2026-09-03 01:46:20"Why?"
His voice echoed through the bridal chamber, or so he thought. In truth, it left his lips as a broken rasp, drowned in the blood he coughed onto the crimson carpet.
Xiao Meng lifted his head.
Red lanterns swayed above him. Red silk draped the walls. The wedding wine he had shared moments ago still burned in his throat, but it was no longer sweet. It was cold, and it was spreading.
They stood around him in a circle, the people he had called family. His senior brothers. His senior sisters. His master. And before him, in a gown of bridal red, her face hidden beneath a veil, stood Lin Xueyi, the woman he had waited three hundred years to marry.
He did not need to see her face. He had known her too long. He knew the way her fingers tightened when she lied, the way her shoulders stilled when she felt nothing.
They were perfectly still now.
"Blame yourself, junior brother." Gu Yunting, his eldest senior brother, smiled with the ease of a man at a banquet. He swirled the last drops of wine in his cup. "A man who stands above everyone should not trust anyone beneath him."
Numbness crawled up Xiao Meng's arms. His fingers twitched against the floor.
Poison, refined to destroy those in the great saint realm. How could they do this to him, why was heaven spitting on him after he gave his all to them.
How could this happen?
I have to channel the qi. Push it out. Fight.
He forced his spiritual energy into his core, and golden light flickered beneath his skin.
"Don't let him stabilize it!" The roar came from behind the circle. "Begin the incantation. Now!"
The voice belonged to Daoist Taixuan.
Seven figures dropped into position at once. Their sleeves snapped wide, their palms struck the floor, and the chamber answered. Silver runes erupted across the ground and spun outward in nine concentric rings. Pillars of pale light rose from each ring, joined overhead, and sank into the rafters like the ribs of a great cage.
Xiao Meng felt it before he understood it. Beneath the sacred glow, at the very core of the array, something rotted. A thick, hungry, demonic energy was waiting to feed.
"This is... the Nine Prisons Heaven-Sealing Formation." He choked on the words. "Master! That is a forbidden art! Why? Why are you all doing this to me?"
Taixuan stepped forward, stroking his long white beard. His blue eyes, once warm enough to shelter a lost boy, looked down on him now like a butcher's over a lamb.
"You outlived your master, boy." His voice was soft and venomous. "I have cultivated my whole life. Two thousand years, and I am still stuck in the Great Luo Immortal Realm. And you, merely five hundred years old, dared to step past me." His lips curled. "I could have tolerated a genius. But you became a monster this world should never have had."
"Monster..." The word echoed from the others, one after another, as if they had rehearsed it.
Xiao Meng laughed through the blood. He slammed his palm on the floor and the Frostfall Sword leapt into his grip, he rose on shaking legs.
"Then come take it, Master."
He moved.
Frostfall Sword Art: Nine Winters Descend. Nine arcs of silver frost split the air and tore across the chamber. The first cut shattered two pillars of light. The second froze the ground in a sweeping crescent. Gu Yunting threw himself backward and thrust both palms outward.
Thunder-Subduing Palm!
Purple lightning roared from his hands and collided with the frost. The explosion hurled red silk across the room. Xiao Meng pressed on, blade humming, aiming for the nearest seal-bearer, his third senior sister, Ye Zhaoling.
His spirit core stuttered.
The poison surged, and his sword wavered by a hair. It was enough. Ye Zhaoling's twin crescent blades crossed in front of her throat, deflecting his strike. Blood sprayed from his shoulder where her second blade had cut through his guard.
He was nearly there. If he could just stabilize the core, he could still break free.
"Junior brother."
The voice was lazy, almost kind. Shen Hanzhou, his second senior brother, stepped out of the shadows with something heavy in his arms. He did not say anything else. He simply tossed it across the floor.
It landed at Xiao Meng's feet.
His sister.
Xiao Ning lay lifeless on the red carpet, her hair loose, her small hands open and still.
The world stopped.
Brother, you must look after her. Promise me. His dying mother's voice rang inside his skull, thin and trembling, her cold hand clutching his. He had been only a boy then, when he promised his dying mother to protect his sister.
"Xiao Ning..."
The sword slipped from his fingers.
It was only a moment and, in that moment, his spiritual sense collapsed, and the poison swallowed his core in a single gulp. He vomited blood, and the nine rings of runes blazed white.
"Seal him!"
The first chain erupted from the floor. It pierced his shoulder, the second drove through his thigh. A third, a fourth, a fifth, black iron etched with golden runes, bursting out of the formation and burying themselves in his flesh. Each one tore a piece of his cultivation away. Each one dragged him down, as if the earth itself wanted him kneeling.
Move, he told his legs. Move!
He pushed through them. He tore one chain from his arm, and another from his side, and dragged himself forward one step at a time, painting the carpet with his own blood.
Xiao Ning's fingers twitched.
Her eyelids fluttered open, unfocused, dull with pain. She wasn't dead, she was still alive.
"Big... brother?"
Tears welled in her eyes as she saw the chains winding around him like iron serpents.
"Big brother!"
She tried to rise and fell. Her legs had been cut, and the wounds had been left to bleed. She dragged herself across the red floor with her fingers, leaving a trail of crimson, blood bubbling at her lips with every sob.
"Big brother... don't... go..."
"Xiao Ning, stay there! I'm coming!" he roared.
But his body would not obey. His spiritual energy bled away. His Great Saint aura crumbled to Saint, then to Sage, then lower still. The chains tightened. He reached out his hand.
She reached back.
Their fingers were inches apart.
Shhhk.
A blade slid through her chest, from behind. It pierced her life core cleanly, with no hesitation.
Xiao Ning's eyes widened. Her small hand fell short, just short of his.
Xiao Meng stared at the sword. He recognize it at a glance, it was the sword that had sat on his belt for five hundred years, the one he had trusted with his life. Silver seal-script now crawled along the blade, stripping him of any command over it.
His gaze rose slowly along the blade, to the hand holding it.
The bridal veil lay on the floor. Lin Xueyi stood with her back straight, her face white as jade, her eyes empty. There were no tears, no hesitation, nothing. She looked at him the way one looks at a stranger.
"A pity," Daoist Taixuan said, brushing his sleeve. "We could not kill you, boy. But sealing you for eternity is still the better option."
Something inside Xiao Meng broke.
He began to laugh.
It started low, then grew until it shook the chamber. His long black hair drained of color strand by strand, turning to snow-white as the chains lifted him into the air. Blood ran from his eyes like tears.
"Is this the wrath of Heaven?" He tore his gaze upward through the shattered roof. "Is this the price I pay for loyalty? I guarded your realms! I swore your oath! And this is how you repay me?"
Thunder rolled across the sky. Lightning split the clouds in answer.
He looked at them, one by one, memorizing each face. Gu Yunting. Ye Zhaoling. Shen Hanzhou. Taixuan. Lin Xueyi.
"I will come back," he said, in a voice that no longer sounded human. "Mark my words. Heaven or Hell will not keep me. I will make every one of you pay. This is my Dao Promise. Vengeance will be my path!"
The sky roared. A bolt of lightning crashed through the roof, and the nine rings of the formation exploded in blinding light.
The air tore open.
A jagged rift yawned in the center of the chamber, deep and crimson. Pale hands, hundreds of them, clawed out of the dark, gripping the chains and pulling.
"What is this?" Ye Zhaoling stepped back, her blades trembling. "Is this part of the formation, Master?"
Taixuan's face went rigid. "No... Stop it! All of you, stop it now!"
The spirit manifestation they had summoned, a colossal bronze warden with nine faces and nine chained arms, lunged forward to drag the chains back. But the hands overwhelmed it. Chain after chain was pulled taut into the rift. The warden's arm shattered.
Xiao Meng felt himself dragged away.
He turned his head, one last time, toward the small body on the floor.
Then toward the woman in red.
He smiled, and his blood-tears glittered in the light.
"I will be back."
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Su Qingyue, sad tale
That night, Xiao Meng sat on the east wing's roof tiles and stared at the red sky.He kept his breathing steady, the Azure Stream flowing through his meridians, and let the qi circle through his dantian again and again. Two days had passed since the theft, and in two days he had learned something strange about himself.His spirit sense was sharper, unlike the normal guard in the mansion. When he closed his eyes, the entire manor unfolded in his mind like an ink painting: the guards pacing the wall, the steward snoring in the storehouse, a mouse in the granary, a moth against a lantern. He could feel every change in the air, every breath, every heartbeat. He had assumed it was normal until Qingyue gaped at him over dinner."Tiānrén Gǎnyìng!" she had cried, spilling her soup. "Heaven and Man Resonance! That's an ability reserved for cultivators who have formed a Golden Core!"He remembered her clear explanation of what the golden core was. A Golden Core, Jīndān, was what a cultivator bec
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Xiao Meng woke to the creak of wheels.A wooden ceiling swayed above him. A lantern rocked on its hook, and the air smelled of dried herbs and horses. A carriage. He sat up and found three faces watching him: a lean, grey-eyed man with a trimmed beard, a broad-shouldered guard he vaguely remembered from the hollow, and a girl who was beaming."He's awake! Father, he's awake! I told you he wasn't dead. Mu Jian owes me a silver.""I said he was breathing too evenly to be dead," Mu Jian muttered, with a deep sigh." Yeah, whatever, it’s the same as saying he is dead." The girl clasped her hands and bowed with theatrical grace. "Let me introduce myself properly, since you fainted on me last time. Su Qingyue, daughter of caravan master Su Beichen. You may remember my name with gratitude.""Qingyue," her father said mildly, with a heavy sigh, "Young man, you saved my daughter's life. We found you unconscious and alone among the. Leaving you there was unthinkable."Xiao Meng stared hard for a
The Man Beneath the Red Sky
"Help! Someone, help me!"The cry came again and again, ragged and frantic, scraping at the edges of the dark. Then a shriek tore across the air, so shrill it split the silence in two, and Xiao Meng's eyes snapped open.Leaves, orange leaves, dry and brittle, buried him to the chest. He thrashed upward through them, and they spilled from his shoulders like dying embers as he dragged himself to his knees, gasping.The sky was red, a deep, bruised crimson stretched from horizon to horizon. Beneath it lay broken walls, rusted halberds leaning in the dust, and the vast ribs of some colossal beast arching overhead like the ruin of a temple.Where am I?He pressed a hand to his chest. His heartbeat was slow and steady. His fingers were long, callused, and unfamiliar. His body felt like borrowed clothing, tailored for a stranger.Who am I?"Please! Somebody!"The voice came from beyond a ridge of shattered stone. Xiao Meng rose, swayed, and found his balance. He walked toward it without knowi
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