I had to admit that it did feel strange to hold so many leaves at once, almost immoral. Wrong, even if the leaves were sanctioned by the source.I glanced at Flee. She watched the spinning sphere with focus.“We’ll sort by thickness,” I murmured at her, already planning. “Thicker for the bombs. Medium ones for my testing. Thin for everything else.”I drew the sphere tighter. The whirling mass condensed to something the size of a barrel, then a bucket, then a fruit, smooth and firm. I felt for the point where compression would begin to damage the inner structure of the leaves and stopped there. The thrum settled into a slow pulse that matched the tree’s own cadence.I set the ball down on the soil mound. It didn’t bounce, even though it really felt like it should. That thought made me smile; what was I treating this essentially sacred artifact as? A football?It sat there and vibrated, not affected by my heretical thoughts at all, the tiny movements from the leaves keeping the layers f

The leaf could source and carry, but a mortal’s body needed channels to receive and distribute. Cultivators developed meridians over time through training, pills, and guided circulation. A mortal’s—or a broken cultivator’s—body had physical vessels and nerves but no reinforced Chi channels.I could think of three ways to build meridians. First: brute-force carving using controlled Chi like a blade—fast, dangerous, sometimes effective with sturdy constitutions, too high-risk for broad use. Too much involvement from me, too, which would mean too much time taken. Second: gradual conditioning with low-dose Chi and herbs, allowing the leaf to form quasi meridians—safe, slow, not suited to wartime. Third: introduce a guiding intelligence that could enter the body and shape growth from inside—something like what I had done for Zhang.If a leaf could be a conduit, then a leaf could be the seed of a construct with a task. It would need will, not awareness. It would need enough structure to hol

I nodded, and we had a full, lengthy recap, which included the fact that I was going to die. The atmosphere turned dismal again, by the time I stopped speaking. However, to my surprise, Su Lin and Cao Chen did not linger on the fact I was going to die soon. Perhaps they knew I needed normalcy right now. Perhaps they needed it too. They moved the conversation to where hands could rest and tongues could loosen without shaking.“So much has changed in such a short time,” Su Lin began. He sank onto the reed mat with a soft grunt, palms flat on his knees. He stared across the courtyard toward the old plum tub and then back to me, as if mapping the distance between the world we had lived in and the one we stood in now.“You’re telling me,” Cao Chen chuckled. He settled beside Granny Lang, forearms on his thighs. “Just a year ago, I thought I’d be stuck in that town. I thought Brother Zhang wouldn’t be healed. But then, everything changed so quickly. And everything went to shit just as quick

I looked at the spirits that had practically filled the room—hundreds upon hundreds of them, all around me. With this, I had enough not only for the mortals but also the newly awakened cultivators who needed a boost.With this, our army would have a much higher chance of surviving.I walked the room once more to count. I didn’t have to, but counting calmed the part of my mind that wanted to jump ahead. I kept a finger on the tally line along the door lintel, adding a mark every ten. The marks ran past the midpoint and to the far side. A good number. I had packed the earlier batches into unlidded cups with chalk marks—single lines for first run, double for the rechecked set, a dot for those that had passed a heat test against a lamp flame, just in case. Those stood ready on the bench. The spirits in the air were the fresh run. They pulsed faintly, in time with my breathing.I closed my eyes for one breath to fix the next steps. Then I opened them and reached for the connection I had sp

A second later, the bombs leached into the Demon God, burning it in a white fury, the absence of miasma. Where it took hold, the Demon God’s surface developed pits. Yin’s alchemists built the mix so it would crave miasma the way a dry sponge craves water and so it would go inert when it found none. The pitted areas would heal slowly without a large infusion of fresh miasma.Twilight kept pressure on them to stop the Demon God from re-seeding those sections with its core. The Demon God kept screaming until it finally seemed to understand the dire situation it was in.The air above the forward ranks warped and flared. Feathers formed out of heat, then blackened as threads of miasma veined them. The eyes that blinked open were rimmed with soot. The head turned once, taking in the tree, the roots, and the armies, then fixed on me. There was recognition in that gaze. There was also the rigidness of a mind locked in orders it did not choose.The Demon God had chosen to unleash its first Div