Black cloud rolled across the vault of the chamber, muffled thunder striking overhead one peal on top of another, the cracks in the testing stone still spreading, five colors of mixed spirit energy spilling out everywhere like mad.
Chu Qingxue stood rigid where she was, her head humming as though she had been struck by lightning herself.
Three months she had lived here, careful to the last inch every single day, terrified that half a flaw would expose the truth of the body-snatching. She had thought taking Lin Jin to be tested was walking through a simple procedure, an hour's work at the outside — and who could have foreseen that a mere spirit test would call down a heaven-and-earth tribulation and blow open a bizarre body that devoured spiritual power by nature.
Let this reach the Elders' Hall, let the Enforcement Hall lay out its soul-searching formation, and Lin Jin would certainly be detained and put to severe interrogation, and the secret she had hidden so long might very well be stripped bare along with him.
The image of the Soul-Refining Lamp burning a soul flashed through her mind, and the anxiety and terror and frustration of days on end detonated at once. I'm not pretending any more. I'm laying my cards on the table.
She turned her head toward the outer sect disciples packed thick outside the doorway, her voice wrapped in a cold severity she could not hold down. "Two of you, come here. Help Senior Brother Lei out for treatment, and bring him a high-grade meridian-stabilizing pill."
Lei Wujie held the corner of his mouth where blood kept seeping through, his dantian meridians torn by the backlash so that every movement dragged a stabbing pain through him, and still he forced himself half a step forward, his eyes full of worry. "Qingxue, the phenomenon here is dangerous. I cannot leave you to stand against it alone. I can still call up lightning to help you..."
Chu Qingxue only raised an eyelid a fraction, not the least room for discussion behind it, and lifted her chin lightly to the disciples on either side.
Two strong outer sect disciples came forward at once and took Lei Wujie by the arms, one to a side. With his cultivation damaged he could not break free at all, and could only be half dragged and half carried out, turning his head again and again the whole way, unable to let the matter go.
The heavy stone door came down with a crash and shut out the cries rising and falling outside. Nothing was left in the sealed chamber but the roar of the tribulation cloud and the shrill hum of disordered energies colliding.
Chu Qingxue let her sleeves fall slowly. The Golden Core power that had lain quiet in her so long churned and boiled beyond her control. This Flawless Sword Body held a vast reservoir of origin water energy to begin with, and every day she had deliberately sealed it down layer by layer, terrified that a loss of control would expose the fact that she could not control power at all. Now every one of those fetters broke apart at once. Ice-blue spirit mist detonated off her without cease, the hem of her white robe flung about by the waves of it, and the sheer strength of it frightened even her.
She raised her eyes to Lin Jin hanging in the air with his energy rioting, angry and alarmed at once, and muttered through her teeth, "Lin Jin, today you are going to settle down whether you like it or not. Grit your teeth for me."
And the Lin Jin in the air had long since come apart at the seams.
When the energy first entered him he had been full of nothing but wonder and elation, certain he had finally come into the heaven-defying fortune every novel protagonist was issued as standard, and the thoughts of a heavenly spirit root, of standing at the summit, of being looked up to had grown wild in him.
Then the tearing agony had come up out of his dantian, the tribulation cloud had pressed down from the ninth heaven, and the malevolent energy the tribulation carried with it had driven straight into his sea of consciousness through the opened breach of his spirit root.
Every greed, every obsession, every possessive impulse buried at the bottom of him and deliberately held down in ordinary life was magnified without limit by that malevolence.
He wanted limitless spiritual power. He wanted to stand above every cultivator alive. He wanted sole possession of Chu Qingxue, the one person who had treated him well. That small edgelord ambition of his was catalyzed by the devil energy, and thoughts of violence and blood began to grow out of it by degrees.
The devouring physique newly woken in him took its own advantage of the chaos, seizing wildly at the lightning energy Lei Wujie had passed in and at the five phases of mixed energy spilling through the room, and the mongrel, alien power washed over his spirit and ate away his own gentle consciousness a piece at a time.
The clear-headed consciousness that belonged to Lin Jin retreated and curled inward, while a layer of dark purple evil markings raced up his neck and across his limbs, and the flesh of his chest tore itself open along a seam to bare a pulsing crimson spirit-devouring crystal, every beat of it dragging the surrounding energy into him in a frenzy.
The clear eyes of a young man filled entirely with the red of blood, not a scrap of reason left in them, nothing there but an endless famished urge to take.
"Spiritual power... it smells so good... give me all of it to swallow..."
A hoarse, greedy snarl rolled out of his throat. His limbs bunched, and the whole of him became a purple-black afterimage, hurling itself straight at Chu Qingxue on a wave of devouring force, sharp fangs bared, aimed at her shoulder, meaning to bite through flesh and draw off the pure origin of her mutated water root.
Chu Qingxue did not give an inch where she stood. She did not dodge, did not evade.
One turn of thought, and thick, solid ice-blue water armor covered her shoulder, layer upon layer of spirit patterns woven into an impenetrable barrier.
A dull thud sounded. Lin Jin bit down hard on the armor of spiritual power, his teeth struck the utter cold of the water energy, the shock of it numbed his skull, and the rebound flung him away to crash down hard at the edge of the white jade platform.
He braced all four limbs on the ground, fingertips gouging into the jade surface, scarlet eyes locked on the dense water energy about Chu Qingxue, the crystal in his chest beating faster and faster, the purple markings on him glaring bright, and arched his back to charge again.
Chu Qingxue stepped forward onto the air, an array of ice patterns spreading out beneath her feet, drawing all the disordered five-phase energy around them off to either side and cutting Lin Jin's devouring pull away from it, and her voice came weary and resigned. "Idiot. One day in the cultivation world and you've made one mess after another. I truly have no idea what to do with you."
"Stop letting the malevolence take your mind. Get some sleep. Every trouble outside this room, I will carry myself. The two of us are going to live properly in this cultivation world, whatever it takes."
Before the words were finished she brought her right hand up in sword fingers, gathered the origin water power of her entire meridian system at the fingertips, and a shaft of ice-blue light condensed to its utmost pierced the air and struck straight at the sea of consciousness behind Lin Jin's brow, meaning to shatter the tribulation malevolence that had invaded his spirit and wake his own mind.
BOOM!
The light drove hard into his brow, the force of it carrying the power of frozen ice through his whole body, and his back slammed into the wall of the chamber. The hard white jade split into deep cracks like a spider's web and fragments of stone came rattling down.
Lin Jin slid limply down the wall, the purple markings on him flickering light and dark, two consciousnesses tearing at each other inside him, his limbs jerking hard beyond his control, the red glow of the crystal in his chest strengthening and failing by turns. He fought to brace himself on the floor and meant to rise and kill again — and out of his throat came a hoarse man's voice that did not belong to Lin Jin at all, ancient, and steeped in a hatred cut to the bone.
"The Flawless Sword Body... ten thousand years, and it is the Flawless Sword Body again... Gu Qinghan. You are a ghost that will not disperse. You are actually still alive!"
As the words ended Lin Jin's body went slack and he fell heavily to the ground, the scarlet eyes closing slowly, the rioting devouring power about him withering all at once.
Chu Qingxue stood where she was, the light at her fingertips fading slowly, and a vast wave rose in her.
Gu Qinghan?
She turned over every one of the original owner's twenty years of memory, and she had read through tens of thousands of the Ethereal Sword Sect's ancient volumes. She had never once heard that name.
The soul that had just spoken was absolutely not Lin Jin.
Her own bro was flighty and easy-natured; he could not have produced words like those, cold and vicious and freighted with a ten-thousand-year grudge.
In that moment when the tribulation's malevolence invaded and the devouring physique woke, a foreign soul that had lain dormant for ten thousand years had seized its chance and taken Lin Jin's sea of consciousness.