Chương 69: Chapter 18

Stepping back from the single battles, Wu Zetian couldn't repress a flicker of annoyance. At the Sect's height, no beastkin would have been able to reach this deep into the Night Domain. A chain of fortifications ringing the Beast Lands would have long intercepted and destroyed them. It just went to show how far the Night had fallen, and it would be another point in the graph of those two. Yet again, there was no point in crying over spilled milk.

On the Plateau, the reconstruction and recolonization of the outer sites was proceeding apace. The last thing she needed or wanted was to have these monkeys get in the way of that, or, worse, establish a nest. Wu Zetian accepted a cup of tea from Shanti with a small nod. Drinking, she focused again. Her spirit didn't rush across the Night as much as it expanded to encompass it. She was the Night, her tendrils spiderwebbing the cover that emanated from the Shadow Dragon Vein. This was her Domain effect.

Any other practitioner of the Night Arts could summon his Night, but to have appreciable effects on the martial side, it had to be condensed. Expand it and it thinned, even as it allowed you to expand your perceptions. She was the exception to the rule. Not only could she keep her Night expanded without any loss in power, but she could also do so to a monstrous degree, wide enough to encompass the Plateau and beyond.

By spiderwebbing her influence through the Night produced by the Shadow Dragon Vein, the effect increased still. The Night that emerged was a gigantic, heavy thing, innervated with her spirit, ready to crush any invader. Or to contend with Immortals, in this case. It was a small signal at first, a little blip in her consciousness. Wu Zetian zeroed in on it like a hawk. The touch of Shen answered her, a nugget of immortality. But this immortality didn't smell of nighty lilies or feel like dew under the silver moon.

It was the fluids of ten thousand corpses left to rot under the desert sun. It gurgled, it slowed, it rotted and then stilled. A river choked with filthy sediment. Revulsion washed over her. Yellow-Brow. The Immortal of Entropy, the Great Mountain Sage, the Saint of Rot. Second-hand hostility from her previous self's memories flooded her, thick and toxic and overwhelming. Yellow-Brow had done more than oppose her predecessor: he had threatened her, even wounded her.

In the old Wu Zetian's worldview, that made him an existential threat, to hate and dread forever. Wu Zetian tasted the feeling, almost impressed by its virulency. Then, she choked it, and focused deeper. It was a screen, a hard nut of Rot wrapped around a life. Able to endure her general screening, it fell apart under direct scrutiny. The thing inside was alive only in the loosest sense. The slobbering beastkin could hardly be called that. She must have been quite the specimen in her prime.

Female beastkin were rare, and they invariably grew to important positions in their tribes, as shamans and keepers of traditions. The closest to a civilizing presence the race had. A shame that Yellow-Brow enjoyed breaking precious things, and the more precious the broken thing was, the greater the Rot. The she-beast was little more than a skeleton. She dragged herself on stick-like legs, her stump of a tail waving without point. A moan spilled from between crooked fangs, a keening sound that never stopped.

Like the Rot never stopped. Her body seemed caught in the moment between barely holding together and total dissolution. It radiated from her like a cloud, turning the air green, rotting the ground where she stepped. Wu Zetian felt a wave of pity. This was Yellow-Brow, ruining everything he touched because Rot was sacred and wholesome, untouched life was pointless and weak. But what did this mean for her Domain? A pestilence bomb.

If it reaches deep enough in the Domain, it will detonate and infect my people with an immortal strain of sickness. A Shen-powered pestilence. Just the idea made her shiver. It would take her focused effort to eradicate it, and not before it claimed its victims. Because it would be massively virulent and deadly, no doubt about it. And yet… Is this all? As a businesswoman, she was used to schemes within schemes. More to the point, to small schemes that could fail as long as they protected bigger schemes.

This one could work well, provide a distraction and chip at her population. And it wouldn't be alone, obviously. But that was all it'd provide, a distraction and a small blow. It wouldn't be strange. Immortals reasoned in centuries. But it was two maniacs she was grappling with here. From what she learned, they had discarded her because of her long disappearance in secluded cultivation. Maybe they had discarded her entirely, which was the reason why they returned to their little war-games.

Now that she was back, stronger and more annoying than before, it stood to reason to think they would band together to eradicate her. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. And distractions like that wouldn't make the cut, not today, not in a century. Chen Liwei. The General's signature was a point of cold brilliance. She was focused on coordinating the patrols, but that didn't stop her from turning her way immediately. At your service, Founder.

Wu Zetian hummed. She was truly dependable, was she? I will be sending you coordinates shortly. Each corresponds to a plaguekin infected with a Shen malady. A Shen… Founder, I shall deal with them myself at once. No, stay put. I smell some kind of trap. Send a group of Elders. But Founder, the Shen will detonate once they destroy the vessel. Leave that to me. I'll smother it. Just make sure they are prepared. By your will.

The connection broke, and Wu Zetian felt the General's purposeful determination, likely handing out her orders. She frowned. She didn't enjoy playing by the rules of this world, but she just couldn't risk sending out one of her Sect Elders while still missing the real danger. Ruthless arithmetic it may be, a Nascent Soul was unreplaceable. A Core Formation elder was not. Squashing her guilt, she reached for her second trump card. Elder Xing? At your service, my Founder.

The Elder was meditating in his compound in the Lightless Underworld, ready for deployment at a moment's notice. His steady, vaguely excited presence calmed her. He couldn't wait, this old wolf. Just checking your readiness. Always a pleasure. Humming, Zetian put down her cup and returned into the Night. She had focused on the sky, the forest, the earth. What about underground? Her awareness sank deep, tentacles of senses seeping into the Domain's earth. And she found… nothing.

The Qi of the land, dense and deep from millennia of exposure to the Night, ran like a sea of syrup. Very much undisturbed by any Rot. Wu Zetian paused. Had she been overthinking? No, the reasoning is sound. And better to have an excess of effort rather than the opposite. She focused inward. Shen was more than higher-quality Qi. It was immortality, an element purified from earthly decay and crystallized into an endless loop. A theme given form, an idea come to life.

A painter may struggle all his life to bring such a thing on his canvas and fail. Shen embodied it, the metaphysical made physical. For Yellow-Brow, it was entropy itself, the slow, unstoppable rot of all. More than just an acid, or a mass of worm, or the elements of air and earth, it was the very idea of decay, forcing itself over the world. All fall. All rot. So it's the way of the world and, in his Immortal mind, so was the way of Heaven and the sky above the sky.

Decay that lived, that breathed and reproduced, ruined and birthed. It could hide its face from the Night, seed its beds in the cracks of the world, unseen and unnoticed until the moment it would sweep out and flood the land in its blinding truth. And yet, her Night wasn't the absence of physical light either. Night, oh, Night. A man may peer into its depths and feel its essence and never understand. The endless mystery. The fathomless fear. The murmured secrets and crooked finger.

The abyssal weight and starlit cloak. Men looked above, saw the stars and then the dark and felt. They felt it in their trembling hearts. Now, it was here. This deep secret. Wu Zetian was at the center of it. Night was embodied in her body that knew no decay, her mind that saw the mystery and could grasp its immensity. She reached for it, the heart of Night, and spoke words that became law everywhere her Night lay. Everything hidden beneath my Night shall cast a shadow.

Pulling on so much power made her blind to much, but it also opened the world to her eyes. Secrets and that which was hidden became visible to her, for her Night had domain over the nature of hidden things and they couldn't escape it. Buried ore. Nestling insects. Bones beneath forgotten graves. Underground rivers and homes the forests had long since reclaimed and erased. In the all-embracing, all-enfolding Night, they poured their secret existences, casting their shadows into the dark.

They became known to her as though she had walked beneath the boughs and uncovered them by her own hand, one by one, as though she pushed the bramble away to reveal the silent ant and the last trace of a footstep left a long time ago. The millions of secrets that dotted the Night Domain appeared to her. And among them… The Seed of Rot. It was a marvelous thing, the Seed of Rot.

A full-blown pestilence, backed by Immortal will and ten thousand years of rot, gathered, purified and then accumulated into a black nut the size of a fingernail. It was bestowed with a Fate, which hung above it and composed the whole of its desires: to reach the Night Domain and bloom, bloom, bloom. It would do so with the roaring, whole-hearted triumph that only a being who had given itself, mind, body and soul, to a single aim could conceive.

It would erupt, and bloom and, for a moment, be magnificent in the fullness of its past, present and future coming together in completion. And as it did, all living beings around it would sicken, rot and die. Magnificent buboes would sprout, pus would well up, blood would flow and the very stone rot. Ten thousand years under a black wind of plague, unleashed in the space of a second.

Wu Zetian saw her city turned into a charnel house, her people screaming as their flesh rotted, their banners and pride and joy turning to mulch. The children, drowning in the mud. It took much to anger the Mother of Night. Wu Zetian looked at the cup in her hand. Very refined and cultured before, now reduced to little more than dust and shards in her grip. The tea dripped from her fingers.

"Shanti." The woman was pale, but kept her composure. Wu Zetian slowly retracted her aura back inside.

"Clean this up, please. Then withdraw and close the door. I have a task to attend to." Shanti, to her credit, didn't ask. Not hearing the door being closed, Wu Zetian closed her eyes and let out a deep, slow breath, smoothing down her thoughts. The Seed inched its way toward the Plateau, a tiny thing worming its way through rock and stone. No, I don't think so. Wu Zetian reached for it. She didn't do so in any way resembling the physical.

She reached through the Night, for the secret that was laid bare and vulnerable for her to pluck. Before she could, a will made itself known. Rot has no secrets. The Seed disappeared from her perceptions. What was a secret, now was simple decomposition. Roots dying underground. Minerals oxidizing. Water eating limestone. A dead beetle collapsing into soil. The Seed was lost among the endless process of dissolution that fed life. It didn't hide, and so there was no secret to be found, no hiding to be exploited.

A rotting power protected it, and, by making it into just another piece of the wheel, it hid it from her perceptions. No, not hid it. It was there. Simply, her perceptions slid over it, unable to recognize it. The Seed had dispersed its identity across one million acts of entropy. Wu Zetian loosened her shoulders, a grim kind of acknowledgement washing over her. Hello, Yellow-Brow. Her answer was a slow chuckle, from one who didn't know what joy was.

The aura pervaded her senses, oily and black and singing of things that should be dead but refused to. Beneath, the Seed continued its progress. Wu Zetian scoffed under her breath. If you think to scare me, you don't know me, old bone.