The Heavenly City rose from the central plains like a crown placed deliberately at the continent’s heart. Its walls were not stone but polished white jade veined with spirit gold, and its gates stood open at all hours, swallowing and spitting out endless streams of merchants, cultivators, and beasts of burden. Every trade route in the Central Continent eventually led here. Every clan with something to sell maintained a pavilion. The city’s skyline was a forest of pagodas, each one a marketplace stacked ten stories high, and at its center, the grand plazas hosted auctions that could make or break sects.Lucas and Ivy passed through the eastern gate without fanfare. Their clothes were still travel-worn from the Dark Star Valley, though the black iron ring on Lucas’s finger held more wealth than most of the merchant lords flaunting their silks in the streets. They had come for one reason: the Sacred Lotus Root of a Thousand Winters. Ivy’s Qi root, injured during the Goddess’s ruins in a

The Black Bamboo Forest stood at the eastern edge of the Heavenly City, a stretch of dark stalks and whispering leaves that bordered the trade road like a wall of shadows. By day, merchants passed through without trouble. By night, the forest became a different place. The bamboo grew thick enough to swallow torchlight, and the paths twisted in ways that maps could not hold.Lucas and Ivy walked the road in the hour before dawn, the jade box containing the Sacred Lotus Root secure in Lucas’s coat. The sky was still black, the stars faint behind a thin veil of cloud. They could have flown. They did not hurry. Lucas walked with the calm of a man who had already calculated every possible threat and dismissed most of them as irrelevant.Ivy matched his pace. She did not speak. Her eyes, silver in the darkness, scanned the bamboo walls on either side. She felt them before they appeared. Ten presences, cold and focused, each one a True Immortal who had killed often enough that the killing in

The iron dust from the crushed emblem still clung to the floorboards of the herbalist shop. Outside, the Heavenly City churned with its usual noise, but inside, the silence was heavier than stone. Lucas stood by the window, the red scroll tube from the Heavenly Sword Emperor still unopened in his hand. He had accepted the invitation, but the threat against his distant family still coiled in his chest like a cold snake.Behind him, Ivy moved.She did not rise from the meditation mat so much as unfold, her silver hair catching the pale light as she stepped around the table and stopped at his side. Then, without hesitation, she lowered herself to one knee.Lucas turned. “Ivy.”“I am not strong enough,” she said. Her voice was steady, but the words carried a weight that had been building for days. “At the Dark Star Ruins, I advanced two stages, but it was still not enough to stand beside you against the Three Clans. You faced ten True Immortals while I stood and watched. You broke the for

The Meteor Stone Gate lay embedded in the hillside a kilometer away, a silent testimony to the fact that something unprecedented had just walked into the Death Arena. The fifty thousand spectators who had jeered and mocked were now quiet, their throats dry, their betting slips crumpled in sweating palms. But the tournament had rules, and the rules did not pause for fear.A gong sounded, deep and resonant, echoing across the colosseum floor. The herald, whose voice had lost some of its earlier swagger, stepped onto a floating platform above the red sand and raised his jade tablet."The first round of the Imperial Blood Tournament is the Blood Draw," he announced, the formation amplifying his words. "Each newcomer will be paired with one Elite Elder of the orthodox and unorthodox paths. This round is designed to test the younger generation's respect for their seniors—and to remind them of the gap that only centuries of cultivation can bridge."A murmur rippled through the VIP pavilions.

Feng Lei's face contorted. The vein in his temple had gone from pulsing to visibly bulging, and his silver saber, sensing its master's fury, blazed with a light that hurt to look at. Fifty thousand spectators leaned forward in their seats. The other participants pressed themselves against the tunnel walls. Even the magma beneath the arena floor seemed to bubble louder, as if the colosseum itself was holding its breath."You are dead," Feng Lei whispered. The amplification formations caught every syllable. "You are dead, and I will make it slow."He moved.The [Thousand Star Thrust] was not a technique of the Heavenly Sword Emperor's main lineage—it was something Feng Lei had developed himself over three centuries of dueling. His body became a blur of silver lightning, and his saber multiplied. One blade became ten, ten became a hundred, a hundred became a thousand points of killing light that filled the air above the arena. Each point was real. Each point was aimed at a different vita