His father nodded once. He stood up and took his tea to the window and stood there looking out at the road — at the place where the forty-seven had been and were no longer. At the cracked section of road from Kross Voss's misfired technique that Dou had already been complaining about needing to repair.He stood there for a while.Wei Liang finished his second bowl of rice and said nothing else. Some conversations end when they end, and this one was ended, and that was fine.---General Desh came at midmorning.He sat at the table and accepted the tea Wei Liang's mother offered him because he was a man of basic courtesies and refusing offered tea was not one of them. He had a small writing brush and a piece of paper."Tell me what happened," he said. "From the beginning. Clearly."Wei Liang told him. Not everything — not the System, not the ancient ruins, not the things that lived in the space between what was explainable and what wasn't. Just the facts: the Summit, the matches, the fa

My brother competed at the Summit," she said, walking over to stand beside Var Voss — not because they were friends, but because they had the same target and that made them temporary allies. "Jin Sorel. Top three percent of all active cultivators his age in the entire nation. Royal Cultivation Council certified. Undisputed top disciple of the Golden Wind Sect for three consecutive years." She looked at Wei Liang. "He lost to you. And my family — my entire family — has been trying to explain that to themselves ever since." She looked at the badge. "You are outer sect from an academy nobody has heard of. You have no master, no lineage, no verifiable record. You are nothing. And nothing beat my brother. So either my brother is less than we thought — " Her voice tightened. "Or the result was wrong." A third voice. From behind both of them. "Or the result will be corrected." This one he did not immediately recognise. A girl. Sixteen at most. Stonewall Sect colours. Small, carrying her

A straight blade, old, the metal a colour that was not quite any metal Wei Liang had seen before. A simple grip, wrapped in something that had aged beyond identifying. No ornamentation. Nothing about it that would catch the eye if you passed it in a market.But the formation lines on the pedestal were dense and specific and Wei Liang read them in the first three seconds.For the one who can hold everything.He stopped walking.The seven other entrants in the hall were arguing about the sword. Two of them had already tried to take it and had failed — the sword had not moved. Not locked in place physically, they said, just — not moved. Like trying to lift something that had decided not to be lifted."It requires a specific cultivation key," one of them was saying. He was from the Iron Mountain Sect — stocky, mid-Core Formation, the manner of someone who was used to being the most cultivated person in any given room. "A trigger technique that matches the formation on the pedestal. I have

Day seven.That was when the first person died inside the ruins.Not from a hazard. Not from one of the unknown dangers the man at the entrance had warned about. From another entrant.Wei Liang heard about it from Scholar Ven, who had seen it happen from a distance and had the specific pale, controlled look of someone who had seen something she was still processing."Two entrants from different sects," she said. She was sitting at the entrance of the fourth structure where Wei Liang had set up his base — close to the stone table, close to the notation walls, close to the sealed door he was slowly working on reading. "They found a chamber in the second structure. A formation storage chamber — filled with technique scrolls, cultivation resources, objects. There was only one entrance. Both of them arrived at the same time." She looked at her notebook. "It escalated.""How badly?" Zhao Peng said."One of them is not going to need to escalate anything anymore," Scholar Ven said.The camp o

A large chamber. Full of things.They had not found it alone.Two entrants from the Crimson Spear Sect had found it at the same time from a different entrance.Six people. One chamber. The same arithmetic as before, but this time the calculation had been made before anyone had a chance to talk, and the result was different.The fight in the chamber had been brutal and short.Two from the smaller sect were dead.The other two were badly injured — one of them unable to stand, the other standing only because she was using the wall.The two Crimson Spear entrants were walking out of the first structure with their arms full of things from the chamber and their robes dark with blood that was not all their own.They walked through the courtyard.Nobody stopped them.Nobody said anything.The man at the entrance looked up from his ledger, looked at the Crimson Spear entrants, looked at the blood, made a note in his ledger.Put his pen down.Picked it up again.Wei Liang stood in the courtyard