapped herself thoroughly in a face-veil. A dignified Elder of the Wenjian Sect, running off to Tianji Pavilion to beg a marriage-fate divination — if a fellow disciple spotted her, her face was forfeit for the rest of her life.
Taking advantage of the first light, while most cultivators were still abed, Yu Wenqiu slunk out of the Wenjian Sect encampment like a thief, hugging walls, cutting through alleys, and looping around a very long way before finally reaching the outer edge of Tianji Pavilion's grounds.
After some effort passing along a code phrase and verifying her identity, she was at last shown into her friend's guest room.
The woman who opened the door looked to be a little past thirty, her grey-white Daoist robes spotted with ink stains, her hair twisted up in a careless knot with two loose strands hanging by her ears, a scholar's easy indifference in her features. Zhou Xiaoyue: not especially famous among Tianji Pavilion's third-generation disciples, but uncannily accurate with the hexagrams.
Yu Wenqiu seized her hand and looked at her with beseeching eyes. "Sister Xiaoyue, I need your help!"
"It's — there's something fairly important I need to do soon, but I can't judge the timing, so I want you to cast a hexagram for me and see whether it bodes well or ill."
"So what is it?"
"It's, ah. A major life event."
"Could you be a bit more specific? Divination needs a clearly directed question. The vaguer you are, the less accurate the result."
Yu Wenqiu gritted her teeth and dropped her voice. "Marriage fate."
Zhou Xiaoyue's jaw dropped. "You have someone?"
"Not yet." Yu Wenqiu's face went up in flames. "There's just… someone I want to confess to."
Honestly, after knowing Yu Wenqiu this long, it was the first time she had ever heard anything of the sort.
It shook Zhou Xiaoyue's understanding of the world rather badly, and it was a good while before she managed, "Who is he?"
"Never mind that. Just tell me whether my confession will work."
Zhou Xiaoyue didn't press. She laid three bronze coins on the divination plate and drew spiritual power through her fingertips.
The coins spun, spirit-light flickering, the formation's patterns lighting up one ring after another.
Yu Wenqiu held her breath.
Several breaths later the three coins stopped spinning and settled together. Yu Wenqiu craned her neck to look. The arrangement of heads and tails formed a clear, unmistakable character on the tabletop.
—凶 (ill omen).
The confession — an ill omen?
It's over it's over it's over, even Heaven isn't on my side, does this mean Little Gu doesn't even—
Yu Wenqiu's whole life had already begun flashing before her eyes.
But just as her composure was about to collapse entirely, the woman across from her was in no hurry to speak.
Her brows were knit tight, her stare fixed on those few coins, her gaze sweeping over them again and again.
Yu Wenqiu noticed. "Wh-what is it? Is it especially bad? Catastrophically bad?"
"Don't panic."
Zhou Xiaoyue shook her head, reached out, and set her fingertips on the rim of the divination plate.
And then—
She rotated the entire plate ninety degrees on the tabletop.
That harsh, glaring 凶 turned over with it.
Yu Wenqiu stared blankly. Zhou Xiaoyue pointed at the overturned character.
"It isn't 凶 (ill omen). It's 区 (qu — district)."
"…?"
A question mark sprouted above Yu Wenqiu's head.
In the end, Yu Wenqiu never did work out what that 区 was supposed to mean.
Zhou Xiaoyue leafed through her classics for ages, then ran the derivation three more times on her fingers. Every result pointed to the same character, and she still couldn't produce a reasonable explanation for it.
Yu Wenqiu left the Tianji Pavilion grounds with a bellyful of doubt, that nonsensical 区 turning over and over in her head the entire way, refusing to be shaken loose.
But she was, after all, a woman who had weathered real storms. She soon forced the confusion down. Ill omen or district, the things that had to be done still had to be done — and the most pressing matter at hand wasn't the mystery of a single character, it was the Grand Tournament breathing down her neck.
As an Elder of the Wenjian Sect, she could hardly attend the ceremony with her head full of romantic entanglements.
Over the next two days, Floating Isle City grew livelier by the hour.
Gu Chengming wasn't idle either.
By day he cultivated in the guest courtyards, consolidating the Third Realm; by evening he met with Shen Ganqiu, Han Che, and the others to discuss the Wenjian Sect's arrangements for the tournament.
On the other side of things, Ji Yixi told Gu Chengming about the clue she had found — a name. He turned it over for a long time without reaching any conclusion, and finally set it aside for now.
The most pressing thing was tomorrow's Grand Tournament ceremony.
The night after the Grand Tournament, the hour of Zi.
Once night fell, Floating Isle City became quieter than it was by day.
The market streets that usually blazed with lanterns shut early, even the bustling Cloud-Gazing Tower closed ahead of time, and in the Wenjian Sect's guest courtyards nothing remained but the babble of water in the spirit-spring channels.
Gu Chengming sat cross-legged on the couch, eyes half-closed, running the night's last full Great Circulation of the Hundred Bones Resonance.
Blood and qi surged inside him like a tide. The Hundred Bones Resonance's body-refining force completed one full circuit along his meridians, packing his Third Realm foundation another degree tighter.
Gu Chengming exhaled a slow breath of turbid air and opened his eyes.
The sky outside was still pitch black. Two or three hours yet until dawn.
He didn't continue cultivating. He lay down instead, meaning to rest a little and be at full strength for tomorrow.
Dawn light came through the window lattice, laying neat bars of brightness across the floor.
Gu Chengming woke the moment the light touched his eyelids. The full, brimming warmth left over from last night's Hundred Bones Resonance cultivation hadn't entirely faded; his whole body was pleasantly hot, as if he'd been soaking in a hot spring.
He sat up and rolled his wrists. Footsteps approached outside the door.
Then Yu Wenqiu's voice—
"Little Gu! Are you up? The tournament ceremony's today, don't you dare be late!"
Gu Chengming answered through the door. "I'm up. Be right there."
He washed and dressed briskly, changing into the Wenjian Sect's formal sword-cultivator vestments, a standard-issue longsword hanging at his waist. The effect was crisp and quietly composed.
When he pushed the door open, Yu Wenqiu was leaning against the osmanthus tree in the yard gnawing on a piece of osmanthus cake. She had put on her formal Elder's vestments today as well, unusually tidy for once — though the crumbs at the corner of her mouth undercut the solemnity somewhat.
"Come on, come on." She chewed and hurried him along at the same time, already heading for the courtyard gate.
Gu Chengming followed.
Shen Ganqiu, Elder Han Che, and the rest of the competing disciples had already assembled at the encampment entrance. The party set out in formation, heading for the Wavewatch Pavilion at the center of Floating Isle City.
Along the way, the parties of every great sect converged from all directions.
Banners blotted out the sun over the main avenue, and the noise of the crowd rolled like thunder. Cultivators in the colors of a hundred sects merged into one long river flowing slowly toward the same point. Su Qingmeng walked at Gu Chengming's side, her gaze calm on the octagonal tower drawing steadily nearer.
Yu Wenqiu walked a little further back in the column, stealing glances at Gu Chengming's back as she went and then jerking her head away to pretend she was admiring the scenery.
—Her resolve was made. When exactly to confess was still an open question.
Today was out of the question; today was the opening ceremony, entirely inappropriate. Tomorrow wasn't great either — the disciples would be entering the Secret Realm, far too rushed.
So, after the tournament ended?
No good. If she waited until it ended, she'd be right back where she started!
Yu Wenqiu argued with herself the entire walk, and by the time she came back to her senses, the Wavewatch Pavilion had arrived.
The Wavewatch Pavilion.
Floating Isle City's landmark was grander than Gu Chengming had imagined.
The octagonal tower soared into the clouds, cast entirely from some unknown dark-grey metal, its surface carved dense with formation patterns that refracted a faint blue glimmer in the morning light. Every tier extended broad viewing platforms outward, and above the topmost tier hovered an enormous bronze mirror — the true body of the Floating Heaven Mystic Spirit Mirror.
The plaza below was already packed shoulder to shoulder.
The great sects were arrayed by positions determined by lot, banners standing thick as a forest. Further off, the crimson banners of the Harmonious Joy Sect snapped in the morning wind.
Fu Xiaoxiao stood at the head of her column, the Sect Master's red robes framing her slender figure, dignified and solemn.
Across several hundred people, her gaze crossed the sea of heads and found Gu Chengming in the Wenjian Sect's formation with perfect precision.
Their eyes brushed together for a heartbeat in midair.
Fu Xiaoxiao's mouth curved by an amount too small to see, and she withdrew her gaze at once. At the third quarter of the hour of Chen, the ceremony formally began.
The Sect Head of the Mohist Gate ascended the topmost platform of the Wavewatch Pavilion in person and delivered a brief address to the thousands of cultivators below.
It was largely ceremonial — welcoming the sects, wishing the tournament every success. Gu Chengming caught only the gist of it; most of his attention was on the stone platform at the center of the plaza, wrapped in spirit-light.
The platform was roughly three zhang square, carved from a single block of spirit stone black as ink, with a fist-sized spirit pearl set at each of its four corners. Golden formation lines linked the pearls to one another, forming a precise circuit.
At the exact center of the platform sat a single object.
It was a polyhedron about the size of a palm, translucent amber throughout, its surface crawling with countless minute patterns in slow motion. Look closely and you would realize those patterns were not carved formation lines at all, but some kind of self-generating order — as though a miniature world had been sealed inside the polyhedron and was running its own time, alone.
As the Mohist Gate's Sect Head finished his address, a Mohist Gate Elder with hair and beard gone entirely white stepped slowly up onto the platform under the eyes of the assembly.
By Gu Chengming's estimate, the Elder's cultivation was mid Fifth Realm at the very least — proof enough of how seriously the Mohist Gate took this.
The Elder walked to the center of the platform and lifted the amber spirit artifact in both hands.
The instant it left the stone, the spirit pearls at all four corners lit as one. Golden formation light raced along the circuit, and the ambient spiritual qi across the entire plaza spiked several times over.
Fu Xiaoxiao's eyes narrowed slightly. In that moment her Red Dust Art picked up a fluctuation that did not belong to any normal part of the ceremony.
But before she could examine it, the ceremony entered its critical stage.
The Mohist Gate Elder held the artifact aloft in both hands and began to chant the opening incantation in a low voice.
The words were quiet, yet spiritual power carried them clearly across the whole plaza. It was an ancient language, every syllable seeming to bear the weight of time, and those who heard it felt a helpless dizziness rise in them, as though they were being drawn slowly into some space and time utterly unlike the present world.
The artifact's radiance swelled brighter and brighter, and the miniature world within it accelerated sharply, countless patterns twisting and spinning, releasing wave after wave of spacetime ripples visible to the naked eye.
Gu Chengming's gaze locked onto the artifact, and an unaccountable unease welled up in him.
It had no cause, and it was overwhelmingly strong.
—And then the world stopped.
The breeze stopped. A spirit bird crossing above the plaza hung motionless in midair, wings frozen mid-spread. Thousands of cultivators froze where they stood — a hand still raised, a mouth slightly open, a head caught halfway through turning. Shen Ganqiu's gaze had congealed toward the stone platform. Han Che's hand had locked on his sword hilt. The half-piece of osmanthus cake Yu Wenqiu had been chewing hung between her teeth.
Even the Fifth Realm Mohist Gate Elder was no exception; his incantation broke off mid-syllable, his arms still holding the artifact up.
Across the whole of Floating Isle City, every sound in creation had gone silent.
Gu Chengming alone remained conscious — and he could not move.
In that dead stillness, a footstep sounded.
He couldn't turn his head. He could only use what perception was left to him to track where the sound came from.
The footsteps started at the edge of the plaza. They passed through the first row of frozen cultivators, through the second, through the third.
Closer and closer. Then a figure entered the edge of his vision.
A young man in moon-white brocade, the embroidery intricate, a jade belt at his waist, a folding fan closed in his hand.
Handsome features, an air of unhurried grace — a noble young lord who might have stepped straight out of a painted scroll.
He strolled through the petrified sea of people as if wandering a private garden, neither hurrying nor lagging, even pausing with genuine interest to look at one disciple caught mid-yawn, shaking his head slightly, and laughing.
Then he walked on, straight to the stone platform. Ascending it cost him nothing. The protective formations, which under ordinary circumstances could have withstood a full assault from a Fifth Realm cultivator, might as well not have existed before him — he made no attempt to break them at all, and they opened a path of their own accord, like servants welcoming their master home.
He came to a stop before the Fifth Realm Mohist Gate Elder and casually took the artifact from the old man's hands.
The motion was gentle, as though he were accepting a cup of tea from a friend.
With the artifact in hand, he lifted it to eye level and studied it a moment. The faint amber glow reflected in eyes so deep they had no bottom.
Gu Chengming watched it all, and the chill along his spine had never been this severe.
There was no evidence for it, and yet a certainty surfaced in him.
The man standing there was the Red Dust Immortal.
At that moment the man drew his gaze back from the artifact and turned his head slightly.
Those eyes crossed the thousands of cultivators in the plaza and came to rest on Gu Chengming. Their gazes met.
He smiled, and his voice was very soft, carrying the sentiment of old friends meeting again.
"We meet again."
He showed no intention of waiting for a reply. He simply lowered his eyes and looked back at the artifact in his hand.
Then he closed his grip, hard, on the key that generations of Mohist Gate Sect Heads had poured their entire lives into guarding. His fingers tightened slowly — slowly enough that Gu Chengming could clearly see the patterns on the artifact's surface begin to craze under the pressure.
Crack. The sound carried, and the first fissure opened across the surface.
Crrack.
A second, a third, spreading like a spiderweb, amber light leaking out through the gaps.
His fingers kept closing, as though crushing a piece of rotten wood.
Snap.
The artifact shattered to powder in his palm.
And then the world began to run backward.
The clouds in the sky slid in reverse at a speed the eye could follow, the dawn light retreating eastward gathered itself back together and dimmed, as if someone were dragging the canopy of heaven back frame by frame.
The frozen crowd in the plaza began to "revive" in a manner that made no sense — not resuming motion, but replaying every motion in reverse. Congealed arms drew back in. Heads turned halfway around turned back. Open mouths closed.
Footsteps retreated. Banners furled backward. Spirit-light flowed upstream.
Everything rewound at speed, in defiance of natural law.
Gu Chengming's consciousness was swept into the countercurrent like a fallen leaf caught in a flood. Everything in his vision blurred, faster and faster.
Day became night, night became day again, and the rate of retreat kept accelerating.
The plaza vanished. The main avenue vanished. The Wavewatch Pavilion vanished.
The last image left in his sight was the young man in moon-white brocade standing on the shattered stone platform, a handful of dust still clenched in his fist.
He was looking at Gu Chengming.
His lips seemed to move, but the sound was swallowed by the current.
Then everything went dark.
Gu Chengming's eyes flew open and he sucked in a great gasping breath.
His chest heaved violently, cold sweat soaking through his inner robe. He pushed himself upright, and his breathing gradually evened out.
Dawn light was coming through the window lattice onto the floor at precisely the angle and brightness it had held when he woke this morning.
His spiritual power circulated normally, his meridians were intact, his blood and qi brimming — exactly the state he had been in this morning, right after finishing his Hundred Bones Resonance cultivation.
As if none of it had ever happened at all.
"Little Gu! Are you up? The tournament ceremony's today, don't you dare be late!"
Word for word the same as the "first" time he'd heard it.
Had what happened in the plaza just now actually been real? Or had he fallen into some kind of illusion?
Or had he genuinely returned to this morning?
And as Gu Chengming was turning the situation over, a muffled grunt came from the bedding beside him — drowsy, and rather displeased.
His body tensed on reflex. He turned his head and found a figure curled up under the covers with its back to him.
A spill of hair white as snow lay across the pillow, giving off a faint silver sheen in the morning light. She wore a pure white training outfit, the clothing somewhat disordered, as though rumpled by turning over in her sleep.
Gu Chengming stared blankly at the person curled up in his bed. A question mark sprouted above his head.
—The Hundred Emperor?
Outside the door, Yu Wenqiu's voice came again.
"Little Gu? Why'd you go quiet? Are you still asleep? I'm coming in, all right?"
No, hold on — will somebody tell me what the hell is going on right now?
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