Chương 103: The Road to Aethelgard

They emerged into a world that smelled of wheat and dust. The collapse had deposited them in a drainage ditch on the eastern side of the Celestial Wall, half-buried in loose soil and broken masonry. Wei Chen crawled free first, then reached back to pull Lian after him. Her hands were bleeding from the formation work, fine cuts laced across her palms where severed qi channels had lashed back at her. She did not complain. She never complained.

They lay for a moment in the ditch's shadow, catching their breath, listening. The wall rose behind them like a mountain built by human hands, its lower stones still trembling faintly from the collapse. Somewhere beneath those tons of earth, the Crimson Guard were digging themselves out. Wei Chen did not intend to stay long enough to find out.

"Can you walk?" he asked. Lian sat up, tested her ankle, and nodded.

"Can you?"

"Well enough." It was not quite true. His left knee had stiffened, and every breath reminded his ribs that they had been compressed by forces measured in tons. But the Golden Marrow was already working, knitting minor damage. He would pay for the healing later, but later required reaching cover before sunrise. He climbed the ditch's slope and looked east. The imperial heartland opened before him like a map unrolled by a divine hand.

Fields of grain stretched to every horizon, their golden heads stirring in a wind that carried the scent of harvest and distant rain. The road that cut through them was not merely a road. It was the Imperial Highway, a straight line of pale stone wide enough for twenty wagons abreast, maintained by formation masters and imperial engineers across centuries of continuous use. And at its end, visible only as a point of light where the highway met the curve of the world, lay Aethelgard.

Even at this distance, it glowed. Wei Chen had seen cities before. He had stood at the gates of Dragon's Rest and felt its millions of lives pressing against his senses. He had marveled at Azure Spires, whose provincial grandeur had dwarfed anything in Veritas. None of them had prepared him for this. Aethelgard did not merely exist on the horizon. It dominated it. The golden light was not reflection alone.

It was the accumulated radiance of countless formations, of palaces and temples, of a city's worth of cultivated qi gathered across millennia of imperial ambition. It was the center of the world. And beneath its golden streets, according to the sanctuary guardian's final words, lay the greatest Primordial Sage refuge of all.

"We made it," Lian said. She had climbed up beside him, and her voice held something he had not heard in it before: wonder, edged with fear.

"We crossed the wall," Wei Chen corrected.

"That is not the same as making it."

"Must you always qualify victory?"

"Victory unexamined becomes defeat unanticipated." She made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

"You sound like a sect elder."

"I've spent enough time listening to them." This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. They began walking along the ditch's edge, staying low, using the standing grain as cover where possible. The highway was too exposed for fugitives, but they needed to parallel it long enough to reach one of the smaller farm roads that Old Gou's instructions had described.

There, if the instructions were still accurate, they would find a contact who could provide fresh clothing, traveling papers, and a wagon heading toward the capital. Wei Chen reached into his inner robe and withdrew the message. It was a thin slip of treated bamboo, sealed with his mother's personal formation. The characters had faded in places, worn by repeated handling during the long journey. He had read it a hundred times. Make your way to Aethelgard. Find the humble shop owner. Tell no one where you are going.

The shop owner had been found, in a border city far behind them. Old Gou had given him what he needed: the truth of his parents' survival, the reason for their flight, the nature of the hunt that had targeted their research. The bamboo slip's practical instructions were fulfilled. But its true purpose had always been simpler. It had given him direction when direction was all he had. A destination to walk toward when the jungle and the road and the cities seemed endless. He no longer needed it.

Wei Chen stopped walking. Lian stopped with him, reading his intention without needing explanation. He held the slip in both hands. The morning sun warmed the bamboo and made the faded characters briefly legible again. For a moment he saw his mother's handwriting not as information but as presence—the woman who had fought for their village and then walked east into danger. He called up a spark of qi and touched it to the slip's edge. The bamboo caught slowly, then surrendered to flame.

The characters blackened, curled, vanished into ash that the wind carried toward the capital. A message burned could not be intercepted. A destination memorized could not be tortured from him. And a son who no longer needed his mother's written guidance had, in some measure, become the man she had been trying to protect.

"Gone?" Lian asked.

"Gone."

"What now?" Wei Chen looked eastward. The golden light of Aethelgard seemed brighter now, or perhaps his eyes had simply adjusted to seeing it.

"Now we walk into the empire at the heart of my parents' secrets. We find my parents. We understand why the Primordial Sages were hunted, and whether whatever they feared is still waiting beneath that city."

"And if it is?"

"Then we decide what to do about it." They found the farm road an hour later, and the contact—a taciturn woman with a scar across her throat who asked no questions and provided what they needed. By midday they were riding in the back of a grain wagon, disguised as nephew and niece visiting a sick uncle in the capital. The wagon creaked and swayed, and Lian slept against the sacks, finally allowing exhaustion to claim her. Wei Chen did not sleep.

He watched the highway through gaps in the canvas, watched other wagons and travelers flowing toward Aethelgard like tributaries to an ocean. Merchants in fine silks. Soldiers in imperial livery. Cultivators whose robes marked them as disciples of a dozen organizations, all subordinate in the end to the empire's central authority. Aethelgard was not merely a city.

It was the machine that shaped the continent's fate, the court where the Celestial Emperor's will became law, a city where old grudges and ancient secrets met. And somewhere beneath its golden streets, the greatest sanctuary of the Primordial Sages waited. The Void Navigation Pearl rested against his chest, hidden beneath layers of clothing. It would guide him again, when the time came, to whatever lay beneath the capital. But first there were practical concerns: identity, shelter, information, allies. His parents.

The truth of the hunt. He had spent Part One of his life, he realized, learning how to survive without becoming anyone's pawn. Part Two would require learning how to move within a game where the pieces included empires. The wagon rolled on. The afternoon sun lowered toward the western horizon, painting the grain fields in shades of amber and rose.

And ahead, always ahead, Aethelgard grew larger, its towers resolving from points of light into shapes, from shapes into architecture, from architecture into the unmistakable assertion of imperial power. Wei Chen touched the place where the message had been, feeling nothing but the fabric of his robe. He was no longer a boy following his mother's instructions.

He was a Foundation Establishment cultivator walking the True Path, heir to a proscribed lineage, companioned by a former sect disciple who had thrown away everything to help him. He had crossed jungles and mountains, survived bandits and sects, and broken through the Celestial Wall itself. The road before him was the last road. It led to everything he had lost, and everything he might become. Wei Chen settled back against the grain sacks, closed his eyes, and let the wagon carry him toward the golden city.

The final arc had begun.