6.48 - The Fall of Jiankang

Standing atop her fan of silk and lacquered wood, Zhang Lifen hardened her heart and steeled her resolve. As used to the realities of the cultivation world as she was, this was different. The experts below, the strongest of them in the early Seventh Realm at best, all reacted differently to her sudden appearance alongside the legendary King Tan, the once-hidden patriarch of the Li, and the other two remaining core disciples of the Shrouded Peaks Sect.

Hostility, panic, preemptive attacks—it mattered little. Her bow of black qilin horn appeared in her hand, and she drew back the string. A thousand deadly arrows from the Heart Piercing Black Rain fell upon the city, and a thousand experts died. Next to her, Yi Xiurong called her nine golden disks, and nine beams of radiance swept over the crowds below. Ren Huang, Tan Zihao, and Li Renshu all landed in different sections of the city. Winter, desert, and flame all consumed the innocent and guilty alike.

Another thrum of her bowstring, and another cascade of death rained down on those below. Zhang Lifen looked over at Yi Xiurong. Her face was as hard and expressionless as Zhang Lifen imagined her own must be. He Yu had been right. This was an absolute slaughter. Hundreds of experts died each second. Yet to the west, where He Yu and the other two still battled Jin Xifeng, her presence remained as strong as ever. And for the life of her, Zhang Lifen couldn’t detect anyone other than Jin Xifeng herself.

“Grim work, isn’t it?” she asked, releasing another hail of arrows.

“It’s necessary,” Yi Xiurong said. Her voice was firm, yet there was a hollow note to it. Zhang Lifen understood. Although Yi Xiurong’s Dao of Radiance demanded harsh justice, it had never been cruel. Her way had always seen her threading the needle between seemingly incompatible extremes. This must be a test unlike any she’d ever faced.

Zhang Lifen was grateful her own Dao of Grace was largely ambivalent toward their grim work. So long as she carried herself with all the elegance of a true lady of the Way, she had little trouble reconciling her actions with her ideals. So long as she didn’t think too hard on what she did, she could justify her actions easily enough. To slaughter thousands could be a thing of beauty, if done with the deft hand of a true expert.

She thought that Ren Huang likely had the easiest time of them all, even compared to Tan Zihao. The king sought glorious battle, and while this certainly wasn’t it, he clearly had no objections to their work. She didn’t know what Li Renshu’s Dao was. Probably something about winter or ice. She couldn’t imagine how he squared this circle, but neither did she think he particularly needed to. But Huang… this sort of thing was likely enough to drive him to Divine Soul Apotheosis. The rage that had boiled within him for years—at Jin Xifeng, at all those who’d worked to free her, and all those who had gone over to her after she escaped—the hungering blaze of his spirit held no mercy for them.

“Ren Huang, the Insatiable Flame,” they called him. She glanced to the quarter of the city he was in. Already the blaze reached to the sky, black smoke spreading over the rest of Jiankang as more fuel lit up at his touch. At least he seemed to be enjoying himself for a change.

As she sent another volley of a thousand arrows down upon the citizens of Jiankang, she glanced westward once again. Jin Xifeng’s spirit seemed undiminished in Zhang Lifen’s sight. She did her best to push aside her worry for He Yu and the others. Trust, she told herself.

Either He Yu was right, and this truly was the key to victory, or he wasn’t. And if he wasn’t. Well, her conscience wouldn’t bother her for very long in that case.

*

Chen Fei ran through a nightmare. Her village burned, and raiders threatened to overwhelm the defenses the other adults had set up. Somewhere in the fighting, her parents lent their strength to the defense. But Chen Fei ran.

Through the night, up the mountain, she ran. By her reckoning, she should have reached Abbot Liao’s temple hours ago, but the trail seemed endless. She found only shadows grasping at her from the dark and whispering for her to stop. To let them in.

The further she ran, the higher up the mountain her legs carried her, the more lost she became. Turned around. Why couldn’t she find her way? This was her home. She’d spent countless hours here as a girl. She knew every last stone, stump, and clump of moss on this peak. Finally, if only to catch her bearings, she stopped.

When she turned around on the path, she saw her parents. Standing there, smiling, with her father’s arm around her mother’s waist.

“Fei, come. The attack is over. We pushed them back. It’s time to go home,” her mother said.

Chen Fei frowned. The attack was over already? It was still dark. Raids usually lasted through the night, with the attackers retreating only with the coming of dawn, usually. If it had been nomads instead of mere bandits, the raid could have lasted for days. And how had her parents caught up to her? She’d been climbing for what felt like hours.

“It’s okay if you’re afraid,” her father said.

She drew to a halt in the path. It was okay that she was afraid. But something twinged at the back of her mind. Hadn’t she already had this conversation with them?

She had. Before her breakthrough. Before reforging her body when she advanced to the Seventh Realm. She had visited her parents, and they hadn’t lived on this mountain for decades. They’d moved into the empire proper after the village nearly wasted away. After the famine and the drought and the continued raids. Something at the furthest edge of her perception shuddered. Like the world had taken an uncertain breath in anticipation of an untold disaster.

“You said that already,” Chen Fei said. Although she tried to keep the uncertainty from her voice as she spoke, it came through regardless. In the past, she would have felt ashamed. But it was fine. She didn’t have to know all the answers or do all the right things.

“We did, didn’t we?” her mother said. “We had this conversation when… you came to visit us.”

“I need to go,” Chen Fei said. With a brief mental command, she called her flying treasure from her storage space. Nothing happened.

“But why?” her father asked. “You have everything you need here. Everything you want.”

“No, I don’t,” she said.

A wrongness trembled along her Dao connection. The Dao of Protection hummed in the depths of her Daoist Mind, resonating with her Way. There was something she’d missed, something she was supposed to do. And this wasn’t it.

The world shuddered once more. Then, everything broke. She found herself standing in a ruined crater once more. A bloody sunset did battle in the sky with a raging storm. Jiankang sat far off on the horizon.

A hundred feet above her, He Yu did battle with Jin Xifeng. They were locked in a violent melee, Jin Xifeng’s swords darting at He Yu like so many hornets while he fought her off with grim desperation.

One key detail had changed while Chen Fei had been in whatever vision that was—their positions had switched. He Yu had his back turned toward the capital. And while Jin Xifeng pressed him with blade and technique alike, it seemed for all the world she was far more intent on getting past him, rather than defeating him outright.

*

Li Heng stood in a palace courtyard. The taiji had been carved into the tiles, and he stood in the exact center of the diagram. Memories, long forgotten and discarded, played out all around him. That first night when He Yu had arrived at the sect. Li Heng’s initial offer of aid and support. Those moments struggling in the wilds and under Old Guo’s tutelage. The rift in their friendship that grew in the silence of grievances unaired.

A certain bitterness gripped at his heart as he watched those sequences play out. Hadn’t he been over them enough already? Hadn’t he faced these demons time and again over the years? Envy had turned to shame then to regret years ago. Why was he revisiting this now, of all times? If he was here again, of all places, at least he knew what he needed to do.

“It isn’t easy,” he said, as much to the memories as himself, “to be the son of someone great. Neither is it easy to watch your peers pass you by. I had once thought I would be at least equal to my father and my grandfather. I had once thought a peasant boy from the southern empire would make a decent, if not particularly noteworthy retainer and eventual ally. Turns out I was wrong.”

As the memories shifted around him, Li Heng looked within himself. To where his Wayborn Seed had taken root, and reached through his spirit to form a connection with the Dao of Balance. Wasn’t this ultimately another manifestation of the same principle? Reconciling his expectations with the reality of his life was a sort of balance, was it not?

And besides, he’d come far. Further than he ever gave himself credit for, really. By all reasonable measures, he was a monster. A talent outshone by only a handful of absurdly powerful individuals—all of whom he counted as friends or more. What then, did it matter that he didn’t live up to them? Sure, he hadn’t earned an imperial commission. But under Jin Xifeng’s rule, what else should he expect? He’d spent fifteen years holed up in his father’s estate, then another ten in the Jade Kingdom. When he returned, he’d done so in open defiance to imperial rule. But here he was, facing down a newly ascended Ninth Realm expert, having just a single sixty-year cycle’s worth of life and experience behind him.

With that thought, the courtyard shuddered. The memories flickered all around him like candles in a draft. Li Heng smiled to himself.

“You think I don’t know? That I haven’t figured it out?” he asked nobody. At least nobody who was physically present. “You used this technique on me once before. I wrestled with its effects for years. I burdened myself with regret over my words and actions because of it. Are you really so arrogant that you think I’d have forgotten? To think you could use the same trick twice?”

Another shudder passed through this simulacrum of a world. Li Heng flexed his spirit, pushing outward in response. Frost lined the relief of the taiji stamped into the courtyard’s tiles. Winter gripped the sky and frost crept up the hem of his robes. With a great crack like an ice sheet crumbling with the coming of spring, the false world and its memories of lies fell away.

*

He Yu continued his struggle against Jin Xifeng, the sound of his guandao against her swords clashed against the current of the thunder, his storm, and the cries of the countless dead.

Jin Xifeng’s unleashed fury was a thing of horror to behold. The instant she infused the nine flying swords with her qi—a sickening mix if shadow and blood aspects—the battle swung decisively in her favor. In those opening seconds, she’d nearly taken both his arms, and his head. Even now, her fury beat back his storm, her nine bloody blades shattered every formation of the Spring Rain Mirror he could summon to his aid. It was as though all the heady he’d made while her servants died by the hundreds mattered for naught.

She was too much, and He Yu couldn’t say for how much longer he could last. Not against this.

An eruption of shadowy qi burst from the earth. A geyser of obliteration raced to him from below. He avoided it, but only just. The flickering micro-jumps of using the Sky Dragon’s Flight in short, controlled bursts and bolstered by the Empyrean Ninefold Body Tempering allowed him to escape the worst of it. Still, pain seared up his right arm as he was barely clipped by her eruptive technique. His robes and armor, both treasures in their own right, were gone from the shoulder down. His skin looked as though someone had poured boiling water over him. The pain was indescribable.

As her technique cleared, Jin Xifeng came for him, her nine blades pointed at his heart, and she stood atop the last of her blades, shadows creeping up both her arms and curling around her nine flying swords. She drew ever closer, and He Yu saw his death in her eyes.

He resolved to stand until the last. If that was all he could do against her, then that was what he’d do.

A towering blast of mountain qi pierced the sky from directly below Jin Xifeng. For an instant, Chen Fei, clad in the Titan’s Panoply, hung against the sunset above Jin Xifeng. The gleaming empyrean shine of her Falling Star Strike briefly overwhelmed the light cast by the crimson sun.

When she struck Jin Xifeng, the world below cracked for a hundred li in every direction. They both hit the ground an instant later. The accompanying explosion of power forced He Yu to shield his eyes.

Li Heng appeared next to him with the White Hare Dance. “Sorry,” he said, cracking a rueful smile. “We were a bit occupied.”

He Yu allowed himself an instant of relief. For how long he’d held against her alone, he couldn’t have said. But now, for the first time since she’d stopped holding back, he allowed himself to hope. His meridians ached, and his dantian was far emptier than he would have liked.

From his storage treasure, he drew out a medicinal pill. The air filled with its revitalizing scent. He popped it in his mouth and bit down. As the restorative qi surged through his meridians and restored his cultivation base, he turned to Li Heng. “I don’t think I could do this without you. Let’s finish it.”

Together, they threw themselves back into the fray.