Chương 25: Chapter 24

The town was described in the Sect's new rolls as "transitional value site." Haoran thought it was a pile of shit. Yet again, it was the Godless Night's pile of shit. The Nascent Soul expert stood atop a pagoda. The rickety construction had seen better times: the three roofs, built in the sloping angles meant to keep the Night Rain at bay, had lost most of their tiles.

Skeletons of crisscrossing beams, many sporting masses of dusty cobwebs, stood exposed to the elements, the spirit-wood they were built out of the only reason they hadn't long given up to neglect. Beneath him, the town of Qiangan spread out, as attractive as the ruined wreck it was. A provincial capital back in the day, with a population in the order of the hundreds of thousands, it was a shadow of its former glory.

Barely one tenth of that number squatted in neighborhoods made out of sprawling, communal buildings meant to hold a sea of humanity. No house showed at least some sign of patching or damage. A tight network of bridges, ropes and scaffolding clung to the buildings like the flotsam of a shipwreck. The reason was quickly found: the mortals – Haoran scoffed at the term. As if cultivators didn't die. – had to keep to the higher floors.

The muddy roads beneath were for the demonic scum who had been ruling here and their pets. Whole compounds lacked a roof, having whole plantations of grains and fruit trees instead. Massive wooden cranes bolted to the walls waited to pull the spiritbeast carcasses that would then be used to fertilize the fields. Haoran nodded grimly. That was smart, inventive. He liked that. Still, he was annoyed. He had known this town, even visited it during leave.

The drugstore center was still there, turned into a hollowed ruin. The small square he had stopped to buy roasted chestnuts, with the stone fish fountain, was gone. All that remained of it was a field of trampled mud. How long ago was that? He had long stopped keeping counts of his years, but it must have been during Old Xin's reign. Before… everything. Bah! He was too old for regret! … or that's what he would have liked to say.

And then there was the really unpleasant stuff, the kind that made you sneer because you knew it told you that there was far worse hidden underneath. Bodies nailed to the walls, naked and signed with the glyphs of Betrayer, Thief and more. Heads impaled on spikes as warnings. Fanged cauldrons that bayed for blood. Slave pits and feeding pits for demonic beasts. Haoran was glad the demonic scum who had kept shop here didn't have a name. Oblivion was the proper end for that trash, right after a crushed skull.

It was the end of a well-prepared coup: the Godless Night had taken its time with Qiangan. The villages, hamlets and mining settlements in the countryside of Yaohai District – how it was registered in awfully out-of-date rolls - fell or turned over quickly. Not one soul in all of Qinghai had missed the fireworks that broke up the siege: more often than not, the Core Formation squad leaders needed only to send a few messengers to have both mortals and cultivators fall to their knees.

More than once, they arrived at a village, only to realize that news overtook them. At the best, they were welcomed by trembling peasants who hid their fear beneath welcoming veneers and banquets that a beggar in the Sect would scoff at, but that were the best these people could scrape together. Rogue cultivators who had worn lofty titles only the day before would step forward, offering their services as humble novices with hesitant smiles and wringing hands.

Tales of how the foul demonic ones had scurried away would be exchanged over shared cups. At the worst, they found houses filled with carrion. Finding the demonic cultivators who had killed their "property" and then themselves as one last act of defiance was no relief. But it was catching the odd idiot who had gone feral from all the garbage they had injected into themselves as a last-ditch resort. It let you unload some of the rage, at least.

All going swimmingly, in a way, and a small part of Haoran was scared of it, even if he wouldn't ever admit it, not even to himself. Tribal groups. Loose collections of fiefdoms. Warlords' holdings and little trump states. They were all folding like game tiles, all on the word of less than two hundred cultivators backed by the threat of absolute annihilation by a divine power. Most people had no idea what the Godless Night even was.

The Sect was a myth, its true identity distorted by distance and time into something that may as well be another thing altogether. All they knew was that a great power was on the move, and, as all the weak in the world knew how to do, they were quick to bend the knee and hope for the best. The Founder hadn't put one foot out of the Wu Plateau, and Qinghai was rolling over like a domesticated puppy. Did he blame it? Haoran was an old dog, used to the roughness of war.

But watching that woman massacre a dozen of his equals was enough to shake even him. Even that old iceberg Chen Liwei was rattled. No matter how high she put her chin, Haoran knew her too well not to see it. No, she may be an unsufferable old snob, but for once, he didn't blame her. And he didn't blame Qinghai for capitulating, the rogue cultivators for throwing away their trappings and obediently bowing their heads, and the demonic ones for killing themselves. Which made Qiangan's defiance all the more ridiculous.

The town squatted beside one of the two minor Dragon Veins that traversed Qinghai, the Iridescence. Its floating port had once played host to the comings and goings of massive flying ships. Mines' worth of spirit stones had found their place on its naval charters, each cargo enough to have a small Sect go mad with greed. Now, all that remained of it was a heap of rubble just outside the crumbling city walls.

The elegant docks, towering customs and massive loading equipment were all gone, turned into a ruin half again the size of the town. As for the great mines, they were half infested with spirit beasts and half crumbled or blocked. No spirit stone had been extracted from the Iridescence in decades. And yet, the demonic idiots weren't letting go. The declaration they sent in response to the Sect's messages was a mishmash of threats, recriminations, and insults. The answer was swift and ruthless.

The Core Formation Elders who led the messenger groups were grizzled veterans, made familiar to guerrilla warfare by decades spent fighting against superior enemy forces. Haoran hated it. He longed for the days when formations of armor-clad disciples strode into battle. But he couldn't fault their efficiency. The officers used their troops like whips, stripping the demonic cultivators of their capacity for resistance with the patience of someone skinning a hog.

They set ambushes, killed scouts, lured counterattacks, and made examples of captured rebel leaders. By the time they had pulled together most of the Disciples scattered in the county, the demonic cultivators in Qiangan were like sheep caught in their pen. They were slaughtered to a man, and the town seized. Haoran grudgingly admitted it: they knew their stuff. And that didn't stop at the battlefield. Beneath, Disciples in black were hard at work.

Grizzled officers inspected rows of demonic artifacts that soldiers in half-armor dragged outside. A nod meant the thing had to be shoved back into its place, where it would wait for later delivery. A firm No meant obliteration, or, if the artifact was too nasty to mess with, sealing. The same wasn't for the corpses of the trash who thought they could stand to the Godless Night. They were being gathered in great piles, while spirit bonfires were stoked.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. It was a light sweep, done to ease the work of the true audit teams hot on their heels. But more than anything, and that puzzled Haoran, it was for the benefit of the mortals. Mediators from the Mortal Corps, soft-spoken individuals wearing smiles and offering sacks of grain, were speaking to groups of awed elders, while the people of the town crowded the roofs, watching wide-eyed.

They explained, eased, offered reassurances and pictured a new, better world, one made from order and held by rules – the word was like a blade wrapped in silk -. You couldn't deny them: the sight of the destruction, and, now, the reorganization made it impossible. And their words would contain chaos better than any wall. If the warriors of the Godless Night bet on efficiency, coming, killing and then moving on, the mortals would be left disoriented, maybe even fall to panic and infighting.

Like this, there was no hole through which order could slip. Haoran wasn't one for doubt, but for once, he didn't know what to think. No high-level cultivator of the Godless Night cared for mortals. In the mind of many of the snotty brats who made up the high echelons, a little chaos sparked from sudden power vacuums was nothing to lose your skin over. They could even find advantages in it.

But this was the word of the Founder herself: the old dragon had released precise instructions about first contact, and the mediators, so often looked down, tromped around with the weight of the highest authority behind them. In any other case, Haoran would have nodded in grudging approval. Knowing how the Godless Night was, all he felt was a bad feeling coiling in his gut. There was a reason why he had always refused to mingle with them.

With all that, the boys – he couldn't bring himself to call them warriors – were doing right by themselves. Shame he hoped something bad would happen. When he had presented himself to the overall commander of the vanguard teams, he was treated to the familiar sight of a man who knew this was irregular but lacked the means to stop it. Deploying a Nascent Soul was no joke, and he knew very well what kind of fallout could come down on the head of everything involved if the Founder got prickly about it.

Haoran could empathize, but ultimately, he didn't care. This had to be done. For the good of the main branch and the Young Master. The thought of his young lord sparked a mix of fondness and concern. Should the Ancestor get antsy, nobody would be punished more than Wu Nenqin. And should things come to the worst… Haoran crushed the thought like a skull caught in his fist. The Young Master would be alright. There could be no other possibility. What remained was to make sure that their scheme would succeed.

It had taken Haoran little to have a full county assigned to himself. On his own, he could cover the same ground as hundreds of lesser cultivators in less time. What he had done instead was wrap himself in Night and follow the vanguard teams as they made their way into Yaohai. He would take care of Feixi County, but later. Bringing that kind of result would hopefully do something in re-establishing the Founder's opinion of the main branch, but what Haoran and the Young Master hoped was to show themselves useful.

And nothing did that like solving someone else's mess. Haoran was ready to go the distance for the main branch. Since old man Xin saved him from death and gave him a place to call home, his loyalty belonged to the Wu family. When the patriarch died, he lost his purpose, only to find it again in the new generation. In the Young Master, he had seen the same qualities of the grandfather, and so had found a home anew.

For his sake, even discarding his honor and orchestrating problems would be an easy burden to shoulder. But young Nenqin would not abide by it. He had approved his mission, but demanded he'd help the Sect's forces, not the opposite, no matter how much good may be lost for the main branch. Haoran wanted to be gruff, but pride had its ways. The sudden commotion put an end to his reverie. A group of demonic scum, reeking of overloaded Meridians, had broken into the square.

Despite the surprise, the Godless Night disciples reacted like a well-oiled machine. They divided into groups: one took care of protecting the civilians, the other charged into battle. They didn't need to have bothered: crazed by their techniques, the demonic cultivators came straight for whoever had a weapon. Haoran watched as the square devolved into furious fighting. The soldier in him scoffed at the elegant twirls, the skillful dodges, the pinpoint attacks. But he would admit it.

For being frilly boys, they knew their stuff. His heavy armor shifted as he rolled his shoulders. One-inch-thick black plates slid over each other with a clanking chorus. The lower layers, softer and more supple, creaked. His steel boot pressed an indent into the beams, hobnails the size of a man's wrist carving their shape into decades-old spiritwood. As he fell from the pagoda, fear had no place in Haoran's mind; there was only the grim focus of a veteran with hundreds of years of experience.

And a now distant worry for things unfolding back home. Wu Zetian went through the reports with a distinctly good mood. At one month from the start of operations, four of the fifteen counties that made up Qinghai Province in the old scrolls had been mostly reclaimed.

It didn't mean that they were productive territories: after the reclamation teams gave the green light, it fell to the auditing and support teams to assess, bundle up and send whatever useful wealth they found back to the Sect, as well as to set the first bureaucracy infrastructure. Chronic lack of manpower meant that, apart from a handful of important locations, the Sect's presence on the territory would be minimal.

Wu Zetian had given orders to staff towns and villages' government with local notables, mortals and rogue cultivators alike. The Godless Night would supply the institutional framework and work as an inspecting force. That would allow her to minimize her commitment in boots on the ground while the audit process was ongoing. In time, she intended to see the black appear everywhere. For now, this would suffice. She imagined the whole process like the shriek of a bat.

Each concentric wave of sound represented a different sweep: the first was composed by the vanguard teams, crack troops and mediators charged with spreading the news of the Sect's return, explaining the new regime and suppressing resistance. With the bulk of her forces busy in the Borderlands, these soldiers amounted to five hundred in total. Yet, they worked fast, and no force had presented itself that was able to stop them yet. After them, the second wave was composed of the auditing and bureaucracy teams.

These cultivators inspected fields, recorded the number of houses, updated maps and filed records. They produced laws, planted boundaries, set up new governments and nominated officers. Apart from clerks used to this type of work, they included farming, mining and building experts who offered their expertise to improve the existing infrastructure. Once their task was done, most would return to the Plateau. Only a few would remain, continuing to work as guides for mortals and rogue cultivators alike.

Lastly, the third sweep was still far in coming and would include builders and heavy transport. Wu Zetian didn't intend to leave the development of her country to mortals. Cultivators of the Sect would be heavily involved, and they would restore Qinghai to its former splendor. In time, of course, when she had the resources. But she was patient. Once the screech had exhausted its momentum, it would start spiralling back.

The teams would return in the inverse order they had left, and bring with them wealth and new personnel. After a time, new sweeps would be sent, steadily reinforcing and extending the Sect's domain. Until all of Qinghai was caught in her net. It would take time. Manpower shortage meant that the net would be loose at the beginning. At times, the guides would be the only contact between the Sect and the territory. The most profitable and dangerous territories would be out of her grasp until she could redeploy.

But she was patient. Through this steady effort, a new nation would be born, one marshalled into submission by constant comings and goings, measured contact and show of force. She even had found a stylish name for it: Project Screech. Or maybe it wasn't. She liked it. It was enough. Wu Zetian had set the timetable herself.

She had fished heavily from her previous incarnation's memories to make sure that her cultivators weren't overtly strained, but that the new settlements wouldn't be left alone for too long either. No point in giving them ideas, was now? Smiling faintly, she opened a new scroll. Good results were already coming in: the first batches of useful cultivation material and promising talents were on their way to the Plateau. Wu Zetian felt the familiar, small tingle of satisfaction as her purse grew heavier by one coin.

Mmh, Haoran, again. The Nascent Soul's name was a constant in the reports. Not only had he subdued a county on his lonesome, but he also managed to act as an almost universal troubleshooter. Wu Zetian could see what was going on. Her grandson, looking to curb favor. Well, it was working. If he were an executive, this would be the right time for a bonus on his paycheck.