Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Xuan led them down out of Bo Ren’s ring and into the dead streets, six shadows moving fast and low, and the city let them come without a sound.

That was the horror of it. He’d fought his way through cities before, cities that screamed and burned and fought back with everything they had. This one only watched. Doors hung open on rooms where dinner had gone cold in the bowl. A child’s kite lay in a gutter with its string still wound around a hand that wasn’t attached to anything. Nothing moved but them, and the wrongness of it got into his teeth worse than any monster could.

[ Left at the well, ] Mira said, threading the map through his skull. [ Patrol two streets over, moving crosswise. They don’t drift, remember. They walk a line, like something told them where the edges are. Read the line, live in the gaps. ]

’And if I read it wrong?’

[ Then you find out how fast that new stage of yours really is. Left. Now. ]

He went left.

They lived in the gaps for six streets. On the seventh, one of the grey ones came around a corner ahead of them, and the whole team melted back against a shuttered shopfront and stopped breathing.

It stood in the middle of the street and turned its eyeless head one way, then the other, the long skull tilting as if it were listening to something under the stone.

uan counted his own heartbeat and willed everyone else’s to go quiet along with it. The warden’s teeth caught the faint light. Its jointed limbs shifted, folded wrong, patient. Then it walked on, and the street was theirs again.

Qingyue eased the frost back down her blade before it could ring in the quiet, and shook out the hand that had been a breath from swinging. "I hate this," she murmured, barely a thread of sound. "Give me a wall to hold any day. At least a wall shoots back."

The gatehouse squatted at the foot of the imperial hill exactly where Xinhua’s chalk had put it, a blunt fist of a building with the black slope rising behind it and the crawl of the hill thick on the stone above.

Its outer door was shut, barred from inside, a wagon dragged across it for good measure. Xuan almost smiled at that. A man who barricades a door is a man still alive to be afraid, and fear he could work with.

Getting in was Xinhua’s part. She stepped to the barred door, and when she spoke it wasn’t loud, but it carried the flat weight of a woman who’d given orders in that palace before its lights went out.

"Minister Sui. The Third Princess is standing in your street. Open up, and let’s both still be useful to each other when this is over."

A scrape from inside, a whispered argument, the wagon dragging back. The door cracked on a slice of lamplight and a face that had aged a decade in a handful of nights.

Sui had been a large man once. The dark had taken the fat off him and left only the fear, and he clutched his lamp like the last warm thing in the world. His eyes went past Xinhua to the armed strangers at her back, to the sword humming at Xuan’s hip, and did a frightened little sum.

"Your Highness. You- came back. Into this." He swallowed. "Why would anyone-"

"Because the throne’s still worth taking, and you’re sitting on the one thing that takes it." Xuan moved up beside Xinhua and let the man get a good look at him. "The mechanism. The whole city’s wards run through this house, and you’ve been crouched on top of it in the dark, door barred, waiting for someone to come tell you which way to jump." He tilted his head. "So here I am. Jump toward the ones who win."

"The Second Prince-"

"Is off south with an army, praying nobody ever asks him what happened here." Xuan didn’t give him the room. "He’s not coming back for you, Minister. Nobody is. The only road out of this that ends with you breathing runs straight through the woman in front of you. She takes the throne, you’re the man who handed her the city. He takes it, you’re a corpse who locked a capital full of the dead in the dark for a prince who left you here to rot beside them." He opened his hands. "So pick the version where you get old."

Sui looked at the sword, and the princess, and the black hill breathing over his roof, and Xuan watched the math finish behind his eyes. A coward’s courage is just a coward running the numbers and finding one answer left.

"...In there." His voice dropped to a whisper, as if the hill might hear him turn his coat. "The mechanism’s in the inner chamber. I locked it down the night the things came off the slope, tight as I could, I swear-" He was already moving, lamp trembling, drawing them into the gatehouse’s throat. "If it still reads the blood of the line, if the wards still know a Wei when they taste one, you can have the whole city. I only ask-"

"You’d like to be on the winning side and alive to enjoy it. Right. Noted." Xuan followed him in. "Move."

The inner door was imperial iron, a smaller cousin of the vault’s, and Sui’s hands shook so badly it took him three tries to work the seal. Xuan let him fumble. Whatever slept behind that door had been shut in with the mechanism all this time, and shut in was a comfort, right up until the moment the door opened.

The seal gave with a groan, and the smell rolled out ahead of the light, old stone and the inside of a sealed jar, the graveyard reek he’d learned to hate.

The mechanism stood at the center of the chamber, a black column of imperial iron threaded with dead ward-light, everything Xinhua had promised it would be. And coiled around the base of it, folded into the dark it had climbed up through a broken grate in the floor, something unwound a long grey limb and turned a crowded skull toward the lamp.

It was bigger than the ones in the streets. Its plates ran darker, older, and it moved with a horrible economy Xuan had seen exactly once, in a corridor beneath the palace, over the body of a Pavilion sword named Fang.

Behind him, Yan Wuji made a low sound in his throat, and his blade came up on its own.

[ First-tier. ] Mira had gone flat, every scrap of dry burned off her. [ It came up the root of the net, Xuan. It’s sitting on the one thing you came here for, and it is wide awake. ]

The warden rose off the mechanism, unfolded into the lamplight, and set itself squarely between them and the only plan they had.

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