That night, the air of the Seventh Nether Floor was still sharp with the tang of blood and poison.
Li Xuan stood in the Fourth Aisle and did not trust his legs. The numbness had crept from his arm into his shoulder, and every breath came thin. Twenty-one dead men lay upon the slate, and not one drop of blood stained the stone. The old black lines inlaid in the floor had fallen quiet again. In the corners where the green poison mist had gathered, they had drawn it down like water into dry sand, and the air cleared of its own accord.
Elder Gu rose slowly from his cot, rubbing his face with two trembling hands. He looked at the bodies. He looked at Li Xuan. He said nothing.
Then he took the key from his belt and went to fetch the hand-cart used for condemned records.
They worked until the fifth watch. Four trips, five bodies each, down the spiral stair to the old paper kiln. Li Xuan’s right arm hung useless, so Gu took the heavier ends, and he handled the dead as a man handles work he has done before. The iron door shut. The kiln roared. By dawn there was only white ash, armor and serrated blades and all. Among the ash of Du Mo’s belt, Li Xuan found a token of gold stamped with the seal of the Eastern Palace. The fire had not marked it. He wiped it clean and slid it into his sleeve beside the black box. Li Xuan swept the ash into an iron pan with his left hand, carried it to the ventilation shaft at the back of the Fourth Aisle, and let the mountain wind take it.
When it was over, the floor was spotless. A stranger would have taken the Seventh Nether Floor for a quiet, empty cellar of dusty paper.
Gu sank down onto his cot. He looked at the clean slate where twenty-one men had just died, then at Li Xuan, who was setting fresh water upon the stove.
"Boy..." Gu whispered, his hoarse voice shaking. "Du Mo was a famous butcher in the Southern Marches. Thirty years ago he killed a whole third-rate sect with a single breath of green fog. And you got rid of him with a drop of cold tea."
Li Xuan poured the boiling water into the red-clay teapot. "The tea was warm, Senior Gu. Cold tea ruins the stomach."
Elder Gu gave a dry, bitter laugh and reached for his wine gourd. Then he stopped. He looked at Li Xuan’s right hand, which was shaking too much to hold the pot steady, and he put the gourd down.
He rose, took the teapot, and poured the cup himself.
"A drop of warm tea," the old man muttered, "enough to wipe out a grandmaster of Core Formation. If the Crown Prince knew what sort of monster he had left sitting down here, he would flee the capital tonight."
"A monster would not need both hands to set down a cup." Li Xuan took the cup from him and drank slowly. His dark eyes were calm and deep as an ancient abyss. "Let him stay upon his throne a little longer, Senior. The throne room is noisy. Down here, it is quiet."
He closed his eyes and let his awareness sink into the Dao-Creation Mind Palace.
The hundred Void-Refining Pills lay in neat crystal jars upon a shelf of pale jade, each pulsing with pure, concentrated cosmic energy. He did not touch them. A pill that killed nine men in ten could wait for the tenth, and he had not yet become that man.
Instead he took a single cup of Spirit-Nourishing Jade Tea. He held a single sword-nourishing jade stone in his palm. He sat and breathed, and for the length of three incense sticks he did nothing at all. In the depths of his lower abdomen, the seed with its single pale root slowly drank the tea, drank the cool edge of the stone, and put out a second root, thin as a thread of silk.
Body Tempering, Fourth Stage.
It was a small thing, and no one in the world would have noticed it.
At the third watch, the Boundary Stone in the northern wall grew cold against his palm, as he had left it resting there. Three small, bright fears had stood at the top of the stair, shivered, and fled. The array had tasted them. Li Xuan listened to the running footsteps fade, and a faint smile touched his lips.
Let them be afraid. Fear is a better wall than stone.
In the great Eastern Palace, Crown Prince Li Chen dashed his jade cup against the rosewood table, and the fine vessel burst into fragments.
"Still no word?" Li Chen shouted, his face twisted with fury, glaring at the spymaster in black leather who knelt before him. "Twenty elite guards of the Shadow-Blood Battalion and the Grand Elder went down to the Seventh Floor two double-hours ago! How can a whole assault force vanish without a sound?"
The spymaster pressed his forehead against the cold marble and trembled. "Your Highness... three shadow scouts were sent to inspect the entrance a quarter-hour ago. The iron doors stand open. But there was no sound, no blood, and no sign of battle."
"And the Dragon-Vein Core?" Li Chen’s voice cracked with anxiety.
"The scouts could not go in, Your Highness." Cold sweat ran from the man’s chin. "At the threshold of the Seventh Floor, a strange and suffocating chill seized their souls. They said it was like stepping into an ancient tomb guarded by a sleeping primeval beast. They panicked and ran."
Li Chen’s heart sank. A thin, creeping cold ran along his spine.
First, Director Chen had vanished without a trace. Now a late-stage Core Formation elder and twenty elite assassins had vanished into the same dark hole.
"Li Xuan," he whispered, and his hands shook as he gripped his silk sleeves. "That waste... no. It cannot be. His dantian was shattered by his own hand. I watched his veins burst with my own eyes upon the white jade steps. He is a cripple. A hollow shell."
"Your Highness."
The solemn, aged voice came from a shadowed corner of the great hall.
A tall man in long robes of deep purple stepped into the light. He carried a heavy bronze staff hung with nine rings, and in his eyes burned two clear golden flames, the mark of an ancestor at the peak of the Nascent Soul Realm.
This was Imperial Protector Zhao, the only other elder who remained in the royal house of Great Liang.
"Protector Zhao!" Li Chen spun and bowed. "Has your divine sense found anything?"
Protector Zhao shook his head slowly, his face grave. "Three times I have swept the Imperial Archive with my Nascent Soul divine sense. The upper six floors are ordinary. But the Seventh Nether Floor is shielded by a barrier both vast and subtle. My divine sense strikes it and falls away, as water falls from steel."
Li Chen drew a sharp breath and stepped back. "A barrier? What barrier could an overlooked archive possibly hold?"
"Most likely the ancient formation left by the Founding Ancestor," Protector Zhao said coldly, and his golden eyes narrowed. "Perhaps the dragon-vein energy remaining in the mountain has woken the Archive’s own defenses. Or perhaps someone down there has roused the Founding Ancestor’s inheritance."
Li Chen’s face turned deathly pale. "You mean... Li Xuan?"
"Whoever it is." Protector Zhao struck the floor with his bronze staff, and the sound rang through the hall like a funeral bell. "Your coronation is in three days. The Grand Imperial Ancestral Rite will wake the ancestral arrays across the whole capital. At that moment I will take the royal elders down to the Seventh Floor myself and break that vault to pieces."
He turned his face toward the distant Imperial Archive, his voice cold and wholly sure of itself.
"Whoever hides down there, before a Nascent Soul ancestor, he is nothing but dust."
Ten zhang below the earth, the Boundary Stone grew warm.