“Kneel,” said Elder Qu.Leo Bai stayed on his feet.Four hundred people crowded the balconies of the Bai Clan’s Great Hall, and every one of them had come to watch him break. He stood at the center of the marble in a plain gray robe and counted his breaths, because counting kept his hands from shaking.One.“I will not say it again, boy.”Two.Mei Qingshan, Patriarch of the Mei family, raised two fingers. The pressure of a Core Formation cultivator came down on Leo with a crushing, total weight. His knees hit the marble hard enough to echo. Somewhere above him a man laughed. Someone else clapped twice, softly, pleased that the show had finally started.Three.Leo kept his head up. They could not take that.The floor was colder than any floor had a right to be. The cold crawled up through his robe and into his bones, and he barely felt it. What he felt was the swallowed stone in his chest, and it had his father’s face on it.Bai Ren stood at the head of the hall in ceremonial robes cut

The Howling Abyss did not welcome visitors. Leo worked that out inside the first hour.The mist never thinned. It tasted of copper and old rot. The ground gave way without warning, and the air carried something sharp enough to scorch a lung. By the second day he had learned something more useful.Down here, pain meant progress.He sat cross-legged on a cracked slab with a Poison-Marrow Berry in his hand. It was the color of a week-old bruise, its skin split and weeping black sap that smelled of vinegar and funerals. Sect cultivators walked a mile out of their way to avoid it. One bite, people said, left poison in the body for decades."Go on," said Bai Yuan. You’re hungry. It’s hungry. Nobody is being subtle.Leo bit down.The taste was a slap, bitter enough to curl his tongue, and after it came a heat that slid down his throat thick and scalding. His vision smeared. His pulse jumped. He clamped his jaw and drew the poison inward toward his dantian.The Canon woke with a roar.The tox

Azure Peak City was awake and shouting with joy.Red silk banners hung from every rooftop. Lanterns lined the cobbles though it was morning. Merchants bawled their prices twice as loud as usual, because caravans choked every road and the richest cultivators on the continent had come to watch a golden saint marry a Frost Moon beauty. Fourteen days to the Great Alliance Feast, and the city had already lost its head.Everywhere Leo looked, someone was selling the wedding. Paper effigies of the Saint Son and his bride grinned from the shop windows. Street singers bellowed ballads about golden light and frost-white silk. A betting stall outside the south gate took odds on how many sects would send envoys, and the biggest crowd stood in front of a painted board listing the gifts the Sun-God Sect had promised every guest. Hardly anyone was reading it for the gifts. It was the nearest thing to a promise most of them had ever been offered, and they wanted badly to believe it.Leo stood at the