Chương 16: What Ellia Left Behind

Ch 16: What Ellia Left Behind Twice in one day, I had asked this body to give me everything it had. Twice, it had somehow found more to give. I felt it happen almost from the outside the sword slipping loose from fingers that had simply stopped listening to me, the sound of my own knees meeting sand I no longer had the strength to stay upright on. Somewhere above the ringing in my ears, the referee was still saying something about the duel being decided. It didn't matter anymore.

I'd already gotten what I actually came to the arena for, and it had nothing to do with the twelve hundred pills sitting forgotten in my dorm room. Kalio's father should have gone there himself. My hand curled into a fist against the sand, the last thing I remember doing on purpose.

"... I know who's responsible now," I said, to no one, to myself, to the mountain range of a father I hadn't buried properly yet.

"I know. And I still can't touch them." Not yet. Not at Sixth Leaf Mortal Realm, against a Sect whose heir carried an Immortal Avatar into a schoolyard duel like it was nothing. Knowing a name and being able to do anything about it were two very different debts, and right now I could only afford to carry one of them. The thought was still turning itself over when the dark finally came up to meet me, patient as it had been the last time.

The first thing I noticed, waking, was the ceiling — pale wood, unfamiliar, nothing like the beams over my bed at the sect or the low stone of my dormitory room. The second thing was the smell: crushed herbs, clean linen, the particular sterile quiet that only exists in a place built for people who are trying not to die. The academy's medical hall, then. I'd traded one bed for another and skipped the part where I remembered choosing to.

Sunlight came in low and gold through a window someone had left cracked open, and for a moment I just lay there, cataloguing which parts of me still hurt and which parts had simply gone numb from overuse. Both lists were long. Movement caught the edge of my vision before I'd fully placed where I was. A girl, near the door, setting something down on the small table beside a vase already crowded with white and pale-blue blossoms I didn't recognize.

"... Ellia?" She went still the way a startled animal goes still not frozen exactly, just suddenly very aware of every possible direction to run in.

"You're awake," she said, to the door, not to me.

"Good. That's — that's good."

"You didn't have to—" I started, and got as far as lifting one hand off the blanket before she was already moving, robes catching the doorframe on her way through it. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Get well soon," she said, fast, like the words had been sitting loaded in her mouth the whole time and she'd only just found the nerve to fire them off before retreating. And then she was gone, footsteps receding down the corridor at a pace that had nothing to do with dignity and everything to do with escape. I lay there for a moment, blinking at the space where she'd been.

"... What was that," I said, to the empty room, and got no answer from it either. Two lifetimes of experience, an Avatar the Legacy System itself had trouble classifying, a sword technique that could split a mountain — and not one shred of insight into why a girl who'd faced down a Divine Realm guardian's own father without flinching had just fled a hospital room like it was on fire.

I decided, with the particular clarity of someone too exhausted to argue with himself, that this was a mystery for a version of me with fewer open wounds. The flowers stayed where she'd left them, and I stared at them longer than the moment probably deserved before my mind finally dragged itself back toward the thing it actually needed to be working on. My father should have gone there himself.

I turned the sentence over again, slower this time, the way the Eyes of Apex — the Divine God's Eye, now, though old habits kept reaching for the old name — had once taught me to turn over a fight I couldn't yet win. Look past the obvious motion. Find the thing underneath it that actually mattered. The Nightsky Sect hadn't needed the Heavenly Sword Sect gone. That was the part that kept catching on nothing, no matter how many times I ran it through.

They'd already held more territory, more disciples, more standing at court. Ruining a rival that posed no real threat to them wasn't strategy. It was waste — the kind of waste a Sect Head with any sense simply didn't spend resources on, not against an old, tired rival who'd have kept fading quietly on its own with time. Unless the order hadn't come from ambition at all.

Unless someone else had wanted the Heavenly Sword Sect gone badly enough to spend the Nightsky Sect's reputation and blood buying it for them — and the Nightsky Sect, for reasons of their own, had decided that debt was worth paying. Someone gave the order. Kalio's father simply carried it out. The thought settled into place with the particular cold weight of something that felt less like a guess and more like a key finally finding the lock it had been cut for.

If that was true, then the Nightsky Sect wasn't the wall between me and my father's killers. It was only the first door. I didn't get the chance to decide what was behind the second one. The air changed before any sound did — the specific, wrong stillness the Divine God's Eye had taught my body to recognize faster than conscious thought could catch up to it. Every hair on my arms rose at once.

Somewhere past the window, something vast and patient and utterly certain of its own strength was closing the distance between us at a speed that had no business belonging to anything I could still call human. WARNING Hostile Aura Detected Knight Rank: Golden Threat Assessment: Extreme Golden Knight. The same rank as the giant who'd stood over my father's corpse and called it barely a contest.

I was Sixth Leaf Mortal Realm, half-healed, flat on my back in a hospital bed, and something built to end Immortal Realm cultivators was already close enough that I could feel the pressure of its approach settling into my teeth like the first tremor before an avalanche. I didn't have time to reach for my sword. I didn't get the chance to need it.