I’m Not Dead Yet! When Did My Sect Go Insane?
Woke up. Something had quietly taken over my sect.
Three thousand years behind a shut door. The world outside had spent every one of them without asking me, rearranging itself while I sat in the dark with my eyes closed, and when I opened them there was not one thing left that I recognised anywhere in it.
In the main hall a little Golden Core girl was weeping into her sleeves and pointing at my grand-disciple: Elder Jian Wuyou of Sword Peak, a Body Integration cultivator. She wanted his life, because he had roasted her spirit rabbit.
This Seat thought it over. A rabbit, and at worst a First Rank spirit beast. If you want to eat it, you roast it. Where was the problem in that?
She cried harder, and then screamed herself hoarse: “It is not about the rabbit! It is about attitude! His attitude! He does not care about my feelings at all!”
This Seat did not understand one word of it and was, frankly, shaken to the root.
Attitude? Slandering an Elder of your own sect and disrupting the grand assembly of the sect: three thousand years ago that got your spirit root pulled out and your body tossed into the Artifact Refining furnace as sword stock.
Over there, an odd-job disciple of the Foundation Establishment stage was sprawled on the floor, insisting that my martial nephew Ye Qingcang, Lord of the Discipline Hall and a Tribulation Transcendence cultivator, had practised Essence Draining on her.
One sweep of divine sense, and her Yuan Yin was intact, clean as new snow.
She clutched at her heart and said, trembling: “Physical purity is nothing! What matters is my spirit! My soul has been sullied by the coldness in his eyes! He has to take responsibility for me, marry me, or this broken heart will never be whole again!”
Again, This Seat did not understand.
A stare can wound a person?
The worst of it was the one they kept cupped in their hands like a pearl: the lone Heavenly Spirit Root, the future of the sect, Baize.
He had released the Netherworld Demon Lord, the thing ninety thousand years of suppression had been holding down, and now he stood in the middle of the hall with his hands spread and his eyes shining, arguing with perfect confidence: “The Demon Lord… he is just a child who wants warmth! Sealed away for so long, he must be so lonely, so hurt! Why can we not redeem him with love?”
Then the whole of it came clear, all at once.
The Azure Cloud Sword Sect had not been taken over by Body Possession.
The whole place had gone insane.
Sick to the bone.
And This Seat’s sword happened to be the cure for every kind of madness.
Someone.
Tie all of them to the punishment platform for This Seat.
This Seat will not be discussing reason today.
Only physics.
1
This Seat is Su Chen.
Grand Elder of the Azure Cloud Sword Sect.
Three thousand years. Nobody plans a seclusion that long.
I had walked out of the ninth heaven of Tribulation Transcendence into my Cultivation Base at Great Ascension, a state three thousand years of the sect’s best minds had decided was a rumour.
This should have been the greatest day in the history of the sect.
But the first thing I saw on my Leave Seclusion was not the ecstatic faces of disciples, and it was not the banners or the bells either.
It was a farce fit for a vegetable market in the Mortal World, staged on a sacred mountain in broad daylight.
Azure Cloud Peak. The Council Hall at the top of it, where the business of the sect had been settled for a hundred thousand years.
A place that should have been solemn and still. Now wrapped in a kind of resentment This Seat had no words for and no patience left to go looking for.
A Golden Core girl disciple, wailing sharp enough to drown out a funeral.
A Foundation Establishment girl odd-job disciple, flat on the ground, acting more sincerely than any player in the Mortal World.
A Heavenly Spirit Root treasure of the sect, face shining with holy light, saying things more outrageous than any demon.
And my useless grand-disciple, the current Sect Lord Li Changfeng, a Body Integration Late Stage cultivator, sweating like a waterfall, plainly unable to hold the room.
Outside the hall This Seat stood with my presence hidden, and watched.
Li Changfeng rubbed his hands together and looked at the weeping Golden Core girl with his face full of trouble.
“Miaomiao, there must be… some misunderstanding here. Elder Jian is a pillar of this sect. Why would he make trouble over a spirit rabbit?”
The girl called Lin Miaomiao wailed, “Sect Lord! You have been fooled too! He looks down on me! He is jealous that Senior Brother Feng Hao favours me! This is a warning shot, a rabbit sent back to tell me exactly what he thinks of me!”
A frown came down over my eyes.
Feng Hao?
Ah. Now This Seat remembered. A Nascent Soul brat with some talent, and a face that was honestly not bad.
But what did any of that have to do with Jian Wuyou?
Jian Wuyou. My grand-disciple. A single mind for the sword, Body Integration Peak Stage, and the Elder in this sect with the best chance of breaking through to Tribulation Transcendence.
He would envy a Nascent Soul brat because a Golden Core girl liked him?
He had forgotten what his own Dao companion looked like. Was he supposed to care about this?
A very large question mark rose up in the back of my mind.
Had this girl been kicked by a donkey, or was her skull caught in a door?
Worse still, quite a few disciples in the hall were looking at her with sympathy.
“True. Elder Jian is always so cold. He might really do something like that.”
“Poor Junior Sister Miaomiao. Senior Brother Feng Hao, go comfort her!”
That Nascent Soul brat Feng Hao stood off to the side with his face cycling green and white, wanting to step forward and not daring to.
This Seat understood.
This was not a question of logic.
This was… a play This Seat could not follow.
And Jian Wuyou, that blunt sword cultivator, simply stood there with his longsword on his back and forced out two words.
“Didn’t.”
Brief and to the point.
Very sword cultivator.
In Lin Miaomiao’s ears, it was oil on fire.
“See! See! He will not even dignify it with an explanation! That means he admits it! That means he looks down on me!”
She cried even harder.
My eyes shut on their own.
Tired.
When had the character of my Azure Cloud Sword Sect come to this?
Three thousand years ago, a disciple who dared raise his voice in this hall was dragged out by the Discipline Hall and had his legs broken.
Slander an Elder?
Ha. The whole family, neat and tidy, hung on the Immortal-Slaying Pillar for three days and three nights, and the crows did the rest.
This Seat had begun to feel that I could not watch any more of it.
Any more of this and my freshly stabilized Great Ascension Dao Heart, an object of reverence in nine provinces and polished over three thousand years of sitting still, would start to crack.
Time to remind these little brats what it felt like to live under the thumb of their Old Ancestor.
2
One step, and This Seat stood in the middle of the hall, which is a distance no eye in that room had been able to follow.
No world-shaking pressure.
No blazing radiance, no vision in the sky.
This Seat simply stood there.
The noise of the hall stopped.
Time might as well have been paused.
Every eye in the room came to rest on This Seat.
First confusion. Then shock. Then fear that would not stay down.
Li Changfeng was the first to react: his legs folded under him, and he dropped straight to his knees with a thud that carried through the whole hall, his voice shaking before he got a word out.
“Your grand-disciple Li Changfeng welcomes the Supreme Grandmaster out of Leave Seclusion!”
“BOOM —”
The hall erupted.
“The Supreme Grandmaster? The Su Chen who went into Closed-Door Cultivation three thousand years ago?”
“Gods above. The Old Ancestor is alive!”
“I… I actually got to see a living legend!”
Disciples, Elders, everyone went down in a dark mass, not one of them daring to breathe loudly.
Only those three actors were still frozen where they stood.
Lin Miaomiao’s sobbing caught in her throat, and she stood there with her mouth open, having forgotten what note was supposed to come next.
The odd-job disciple on the floor forgot to keep twitching, and lay there with her mouth half open, one hand still raised in the middle of a sob.
The holy light on Baize’s face, that lone Heavenly Spirit Root, had set like cold wax.
One glance went round the hall and took the measure of every face in it.
And then it settled on Lin Miaomiao.
“You. Come here.”
It was not loud, and nobody in the hall could have mistaken it for a suggestion.
Lin Miaomiao jerked as if she had been slapped, then crawled over on her knees and knelt in front of This Seat, hands flat on the flagstones.
“Tell me. What happened to your rabbit?” This Seat asked.
She seemed to find her footing again, and fresh tears came at once. “Old Ancestor! It was… it was Elder Jian! He… he roasted my Snowball! My life-bound spirit pet!”
“Life-bound spirit pet?” This Seat raised one eyebrow. “You signed a soul contract with it?”
“That… well, no…”
“A bloodline contract, then?”
“N… no…”
“Then what makes it a life-bound spirit pet?” This Seat’s voice cooled.
Lin Miaomiao choked on that, then mumbled, “But… but Snowball has been with me five years! I already think of it as the most important part of my life! It is my life!”
Not a ripple went across my mind, and honestly, I almost wanted to laugh.
Your life?
A Golden Core cultivator’s life, and it is a rabbit that cannot speak?
Publish that, and the whole demonic path of the Eastern Domain would laugh until their teeth fell out.
“Jian Wuyou.” This Seat turned to my grand-disciple.
“Disciple is here.” Jian Wuyou bowed.
“You roasted her rabbit?”
“Returning to the Old Ancestor: I did not.” Jian Wuyou’s answer was still that simple.
“Mm.” This Seat nodded.
I believed him.
Men who cultivate the sword have hearts like iron in them, and lying is beneath them the way crawling is beneath a man who can walk.
This Seat turned back and looked at Lin Miaomiao.
“He says no.”
Lin Miaomiao panicked and shouted, “He is lying! Old Ancestor, you have to give me justice! It is jealousy! He just cannot stand me!”
“Jealous of what?” This Seat asked, genuinely curious now. “Jealous that your Cultivation Base is higher than his? Or that you have lived longer?”
Lin Miaomiao ran out of words, worked at it for a long while, and produced exactly one line.
“He is jealous that Senior Brother Feng Hao treats me well!”
Dead silence.
Even Feng Hao himself looked like he wanted the floor to open up and take him.
This Seat finally could not hold it in and let out a small laugh.
“Heh.”
“A Body Integration Peak Stage sword cultivator, jealous that a Nascent Soul brat is nice to a Golden Core girl?”
“Who taught you to think like that?”
3
Lin Miaomiao’s face went the color of pig liver.
She had clearly not expected the legendary Old Ancestor, the one the ballads were all about, to be quite this… blunt.
She did not give up; she took a breath, rebuilt the same argument out of the rubble of the last attempt, and came at it again from a new angle.
“Old Ancestor! This isn’t about jealousy! It’s about attitude! His attitude toward ordinary disciples like us! He sits up so high he can’t see the ground, he doesn’t care about lives! Today he roasts my Snowball, tomorrow he could…!”
“Stop.”
This Seat cut her little essay off there.
“This Seat has cultivated for a hundred thousand years. There are two things I cannot stand.”
“First, people crying in front of me.”
“Second, people wasting words in front of me.”
“You are doing both.”
My eyes went cold.
Lin Miaomiao shut up instantly, shivering, one hand still half lifted from the gesture she had been making.
“This Seat does not care about attitude. Only about facts.”
“You say Jian Wuyou roasted your rabbit. Do you have proof?”
“I… I…” Panic. “I smelled it! Near Elder Jian’s cave residence, I smelled Snowball burning!”
“Smelled it?” This Seat laughed. “And that is your proof?”
“Yes! The smell! The smell of a broken heart! Nobody else could smell it!” she insisted.
Two fingers went to the space between my brows.
Talking to someone whose head has come loose from its moorings is a genuine trial for a Great Ascension Dao Heart, and This Seat had been out of practice for three thousand years.
“Fine.”
This Seat could not be bothered to argue any further.
Against this kind of person, reason is useless.
You need magic, and the older the magic the better.
Or, in our line of work, immortal arts.
This Seat raised one finger and pointed it at Lin Miaomiao’s brow.
A thread of golden divine sense, faint enough to miss, slipped in through that single point of contact and uncoiled itself through her sea of consciousness without touching a single memory.
“Mind-Bewildering Art.”
A small spell, harmless to the soul, and it does exactly one thing: it makes a person tell the truth without ever knowing that he is telling it.
The haze came over Lin Miaomiao’s eyes at once.
This Seat spoke, and my voice carried a weight that was not entirely my own.
“Now. Tell This Seat why you slandered Jian Wuyou.”
Nobody in the hall was breathing.
Lin Miaomiao’s eyes went empty, and in a dreamy singsong voice, the voice of somebody reciting a lesson learned badly and half forgotten, she tipped the whole jar out and let it run.
“I… I like Senior Brother Feng Hao…”
“But Senior Brother Feng Hao only ever cultivates. He never looks at me twice…”
“I heard the person he admires most is Elder Jian. That kind of man who never smiles…”
“So I thought… I thought if I made a scene, if Elder Jian bullied me, then Senior Brother Feng Hao would see how weak and helpless I am, and he’d step in to protect me…”
“Snowball… Snowball just ran off. I don’t even know where it is…”
“I just needed an excuse. An excuse that would make Senior Brother Feng Hao notice me…”
“Why won’t he look at me… why…”
So heartfelt.
So moving.
If not for the setting, This Seat might have clapped.
The words landed, and the hall erupted.
The truth was this… absurd.
That Nascent Soul brat Feng Hao had gone a shade of purple that suggested he might die on the spot.
Jian Wuyou’s face had gone black as the bottom of a pot.
A lifetime of the sword, and he had never been humiliated like this.
A Golden Core girl, using him as a stepping stone to get a man’s attention?
Sword Intent was already bleeding off him, and he was no longer holding it back.
4
This Seat waved a hand and lifted the Mind-Bewildering Art off Lin Miaomiao.
She jerked awake, saw the contempt and the anger and the shock on every face around her, and understood.
“No… no, it isn’t! I didn’t! That was fake! Old Ancestor, you…!”
She tried to wriggle out of it.
One look from me and she swallowed the rest of it, along with whatever she had been about to say after it.
“Is the matter clear now?”
My voice carried through the whole hall.
Li Changfeng lowered his head in shame. “It is. Your grand-disciple was incompetent. Grandmaster, please pass judgment.”
“Your crimes can wait.”
Then I looked at Lin Miaomiao, limp as wet mud.
“Lin Miaomiao.”
“Disciple… is here…”
“Under the Sect Rules of my Azure Cloud Sword Sect as they stood three thousand years ago, slandering an Elder of the same sect and disrupting the order of the sect: what is the punishment?”
Li Changfeng answered at once, without a flicker: “Grandmaster, the cultivation base is destroyed, the limbs are broken, and the offender is expelled from the mountain gate, never again to set foot inside the bounds of the Azure Cloud realm.”
He said it flat, like a hammer on a nail.
Clearly he too had had enough of the crooked wind that had been blowing through this sect for the last few decades, bending everything that stood upright.
Lin Miaomiao heard the sentence out to the end, and then came apart in front of the whole hall.
“No! Please! Old Ancestor, spare me!”
She kowtowed like a madwoman, again and again, until the blood came up through the skin of her forehead and marked the flagstones.
“I was wrong! I know I was wrong! I was confused! I just love Senior Brother Feng Hao too much! Is it a crime to love someone?!”
Back to the emotional logic, then, and This Seat had already said what needed saying about that on the way in.
Ha. This Seat laughed, and let it stand in for everything else.
“Loving someone is not a crime.”
“Your love, though, is cheap.”
“So cheap that it needs another man’s reputation and the rules of this sect to pave its road.”
“Here, when you are wrong, you admit it.”
“Take the beating standing straight.”
I turned my face from her. To the Elders of the Discipline Hall: “Drag her out. Carry it out.”
“Yes!”
Two Discipline Hall disciples came forward and hauled her out, howling all the way down the steps.
Her crying faded down the mountain path.
The hall was a grave.
Every disciple had his head down, and none of them would look at This Seat.
They could feel it.
The old rule of this sect, iron-blooded and not up for debate.
No gentle sentiment.
No mercy outside the law.
Only cold, absolute justice.
The result satisfied me.
A healthy sect does not need all that muddled talk of human feeling and emotional entanglements.
It needs two things.
Rules.
And the fist that enforces them.
Now, the second one.
Next, the Foundation Establishment odd-job disciple, still flat on the floor playing dead.
“You. Here. You too.”
5
That odd-job disciple named Xiaocui was shaking like a sieve.
She scrambled on hands and knees to kneel in front of This Seat, face white as paper.
“Old… Old Ancestor… spare me…”
“Lift your head,” This Seat ordered.
She lifted it, trembling.
Not bad to look at. A pity that her eyes were doing nothing but arithmetic.
“Your name?”
“Disciple… Xiaocui…”
“You say Ye Qingcang practised Essence Draining on you?” This Seat turned to the Tribulation Transcendence martial nephew standing not far off, whose face showed nothing at all.
Ye Qingcang, Lord of the Discipline Hall, from my own line, and the last man in this sect I would have expected to hear that name attached to.
He cultivates the Dao of Supreme Detachment. Never mind draining an odd-job disciple, he would call looking at a stray dog on the road a waste of his time.
Ye Qingcang bowed. “Grandmaster, there is no such matter.”
“Mm.” This Seat nodded.
I believed him too.
This Seat looked at Xiaocui. My voice stayed flat.
“This Seat has already examined you. Your Yuan Yin is intact. Where does any draining come in?”
Xiaocui had evidently been expecting the question, and had the whole of it rehearsed; she took a deep breath, reset her face, and began the performance again from the top, note for note, as though This Seat had not already heard the first movement of it half an hour ago.
“Old Ancestor sees all! Disciple did not mean… not the body!”
She clutched her chest, the picture of a woman whose heart was breaking.
“The spirit! The soul! Lord Ye… he looked at me with those cold, heartless eyes! Like a sword, straight through my soul, defiling my pure and spotless heart! My Dao Heart… my Dao Heart is shattered!”
She sobbed, “Disciple is only a lowly odd-job disciple! My one wish was that one day I might build my Dao Foundation and reach Longevity! And now… he has ruined everything! He must take responsibility!”
“In what way?” This Seat asked.
“He… he must marry me! Give me a lifetime of tenderness to make up for what I have suffered!” She found her courage, planted her hands on the flagstones, and said it loudly enough for the back of the hall to hear.
“Pff—”
A disciple with weak self-control laughed out loud.
Then a glare from the Discipline Elder turned him purple in the face.
It was all I could do not to laugh out of sheer disgust.
Well now.
This shakedown was more technically accomplished than the last one, and it had been mounted by a Foundation Establishment odd-job disciple with no backing, no patron, and nothing to bargain with.
It had gone straight up from the physical plane to the spiritual one.
And she wanted a Tribulation Transcendence powerhouse to marry her?
Why not ask for the whole cultivation world as her dowry?
“A look can defile the heart?” This Seat regarded her the way one regards a rare species.
“Yes! Old Ancestor! This kind of wound, you cannot see it! But it kills!” Xiaocui said, with the perfect conviction of a woman who has told the same lie often enough to move into it.
“Good.”
A nod was all the answer that deserved.
“Then since it is a wound of the soul, it should be examined by means of the soul.”
Xiaocui blinked, and it was plain that she did not follow.
The next second she did.
This Seat’s hand came down on the crown of her head with no warning at all.
A surge of divine sense, impossible to resist and ugly as a battering ram, crashed into her sea of consciousness.
“Soul Search!”
A cry went up from the crowd.
The Soul Search Art!
One of the most vicious and brutal Divine Ability in the whole cultivation world, and This Seat had just turned it on a girl who could not yet build a Dao Foundation.
At best, idiocy; at worst, Soul Scattering, and nothing in between that anybody in the crowd could name.
Who would have thought the Supreme Grandmaster would use such thunder on a Foundation Establishment disciple?
Xiaocui did not even have time to scream before her eyes rolled white and her whole body convulsed where she knelt.
Her memories, every secret she had, were flung open in her own sea of consciousness like scroll paintings, and This Seat turned each one with a violent hand.
6
A few breaths later.
This Seat withdrew my hand.
Xiaocui slumped to the floor, foam at her mouth, an idiot through and through.
That was how she would spend the rest of her life, and the rest of it would not be long by cultivator reckoning.
There was no pity in my eyes, and I did not put any there.
So you want to pull a shakedown on a Tribulation Transcendence elder of the Discipline Hall.
Have the sense to know you might get broken doing it.
Slow and cold, my eyes moved to a corner of the hall.
There, Elder Zhang of the Alchemy Hall was trembling.
“Zhang Dehai.”
I said the name quietly and let it sit there.
The Elder flinched, hurried out of line, and knelt.
“Dis… disciple is here!”
“You have a grandson. Zhang Fan. An inner disciple of the Inner Sect. Correct?” This Seat asked.
“Y… yes, Old Ancestor.” Zhang Dehai’s cold sweat had soaked through his robe.
“From what This Seat knows, a hundred years ago Ye Qingcang was going to take a direct disciple, and your grandson Zhang Fan and another disciple, Lin Jue, were the two favorites at the time.”
This Seat’s voice was unhurried, and landed on Zhang Dehai like a hammer.
“Ye Qingcang chose Lin Jue. Your grandson Zhang Fan took that as a grudge, believing Lin Jue had stolen glory and fortune that should have been his. Correct?”
Zhang Dehai shook harder.
“This… this… the boy is young and hot-blooded, narrow in the chest, but… but he would never dare…”
This Seat ignored him and went on.
“So the two of you, grandfather and grandson, came up with this clever plan.”
“Send this odd-job disciple Xiaocui to pull a shakedown on Ye Qingcang.”
“If it worked, Your Master’s name as the Honored Master would suffer, and it would drag down his only direct disciple, Lin Jue. Then you stir up talk, and conveniently pull Lin Jue down off that seat.”
“One pull and the fire goes out from under the pot. What a lovely scheme.”
With every sentence, Zhang Dehai went whiter.
When This Seat finished, his face was ash and he had collapsed where he knelt.
All of it came out of Xiaocui’s sea of consciousness, of course.
She wanted to climb, and Zhang Fan had promised to take her as a concubine the moment his business in this hall was done.
And Zhang Dehai had held her up from behind.
A pity. This Seat had asked her a question and she had answered it with the whole of her life.
The mantis stalks the cicada, never seeing the oriole behind.
They could not have dreamed This Seat would choose that particular week to walk out of three thousand years of closed-door cultivation.
Still less that This Seat’s way of handling a problem would be so… crude.
“Is any part of what This Seat said wrong?”
Zhang Dehai’s lips worked at the air several times, and not one word came out of them.
The facts were on the table. Nothing to argue.
“Someone.” This Seat’s voice was as cold as the ice of the ninth underworld.
“Take Zhang Dehai, and his grandson Zhang Fan, both.”
“By sect law: plotting against a fellow disciple, slandering the Lord of a hall: this is the crime of betraying the sect.”
“Cultivation base destroyed. Thrown into the dungeons. Ten thousand ants gnawing at the heart, until the soul is gone.”
“His clan. Three generations. All three generations, expelled from the sect, never to be taken in again.”
“As for this one…” This Seat pointed at Xiaocui, already drooling on the floor.
“Wanted to climb? Wanted to grab a high branch?”
“Then give her what she asked for.”
“Throw her into the Pit of Ten Thousand Serpents behind the mountain. Let her get properly close to those spirit snakes.”
Cruel, and the hall said so with its silence before anyone dared say it out loud.
Too cruel.
Everyone in the hall had their courage shaken loose.
This was past cleaning house.
This was pulling the roots, burning the grass, leaving nothing to regrow.
For a while the hall was so quiet that a pin would have been heard from one end of it to the other, and the only sound left in it was heavy breathing.
They finally understood.
The Azure Cloud Sword Sect that killed first and asked later and held rules above heaven. It was back.
And This Seat simply watched it all.
Not a ripple inside, not even a mild regret for the paperwork this would make.
Two pieces of trash dealt with, and the air in the hall felt cleaner than it had in a hundred years.
Now.
The last one. And the most troublesome one.
Last of all, the Heavenly Spirit Root prodigy, who had stood straight as a spear the whole time.
7
Baize was the only Heavenly Spirit Root this sect had produced in several hundred years.
Peerless talent, with Fortune itself riding on his shoulders from the day the Heavenly Spirit Root was tested.
They called him the hope of the Azure Cloud Sword Sect.
Which is why he had been spoiled.
Spoiled until he had no idea how high the sky was.
Spoiled until… his saintly heart had overflowed its banks.
He was standing before me, and he looked back at me.
No fear in his eyes.
Something else was there instead: confusion, and a little pity, and the pity was the part that interested This Seat.
As if he were looking at a stubborn old man who had never learned the meaning of great love.
“Baize.” This Seat spoke.
“Disciple is here.” He bowed, neither servile nor proud.
“Do you know what you have done?”
“I do not.” He shook his head, perfectly composed. “Disciple only did what I believed was right.”
“Right?” This Seat turned it back on him. “By right, do you mean releasing the Netherworld Demon Lord from under the Demon-Sealing Pagoda, where he had been suppressed for ninety thousand years?”
“That Demon Lord slaughtered three great cities of our human race. He devoured ten million living souls.”
“His hands are soaked in the blood of the innocent.”
“Releasing him sets you against the entire human race.”
“And that is what you call right?”
My voice had real anger in it now, and I let it show.
The first two had been small things, rot inside the sect.
This Baize, though, had done a thing that could bring ruin down on the whole sect and on every sect standing beside it in the cultivation world.
Faced with the question, Baize did not repent of anything; he drew himself up straighter instead, as though the hall had insulted him.
His face was shining with something close to religious fervor, the shine a man gets when he is sure that the world will eventually agree with him.
“Old Ancestor, you see only his crimes. You do not see the suffering behind them!”
And then he began his speech.
“I have read the old records. The Netherworld Demon Lord was not born a demon! He was once a brilliant cultivator of the human race, in ancient times! He fell in love with a princess of the demon race, and the world turned on him. The so-called righteous sects joined hands to crush him. There was nowhere left for him to go but the Demonic Path!”
“He is not evil! He was simply… hurt too deeply!”
“Sealed under the Demon-Sealing Pagoda for ninety thousand years. Think of the loneliness! The solitude!”
“Disciple sat beneath that pagoda and spoke with him mind to mind for three days and three nights, and I could feel the pain inside him, and how much he longs for warmth!”
“He is like… like a child who wants to be loved!”
“If we only give him enough love, enough warmth, he can be redeemed! Why must we always fight and kill? Why can’t we use love to dissolve hatred?”
The speech was stirring enough, of the sort that makes the listeners grieve and the ones standing behind them weep and the ones in front of them study the ceiling, and it went on for some while.
A few of the more sentimental girl disciples were already wiping their eyes.
“Lord Demon… he’s so pitiful…”
“So that’s the tragic past he had…”
Listening to this, This Seat nearly slapped him into the floor.
A child, he said, and meant it.
A demon lord who had lived several hundred thousand years, and he was a child?
Wants warmth, and ninety thousand years of it, no less.
What he wants is fresh flesh and fresh souls!
Redeemed, with love, and never mind the three cities.
With what? With your Heavenly Spirit Root as a snack?
This Seat has seen fools enough in my three thousand years of it, and never once a fool as thorough as this one.
And so utterly self-righteous about it, so freshly and originally stupid, that it was almost an achievement in its own right.
“Are you finished?” This Seat asked, face blank.
Baize nodded. “I am finished. Old Ancestor, please understand disciple’s good intentions.”
“Mm. This Seat understands your good intentions now.”
That got a nod out of me.
“You believe he can be redeemed.”
“Yes, Old Ancestor! I firmly believe it!” Something idealistic was burning in Baize’s eyes.
“You are willing to redeem him with your own hands.”
“Disciple is willing! Ten thousand deaths, no regrets!” His face was set.
“Very good.”
The corner of This Seat’s mouth curved, cold.
“This Seat grants your wish.”
8
Baize froze.
He had not expected This Seat, the terror of nine provinces for a hundred thousand years, to be so… open-minded.
His face lit up. “Thank you, Old Ancestor! Disciple will not fail! I will guide the Demon Lord back onto the proper path and rid the sect of a great enemy!”
“No need to thank me.” This Seat said it flatly. “It is what you deserve.”
The words were barely out of my mouth.
This Seat reached into the void and seized.
“RUMBLE!”
The whole Azure Cloud Mountain Range shuddered.
Above, the sky turned, and a huge spatial vortex opened out of nothing.
A hand of heaven-shaking size, formed entirely of endless spiritual qi, tore space open and reached into a demon domain beyond this world!
“ROAR — !!!”
A roar that shook the earth came through the vortex.
Inside it was bottomless malice, and delight, and the sound of something that had been waiting a very long time.
“HAHAHA! You old bastards of the Azure Cloud Sword Sect! This Lord is back! Get ready for a baptism of blood and fire!”
It was the Netherworld Demon Lord, fresh from his escape.
He plainly had not caught up with the situation.
A second later, his laughter turned into a shriek.
“No! That’s… a Great Ascension power! Impossible! Su Chen! You old corpse, you’re not dead?!”
The giant hand did not give him time to think.
It closed on that enormous demon body the way you pick up a chick by the neck, and hauled him bodily out of the vortex, dripping with demonic qi and roaring loud enough to crack the tiles of the roof!
The Netherworld Demon Lord, once insufferably arrogant, was now held in a fist of spiritual qi, unable to move, able only to roar in helpless rage.
The hall had forgotten how to blink, and several of the younger disciples had forgotten how to breathe.
So this… was the Supreme Grandmaster’s strength?
One reach, and a Demon Lord who had given the entire sect headaches was dragged back like a stray cat?
Baize was stunned too.
His mouth hung open, and the holy light on his face cracked for the first time since he had walked into this hall.
This Seat paid no attention to the general shock.
The Demon Lord in my left hand, the fingers of my right held sword-straight, I drew a line in the air toward the plaza outside the hall.
“HUMMM —”
The laws of space stirred.
A wall of light, glowing gold, rose out of the ground and closed over a plaza a thousand meters across.
The seal was mine, laid down on the cultivation base of a Great Ascension, with the laws of both space and time woven into its grain.
Ten Demon Lords could not have got out of a box laid like that, so one of them was not even worth a question.
“Go in.”
This Seat tossed him aside.
That great demon body of the Netherworld Demon Lord flew into the barrier like a sack of rubbish.
The moment he landed he threw himself at the wall of it, again and again, and the barrier did not so much as shimmer.
That done.
Baize, still standing there like a carved wooden chicken.
“Now. Your turn.”
9
At last Baize’s face changed.
The flush of idealism drained out of that face, and what came up through the skin behind it was the chalk-white of a man doing sums he already knew the answer to.
“Old… Old Ancestor… what does that mean?” His voice wavered.
“Didn’t you say you wanted to redeem him?” This Seat said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “This Seat was worried he might go running about out there and make it inconvenient for you. So This Seat fetched him back, and prepared you a nice quiet spot with scenery and no interruptions.”
This Seat pointed at the golden barrier.
“Look. Beautiful.”
“The barrier is set for ten thousand years.”
“Inside ten thousand years, you cannot get out, and nobody outside can get in.”
“This Seat has given you time enough to talk, to understand each other, to redeem each other.”
“Go on. Use your love. Warm that heart of his that has been lonely for ninety thousand years.”
This Seat said all of it lightly, in the tone a man uses when giving directions to the nearest outhouse.
To Baize it sounded like something whispered by a demon.
Him, and a Demon Lord whose name opened doors the way an open grave does, shut up in one box together, three paces apart, for ten thousand years?
This is redemption?
This is feeding a sheep to a tiger!
“No! Old Ancestor! That is not what I meant!” The panic took the whole of him at once. The holy light went out of his face like a lamp with the oil run dry, and what was left underneath was terror with nothing covering it.
“I… I cannot go in yet! My cultivation base is not enough! I need time! When I reach Great Ascension, I will…!”
“No need to wait.” This Seat cut him off.
“Redemption runs on the strength of the heart. Not the cultivation base.”
“Wasn’t that what you said?”
“This Seat believes in you. With a heart that full of great love, you will certainly succeed.”
That said, This Seat gave him no more room to argue.
One wave of the hand.
An irresistible force caught Baize up and flung him at the golden barrier.
“NO — !!!”
Baize screamed like a pig at slaughter, all the holy light gone out of his voice and nothing left in it but an animal’s opinion of dying.
He could see, inside the barrier, the Demon Lord’s enormous mouth crowded with fangs, and the eyes glittering with cruelty and amusement.
“Heheheh… a Heavenly Spirit Root, soft and tender… This Lord’s favorite kind…”
The Demon Lord’s laughter raised the hair on every neck in the hall.
Still screaming, all the way in, Baize came down inside the barrier and landed on his feet, neat as a man stepping off a boat.
“WUMMM —”
One pulse of light ran round the barrier’s edge, and it closed with a sound like a door being shut in another room.
Everything inside was shut off from everything outside.
There was even a kindness in the arrangement, though nobody would thank me for it: the barrier could be seen from one side only.
People outside could see everything happening in there.
People inside could not see out.
All to make it… convenient for the disciples of the Sect to study and observe.
“There. Settled.”
This Seat clapped my hands, as though I had done nothing of any importance.
“Three problems. All solved.”
“Now. Does anyone else have an opinion?”
My eyes went slowly around the hall.
Not a sound.
Disciples, Elders, all heads down, all bodies trembling a little with fear.
Nobody would meet my eyes.
An opinion?
Who would dare?
Who would dare again?
They understood now, all the way down.
This Supreme Grandmaster who had not shown his face in three thousand years was a thorough practical man.
Or better: a problem-solving machine with no feelings in it.
Talk to him about feelings and he talks to you about rules.
Talk to him about the spirit and he talks to you about physics.
Talk to him about great love and he ships you straight off to your beloved, the two of you alone together for the next ten thousand years.
In front of this Old Ancestor, every little essay, every emotional hostage-taking, every halo of sainthood…
All of it was a joke.
Not worth one blow.
10
Inside the hall, the silence of the grave.
The restlessness, the noise, the strangeness of before: all of it was gone, replaced by a cold and absolute order.
Good. That would do, and better than good.
This was what a sword cultivator’s sect was supposed to look like.
Quiet, and killing-clean.
What was left was to trim the branches of these crooked saplings, and straighten out the Dao in their heads.
The Sect Lord, Li Changfeng, was trembling from where he knelt at the foot of the dais, and the eyes came to him first, as they should.
“Li Changfeng.”
“Your grand-disciple is here!” He flinched and knelt lower.
“As Sect Lord, you failed to keep your people in hand. The character of the sect has rotted. You cannot tell one man from another, and you handle matters badly.”
“Do you know what you have done?”
“Your grand-disciple knows! Please punish me, Grandmaster!” Sweat ran down his face. He did not attempt one word in his own defense.
“The punishment is three hundred years beneath the Demon-Sealing Pagoda. Three hundred years of Face the Wall, and the seat of Sect Lord will be held, for now, by Jian Wuyou.”
“Disciple… accepts the punishment!” Li Changfeng knocked his head hard on the floor, and inside he actually let out a breath.
Only three hundred years facing a wall, out of a life measured in thousands of them: that was a gift from the Old Ancestor, and he knew it.
Jian Wuyou was next.
“Jian Wuyou.”
“Disciple is here.”
“As Elder of Sword Peak, a Body Integration power, when a Golden Core disciple made an unreasonable scene, all you did was stay silent. You did not know how to defend yourself and the dignity of the sect with thunder. That is a fault as well.”
“The punishment: enter the Sword Tomb. A hundred years of studying the sword.”
Jian Wuyou started, then his face lit up. “Disciple… thanks the Old Ancestor for the grace!”
A hundred years of sword study in the Sword Tomb: that was the reward the sect gave its great contributors!
He understood both halves of it at once: the Old Ancestor was correcting him, and the Old Ancestor was raising him.
That done, my eyes went around the hall, one face at a time.
“From this day, my Azure Cloud Sword Sect has new rules.”
As I spoke, This Seat stepped out of the hall onto the plaza.
My right hand rose, and pressed down on the ground.
“RRRRRUMBLE —”
The earth split. A block of dark stone a hundred zhang tall rose slowly out of the ground and stood in the middle of the plaza.
The stele was plain and old, and gave off a breath out of the deep past, thick with spiritual qi.
This Seat held two fingers sword-straight, used them as a brush, used the Heaven and Earth Spiritual Energy as ink, and began to cut characters into the stone.
The fingers moved, and the writing flowed like dragons and phoenixes. Every character carried supreme Sword Intent and the deep truth of the Great Dao, cut with raw spiritual qi.
Golden strokes burned themselves into the stele and gave off a light that would not fade.
Soon, several lines of new sect law stood before everyone: crude, blunt, and striking straight at the soul.
[ New Sect Rules ]
One: Futile rage is forbidden. If something is unfair, show your cultivation base first. The higher cultivation is the argument. The lower cultivation shuts up.
Two: emotional hostage-taking is forbidden. The Great Dao has no feelings in it, so talk about feelings less, and anyone who again does something low in the name of “love” gets packed off to the Ten Thousand Beast Mountain Range, there to court a Demonic Beast and cultivate its feelings.
Three: overflowing sainthood is forbidden. All things have spirits, and all things have natural enemies, and anyone who again sacrifices himself to ferry a demon lord across goes straight into the Demon Realm, packed and posted, to help him prove the Great Dao.
Four: The final interpretation of the three rules above belongs to This Seat.
Done, and not one Elder in the hall dared to point out that he had written it himself.
The hand came down, and I stood where I had been kneeling.
On the whole plaza, every disciple stared at the characters on the stele.
Every character went into their skulls like a sword.
Simple, which nobody in the cultivation world had ever accused the rules of being.
Blunt.
Unreasonable, like a cliff.
And yet… it left a strange… calm.
Yes. This Seat could feel it settling over the plaza like weather.
This was how the cultivation world had always worked.
The strong are honored. Strength does the talking.
When had it become so fussy, so tangled up in feelings that were not even there?
Realization came into many eyes.
The fog that had built up in their minds from all that strange talk seemed to be cut apart in one stroke by these few domineering lines.
Their Dao Hearts had never been so clear.
11
You have to pull a weed out at the root.
Putting up the stele was only step one, and the easy step, at that.
Next came turning the whole “polluted” atmosphere of the sect around.
My divine sense spread out like an invisible net, and the whole sect lay under it.
And very soon it found some… more interesting things.
The Scripture Pavilion.
A gaggle of Outer Disciples of the Outer Sect, who should have been reading cultivation techniques, were crowded around a storybook titled The Tyrant Sword Sovereign Loves Me.
Every one of them red to the ears, drunk on it.
This Seat stirred my divine sense.
“BOOM!”
A purple bolt of Heavenly Lightning came down out of the sky, hit the storybook dead center, and left nothing but ash.
So frightened they were half a step from Soul Scattering, the disciples went for the training grounds with their pants already wet, and nobody laughed at the ones who fell down on the way.
The Pill Workshop.
Several girl disciples who should have been doing Alchemy were gathered around a batch of Medicinal Pills, crying.
“Wuwuwu, baby pill, Cauldron Explosion, why? You died so horribly!”
“It’s all my fault, I botched the Heat Control, I killed you!”
This Seat could hardly stand to look.
Another nudge of divine sense.
An invisible force swept those girls, Pill Cauldron and all, into the outhouse.
Let them clear their heads properly.
The Spirit Beast Garden.
A crowd of disciples were not feeding the beasts. They were hugging a particularly cute treasure-seeking rat and snorting it in like a drug.
“Ahhh, Fluffy is so cute!”
“Let me kiss it once!”
Meanwhile the iron-armored rhinos beside them, uglier and far stronger, were so hungry they were chewing the dirt.
This Seat sighed.
One flick of the hand.
The treasure-seeking rat went straight into the iron-armored rhinos’ feed trough.
The disciples were sentenced to a year of shoveling rhino dung.
Let them learn what “cute” really means, one shovel at a time, and let the rhinos do the teaching.
For a while the entire sect was a farmyard with a fox loose in it.
Every disciple in the sect who was lazy, or fussy about his food, or busy with anything that put no qi into his meridians, got a “warm greeting” from the Old Ancestor before the week was out.
The results were obvious.
Inside a single day.
The whole sect’s air cleared the way a room clears when a window is thrown wide and the smoke has somewhere to go.
Disciples trained like wolves in a hard winter.
They walked with a wind behind them. Their eyes had gone sharp.
Nobody dared cry in public any more, or talk about who was seeing whom.
The way people greeted each other changed from “Senior Brother, have you eaten?” to “Senior Brother, Breakthrough today?”
The whole sect was soaked in a healthy air of train or die.
Down beneath the Demon-Sealing Pagoda, Li Changfeng saw all of it, and wept like an old man.
This is my Azure Cloud Sword Sect, and it has come back to me!
This is what sword cultivators are supposed to be!
12
That done, This Seat returned to my own Grand Elder Peak.
Clouds wrapped the summit. Quiet and easy.
Absent for three millennia, and the peak was exactly as it had been.
This Seat brewed a pot of Dao-Comprehension Tea, sat on the edge of the cliff, and looked down at the Azure Cloud Sword Sect below. New from the ground up.
In my head, though, one question kept turning.
An Inheritance running unbroken for hundreds of thousands of years, and in three thousand it had come apart into that. What was it that did it?
Had people changed?
Or… had the age itself changed?
Those disciples thought a certain way, and This Seat could not follow that whole “logic” from one end to the other. It worked on them the way a plague works on a village.
The kind of Inner Demon that eats a Dao Heart.
It turned cultivators away from the Great Dao. Into illusory feelings. Into cheap self-moved sentiment. Into solving every problem with tears and little essays.
If it went on much longer, forget Ascension. If the sect was not wiped off the map, it would be the ancestors’ doing ghost-work.
This Seat sipped the tea.
Clean, and cold, and it washed the soul the way cold water washes a cut. Unpleasant, and necessary.
Perhaps This Seat should give myself a hard look too.
Had three thousand years of seclusion been too long?
Handing the sect to these juniors. Too much trust?
A sect’s strength lies not only in how high its strongest fighters stand, but in how pure and how tough its character is.
So before Ascension, This Seat had better stay a while longer, and see it through with my own eyes.
Get the “steel seal” stamped into the heads of these little brats. Deep, so that it would still be legible when the next three thousand years had gone by.
At the very least, let them understand one simple thing.
In the cultivation world.
A sword will always work better than tears.
Strength will always matter more than “attitude.”
13
This Seat’s “rectification campaign” made too much noise.
Word raced through the whole Eastern Domain.
In particular, This Seat had caught the Netherworld Demon Lord alive, and then shut the Heavenly Spirit Root prodigy Baize in with him to “redeem” him. Word of it set off an uproar.
A few days later.
A streak of light cut the sky, crossed the ridge, and came down hard on the flat ground outside the Mountain Gate.
The visitor was a Holy Maiden of the Jade Pool Holy Land in the Central Province.
It was said this Holy Maiden was thick as thieves with Baize, and that the two were in love.
She had come to “get justice” for Baize.
Li Changfeng had been sent to Face the Wall, so the acting Sect Lord, Jian Wuyou, received her.
“Elder Jian, my Jade Pool Holy Land has one question. What crime has Baize committed, that he should suffer such torture?”
The Jade Pool Holy Maiden arrived with her nose in the air, and demanded an answer from Jian Wuyou.
Behind her came several Elders of Jade Pool, none of them looking pleased.
After This Seat had taken him in hand, Jian Wuyou’s way of doing things had gone harder.
“Baize released a demon lord on his own authority and brought disaster on the world,” he said, flat as a struck bell. “That is treason. The Supreme Grandmaster sending him to redeem the demon lord is mercy outside the law.”
“Absurd!” the Holy Maiden snapped. “Senior Brother Baize is kind of heart. He cannot bear to see a demon lord suffer. Where is his crime? The ones at fault are you brutes who know nothing but killing! You do not understand returning good for evil. You do not understand ending a quarrel before it starts!”
Jian Wuyou frowned.
He had already found out, at some cost, that reasoning with this woman did not work from any angle.
Their thinking did not seem to run on the same plane at all.
“If you are not satisfied, go and argue it with the Supreme Grandmaster of my sect.” Jian Wuyou could not be bothered. He kicked the whole thing to This Seat.
“Fine! I will go and have a word with this Old Ancestor of yours who cannot tell black from white!”
Burning with righteous fury, the Holy Maiden took her people straight toward This Seat’s Grand Elder Peak.
14
There was tea in my hands, and I was in no hurry with it.
And then I saw a young girl in white, face shining with “justice”, come storming up the mountain.
“Lin Feifei of the Jade Pool Holy Land pays her respects to Senior Su Chen!”
She said pays her respects, and there was not a drop of respect anywhere in the sound of it.
“Senior, this junior has one thing she does not understand, and asks Senior to enlighten her!”
Lifting my eyelids was more effort than this was worth.
“Speak.”
“Senior Brother Baize is kind to the core and cannot bear to take life. That is the great compassion of a cultivator. Why would Senior humiliate him like this? Shutting him in with a demon lord is no different from killing him!”
She demanded it like a woman who has carried the moral high ground up the mountain with her in a basket and intends to set it down on the table.
This Seat set down the cup.
“First, it is not mercy. He is stupid. Let a demon lord loose and more people die. A three-year-old could work that out.”
“Second, This Seat did not humiliate him. This Seat granted his wish. He wanted to redeem the demon lord, so This Seat gave him the best platform and all the time in the world. Is that not helping a man to his heart’s desire?”
“Third…”
And at last the eyes came to rest on her.
And it went cold, colder than the wind coming up the cliff behind me.
“You are an outsider. What gives you the standing to question This Seat on how I deal with my own disciples?”
“Has the Jade Pool Holy Land stuck its nose in too far? Or do you think your fist is harder than mine?”
Under that look, Lin Feifei dropped into an ice pit, and half the bluster went out of her on the spot.
She still forced herself to say it. “Senior is… using force to crush people. That is not reasoning!”
“Reasoning?”
This Seat smiled.
“On my ground, what This Seat says is reason.”
“The reason you want is a misty pity for all creation, a self-congratulation paid for with everyone else’s interests.”
“This Seat’s reason is that people who do wrong pay for it, and the sect stays at peace, and so does the world.”
“Now. Whose reason do you think is harder?”
15
Lin Feifei had nothing left to say.
Behind her, the faces of the Jade Pool Elders had gone ugly.
They had not expected this old monster out of legend to be this domineering.
Salt would not go in, and iron would not break him.
He was not playing by any rule they knew.
“Senior! This is twisting words!” Lin Feifei got out, after a long struggle.
“Twisting words, then. Crushing people with force, then.”
Up out of the chair This Seat rose, without any haste at all.
A pressure that was barely there, and as wide as a smoking sea, began to spread outward from the peak until it filled the whole of the ridge and the valleys below it, slow and heavy, like weather.
The air on Grand Elder Peak turned solid, the way water turns solid, and without any of the warning water gives.
Everyone from the Jade Pool Holy Land felt a mountain out of the first age come down on their backs, and breathing took effort.
Their faces showed raw terror.
What… what cultivation was that!
Great Ascension, certainly. Not a beginner’s cultivation base at that stage either. A deep one, settled in it for years.
“This Seat is in a good mood today. This Seat does not want to kill.”
The voice came into their ears with nothing in it at all.
“Now. You have two choices.”
“One. Get out of the Azure Cloud Sword Sect right now. Go back where you came from.”
“Two. Stay. Keep Baize company. Redeem the demon lord together.”
“Choose.”
There was no third option.
Get out.
Or die.
That was the Dao of This Seat. That was my whole reasoning.
Lin Feifei turned paper-white.
In my eyes she saw a killing intent with the wrapping off.
She had no doubt that one more word would see her a cold body the next second.
The name of Holy Maiden she had leaned on, the doctrine of benevolence she believed in. In front of absolute strength, all of it was thin and grey.
“We… we are leaving!”
One of the Jade Pool Elders finally broke under the pressure, voice shaking.
He pulled the dazed Lin Feifei along, gathered the rest, and fled on sword flight, more crawling than flying, and they did not get a hundred li before the last of them stopped looking back.
That scrambling sight had nothing left of an envoy from a holy land.
This Seat watched their backs disappear, sat down again, and picked up my tea.
The world was quiet at last.
Propaganda and morality, used to press me down?
Ha.
Childish, and cheaper than the tea I was drinking, and about as much use against a man who has already decided what the world is.
In This Seat’s day, we called that courting death.
16
With the Holy Maiden of Jade Pool Holy Land gone in disgrace, the Azure Cloud Sword Sect settled into real peace.
Nobody with eyes half open would come and rub This Seat the wrong way now.
Inside the sect, after This Seat’s iron-blooded cleanup, there was life in the place again.
Nobody in the sect competed any more over whose Dao companion was the prettier piece of work, or whose spirit pet was the cuter one to keep on a leash. Not one.
They competed over Cultivation Speed, who had more contribution points from missions, whose sword work was sharper.
At the Grand Tournament, you could not find a single weeping “I yield.”
Only men fighting until their Spiritual Energy ran dry and they could not stand up.
Lose, go home, train like a demon, come back and take it next time.
Win, and do not get proud, because there is always someone stronger ahead.
A clean, upward, elbow-first scramble went through the whole sect like a wind through a wheat field. In it, every man’s business was to be better than the man beside him, and nothing else was anybody’s business at all.
Even the disciples who stoked the kitchen fires competed over whose fire burned hotter and better Tempered the impurities out of a Physical Body.
Jian Wuyou watched it all and was well pleased.
The strength of the sect climbed fast enough to see with the naked eye.
And the great stele standing in the middle of the plaza became the first lesson for every disciple who came to Join the Sect.
They would gather beneath it and listen to their Senior Brothers and Senior Sisters tell the “legend” of the Supreme Grandmaster, with all the flourishes.
“See that? Those are the rules our Old Ancestor laid down! Crude, blunt, and they work!”
“I heard a girl disciple slandered an Elder once, and the Old Ancestor stripped her cultivation base on the spot and threw her down the mountain!”
“There was another one tried to shakedown the Lord of the Discipline Hall. Old Ancestor ran a Soul Search, pulled her out roots and all, and fed her to the snakes!”
“The best one was that Heavenly Spirit Root. Wanted to redeem the demon lord. Old Ancestor wrapped him up and posted him in for a ten-thousand-year private world of two with the demon lord!”
The new disciples listened with their hearts up in their throats, with the stories coming at them one after another, and found the whole thing… strangely good.
The golden barrier, with Baize and the Netherworld Demon Lord shut up inside it, turned into the most famous sight in the sect. Disciples came from three peaks away to look at it.
Every day disciples went up to “study and observe”, which was the official wording, and everybody knew what it meant.
They could see perfectly well that Baize, once so full of himself, was being kicked around in there by the Demon Lord like a ball.
The Demon Lord seemed to think eating him outright was too cheap, and found a new way to torment him every day.
And Baize, mouth still running, on the wrong side of a barrier he could not get out of.
“Stop hitting me… let’s sit down… and talk properly… love… love can dissolve anything…”
Every time, the watching disciples shivered together, and not one of them laughed.
Then quietly turned and went back to double their training.
A saintly heart?
Nowhere to be found.
After what the sect had watched happen to Baize, in front of the whole hall, who was going to be the next one to hold an idea like that? Nobody. Nobody at all.
17
Up on Grand Elder Peak, This Seat was enjoying a rare stretch of quiet.
Every day: tea, clouds, and the occasional pointer for Jian Wuyou’s cultivation.
The days were comfortable.
Then one day, somebody brought me a set of numbers.
An Inner Disciple of the Inner Sect came respectfully up to the summit with the monthly report on the sect’s housekeeping.
At first it was nothing I cared about.
Then a sweep of divine sense caught something interesting in the figures.
“Hm?”
A small sound came out of me that was nearly a laugh.
“This month’s output from the Spirit Beast Garden is up thirty percent on last month. Why?”
The disciple hurried to answer. “Old Ancestor, it is all thanks to you!”
“Oh? Tell This Seat.”
“In the past, most of the disciples in charge of the Spirit Beast Garden had the wrong thing in their heads. They always crowded around the good-looking beasts. The ornamental ones that were no use. The battle beasts that gave spirit milk and spirit eggs but looked fierce got nothing but neglect.”
“Worse, some of them would get into crying fits over two beasts competing for attention, and forget to feed anyone.”
The disciple’s face turned faintly contemptuous as he said it, the way a young man’s face does when he is sure the old ways have been proved silly.
“But since Old Ancestor straightened out the character of the sect, that does not happen any more!”
“Now the disciples in the Spirit Beast Garden are judged on one thing only, output and fighting strength! Whoever’s beasts produce more gets more contribution points from the sect!”
“Everyone is working with their teeth in it. The beasts eat well, sleep well, and the output goes up by itself!”
The disciple was glowing as he said it.
Listening, This Seat went quiet.
So that was it.
Even raising an animal came with “good looks” and “romantic disputes” attached.
Just how mad had this sect been before?
This Seat waved the disciple away.
Picked the teacup up, took one small sip, put it down again.
Inside, This Seat did not know whether to laugh or to cry.
18
Months later, with the snow gone off the high ridges and the first green showing in the valleys below.
The Mountain Gate stood wide open. Disciples came up the thousand steps in a line that did not break from dawn to dusk.
Boys and girls came in an unbroken stream to sign their names, several times the number of past years.
No mystery as to why.
The tale had gone round the world: the Supreme Grandmaster Su Chen, one break of seclusion, and then the sect put in order with thunder, cowing the whole Eastern Domain.
Young people who wanted the real path of the strong came because of it.
What they wanted was not some misty love and hate.
They wanted a road they could walk with their feet on the ground, step by step, all the way up to the immortal Dao.
And the Azure Cloud Sword Sect as it stood now was plainly the best choice there was.
In the clouds, looking down at all those young faces with the blood still running hot in them, This Seat stood a long while.
It did This Seat good to see.
Then Jian Wuyou came up beside me.
“Old Ancestor, everything is on the right track.”
“Mm.” This Seat nodded.
“Only…” He hesitated. “That barrier… does it really have to hold for ten thousand years? Baize is… a Heavenly Spirit Root, after all.”
This Seat gave him a look from the corner of my eye.
“Being a Heavenly Spirit Root is not a license to be a fool.”
“If the temperament does not hold, then no matter how high the cultivation base climbs, he is just the next demon lord.”
“Let him sit in there and wear his temper down. When he can kill that demon lord with one stroke, then he will have earned the right to come out.”
“Understood, disciple.” Jian Wuyou bowed and took the order.
Nothing more needed saying. My eyes went out to the far edge of the sky.
Clouds unrolling and furling over the far peaks, and the Great Dao without an end to it in any direction.
Cultivation was a lonely road, and a cruel one.
What it asks for is a Dao Heart that does not bend, a will that does not kneel, and the sword in your hand that nothing can break.
As for all that love and affection, all that right and wrong, all that softness…
It only slows down the draw, and the draw is everything.
This Seat took the wine gourd from my waist and tipped it back.
The liquor went down hot and rough.
Good.
That was the taste.
Now this was cultivation.