Yixuan led Miguel over the high rosewood threshold.
A draft swept down the corridor to meet them, carrying the clean scent of pine needles.
Miguel turned toward the source of that wind, and the view the great hall had been blocking opened up all at once.
This was the real heartland of the ancient sect of Daoist arts.
None of the pressing weight of the steel jungle that sat at the center of New Eridu.
The whole of Yunkui Summit had been raised along the run of a steep ridgeline.
Broad stands of evergreens sprawled wherever the slope allowed, swallowing one weathered old building after another in green.
High on the cliff face, several clear mountain springs spilled down.
The water threaded through stone channels cut by hand, winding and doubling back before it emptied into the scattered courtyards below.
From this platform in front of the sect hall, the highest ground on the mountain, all of Yunkui Summit lay open to the eye.
“Mr.
Miguel, this way.” Yixuan walked ahead to lead him, her steps steady on the moss-grown stone stairs.
Miguel followed, his gaze traveling over the buildings with their upswept eaves.
“You picked a good spot,” Miguel said, making conversation.
“The air’s a whole lot better than downtown New Eridu.
Live here long enough and I bet you’d add years to your life.” The words loosened something in Yixuan, whose nerves had been drawn tight with worry over her sister.
“Your impression of Yunkui Summit is the same as most people’s, Mr.
Miguel,” she said with a soft laugh.
“Though I’ll admit it — compared to the city, the environment here really is better.” Now that the conversation had opened up, Yixuan began pointing out the various parts of the grounds for him.
“That is the training ground.
The disciples do their morning practice there.” Miguel looked where she pointed.
The clearing was a decent size, with rows of weapon racks lining its edges.
At the moment, though, only two or three young people in loose practice robes stood there holding horse stance.
The vast space around them made the emptiness impossible to miss.
Yixuan shifted her hand to the right.
“The three-story pavilion by the water channel is the archive pavilion.
The row of single-story houses beside it holds the disciples’ meditation rooms and living quarters.” Miguel took it all in.
Training ground, living quarters — there was hardly a soul anywhere.
Now and then someone dressed as a servant hurried past with a wooden basin, and that was all.
The heart of the sect was quiet to an unnatural degree.
“Is your mountain always this empty?” Miguel asked, drawing his gaze back, curiosity in his voice.
“Way I remember it, Yunkui Summit has a real name in New Eridu.
Figured you’d have disciples crawling all over the place.” Yixuan turned and continued down the steps.
“You must forgive the sight.” She smoothed back the white hair the wind had disordered.
“Our rules here are rather loose.
Cultivation is a matter of following one’s own nature, so the disciples don’t keep to the five-day week the citizens of New Eridu do.” Miguel caught up with her.
“Whenever a commission comes in, or a neighbor at the foot of the mountain asks us to read a house’s feng shui or divine good and ill fortune, they go down and work.” Yixuan paused, glancing back at him.
“Today happens to be a weekday, when the city puts out the most odd jobs.
Most of the disciples have gone down to take commissions and earn a little extra.
The ones still up here are either in secluded cultivation, or they’re like Fufu — the sort who’d rather stay on the mountain and cause trouble with their martial siblings.” Miguel grinned.
“So you’re running a full-service housekeeping agency up here.
Pretty broad line of business, too.” Yixuan shook her head, helpless.
“A sect has to keep running, and everyone has to eat.
You know what prices are like in New Eridu.
My fortune-telling alone would never feed a whole mountain.” The stairs ran out, and the two of them turned onto a level path of blue-stone brick.
The greenery grew thicker around them.
Sunlight fell through the gaps in the leaves and left dapples of light scattered across the flagstones.
Without seeming to notice, Yixuan slowed.
She looked down the little path ahead, which seemed to have no end at all, and her voice dropped.
“The truth is, the mountain isn’t this quiet only because they’ve gone down to take commissions.” Miguel picked up the change in her mood at once.
He didn’t interrupt.
He simply walked beside her.
“Thirteen years ago.” Yixuan’s fingers worried at the talisman gourd at her waist without her realizing it.
“The day of the Fall of Old Eridu.
My sister, and most of the senior disciples on the mountain then, all went down to save people.” She drew a deep breath, her chest rising and falling.
“The disaster came too suddenly.
Hollow Zero spread faster than anyone had predicted.
A great many of them never came back.” “The disciples you see now are mostly orphans the sect took in afterward, or newcomers recruited in the last few years.
Compared to how it was at its height, Yunkui Summit’s numbers are a shadow of what they were.” She turned to look at Miguel and forced out a smile.
“Forgive me.
I shouldn’t burden you with such heavy things.” Miguel studied that face and the strength she was pretending to.
He stopped, turning to take in the empty practice yards and silent houses.
Thirteen years ago.
That was the exact moment the Source of Creation had dropped him into this world.
The past surfaced.
Back then, generous accounting made him an ordinary man who had just been handed a cheat code.
He’d carried the highest-order Power of Creation, amplified by Mark Nine, but that power came shackled to a merciless limit.
One minute.
Sixty seconds, and no more.
In that one minute, deep in the heart of Hollow Zero’s rampage, bracing against the pressure of the Black Wall’s expansion, he had carried out every person he could find, one after another, until there was nothing left in him.
He really had given it everything.
His body spent past its limit.
His mind pushed to the edge.
And at the end, if he hadn’t burned every remaining second forcing a hole through the momentum of Hollow Zero’s expansion, that disaster would have taken several times as many lives.
But one man’s strength runs out.
Even at his absolute limit, plenty of people had still been swallowed by the calamity — in corners he never saw, at hours before he ever arrived.
The elders of Yunkui Summit.
Yijiang’s ruin, when she forced the Azure Empyrean Sword into motion.
All of it happened in that chaos.
Miguel breathed in deep, and the cold air poured into his lungs.
He was not that man anymore.
After ascending to the Third-Tier Divinity, he had wrested the Authorities of [Time] and [Space] away from the World’s Malice.
And afterward, to hold that malice in check more effectively, he had traced the fate-lines of countless people who, on the original timeline, would have crossed paths with Wise and Belle.
Some of them had been pulled off their wretched courses by his arrival and lived quiet, settled lives now.
And some, because his reach had fallen short back then, were still carrying the weight of old wounds today.
Miguel looked down at the blue flagstones under his feet.
Those regrets carved into the timeline — he wasn’t going to let them fester any longer.
If fate had put him in front of these people again, then it was his responsibility to work every one of those knots loose.
“Let’s go,” Miguel said, starting forward again, his voice level.
“We keep moving.” Yixuan gathered herself and hurried after him.
The deeper they went toward the rear mountain, the more hushed everything became.
A moment ago there had still been the occasional birdcall.
Now there was only the sound of their footsteps on the stone path.
Yixuan had changed, and it showed.
The closer they came to where she lived, the less she could hold on to the composure a Sect Master was supposed to have.
“Mr.
Miguel, that courtyard ahead is the one.” She pointed toward a dense stand of bamboo.
“When we go in, if my sister is… if her condition is bad, please don’t push yourself.” Her words came faster and faster without her meaning them to, and began to trip over each other.
“I’ve brought plenty of people to look at her over the years.
Every one of them said her soul was already empty.
I just… I just didn’t want to give up.” She kept talking as she walked, her hands wringing together in front of her.
“Over here is the herb lodge — my sister used to love puttering with medicinal plants in there.
No, wait, that’s the alchemy hall.
That’s not right either…” Strung between terror and hope, this normally composed Sect Master had lost the thread of her own sentences, and was misplacing buildings on her own mountain.
Miguel took it all in.
He didn’t correct her, and he didn’t offer comfort.
At a moment like this, words were worthless.
Only laying the facts in front of her would settle a heart that had hung in the air for thirteen years.
So the two of them kept a strange, unspoken accord.
One walking ahead, rambling through introductions she wasn’t paying attention to.
One walking behind, silent and full of thought.
The blue-brick path finally ended.
Half hidden in the bamboo, a small courtyard of old-fashioned make came into view.
The walls were laid in gray-blue brick, and the wooden gate stood half open.
It was so quiet here that even the wind had stopped.
That dignity and cold clarity unique to Yunkui Summit had been magnified inside this little courtyard until it was almost unbearable.
Yixuan stopped short.
In an instant she was clear-headed again, every scattered thought crushed down the moment her eyes landed on that wooden gate.
They had arrived.
Thirteen years of waiting, and today it would finally come to an answer.
Yixuan stood before the gate with her hand on the brass ring.
Her fingers trembled, and she couldn’t stop them.
Miguel came up beside her and halted.
“Open it.” His voice was quiet, and remarkably steady.
Yixuan bit down hard on her lip and shoved the gate open with both hands.
The wood let out a long, drawn-out creak.
A thick bitterness of medicine rolled out to meet them, mixed with the stale air of a place the sun hadn’t touched in years.
In the middle of the courtyard stood an ancient tree, long dead.
Directly across from them, the door of the main room was shut tight.
They crossed the yard and stopped in front of it.
Yixuan pushed the door open.
The light inside was dim, the heavy curtains drawn without a gap.
On the bed at the far end of the room, a figure lay perfectly still.
Long white hair spilled across the pillow.
The face turned up to the air was seven parts the mirror of Yixuan’s own, and drained of every trace of color.
Her chest barely moved at all.
Still, with none of the vitality of a living thing left in her.
The twelfth Sect Master of Yunkui Summit.
Yijiang.