Chương 42: The Eastern Gate

The contract sounded simple on the ledger: Dismantle a corrupted formation in the lower cisterns. Simple, however, was not the same as safe, and the Adventurer's Guild had marked it silver-rank because two previous teams had failed to return. Wei Chen descended alone. That had been his own condition. The guild's dispatcher, a tired woman with ink-stained fingers, had argued that silver contracts required at least three bronze-rank members. Wei Chen had countered that three bronze-rank members would die.

The formation was not merely corrupted; it was layered—a modern suppression array bolted onto something older, like a patch sewn over a festering wound. More bodies meant more qi signatures pressing against unstable threads, and unstable threads, in Wei Chen's experience, unraveled into explosions. He had not explained how he knew that. He had simply shown her his guild token, his alchemist's registration, and the flat certainty in his eyes. Now the cistern breathed around him.

Water dripped from vaulted ceilings into black pools that smelled of rust and old stone. The air was thick with ambient qi turned sour, a taste like copper left on the tongue too long. Wei Chen moved with the economy the legacy demanded: each step placed before the next was finished, his weight distributed so that his own qi did not disturb the pattern webbing the floor. The formation occupied the far end of the chamber, spiraling across the damp flagstones in bands of corroded silver.

Modern work, clearly—the glyphs were angular, efficient, designed to channel and contain. But beneath them, barely visible where the silver had flaked away, older lines ran in curves the legacy recognized. Pre-Sundering script. The same script that lived in his memory, written in the hand of people who had died ten thousand years before the kingdom of Veritas had a name. Wei Chen knelt at the boundary and let his senses spread. The corruption was not external.

Someone had tried to use the older layer as a power source and had tied the modern array into it without understanding the syntax. The result was a feedback loop: the ancient lines drank in modern qi, twisted it, and fed it back as rot. Left alone, it would eventually saturate the foundation and collapse the district above. They treated it like a battery, he thought. They saw a shape and assumed it was empty. He worked slowly.

First, he mapped the modern array with a stick of compressed chalk, marking nodes in a notation of his own devising. Then he began the delicate work of severing the ties without triggering the ancient layer. His fingers moved in small circles, qi compressed into threads fine enough to slip between glyphs. The legacy supplied the technique; modern conditions supplied the instability.

He adapted as he went, shortening a channel here, thickening a buffer there, translating between what the ancients had intended and what the stone had become. Hours passed. His thighs ached from kneeling. The sour qi pressed against his skin, testing the density of his refined flesh, and found no easy purchase. Then his chalk line broke against something that should not have been there. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

A hard edge, buried two inches beneath the floor. Wei Chen paused, qi threads withdrawn, and used the tip of a small pry bar to lift the cracked flagstone. Beneath it, half-sealed in mortar and root-grown earth, sat a tablet fragment no larger than his palm. The surface was gray-green stone, worn smooth by water and time, and the script across it was unmistakable. Not modern. Not even close. His heart beat once, hard, and then settled into the calm the legacy had trained into him.

He did not touch the tablet directly. Instead, he wrapped it in a sheet of waxed silk and tucked it into his inner robe, against his ribs where his own qi would hide its resonance. To any observer, it would look like a sample stone. There were no observers. The cistern was silent except for the drip of water and the fading hum of the formation he had just finished dismantling. He completed the neutralization in another hour, sealing the ancient layer with a stabilizing matrix of his own design.

When he climbed back to the guild office, he reported the job done and the corruption source removed. He said nothing about the tablet. The dispatcher stamped his completion mark and remarked that he worked faster alone than most teams did together.

"It's not speed," Wei Chen said.

"It's fewer mistakes." Back in his workshop, with the door locked and the window shuttered, he unwrapped the fragment and set it under the lamp. The stone was cold. The script was partial, the beginning and end missing, but the middle remained legible to anyone who knew the grammar. It spoke of a gate. Not a city gate, but a threshold between regions: the Eastern Reaches, where the air was thick with qi and the Tianxian Empire had once extended its shadow.

It named a route through the Scarlet Wastes, a path the ancients had called the Verdant Road. It warned of watchstones and boundary wards, most of which had likely fallen to dust. Wei Chen sat very still. Aethelgard lay in the heart of the Tianxian Empire. The empire lay east. For months, his destination had been a word from his mother's message, a point on a map drawn in a language the world no longer spoke. Now it had shape. The Eastern Reaches were real. The route was real. The gate was real.

And he was not ready for it. The realization arrived without sentiment. He examined it the way he examined a formation: identify the load, measure the stress, determine whether the structure would hold. His Foundation Establishment cultivation was stable, his body refinement solid, his alchemy advancing. Against silver-rank threats, he survived. Against gold-rank threats, he would likely die. The Scarlet Wastes, if the legacy's scattered references were accurate, were worse than gold-rank.

They were an environment that killed the unprepared regardless of rank. He needed more. More techniques. More resources. More control over the legacy thrumming behind his eyes. He would not leave Dragon's Rest until he had it. Wei Chen wrapped the tablet again and placed it in the hidden compartment beneath his workbench, beside the storage ring from the corrupted cultivator and the seeds Master Feng had given him. Then he extinguished the lamp and left the workshop.

The eastern wall of the capital was nearest to the Alchemist's Quarter. He climbed the steps while the city slept, passing patrols who knew his face well enough not to question him. At the top, the wind met him with the smell of distant rain and the faint green scent of the plains beyond the valley. He stood at the parapet and looked east. The horizon was a line of darkness still untouched by dawn, but he could feel the direction like a pull in his chest.

Somewhere beyond that line lay the Scarlet Wastes, the Ashen Dragon Sect's territories, the Bridge Kingdoms, the Celestial Wall. Somewhere beyond all of it lay Aethelgard, and the answers his parents had not been able to give him. Not yet, he told himself. But the road is there. The first light touched the edge of the world, turning the distant clouds the color of old bronze. Wei Chen watched until the sun cleared the horizon, then turned and went back down into the city. He had work to do.