2026-02-22 08:21:25
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Chapter 584
Shi Yan Yun’s breath did not change. His face did not change. But his knuckles whitened where his hand touched the pommel of his blade for a split second. Then the whiteness faded. His hand opened.He did not look at any of them. “What do you want me to do?”“Stop calling these floods a nuisance,” the Vermilion Bird said. “Stop pretending your walls will be enough next century. Walls are never enough. You know that.”“We can help you build laws that will keep souls from falling back as teeth to bite everyone and everything,” the Azure Dragon said. “We can shape a frame for the sky again. But we are not enough by ourselves. We need a core worthy of anchoring edicts.”Shi Yan Yun turned his head then. His eyes were a flat dark. “Mine.”“Yes,” the Vermilion Bird said. “Yours.”The ridge wind moved patterns in the soot on the roofs below. The people had gone back to sleeping. The watch bells sounded the hour. Two were answered by three. Shi Yan Yun remembered the way his brother had once
Chapter 583
On the sixth night of that siege, a creature climbed the wall and bent its face toward him. Its eyes were hollow sockets full of heat. Its breath stank of old graves and broken pills. It spat a line of void at his throat. He deflected it with the back of his hand and crushed its skull under his boot.It whispered through a shattered mouth, “Shi… Yan Yun…”He did not respond. He did not care for tricks.It wheezed again with a sound like ribs buckling. “Do… you… remember…”He broke its spine so it would stop moving and pushed it back off the wall. He did not look down to see it fall. He set another plate the next morning, so that the imitations of the Divine Beasts would guard this area. He did not look to any of the old letters, not even then.The fourth century taught him that the underworld learned.The demons appeared in a different place from where they had, the first three centuries. They split into three columns with scouts and rear guards and units that carried racks of talisma
Chapter 582
The scenes began speeding up.The first century passed like a breath to those who cultivated on peaks and held nations in their sleeves. It did not pass nearly so quickly for the frontier towns.At the start, the underworld split along a seam no wider than a river path and spat out a thousand shapes. They were misshapen, slow, and hungry. Their eyes were dull. Their claws were blunt. They rose from gullies and old graves and the bottoms of lakes where Water Qi had turned stale. They staggered toward the nearest walls and knocked on them like drunks who had forgotten their own doors.They only had to take a few lives before they attracted the mighty emperor’s attention.Shi Yan Yun stood on the eastern battlements and watched them for a while without drawing his sword.“Pitiable,” he said at last. “Burn the ones nearest the wells. Drive the others west. Let the militias claim heads and markers. It will season them.”They did not need him. He left before noon and returned to the palace
Chapter 581
The next scene made me blink a few times to adjust to the difference in brightness.I stood next to Shi Yan Yun, as he watched what happened below him indifferently.The city was splattered in blood and fire. Traces did remain of what it had been before, but red dyed the towering buildings that reached the very sky, its glory turned to a monument of death made manifest.Cultivators continued to fight, even in the veritable river of blood or astride piles of corpses, they fought on. Each moment new corpses joined the fallen, replaced just as quickly. Those from within the castle and outside the city alike joined the battle, streaming in a steady flow.I let my divine sense spread. The air was thick with shredded Qi. Formations had collapsed; their nodes flickered and faded like dying embers. The ground array that once cycled spiritual veins into the capital sputtered, feeding half-spent streams to broken relays in the streets. On the distant walls, banners once inscribed with warding s
Chapter 580
Across the field, Shi Yan Yun’s fury ate through prudence, then circled back to it. With his own Lords staggering, with his ally dead and still dictating the weather of power, he bled off his anger into the only sensible order left.“Hold. Fall back by rings.”So they retreated together—two currents leaving the same basin by different channels. The hum dulled as the qualified targets thinned and, by the time Shi Qing’s flag crossed the second ring of flags, fell below hearing entirely.Trumpets signaled the end call. The envoys folded their arms over their plates and pretended duty kept their feet nailed to the ridge.Shi Qing did not look away long. When he did, it was to the pavilion the servants had raised under his brief nod. “Send a team to retrieve his body.”“Your Highness—” the field-master began.The Black Tortoise was already moving with eight men and a white flag. They walked the clean lines between lingering residues. Feng Sha lifted the heir’s body with care and turned ba
Chapter 579
A wave of shock moved through the plain. Soldiers on both sides flinched or stared in shock. In the sudden stillness, Shi Qing strode toward the center without expression, the four divine beasts around him.The Black Tortoise reached the heir first. He dropped to his knees and placed his palm on the young man’s head, pressing down in an attempt to heal. Golden light flared, then dispersed.Shi Qing stopped at the edge of the trampled square, looking down at his son. The muscles at the corners of his eyes held steady—there was no movement from him, none at all, nothing to indicate any emotion. He didn’t avert his gaze from his dead son.The Vermilion Bird bowed his head. The White Tiger closed his eyes for the length of one breath and opened them. The Azure Dragon exhaled air slowly, as if he had prepared himself.“Brother,” Yao Chuanli said softly.Shi Qing did not answer.Yao Chuanli lowered his head. “I am sorry.”The White Tiger spoke flatly. “You are not.”“This conflict was not m
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