Chương 134: Book 2 Chapter 47: Interludes III & IV

Interlude III: The Prince of Nine Lives Prince Xiang Chengxuan entered the deepest chamber of his residence and found it already occupied. Two naked figures sprawled across the cloud bed, limbs entwined, flushed skin sliding against flushed skin. The woman sat astride the man, head thrown back in ecstasy. A guttural moan escaped her lips as Chengxuan stepped through the door. His expression did not change and his composure remained as placid as a pond untouched by wind.

When he spoke, his tone was perfectly conversational.

"Compose yourselves. I have your next orders." The pair – siblings – untangled themselves with much grumbling and exaggerated pouting. Neither seemed remotely concerned by their state of undress. Instead, they turned matching lecherous grins upon him. The brother even flashed him a flirtatious smile.

"Join us~~" Chengxuan strongly suspected that had been their objective all along. Their twisted affection for one another was real enough; he had long since concluded that much. The timing, however, was far too convenient to be coincidence. More likely, they had chosen this precise moment in hopes of provoking disgust, embarrassment, or at least some visible discomfort. The shameless invitation was merely another part of the performance. It was also an astonishing display of persistence.

One would think that a pair of assassins feared throughout the empire would possess enough sense to abandon a tactic after it had failed repeatedly. Yet for all their talent for violence, they remained stubbornly committed to testing the limits of his patience, not that they had ever found those limits. After years of employing the siblings, Chengxuan regarded their antics much as one might regard an overly enthusiastic street performer: mildly distracting and entirely incapable of provoking the desired reaction.

"Muxue is about to leave the palace." The statement killed what little remained of the mood. The siblings exchanged disappointed glances at their latest failure to bait him, then straightened. The man ran a hand through his hair and folded himself into a lotus position atop the bed, while beside him, the woman rolled onto her side, making no effort to conceal the full expanse of her body as she watched Chengxuan with unabashed interest.

"I don't have to tell you that this is the only opportunity we will have," Chengxuan said.

"Whatever happens, she is not to return alive. Kill her, and our arrangement will be concluded. You will have your freedom, and your pardons." The two assassins exchanged excited looks.

"Foolish little princess," the woman said, arching her back slightly.

"Don't worry, Your Celestial Highness. We'll make sure to kill her on the very spot her father died." The thought seemed to delight her as her eyes sparkled with amusement. Chengxuan was far less entertained, though the suggestion did stir a brief flash of vindictive satisfaction in him. He crushed it immediately.

"Don't," he said coldly, "waste an opportunity on something like that. The only thing I care about is her death. If you have the chance, take it instead of squandering time in search of irony." In truth, he did not need to say it. The siblings were the deadliest assassins he knew, and for all their outward frivolity and eccentricities, they would never jeopardize a successful kill for the sake of theatrical symbolism. They would strike in whatever manner they deemed most effective.

It was half the reason Chengxuan continued to employ them despite their... eccentric habits. The other half had everything to do with who they were. The Twin Love Terrors – Ye Wuhen and Ye Wuying – had spread their infamy across the empire nearly a century ago. They had embarked upon a bloody campaign of murder, targeting the wealthy and powerful with equal enthusiasm. What transformed them from mere killers into legends was the bizarre ritual they practiced after each assassination.

Upon every corpse, they left a jade recording of one of their couplings, as though passion and bloodshed were inseparable expressions of the same impulse. The scandal had captivated the empire. Tales of the siblings' exploits spread faster than official proclamations, transforming them from common murderers into figures of morbid fascination. Eventually, their notoriety grew so great that Chengxuan's uncle dispatched the Censors to hunt them down.

After years of pursuit, the pair were finally captured and thrown into prison. Chengxuan had been the one to free them after that. He arranged the deaths of every person remotely connected to their imprisonment, then fabricated the aftermath to suggest the siblings had attempted an escape and perished in the ensuing battle. Officially, Ye Wuhen and Ye Wuying were dead. Since then, he had made excellent use of their talents.

In exchange for a century of service, he had promised them what they desired most: freedom, new identities, and the chance to disappear beyond the reach of their old infamy. Their hundred years were nearly at an end. Muxue's death would mark the fulfillment of that bargain. The realization seemed to have occurred to the siblings as well. Ye Wuying's smile widened, her expression taking on an almost girlish excitement. She laughed and kicked her brother lightly in the side.

Wuhen caught her ankle before she could withdraw it, his hand sliding up her calf with practiced familiarity. To an outsider, the exchange might have appeared affectionate. Chengxuan knew better. The siblings treated intimacy the way other people treated conversation. It was simply how they filled silences. Unfortunately for them, Chengxuan had no intention of indulging one.

"Give me a full report," he said.

"Every target and your estimate on whether the Night of Knives can eliminate them all at once." Wuhen looked personally insulted.

"Can it?" he scoffed.

"The Night of Knives has never failed." Beside him, Wuying laid a calming hand on her brother's thigh, though it began drifting upward almost immediately.

"The trembling handmaiden of the princess, the Tiger Army officers including Miao Bu whom you asked us to specifically target, those Outer Court opportunists who rallied against you." Her smile grew proud.

"All of them have been marked, and the moment we invoke the Night of Knives, they die." Chengxuan's next question erased that pride instantly.

"And Mo Jian and his student?" Both siblings grimaced. Wuhen's irritation returned at once, while Wuying sat upright, her earlier excitement vanishing beneath naked displeasure.

"We already told you," Wuhen snapped.

"We're not going after that man."

"Every future ends the same way," Wuying added.

"Death."

"If he truly carries the divine treasure and can wield it..." Wuhen shook his head.

"We agreed to serve you, not throw our lives away." Chengxuan said nothing, simply staring. The silence stretched long enough for Wuying to grimace.

"As for that bitch..." she muttered.

"She fled before we had the chance to do anything meaningful. But that red lotus of hers..." Her expression darkened.

"I don't know what it was. It resembles no technique I've ever encountered. I'm not even certain our abilities would function through it." Chengxuan resisted the urge to dismiss the concern. The heavens contained more techniques and treasures than any cultivator could ever catalogue so encountering something unfamiliar was hardly unusual. However, the siblings knew that as well and for them to admit uncertainty meant they had seen something that genuinely troubled them. He filed the information away and moved on.

"So only those two?" Once again, both assassins looked unhappy.

"Gu Daisheng as well," Wuhen admitted.

"That bastard is impossible to predict," Wuying complained.

"We waited on a staircase for half a day only to discover he'd taken another route entirely. Then we prepared an ambush near the gardens and found him spending the afternoon talking to a statue."

"And not even a talking statue but an actual statue," Wuhen added darkly.

"He goes out of his way to avoid routines," Wuying said.

"Never appears where he should and never travels alone when it would be convenient. Half the time it feels like he knows we're looking for him." Chengxuan frowned. That was three exceptions, though of them, Mo Jian was by far the most troublesome. If the man truly possessed the means to use a divine treasure, his death would have solved more problems than anyone else on the list combined. Still, there was little point dwelling on what could not be changed.

If killing Mo Jian had been easy, matters would never have deteriorated this far in the first place. Regardless, the remaining targets would suffice. If they all died shortly before Muxue's departure, the shock would be considerable. Friends, allies, servants, supporters – all struck down in a single night. It would leave her reeling and far more prone to mistakes. Admittedly, it would also place her on her guard. Chengxuan dismissed that concern almost immediately.

Muxue already knew what this departure represented and understood the stakes as well as he did. Whether he ordered the killings or not, she would be expecting an attack. Wuhen's next question pulled him from his thoughts.

"What about the ones in the city? The children, the miners, the gambler?" Chengxuan's expression tightened. Unlike the others, those names had never been priority targets. Marking them had been an exercise in opportunism more than necessity. At first, he had assumed they might serve as leverage against Mo Jian. Yet the man had never once left the palace to visit any of his former subordinates. The more Chengxuan observed him, the more he suspected the relationships he had imagined simply did not exist.

It would not be surprising if Mo Jian viewed them as little more than stepping stones on his path. Which meant their deaths might accomplish nothing at all, or worse, they might accomplish something undesirable. Suppose he ordered their death and suppose Mo Jian truly did not care about them. Then nothing would be gained. But the flip side was that suppose he did care and the murders succeeded only in enraging a man who possessed a divine treasure. Chengxuan believed his opponent to be rational.

He also believed his grandfather's protection would prevent any lasting consequences. Yet even as the thought crossed his mind, he recognized its weakness. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. His grandfather's guarantee was not truly one of safety, but of vengeance. If Chengxuan were murdered within the palace by someone without the blood of the Imperial Family, his grandfather would ensure the killer suffered for it.

The problem, of course, was that Chengxuan would still be dead. It was a thin thread upon which to stake his life.

"Leave them be," he said at last. The siblings looked surprised, but to him, though the equation was difficult to balance, its conclusion remained unchanged. The city targets represented a card he might still find use for later. There was no reason to play it now.

"If there is nothing else, go and prepare," he said.

"There is little time left." The siblings grumbled, though the protest was entirely performative. Rising from the bed, they stretched with deliberate languor before retrieving robes from the storage pouches they had discarded on the floor. Wuying made no effort to conceal her intentions, inviting him to look, and if he wanted, do more than merely that. Chengxuan would have rolled his eyes if it did not take more energy than he wanted to bother spending on her antics right now.

There was another thing troubling him: the matter of the Black Sulde. It was a genuine immortal level artifact that he had personally won after finding, solving, and presenting one of the many hidden riddles the Immortal Emperor had secreted around the palace. Achieving that feat had cost him close to two centuries of life, and back then, he had barely been in the Core Formation realm. But his gamble had paid off since he had become the Crown Heir shortly after, and all had been well.

Now, he suspected – and it was a suspicion only because he still had no concrete proof – that the Sulde was in Muxue's hands. The very same Sulde that held immense importance to the Yuan she was meant to pacify. Of course it wasn't that simple. If just having the banner was enough to turn the factitious hordes into something resembling a friendly empire, he would have done so by now. Yet… the thought persisted.

He once again replayed the court session in his mind; her defeat, the arguments he had prepared, the pieces he had arranged and moved… there was no mistake as far as he could tell. So absorbed was he in his thoughts that he barely registered the siblings' departure. The chamber door closed behind them, leaving him alone with his thoughts. Chengxuan exhaled. No matter, he had done all that he could. The pieces had been arranged, the orders given, the knives set in motion. There was no more room for deliberation.

What had the Daqin envoy called it, during one of their conversations? Ah – Alea iacta est. The die is cast. The phrase had appealed to him at the time, not because it was profound, but because it was honest. There came a point in every great undertaking when calculation ceased to matter. One stepped forward, and events took on a life of their own. He had crossed that threshold. There would be no turning back now. ……………………………………………………………………..

Interlude IV: The Immortal Emperor He was hiding behind a wall, holding his breath, doing his best to remain absolutely still. The light was faint and red; the air tasted of metal, coating his tongue and lingering behind his teeth; and everywhere, from all around him, came the susurration of blood. It was not a sound that blood should have made, but it did, flowing gently over everything, submerging the world, until all that was left was blood.

Corpses, carriages, parts of buildings, all of them floated in those grisly rivers, melting and dissolving until nothing remained.

"Be a good boy, Xiang," his mother had said before departing, hiding him behind the wall.

"Don't make a sound. Listen until I come back." He had listened. There had been screaming before the blood drowned it out, then a faint rattle before that too had vanished. An hour ago the skies had torn apart with a sound that shook every bone in his body. An immortal, he had thought, but not come out to check. He would not, no matter what. Then that sound had vanished too, and now only the rivers of blood remained, flowing ever on.

Halfway through, he had clamped a hand over his mouth because his own breathing sounded too loud. He had also folded himself into the smallest shape he could manage, tucked against the wall, because moving might make a sound. He was as silent as he could be. He didn't know how long it had been, but surely not that long, because he was still not hungry, and the last Grain Liberation Pill he had taken was a full night before. It was fine. His mother would come back and everything would be fine.

A faint rustling came from the side. Xiang flinched, turning his head, wondering what– –and the Immortal of Listening, Xiang Tingyuan, opened his eyes. His hand was clenched around a scepter: a rod of polished Bin Steel, plain and unadorned save for its head, which had been fashioned into a face. It was a remarkably ugly face, with wild, hirsute features and a nose flattened as though by a tremendous blow.

Three long, pointed ears protruded from either side of its head, while its teeth were perpetually bared in an animalistic snarl. For a moment, he remained motionless before finally exhaling. It was the same dream again. His grip loosened, and the scepter – the Six Eared Pole – vanished from his hand. He looked around, reorienting himself to the familiar contours of his inner world. It resembled an ornate wooden palace, its halls branching into countless rooms and passageways.

Frescoes, murals, and rich tapestries adorned the walls, while plush rugs swallowed the floors. The lacquered wood gleamed with intricate patterns, and above, the ceiling shone like an open sky despite the rafters and beams that crossed beneath it. He had fallen into the old nightmare while seated upon his throne – a simple wooden chair, grand only in its scale – and awakened feeling, for a fleeting moment, like that frightened child again.

Xiang Tingyuan rose to his feet, habitually ignoring the whispers that lingered at the edge of his hearing. Here, within his inner world, there was no one to observe him. Even so, his back remained straight, his hands folded behind him as he strode toward a window set into the wall ahead. It opened from the highest floor of the Imperial Palace, where the structure intersected with his inner realm. The view beyond was the same one he had looked upon for centuries.

His city stretched out below him, roads dividing districts filled with buildings, pavilions, markets, and residences. Above them floated layer after layer of cloud platforms and docking stations for flying ships. Everything had grown outward from the palace at the city's center until it covered an area large enough that much of it was beyond the range of ordinary sight. Far in the distance stood the city walls.

Xiang Tingyuan could no longer make them out clearly with his eyes, but his hearing carried much farther, and the sound of men moving on top of stone, within it even, was clear. Those walls had taken a thousand years to build. Part of that was simply their scale; a mountain range had once stood where the walls now ran and he had ordered it flattened and the stone used in their construction. The rest of the delay came from the formation embedded throughout the structure.

The cities of his youth had relied on qi barriers and formations alone, and he had seen the consequences of that decision. If that being ever rose again, stone would endure better where formations had failed. His gaze lifted to the sky. That view had not changed in centuries either, and if his understanding was correct, it never would. Thirty three enormous panes of red light hung above the world. Each was larger than a continent.

Together they curved around the planet, overlapping to form a lotus whose petals enclosed the entire world. Most people could not see them; only immortals could perceive the petals, and apart from him, there were only eight other people in the world who were in that realm. It was a prison, though not for the world beneath it. His eyes settled, as they always did, on the three damaged petals. Unlike the others, they did not extend all the way across the sky.

Rather, each ended abruptly, torn apart midway through its arc, representing the mark left by the Immortal of Wisdom, when he had torn his shen apart. Three petals had been severed from the rest and had fallen away. For centuries, Xiang Tingyuan had assumed they were gone forever, but as it turned out, one of them was directly beneath his feet. A child possessed it, and for that reason, among others, Xiang Tingyuan had been listening to her with interest.

Since his thoughts had already turned to her, he cocked his head and listened. The sounds were, as always, amusing.

"... and I keep telling you, that's not how it went. Without my contribution in killing Hua Duzi, the Gu would have gone on to eat everyone present. So really, you should be thanking me, Master, and saying things like, 'Excellent work, my great and amazing former disciple. As a reward, you never have to work hard again for the rest of your life.'" Mo Jian's responding snort of disbelief was loud and theatrical, while Tang Huwei's open smile landed in his ears like a whisper.

Beside the Army General, Muxue's sound was entwined with the ringing of the Truth Tolling Bell, rising from deep within her soul, and at the same time he could also hear her heart beating a little faster as her gaze drifted toward the target of those words. Meanwhile, her handmaiden openly rolled her eyes and muttered under her breath, the words impossible to hear even for a cultivator standing beside her.

"... why did I ever think these two were masterminds?" Tingyuan stopped listening, thoroughly entertained. Was it any wonder he kept an ear on them when they did so much to alleviate his boredom? They were considerate, too. Whenever they spoke, they maintained qi barriers and activated sound locking talismans, even in the privacy of their own rooms. True, the consideration was not intended for him. They were attempting to conceal political conspiracies and the planned murder of someone under his protection.

Still, the effort was appreciated. Most people went through their lives making all sorts of noise without the slightest concern that someone might be listening. Smiling faintly, Xiang Tingyuan returned to his throne and sat down. They would be leaving the palace soon, but he was not worried. Both Rahu and Madam Feng knew his intentions regarding the gui, and the only other person who had attempted to claim it was now beyond the Stormwall.

He had been mildly concerned when he had first heard the sounds of the Mad Monk's qi in the Thousand Shattered Islands, but after listening more carefully, he had concluded that the gui was not the madman's objective. No, the Mad Monk had been focused on something else. By Tingyuan's reckoning, it was likely another monk. He could only hope the fellow was dead, because death was preferable to the Mad Monk's teachings.

As for the political implications, Xiang Tingyuan had not devoted even a moment of thought to them. Whichever of his descendants emerged victorious, he would not interfere. Either way, the gui would eventually make its way to him. He did want to hear what Mo Jian had to say, since after so many hints dropped over so many months, his curiosity had finally been stirred, but he would make no further moves. If the boy won, Tingyuan would welcome him and listen. If not... Well, that would be mildly disappointing.

The Netherworld Scorpion; fragments of the shen of the legendary Ruyi Lotus Scepter; knowledge of future events despite possessing neither skill nor training in divination; any one of those would have been enough to attract his interest. The amusing part was that, despite everything Mo Jian and his companions had discussed over the years, the truth behind their goal remained hidden from him, and deliberately so, he supected. Tingyuan knew with certainty that Mo Jian had shared it with his student.

He had simply done so without words, transmitting the knowledge through qi and binding her to silence afterward. It was a sensible precaution; to think they had been worried about his eavesdropping even back then. That said, the current matter presented him with a unique opportunity. One of the names he had overheard from their conversations, Chao Qinzi, had finally been located. Xiang Tingyuan approved of the man.

For nearly seven years, Chao Qinzi had remained hidden in the same place without moving and, more importantly, without speaking. True, he did gnash his teeth from time to time, and Tingyuan found that particular sound unpleasant, but even so, compared to the overwhelming majority of people, Chao Qinzi was wonderfully quiet. In fact, locating him had required a modest amount of effort. That alone had improved Tingyuan's opinion of him considerably.

Now he had a chance to make the trip to the Thousand Shattered Islands and collect the man. Since Chao Qinzi possessed another fragment of the shen, there was every reason to bring him back. It would make for an excellent research opportunity. Decision made, he closed his eyes for a moment. The whispers at the edge of his hearing rose and fell, the city breathing beneath him; the creak of a vendor's cart, a child scolding a dog, someone singing badly in a bathhouse three districts over.

He let it wash over him without catching at any of it. Just the sound of the world going on. It was, he had found, the only reliable cure for the dream. Then, he opened his eyes again, and stopped listening. It was time to visit the Thousand Shattered Islands. After all, Chao Qinzi had gone to considerable effort to remain difficult to find, and the least Xiang Tingyuan could do was reward that effort by showing up in person.

The Immortal Emperor stood and vanished, leaving the top floor of the imperial palace empty.