The midnight watch came in total silence.
On the Seventh Nether Floor of the Imperial Archive, the air grew colder as mist from the mountain roots seeped up through the cracks in the slate.
Li Xuan sat behind his mahogany desk in the Fourth Aisle, a dark blue robe draped loosely over his shoulders. On a corner of the desk stood a small copper stove, its few charcoal embers warming a red-clay teapot.
Day 26 Sign-In...
He rose, crossed to the northern wall, and laid his palm upon a moss-covered stone tablet set into the rock. Upon it were carved the names of the imperial architects who had raised the Archive three thousand years ago.
Hum.
[Location Verified: Founding Architect’s Boundary Stone (Historical Weight: 3,000 Years).]
[Daily Sign-In available. Would Host like to execute Sign-In?]
Execute.
[Executing Sign-In at: Founding Architect’s Boundary Stone.]
[Triggered 100-Fold Multiplier on Milestone Sign-In!]
[Congratulations! You have received: 100 Void-Refining Pills (Grade-9 Divine Quality)!]
[Congratulations! You have received Array Method: <Nine-Heavens Absolute Concealment Formation> (Grandmaster Array Scripture)]
A hundred translucent, star-shaped pills settled into the hidden space of his consciousness, breathing out a dense, cosmic energy of the purest kind. The old texts said one such pill could lift an ordinary mortal to Core Formation in a single night, and that nine of every ten who tried it did not live to see morning. Li Xuan let them sink to the bottom beside the others.
The scripture was another matter.
It unrolled in the jade hall of his spirit as nine gates of pale light, one above another. The Mind Palace could open only the first, called the Veil, and even that it opened slowly, one rune at a time. Li Xuan could not have hidden a city. He could not yet have hidden a cat.
But as the scripture settled, the carved names upon the tablet seemed to shift beneath his fingertips. They were not names at all. They were a key-script, three thousand years old, written in the same hand as the scripture. And far below his feet, in the black rock beneath the Archive, something vast turned over in its sleep.
Li Xuan felt it only as a faint hum in the soles of his feet. He had too little Qi to be pressed by it.
Dragon-Vein Suppression Array, he thought, and a faint smile touched his lips. So the Archive has been holding its breath for three thousand years.
He read the tablet again, name by name, with the patience of a man who has nothing but time. There were forty-one names, each cut in the same neat chisel hand: carvers, surveyors, masons. The forty-second was different. It had been cut later and far deeper, with the cold exactness of a sword rather than a chisel, and it was only a surname: Li. The name that had followed it had been scraped away.
An ancestor does not scrape his own name from a stone, Li Xuan thought. Someone scraped it for him.
He returned to his desk and filled his cup again. The fragrant steam rose slowly in the dim lamplight.
Chen had been the Third Prince’s man, and the Third Prince was not a man who left loose threads. Someone would come. Li Xuan could not say when. He could only prepare.
For two nights he worked. He mixed lampblack with old ink-dust and, with the finest brush he owned, painted nine runes of the Veil, each no bigger than a copper coin, beneath the feet of the shelves at the nine crossings of the aisles. His brush shook at the fourth rune and he began it again. On the second night, at the ninth, he stopped and sat very still for the length of three incense sticks, because the seed in his abdomen had grown dim.
The Veil could not kill. It could only turn light and sound aside, until every aisle looked like every other aisle, and a man who walked in would walk in circles.
But he did not mean to kill with it.
On the third night, at the midnight watch, the teapot rattled upon its stove.
Not from any wind. From the floor. Far above him, wards three thousand years old were being torn open one by one, and the stone beneath his feet felt every tear.
"They have taken their time," Li Xuan murmured, and raised his cup.
At the far end of the hall, Elder Gu snored on, a little too evenly.
Creak.
The iron-bound doors at the top of the stairway were forced open.
Twenty figures in tight midnight-black leather armor slid down the spiral stair like ghosts. Each wore a serrated blood-blade at his waist. Their eyes were cold and merciless, and the air around them carried the suffocating weight of veterans at the late stage of Foundation Establishment.
Grand Elder Du Mo led them. He hovered two inches above the stone steps, his gray robes stirring about him, and a thick, foul green mist crept from his sleeves and spread across the walls, making the stone bubble with black acid.
"Spread out," Du Mo rasped, in a voice like dry bones grinding together. "Kill the old keeper first. As for Prince Li Xuan, break his limbs, strip his skin, and bring him to me alive. The Crown Prince wants him cooked in the formation furnace."
"Understood," the twenty Shadow-Blood guards murmured as one. They became black streaks and vanished into the aisles.
Du Mo snorted. In his left hand he gripped a glowing green compass, and its needle pointed straight down at the floorboards beneath the Fourth Aisle, where the Imperial Dragon-Vein Core was said to lie.
He drifted between the tall mahogany shelves and entered the dim light of the Fourth Aisle.
"Hehehe... my dear former Crown Prince," Du Mo cackled, fixing his sunken eyes upon the young man who sat in silence behind the desk. "Do you wait for death, or are you simply too blind to see the reaper standing before you?"
Li Xuan kept his eyes upon his cup. He took a slow sip and savored the bitter-sweet aftertaste before setting it down upon its saucer.
"Elder Du Mo," he said softly. "You brought twenty men, and you forgot to bring boots that would not leave mud upon my clean floor."
Du Mo’s smile froze.
Before he could grasp the absurdity of a "cripple" complaining about mud, twenty dull, sickening thuds rang out from the dark aisles all around them.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Du Mo whipped his head around and spread out his divine sense.
In every aisle, a guard lay face down upon the slate. None bled. Their armor was whole and their blades were still in their sheaths. At the nine crossings, the Veil had folded each aisle into a copy of the last, and each man had found himself alone. Then, beneath their boots, the old black iron lines inlaid in the floor had woken and pressed down with the weight of a mountain upon every man who carried Qi. Their dantians had collapsed. They had died before they could cry out, so quickly and silently that not one drop of their blood had touched the stone.
"WHAT?" Du Mo’s face went ashen. He leaped backward, and the full power of his Core Formation cultivation burst out in a frantic effort to shield himself. Above his head rose a great green skull, a full zhang in height, roaring with flames that could melt flesh. "WHO IS IT? WHICH ANCESTOR LIES HIDDEN IN THIS ARCHIVE? SHOW YOURSELF!"
But the weight that had crushed the guards pressed upon him too. Sweat ran down his face. The green skull flickered. Its jaws trembled, and its walls thinned like wet paper under a thumb.
Li Xuan sighed, took up his horsehair broom in his left hand, and with his right dipped a finger into his teacup. He lifted from it a single, clear drop of tea.
"There is no ancestor down here," he said, looking at the drop as it trembled on his fingertip. "There is only a servant who dislikes loud noises."
He flicked his finger.
The drop flew.
It did not become a roaring dragon. It did not call down thunder or crack the stone walls. It remained a clear drop of tea, moving in a straight line, in silence, with the first form of the Water-Tracing Blade folded inside it like a seed inside a husk.
The great green skull, a defense said to withstand three Core Formation grandmasters, had been worn through by the weight of the old array. The drop passed through it as through damp paper.
Pfft.
It struck Du Mo between the brows and vanished into his skull.
The green flames guttered out like a candle in a draft, and his eyes bulged from their sockets. For two long breaths he hung in the air. Then a small pale lotus of sword intent bloomed in the center of his forehead, and in the space of a heartbeat his core, his meridians, and his mind were all wiped away.
Thump.
The Grand Elder of the Poison Sect sank to his knees. His brow struck the slate at the very edge of Li Xuan’s desk, and he was dead before he touched the floor.
Li Xuan did not move at once.
Under the desk, his right arm had gone numb to the shoulder. Cold sweat crept along his spine. The seed in his abdomen had dwindled to an ember, and for a moment his sight swam. A drop of tea was a lighter thing than a bamboo slip, and still the cost had been nearly the same.
He rose slowly, went around the body, and looked down at his desk.
Not a drop of tea had spilled. Yet it took both his hands to set the cup back upon its saucer, and he did it with great care.
At the far end of the hall, the snoring paused. One clouded eye opened in the dark, rested a moment upon the light of the Fourth Aisle, and closed again. The snoring resumed.
Li Xuan glanced at the green compass lying upon the slate. Its needle still trembled, and it still pointed at the floor, now directly beneath his own chair.
He took up his horsehair broom and shook it gently. Then he looked toward the dark stairway that led to the palace above, through ten zhang of living rock.
"My third brother is growing loud," he whispered, and a cold light moved in the depths of his eyes. "Perhaps... it is time to clear out the palace."
Not tonight, he thought. A man with a single thread should not try to cut a river.
But the thought had been spoken in the dark, and thoughts spoken in the dark grow roots.