Chương 13: Chapter 12: OF THE STONE

A grossly oversized crystal arrow bound straight for Elder Weiming's chest. In the split-second before the spear reached Elder Weiming, a gleamstone barrier winked into existence in front of her, over her upper body.

Gleaming End went through it without stopping—the barrier doing its job with all the effectiveness of a paper umbrella in a thunderstorm—and continued with its flight, entirely unhindered, to burrow itself into Elder Weiming's chest. Elder Weiming's body, much like the barrier, was run through without slowing down the spear in the slightest, and through the gleamstone barrier Elder Weiming had summoned Jieyuan saw Gleaming End disappear past the illusory wall sealing the cave.

Blood, dark and red, bubbled around the elder's chest from the gaping hole Gleaming End had left in its wake. A hole big enough, clear enough, that he could see past Elder Weiming and into the illusory gleamstone wall behind her. A hole where her heart should've been. The floating gleamstone barrier Elder Weiming had summoned flashed out of existence as suddenly as it'd appeared. Elder Weiming dropped her saber and brought up both hands to clutch at her chest.

She stared at them—at Daojue, most of all—with a look of utter disbelief on her face. Blood spurted out of her mouth in a sickly, wet cough, and she stumbled forward, a step, then two, before falling to her knees. All the while, she didn't take her eyes off Daojue. Elder Weiming's mouth moved soundlessly, but all that she managed was another bloody cough before she slumped, fully collapsing onto the floor. And there she remained, lying completely still. Dead.

"Well." Jieyuan eyed the dead inner elder.

"That's one way to solve our problem, I guess." Just to be sure, he took a few steps forward, getting himself close enough to get the corpse within range of his soulsenses. He confirmed that there was nothing chromal or spiritual left behind in Elder Weiming's body besides the chromal artifacts she had on her, her soul having already been plucked by the Silver Stream. Jieyuan wasn't sure where to even begin. So much had happened in so little time, and most of it defied explanation.

From Daojue somehow finding this cave, to Daojue somehow bonding the spear, to Elder Weiming somehow finding them, and now to Daojue somehow getting the jump on her and killing her on the spot. Somehow, somehow, somehow, somehow. And as if that wasn't enough, the only one in any position to answer all but one of those questions was Daojue. Daojue, who was just about the most obstinately secretive person Jieyuan had ever met. Part of Jieyuan felt very much so vindicated, though. Just about triumphant, really.

Because if there had ever been any doubt that Daojue was special? Well, those doubts had just been killed as surely as Daojue had killed Elder Weiming. Killed good and dead. He also strongly suspected that Daojue's mysterious red ring had something to do with this whole situation. He was about to turn back when Daojue rushed past him, past Elder Weiming's body, and then out through the illusory wall behind her, all without stopping. Gleaming End, Jieyuan realized.

It had gone through Elder Weiming and flown out of the cave; Daojue was definitely in a hurry to recover the above-Redrealm weapon he'd just launched out of sight. Meiyao stepped up beside him. He suspected the dazed look she wore was mirrored on his face.

"So," he began, "that was that." Meiyao didn't seem to hear him. She just stared down at Elder Weiming's corpse. Deciding to leave Meiyao to her thoughts, Jieyuan turned away and began looking around the cave. Daojue had stuck around them so far, so he reckoned there was no need to go running off after him. Once Daojue recovered his spear, he should make his way back.

Jieyuan's eyes landed on the golden sphere lying beside the crystallized body of Protector Yuanzhi, but after some thought he decided to leave it aside for now. He instead narrowed his eyes at the protector's corpse, looking it over more thoroughly, approaching it as he did. He likewise focused his soulsenses on it. His closer inspection only served to confirm the first impression he'd gotten.

Protector Yuanzhi's robes and everything she'd had on her besides Gleaming End had been entirely converted together with her body into purplish gleamstone. Pursing his lips, he stepped away from it and ran his eyes around the cave, through its floors and walls. He wasn't sure what he was looking for. Anything, really. Anything that wasn't gleamstone. He caught something on the edge of his soulsenses, to his right. A small first-shade red form. Barely a moment and four quick strides later, he was standing over it.

He eyed the little green crystal block on the ground, lying right beside the wall. Crystal, but not gleamstone. Jade. He immediately picked it up.

"Did you find something?" Meiyao's voice came from behind him. Turning around, Jieyuan found that Meiyao had left her spot and moved closer, her eyes on him, curious. He held out the object for her to see.

"A jadebook." Excitement bubbled inside him. The last jadebook he'd come across had been Rongkai's, and it'd pointed him towards what could very well be a Violetsoul's inheritance. He didn't need this one to have something quite at that level, though. He'd already be plenty satisfied if it could explain how exactly Yuanzhi had been converted into gleamstone. Meiyao glanced from the jadebook to Protector Yuanzhi's crystallized form, and then back to it.

"What does it say?"

"Haven't looked through it yet," Jieyuan said. He looked around the cave one last time, but it wasn't that big, and by now there wasn't a spot of it that his soulsenses hadn't brushed past at least once. He made his way back over to the entrance, Meiyao keeping pace with him.

"But I say we should first figure out what to do about that"—he nodded at the one corpse that hadn't been mysteriously transmuted into crystal—"and our plans for the short term. Stay in the cave? Leave the cave?" Meiyao furrowed her brow.

"I think we're better off leaving. Weiming somehow tracked us down, and it's clear that whatever it is she's involved in, she's not alone." She paused, frown deepening, like she was gathering her thoughts.

"So whatever method she used to find us, we have to assume that the others also have it, and that there will be more people coming after us. It's unlikely that we'd be able to take them by surprise like Daojue just did, so that'd mean being stuck in an enclosed space with what might very well be another tenth-step Redrealm. Or even more than one." She narrowed her eyes down at Elder Weiming's corpse.

"Our chances won't be that much better on open ground, particularly not against a tenth-step Redsoul, let alone two or more, but I have another Radiant Light Haven talisman with me. It's our best bet, and it won't work in an enclosed space like this."

"Radiant Light Haven?" Jieyuan asked.

"That's the talisman you used earlier?" Meiyao gave a slow nod. She seemed distracted.

"Aunt Yuyan handed me two of them, right before the entrance trials. Told me to use them in case anything happened on a mission outside the sect, to buy myself enough time for someone else to arrive."

"All right," Jieyuan said.

"So we've got a talisman that can stop a tenth-step Redrealm for… well, at least a while, and Gleaming End, which can stop a tenth-step Redrealm… well, permanently. We can work with that." His eyes found Elder Weiming's corpse.

"And that's not everything, either." He made his way over to the body lying by the mouth of the cave and knelt down beside the little pool of blood spreading beneath it. Meiyao followed. Grabbing onto the body's shoulders, he gently turned it over, face up. His throat tightened as he took in Elder Weiming's chalky, bloodless face. The eerie purple glow that filled the cave gave the dead woman's still, placid expression a ghastly, spectral quality. This … This was a tenth-step Redsoul. An inner elder.

A cultivator who'd faced the First Pain over and over, for years, decades. Who'd nine times endured the Second Pain, climbing all the way from mundanity to the peak of Redrealm. And someone like that was dead now, just like this.

"Oh. She was young," Meiyao said, kneeling beside him.

"Probably not that much older than us. Death has barely aged her." Jieyuan studied the woman's face more closely and found that Meiyao was right. Elder Weiming did look older than before, but only slightly so. Cultivators had their lives prolonged by their mantle (at Redrealm, their lifespan was doubled to three hundred years) and the way they aged was adjusted accordingly. But upon death, in the absence of the mantle, their body would take on its natural age.

Looking at Elder Weiming now, he'd put her in her mid-thirties. He shifted his gaze away after a while, refusing to dwell on the matter any longer. There was no point to it. Gently, he patted down Elder Weiming's robes while searching her body with his soulsenses. From a pocket in her outer robe, Jieyuan fished out Elder Weiming's holder pouch, then began throwing all the other artifacts he found on her inside it.

Meiyao helped, removing Elder Weiming's armor—her greaves and gauntlets, which were lying loose around the limbs they covered—and similarly packing it away inside the holder pouch. Also into the pouch went the red skillseed Meiyao got from the elder's chest, under her robes. Jieyuan also found three jadebooks already inside the holder; and he took them out and deposited them in an inner pocket of his outer robe. After putting Elder Weiming's holder pouch away inside his, Jieyuan stood up together with Meiyao.

He then looked back into the cave and nodded at the golden sphere lying beside Protector Yuanzhi.

"What about that?"

"Leave it." Meiyao barely spared the field-focus artifact a glance.

"The illusory field at the entrance is made specifically for this cave. Won't work anywhere else." She began walking away, stepping around Elder Weiming's body, before she disappeared past the illusory wall. Jieyuan made to follow her but found himself stopping right at the entrance, and his gaze flitted between the two corpses before settling on Protector Yuanzhi's crystallized form.

As he stared at it, he found all the reservations he'd initially felt over about the Gleamstone Valley, the reservations that had gradually faded over the last couple of days, resurfacing. Suddenly he felt as if he wasn't looking at the cave, but rather at some bizarre, crystalline perversion of a stomach, one into which Yuanzhi had been swallowed. Well, that seemed as sure a sign to leave as any.

Without another backward glance, he poked his head past the fake wall, out into the open; glancing down he saw Meiyao was on the cliffside, already halfway to the ground. Daojue wasn't anywhere in sight. A quick survey of the wall around the cave, and he found suitable handholds. He grabbed onto them, and after that it was a quick climb down to the ground.

His feet making contact with the gleamstone floor, Jieyuan pushed off the cliffside and turned around; he found that Meiyao was waiting for him next to the tree line, and more importantly, that Daojue was back. He was a little further behind Meiyao, Gleaming End in hand. Although Jieyuan had guessed that Daojue would return, he still felt some relief at the sight of his teammate.

And also at the sight of Gleaming End—because should they come across any other murderous tenth-step Redsouls, the crystal spear could very well be their only chance at survival. The way Gleaming End had effortlessly cut down Elder Weiming earlier, was proof that Daojue had really bonded the weapon. It had gone through the gleamstone wall she'd summoned effortlessly. That meant Daojue had changed the expression of its Law to offensive, and he could've only done so if he'd bonded it.

If he hadn't done so, if Gleaming End's Law had remained strictly defensive, then while the spear would have been indestructible to Redrealm entities, it wouldn't have been able to ignore a Redrealm's entity's defenses like that. Jieyuan stared at the spear; he still had all sorts of questions about it, but he forced himself to look away; they had more pressing matters to deal with right now. And besides, knowing Daojue, Jieyuan had a feeling his questions would go unanswered. He waved his two teammates over.

"All right," he said.

"I say our priority is getting away from here. Then we find somewhere to settle down and go through everything. In the meanwhile…" He reached into his outer robe and took out the three jadebooks he'd gotten from Elder Weiming. He tossed one to Daojue and another to Meiyao.

"We go through this as we run and see if we can figure out how exactly Elder Weiming tracked us to the cave and whether we can do something about it. Sounds good?"

"Fine by me," Meiyao said, closing her hand around the jadebook. Daojue wordlessly accepted the jadebook.

"We head back, away from the Sixth Ring," Jieyuan continued.

"Later we can decide if it's better to stay here in the Inner Valley or return to the Outer Valley, but for now, we should make our way back at least to the Third Ring. We already have enough problems to deal with, and we don't need to add high-step gleam beasts to them. Meiyao, can you lead the way?" Meiyao nodded and set off, walking toward the tree, away from the Gleamstone Flaw. Jieyuan and Daojue followed. As they walked, Jieyuan connected his chroma to the jadebook he'd held onto.

Its contents appeared in his mind's eye, and he kept half his attention on it, the other on his surroundings. It barely took him a few seconds to realize his jadebook was a bust. Nothing important on it, just some inscripts and what seemed to be instructions on how to inscribe them. All that told him was that Elder Weiming was an inscriber, or at least dabbled in inscribing. Not exactly the crucial, life-saving knowledge he was looking for. Hopefully Meiyao or Daojue would have better luck.

—∞— Jieyuan had spent fifteen nights in the Gleamstone Valley. The first handful of them, he'd been tense, on edge, because of a rather unfortunate confluence of factors. One of those factors was that, new as he'd been to the forest and unused to its particular brand of bizarre beauty, the nighttime darkness seemed to him to elevate the Gleamstone Valley's glowing, crystalline eeriness to greater, more chilling and unsettling heights.

Another was the looming possibility of gleam beasts (particularly ones that were where they had no business being like the trio of onyx gleam wolves they'd faced in the Second Ring) wandering his way and catching him unawares. And then there was the whole situation between Meiyao and Daojue, which had been so tense that every time Jieyuan went to sleep he'd wonder if, when he awoke, he'd find that one of his teammates had killed the other.

Over the next few days, though, Jieyuan had grown used both to the glowing, kaleidoscopic living crystals that comprised the Gleamstone Valley and to the idea that a gleam beast could pop up uninvited at any moment. Meiyao had also cooled off some, and though she did not entirely give up her feud with Daojue, she'd settled for ignoring their indifferent teammate, which was already a marked improvement.

And so Jieyuan had ended up adapting, falling into a rhythm, and before long, he'd found that the crystalline landscape had stopped bothering him. And now we're back to step one, Jieyuan thought to himself grimly. That sense of security that had only just started to return to him had been completely wiped off. If anything, Jieyuan would say that the coming night, his sixteenth night in the Gleamstone Valley, might be the worst one yet.

And from the look of things, the nights that'd follow didn't promise to be any better. Jieyuan was crouched on the ground. Lying beside him now was Elder Weiming's holder pouch, drawn fully open; he had one of his arms inside it, pulling out the items inside one by one and depositing them on the ground in front of him. He'd placed himself between Daojue and Meiyao—in this case, physically and figuratively. The whole feud between Meiyao and Daojue? It was back. Full force. With a vengeance.

And he reckoned that just about the only thing staying Meiyao's hand, besides his physical presence between the two, was that she probably knew (at some level, one she'd probably sooner die than admit to) that they'd be better off with Daojue around if they were attacked. And an attack was very much a possibility. The other two jadebooks had similarly been busts, meaning they were no closer to finding out how Elder Weiming had tracked them down, why she'd been after them, or who else was involved in this matter.

They'd already decided they'd be staying in the Third Ring until the end of the Outer Hunt. That'd been just about the only thing Meiyao and Daojue had been able to agree on, though purportedly for entirely different reasons, and in entirely different ways. Daojue had simply given him one of his long, silent stares when he'd asked whether they'd be better off staying here or returning to the Outer Valley and trying to signal an elder over.

For her part, Meiyao had argued that if the Geshihan Clan was involved, it was likely that the elders overseeing the Outer Valley were also compromised, and that the only elder guaranteed to be on their side was her stepmother and overseer of the Outer Hunt, Protector Yuyan. Someone they'd only be able to reach the day the Outer Hunt ended and everyone gathered at the entrance of the valley to head back to the sect. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It was after that they'd decided they'd be staying that the situation had devolved, and what a downward spiral it'd been. Meiyao was standing to his left, arms crossed, alternating between glaring at Daojue and then at anywhere but Daojue. To his right, Daojue was standing, holding Gleaming End upright, and paying Meiyao no mind whatsoever. Instead, he seemed to be entirely occupied with staring at Gleaming End, as he'd been for a long while now.

Jieyuan already found it hard to understand whatever it was that went on inside Daojue's head at the best of times, and right now he was drawing hard blanks. Had it been anyone else, Jieyuan would have thought they were simply excited about their admittedly very handy new weapon, but he just couldn't imagine Daojue getting worked up over something like that. He didn't think too much about it, though, being mostly concerned with Meiyao.

Right now she seemed to be restraining herself, but just a while ago she'd been about to tear into Daojue—who, exactly as Jieyuan had suspected he would, had fended off all his and Meiyao's questions on how he'd found the cave and bonded Gleaming End with steely silence. The only information Daojue had deigned to share with them was Gleaming End's realm: Orangerealm. Which wasn't really a surprise, considering it used to be a Redrealm weapon. Meiyao hadn't taken Daojue's silent refusal well. At all.

But Jieyuan had successfully managed to redirect her attention to the matter of Elder Weiming's belongings before a fight could break out.

"And that's about it," Jieyuan said, as he set down the last of Elder Weiming's belongings—a sixth-step Redrealm scabbard—on the ground, placing it beside the saber he'd removed earlier from the holder pouch. He stood back up.

"How do you two want to do this?" he said. Both Daojue and Meiyao looked down at the assortment of items laid out on the ground. It was quite the haul. Made what he'd gotten from Rongkai after the whole debacle in the Fatebloom Woods look like a pauper's treasure.

Besides the tenth-step holder pouch he'd just been handling, there was the fifth-step sheath, a tenth-step gleamstone saber, the tenth-step spirit-shroud that had been wrapped around it and was now rolled up in the ground, tenth-step greaves and gauntlets, an all-cleanser ring, a mind-linker earring, and a small pile of chroma prisms.

And then there was Elder Weiming's red skillseed, which based on the gleamstone barrier she'd summoned earlier, should be one of the sect's two signature bondskills, Gleaming Stone Containment. A windfall, no matter how you looked at it—but not necessarily as big of one as it could've been. And as he looked at it now, spread out in front of him like this, Jieyuan frowned.

"You know, I'd have expected a bit more from an inner elder. Let alone a noble one."

"No, this seems right," Meiyao said. She picked up the saber and looked it over.

"Weiming was young, remember? She'd probably only just reached tenth-step. And she wasn't from the core bloodline of the Geshihan Clan."

"But no cloudcraft? I thought all elders had one." Cloudcrafts, when not in use, took the form of bracelets of very hard, condensed chromal silk. He'd already noted its absence when they'd been packing away Elder Weiming's things, but he still couldn't help but comment on it. It would've made their lives much easier, giving them the option to just fly out of the forest.

"Most cloudcrafts belong to the sect," Meiyao said.

"They're just loaned out to elders as needed. And whatever Weiming was doing here, I doubt it was a sect-sanctioned affair. Even if it turns out she was supposed to be our watcher, I imagine she wouldn't have been spared one, since she'd have only needed to follow us, and the other elders supervising the Hunt from above would need them more."

"Yunzhu had one. And she's a disciple." Admittedly, a core disciple, but still a disciple. An elder was still supposed to rank above her.

"Surely her visiting Daojue wasn't a sect mission."

"She's a Liangshibai from the core bloodline." Meiyao held the saber still in her hands for a moment, then gave it a swing, then two.

"The high clans all have cloudcrafts of their own, which are divided between their members. Even then, however, a disciple like Yunzhu normally wouldn't have gotten one. Even my brother doesn't have one. But the elders made an exception because of who her mother is." She turned back to him.

"I'm keeping the saber."

"Sure," Jieyuan said. She was the only saber artist among them.

"Does it have a spiritskill?"

"No." Meiyao picked up its sheath.

"I think Weiming had the shroud on it mostly as a bluff." Jieyuan glanced down at the shroud, then at the saber, then to Daojue and… the very precious spear he was holding.

"In that case, you can probably leave it bare. So… Daojue, you take the shroud, and wrap it around Gleaming End." There was only one spirit-shroud. Elder Weiming hadn't bothered wrapping her armor with it; regardless of step, Redrealm gauntlets and greaves, never had any special properties besides the spiritskill that let them meld to the user's body as far as Jieyuan knew. Something about inscripts compatibility. So Redsouls never really bothered covering their armor. Meiyao pursed her lips, but said nothing.

Daojue stared down at the bandage-like pile of tin cloth on the ground for a moment, then picked it up. Good to see he was playing nice. With the shroud, if more people came after them, they wouldn't be able to tell Gleaming End's true step (or rather, its seeming absence of step) and that was just the kind of deadly surprise they would be able to take advantage of in a fight.

One of the properties of spirit-shroud was that they were physically intangible while in use, so Gleaming End would be able to cut just fine with it on. Jieyuan gave it a few moments, looking between Meiyao and Daojue. He hesitated. He didn't have any real right to the loot; Meiyao had helped by delaying Elder Weiming, letting them reach the cave, whereas Daojue was the one who'd actually killed the elder. But when neither spoke up, Jieyuan decided to go for it: "I'd like the armor."

The gauntlets and greaves were plain metal pieces similar to the ones he had on; the only difference between them and his own was their step. It was a massive difference, though. Third-step to tenth-step. This armor was over three times tougher than his own. Neither Daojue nor Meiyao said anything, so that was that. The prisms they split between them, and Meiyao claimed Elder Weiming's tenth-step holder pouch for herself.

Jieyuan also got the cleanser ring since nobody showed any interest in it (it wasn't any better than the one he already had, but he could always sell it). As for the elder's mind-linker, Meiyao bonded it and went through the ciphers on it, but didn't recognize any, so it wasn't any help to them. Out of Elder Weiming's artifacts, Daojue ended up with just the spirit-shroud.

As the one to kill her, Daojue's share should've been the largest, but he didn't speak up at any point while they were distributing the loot, even when Jieyuan directly asked him if he wanted something. Daojue seemed entirely uninterested in the matter, really. Considering Daojue had gotten an Orangerealm spear out of this mess— by far the biggest prize—Jieyuan wasn't too surprised by his lack of concern. And with that, all that was left was Elder Weiming's skillseed. Gleaming Stone Containment.

Jieyuan picked it up, looked between Daojue and Meiyao. Meiyao glanced it and frowned, but Jieyuan didn't get the impression she was interested. Daojue didn't even look at it; he wordlessly walked off to the side, sat down, and started wrapping the spirit-shroud around Gleaming End.

"I'm keeping it, then?" Jieyuan asked, mostly to Meiyao.

"You can have it for now," Meiyao said, still frowning.

"But… Bear in mind that after we tell Aunt Yuyan about what happened, she'll probably want you to return the skillseed to the sect. This isn't like Rongkai. This was a sect elder we killed, and one that belongs to a noble clan. Her artifacts are one thing—Aunt Yuyan will probably let us keep them to make up for how we almost died—but a skillseed's a different story." She shot Daojue a glance.

"The sect—especially the Liangshibai—will also definitely want Gleaming End back, too. It's the sect's sole heirloom artifact. Not to mention it's now at Orangerealm." Daojue didn't even glance up at her, not pausing for a moment as he kept methodically wrapping the shroud around Gleaming End. It was like he hadn't even heard her. Jieyuan pursed his lips. Meiyao was right; there was no way the Gleaming Stone Sect would just let Daojue keep Gleaming End. But he also couldn't see Daojue willingly giving up the spear.

What'd come of that, he still didn't know. But that was something to worry about later, he decided. Because what he did know was that at least for their time being, their chances at survival had shot up with all the new chromal artifacts they had, Gleaming End most of all. Their artifacts didn't make survival a sure thing, though. Jieyuan couldn't help but eye the trees around them uneasily.

He found that he was on high alert for a sudden ambush, just like he'd been his first few days in the forest—except this time not from a gleam beast, but from a tenth-step Redsoul. And also like back in the first days of the Hunt, his team was once again on the verge of falling apart, Jieyuan realized as he returned his attention to his teammates. Daojue was on the ground, off to the side, ignoring them as he finished wrapping Gleaming End; Meiyao was glaring at Daojue, her jaw set.

Now that they were done splitting Elder Weiming's things, there wasn't anything distracting her from how Daojue was acting as if all questions were background noise. Rot. Realizing he had to do something, Jieyuan quickly fished out a jadebook from his robes and hold it out before Meiyao could get started on Daojue again.

"There's still the matter of this." That gave Meiyao a pause.

"That's… the jadebook you found in Protector Yuanzhi's cave?"

"Just the one," he said, and he motioned for her to sit down. Meiyao hesitated, glancing over at Daojue again, before huffing and relenting. She dropped to the ground gracelessly, and he sat down beside her. There wasn't much he could do at the moment besides keeping Meiyao's attention off Daojue until she'd cooled down, and there was similarly little left to do about others coming after them.

He had hope, though, that he'd at least get to the bottom of what exactly had happened to Protector Yuanzhi and find out whether they needed to be worried about being spontaneously converted into gleamstone by the Valley or anything along those lines. That hope died a very abrupt death as he chroma-bond the jadebook, summoning its text to his mind's eye, and was met with some unintelligible sprawl of barely recognizable words he couldn't make any sense of. What in the Heavens?

It was like he'd hit a roadblock not even a step past the starting line. He quickly scanned through its contents, but it was all just more of the same, utterly unreadable text. Like it was in a different language. Which was very much curious, because at least in his current life, he'd never heard about there being other languages. He reckoned he would've been even more confused if Amyas hadn't been familiar with the concept.

"What's wrong?" He opened his eyes, saw Meiyao looking at him curiously, and tossed her the jadebook.

"Have a look."

"Oh?" Meiyao looked down at the jadebook in her hand. Jieyuan caught with his soulsenses as a line of chroma formed between Meiyao's soul and the jadebook. Not even a moment later, though, Meiyao nodded to herself like she'd expected it.

"I thought it'd be something like this. This is in Liangshibai code," she said.

"It's something the Liangshibai use to encrypt some of their jadebooks, those they want to protect from outsiders. Which is just about anything related to the Gleamstone Valley."

"So we can't read it?"

"I know some of it," Meiyao said.

"Aunt Yuyan taught me the basics. Give me a moment. I'll see what I can figure out." She closed her eyes. Jieyuan waited; keeping his gaze on her, he saw her brow furrow in what looked like deep concentration. It was a good while before Meiyao looked up at him.

"I think I've gotten what I can out of it," Meiyao said, opening her eyes. Her frown hadn't left her face, though. Jieyuan leaned forward.

"It's not much. I don't know enough of the code to decipher everything, and it seems to me like Yuanzhi wrote a lot of it in a hurry. It's sloppy. Some parts of it are jumbled. But… Well, it seems like she went to the Gleamstone Depths." Probably noticing the lack of comprehension that should've made its way to his face, Meiyao elaborated, "Right. That's another secret of the Liangshibai Clan. It's the underground of the Gleamstone Valley.

At the center of Gleamstone Valley, there's a fissure called the Gleamstone Maw that leads to the Depths. The Liangshibai don't let anyone inside the Depths—or even anywhere near the Maw. The Liangshibai Clan views the Depths as a hallowed ground; only the Liangshibai are permitted inside."

"Hallowed ground…" Jieyuan had always thought the Liangshibai seemed rather cultish when it came to their obsession with gemstones—and in particular gleamstone. But he'd never heard about them having a specific faith, and the Gleaming Stone Sect, at least, was secular.

"And what's there?"

"I don't know. Even Yuyan didn't want to tell me much more than that," Meiyao said.

"According to the jadebook, though, it seems like it's all gleamstone, just like the Valley, and with more gleam beasts. And something happened to her there—that's one of the muddled parts—that both caused her to start turning into gleamstone and Gleaming End to advance to Orangerealm." Jieyuan went very still. Turn into gleamstone. There it was.

"Yuanzhi made her way back to a cave she'd secretly made in the Flaw long ago, to see if she could somehow revert or at least stop the crystallization," Meiyao continued.

"The last few brief notes on it are another muddled mess, but… well, I guess we already know what the outcome was. I think she threw the jadebook away, at the very end, so it wouldn't be converted to gleamstone together with everything else on her."

"So… as long as we stay away from the Gleamstone Depths, we should be fine?" That seemed, to him, like the lesson to be learned there.

"I've never heard of someone turning into gleamstone before, so I think so, yes."

"All right." Jieyuan glanced down at the gleamstone floor, and then at the glowing crystal undergrowth and trees around them. He still wasn't comfortable around it all, not anymore, but it was nothing he couldn't live with.

"Anything else?" Meiyao glanced back down at the jadebook.

"I'm not sure. Protector Yuanzhi mentions that she burned her soul at the end. And that she ignited it. She actually brings that up a couple of times. But I don't know what that's about." She paused like she'd just recalled something.

"Protector Yuanzhi had a reputation for being obsessed with Firesouls. It almost always came up, when Grandfather talked about her. That might have to do something with it." It didn't ring any bells for Jieyuan, either—not that he'd expected it to, considering Meiyao would know much more about matters of cultivators than he did—but there was something Meiyao had said that did catch his attention.

"Grandfather?" Meiyao's father, the chief elder, was a mundane-born, and he hadn't found anything on her mother or where she'd come from. Meiyao blinked at him, as if confused by his question, and then narrowed her eyes. Just as she'd seemed to have clammed up—for all she raged at Daojue's secrecy, she sure had lots of secrets herself—she sighed.

"I mean Liangshibai Zhaoyong. Sovereign Protector Zhaoyong." She looked off, suddenly rather distant.

"He's not my grandfather, technically. Not by blood. But he's like one in every other sense. Or, well… I used to think he was." She scowled, her expression darkening. Jieyuan recalled what Yunzhu had said, about Meiyao's father and Yunzhu's grandfather—which might as well as be Meiyao's grandfather too—doing something, and how that was what had caused their fallout. It didn't look as if Meiyao would be receptive to more prodding, though, so he let the matter die.

"Anyway, that's about it," Meiyao said suddenly, tossing the jadebook back to him.

"Like I said, we shouldn't be at any risk, at least not from the Gleamstone Valley itself. All we really need to be concerned about are others being sent after us. And…" As luck would have it, Meiyao's eyes landed on Daojue, who had already finished wrapping Gleaming End with the shroud and was meditating silently not too far from them.

"There are some things still left unanswered, however." Meiyao made to stand up. Jieyuan decided he'd had enough of this. She was halfway up when he said, "Remember our fight with the gleam wolves?" Meiyao didn't take her eyes from Daojue, now fully standing.

"What about it?"

"Remember how I looked over your way at the end? And how I saw some things?" Namely, Meiyao glowing green and being surrounded by some red haze.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but Daojue isn't the only one keeping secrets here." Frozen now, Meiyao stared at him, her eyes first widening, then narrowing.

"You… No, that's different—""Is it?" Jieyuan challenged. He held her stare. Meiyao worked her jaw silently, her eyes flitting back and forth between him and Daojue, before she finally slumped and plopped back down on the ground. Then, wordlessly, she crossed her legs and closed her eyes. And that was that. Sighing, Jieyuan turned back to look at Daojue. He wasn't nearly as curious as Meiyao seemed to be, but he'd still have liked some answers.

It was just that he knew well enough that there was no forcing them out of Daojue. Jieyuan found his eyes drawn to Gleaming End. The spear was already fully covered by the spirit-shroud, its crystalline exterior replaced by white, bandage-like wrappings. Daojue had it lying on the ground next to him, with his right hand resting on its shaft. Jieyuan's attention shifted to Daojue's gauntleted hand. He hadn't forgotten the way Daojue had unconsciously rubbed his forefinger earlier that day.

There was nothing he could do about his suspicions for now, but he might have found another piece of the puzzle that was Tianzijun Daojue. Gathering his thoughts, Jieyuan closed his eyes and murmured lowly to himself, " See Maeva." And then he wasn't sitting cross-legged in the Gleamstone Valley anymore, but in somewhere else entirely. A small but tidy room, square-shaped, with pastel white walls, one bed pressed against one wall beneath the window, facing a large bookcase filled with books.

By the bookcase was a desk, and he was sitting on the chair in front of that desk, looking out the bed. Lying on the bed, a book held up high over her, was Maeva, in her yellow sundress and lab coat. Amyas's sister, in Amyas's room. Maeva flipped a page on the book, then tossed it on the bed and rolled around to face him.

"Took you long enough." She was smiling, though.

"Maeva," Jieyuan said.

"Any thoughts on… Well, everything that just happened?" He'd taken to commanding her to appear like this, as a daydream, much like the battle simulations he'd been using. It saved him the trouble of having to explain to his teammates why he was talking to empty air, and he wasn't sure how they'd take the fact that he was using his bondskill to force himself to hallucinate someone.

And that was without taking into account the whole matter of Maeva having been his sister in his previous life and how in his previous life he'd lived in an entirely different world. Maeva sprung up from the bed, then began pacing around the floor. She ended up having to turn around every few steps. Amyas's room hadn't been exactly made for pacing.

It was Maeva who'd gotten the bigger room—almost twice Amyas's—and even after she'd moved out, their parents had kept her room prepared in case she ever came back to visit. Even though she lived with her husband, Yang Qiyun, just two houses down from them.

"Well, I'm afraid I don't have much to offer. I can't think of anything that could solve your current situation." As she spoke, Maeva slowed down her pacing but didn't quite stop it altogether. Her feet kept shifting against the wooden floor. Maeva had never been able to stay put for any length of time, not when thinking. Needed to get all the yummy brain juices flowing properly, she'd say. Jieyuan looked past her, and on the window over his bed he caught his faint reflection. It gave him a pause.

Short blond hair and blue eyes. Thinly built, if not scrawny. Dark bags under his eyes. A prominent, aquiline nose. Thin lips. He turned away. He hadn't realized he took on Amyas's appearance in this place. Maeva was staring at him, thoughtful now and oddly still. But when he turned fully back to her, she resumed pacing.

"And as for the matter of Yuanzhi's jadebooks… Honestly, I don't have much to say on it, either. You have the right of it, I think. Just stay away from the Gleamstone Depths. Same for the matter of Daojue's ring. I agree with you. The ring's important. Especially that design on it. Keep an eye out for it in the future. See if you can find it somewhere else." She paused, tilting her head, and Jieyuan knew an idea had just occurred to her.

"You know, I think you should try using Absolute Will Command to bring up Qiyun. He'd be able to come up with all sorts of theories, I think. This kind of thing was his bread and butter." She scrunched up her nose.

"I never thought I'd say this, but it seems like his obsession with that garbage he called fine literature might actually come in handy. Even if he only has your memories to work with." Jieyuan thought about it. For just a moment, he imagined what Qiyun's reaction would be to this whole situation. And he immediately shot the idea down.

"Hard pass." Maeva raised an eyebrow.

"These hallucinations are based on the real thing, right? Based on how I think you and Qiyun would react? Well, I already know what your husband would do. What he'd say. He'd refuse to cooperate and spend the entire time whining about how it was me who ended up reincarnating in a world like this and not him."

"Come on. He wasn't that bad."

"Maeva, you had him as your husband," Jieyuan said.

"I had him as my brother-in-law. The Qiyun you know isn't the one I did. With you, he had to play nice to get into your pants. With everyone else? The man was an absolute pest."

"That can't be right. You two got along just fine."

"When you were around," Jieyuan said.

"And sometimes even when you weren't. But trust me, if I were to call him now, and he's anything like the real thing, all he'll give me is a headache. Didn't you have access to my memories? Look through them and tell me I'm wrong." Maeva was still frowning, but she didn't press the issue. They talked a while longer, but he eventually called it off, cutting off the command and snapping back into his body. He didn't have quite the luxury of…

spending time with his hallucination of the sister he had in his previous life. Thinking of it this way brought a grimace to his face—it was weird in ways he didn't even want to touch upon—but it helped distance him from Amyas's feelings that always seemed to come over him when he talked to Maeva. No, all the time he had, he needed to spend it on improving himself, on getting stronger. Especially given the circumstances he was in now.

So he used Absolute Will Command this time and closed his eyes, but it wasn't in his room he appeared now, but in a clearing in the Gleamstone Valley, and across from him wasn't Maeva, but Daojue. And Jieyuan prepared himself to die, over and over again. —∞— It was the twenty-ninth of Yellowfull, the penultimate day of the Outer Hunt. They hadn't been attacked yet, and Jieyuan wasn't quite sure how he felt about that. Stifled. Pent-up, too. Mostly, though, he was tired.

The three of them were wandering around the valley, Meiyao at the lead. The sun had only just risen. Although they'd decided to stay in the Third Ring, they didn't know how or if they were still being tracked, so they'd taken to moving to a different location every day, just in case. Thirteen days. That was how many days they'd spent on full alert, and with every day that an attack didn't come, they only grew more tense. By now, Jieyuan was almost hoping it'd just happen already so they could get it over with.

They had stalled in terms of cultivation. They couldn't risk performing the imbuing ritual, not when they needed to be ready to fight at any moment, and coming out of an imbuing session would have them out of commission for at least a little while. The most they allowed themselves was sleep—because that was still a necessity and would remain so until they reached tenth-step—and even then they'd decided that only one of them would do so at a time, with the other two keeping watch.

By the Heavens, Jieyuan almost missed the First Pain. So when Meiyao suddenly stopped—somehow, she always sensed things way ahead of him—and put up her gleamstone saber, what he'd felt was a surge of apprehension, but also excitement. Meiyao wouldn't have reacted like this toward a third-step beast now, or even a fourth-step one. They'd hunted a bit of those while wandering around, and with their chromal artifacts, it'd barely taken a moment.

But then confusion took over when three men in topaz robes stepped out from among the trees. Not one of them wore an elder's coat—they were all disciples—and the man at the lead had a white blindfold over his face. Jieyuan had been expecting a tenth-step Redsoul. An inner elder. Maybe even a protector. More than one of them, even. Instead, he'd gotten Qingshi and two more inner disciples. All of which should be at fifth-step Redrealm, at most sixth-step.

And if he wasn't sure how he felt about the lack of an attack before, he was even less sure of what he felt about this new situation. Mostly, though, he'd say he was confused, because this made no sense at all.