Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

They came again at first light, and this time they brought the real war with them.

Bai Cheng stood on the outer wall of Northreach and watched what he’d sworn he was ready for roll up the valley, and learned in about ten breaths that he’d been lying to himself.

The first assault had been men. This was machines. Siege towers crawled up the valley floor on rollers, tall as the wall and draped in soaked hide against the fire, and the rams came behind them under heavy roofs, and behind the rams walked the two great sects that had stood in the dust doing nothing while the mortals died.

Cloud Veil and Ashvale. They’d let the soldiers bleed the wall soft, and now it was their turn, and a cultivator did not climb a wall the way a soldier did.

The towers reached the stone and their ramps slammed down, and the fight stopped being anything Bai could hold in his head all at once. Cloud Veil’s people came across in dark robes and pale blades and walked through the arrow-storm as though it were rain, the way only a cultivator could. Frostmoon met them on the rampart. Bai threw ice across the ramp of the nearest tower and turned the first three men who tried it into a heap of sliding limbs, and the fourth came over the top anyway, and that one he cut down with his own hand.

Down the wall, Ru Zhao and his Thunder Lotus fought the way fire fights, loud and greedy and everywhere at once. The old man had quit saving himself. Bai watched him pour flame down a tower’s throat until the whole thing went up like a struck torch with men still climbing inside it, and heard him laugh, and knew that laugh for what it was: a man spending everything, because he’d done the sum too, and the sum said save nothing for later. Later was a story for people who were going to get one.

Bai looked for the one thing on that field that never moved, and found it where it had sat since the beginning. The pale canopy on the rise. The Second Prince watched his war climb the wall and did not lift a hand, because he had no need to. Every tower on that floor rolled forward because he was there to make it roll, and every sect held its line because his coin and his name kept them in it. He was the weight under all of it, and he had all the time in the world to lean.

The outer gate went the way all gates go in the end, in a long shriek of splintering timber and then a roar as the valley poured through the gap.

Bai gave the order he’d been swallowing since the towers first showed. Fall back. Give them the outer ring.

They traded it away one ring at a time after that, wall for hours, because hours were the only thing they had left to sell. Frostmoon iced the lanes behind them as they pulled back, turning every street into a killing floor. Thunder Lotus burned whatever it left standing. And Phoenix Mirror held the rear under Commander Tang, who fought through the retreat with the flat, patient fury of a man who had already buried the best of what he had and was in no hurry to outlive the rest of it.

By the time they backed into the second ring, Bai had stopped pretending they were going to hold Northreach. Nobody with eyes still believed it. The only question left was how slow the breaking went, and how much of the north’s time they could buy with it before the last wall came down.

Because that was the whole of it, underneath. They weren’t defending a town. They were a clock. Somewhere far to the north a princess was spending every hour they bought on something Bai would never lay eyes on, and the job, the only job, was to keep the hands turning as long as there was blood left to turn them.

He didn’t know how it was going up there, and he never would. He just kept feeding the wall.

They lost the second ring as the light began to fail, and fell back into the last of it - the inner keep, the final wall, and nowhere behind it to run. Ru Zhao came to stand at his shoulder, half his beard gone to cinders, breathing like a bellows with a hole punched in it.

"The boy wanted a nail," the old man said, looking out at what filled the valley. "Reckon he’s getting one."

"He wanted us to hold." Bai watched the towers grind toward the last wall. "He never said for how long."

"No." Ru Zhao spat a mouthful of ash over the parapet. "Their sort never does."

There was nothing coming to save them. Bai knew the map as well as any man alive, and it held no relieving army beyond the ridge and no column on the road, only the men on this last wall and whatever it was that kept them standing on it.

He looked for the canopy one more time, out of habit, and it was still there on the rise, unmoved, exactly where it had sat when the light came up. That was the whole truth of the day, right there. The wall would break, on this push or the next, and Northreach would go down with it. And the man on the hill would still be sitting under his canopy when it did, because nothing on this field would stop while he was there to keep it running.

Bai drew his blade, ran the last of his ice down the edge, and set himself to spend what he had left on a wall he already knew he couldn’t keep.

Out on the rise, the Second Prince’s banner didn’t so much as stir.

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