Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Xuan looked at the black thing padding down the colonnade and did the only useful thing left to a tired man facing a monster he couldn’t out-muscle. He worked out how to kill it with other people.

"Qingyue, its legs. Wuji, wait for my cut." He was already moving, reading the way its heavier plates sat, the way its purpose made it easy to time. It wanted them, so it came straight, and a thing that comes straight can be timed. ’Mira, where are the seams?’

[ Shoulders and the base of the skull, ] she said. [ The rest is armor even you won’t shear cheap. Wait for it to reach, and take the shoulder when it commits.]

It reached. Xuan went in under the black arm as it swung and put Marrow Dragon’s Armorcleave edge through the shoulder seam, where the plate gave way to something softer, and the cut bit deep where nothing else that night would have. The warden screamed and lurched, off balance for half a breath. Qingyue took the half-breath and turned its legs to a block of ice welded to the stone, and Yan Wuji came over Xuan’s shoulder and drove his vertical down through the base of the skull to the hilt.

It came apart, and it stayed down, which was more than Xuan had counted on when it rounded the corner.

The loyalists broke not long after, and for once it wasn’t his doing. Whatever had let the black warden loose had let it loose on everyone, and the men holding the middle rings for the Second Prince found the same thing coming up their backs that had come down the colonnade at Xuan. They stopped being an army and started being prey, and prey and defenders can’t hold a wall at the same time. Xinhua’s people took the rest while its last holders were busy dying to their own side’s monsters. By the time the fighting thinned, the lower and middle city was hers.

Beside him, Xinhua stumbled, and the last of the net went out of her all at once.

He caught her elbow before she dropped. "It’s gone," she said, and there was something raw in it, a person who’d carried a great weight and felt it torn away rather than set down. "The leash. I can’t feel the wards up here at all. It’s like reaching for a room that isn’t there anymore." She pulled herself straight, pale and furious at her own body. "Whatever’s up here is stronger than the first Emperor’s work, and it’s close."

[ She’s right, ] Mira said, quiet. [ The net stops at the top of this ring. Past it the wards read dead. Not broken, though. Overwritten. Something up here doesn’t answer to the machine anymore, because up here it is the machine, for anything that walks past this line.]

They came up onto the palace approach, and Xuan got his first real look at what the drunk had been doing while everyone else fought over a throne.

The wardens up here didn’t wander. They stood posted. Grey ones and black ones both, spaced along the approach in a pattern that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with a plan, a picket line, sentries set to hold ground. They didn’t rush the intruders the way the penned ones would have. They held their stations and watched Xuan’s people come, because they’d been told to hold and not told to chase.

And past the pickets, where the approach opened onto the palace steps, Xuan saw the vault.

Not the whole of it. A seam of it, rather, a stretch of black imperial stone laid bare where something had torn the palace floor open from beneath, and a stair going down into a dark the eye slid off of, and around the mouth of that stair the wardens stood thickest of all, arranged in rings, facing outward, guarding a hole in the world with the patience of things set there to guard it.

Xuan looked at that and felt the bottom drop out of the night. This was never a man who wanted a throne. If he’d wanted a throne, he’d be sitting on it. He wanted whatever waited at the bottom of that stair, and he’d spent a dynasty’s blood and twenty years playing the fool to buy himself the quiet to go down and take it.

The pickets were the last problem, and Xuan solved them the way he’d solved everything since the gatehouse, by refusing to fight the fight in front of him. He didn’t try to punch through the line. He read it. The wardens held posts, which meant lines, and gaps between the lines, and orders that told them to stay put. So he took his people through the gaps, quick and quiet, threading the picket the way he’d threaded the patrols in the lower streets, and the sentries watched them pass and never broke station, because breaking station wasn’t in whatever the drunk had told them.

They reached the palace steps with the vault yawning off to their left and the great doors standing open ahead, and no living thing between Xinhua and the seat her family had held for three hundred years.

She stood at the foot of the steps and looked up at the open doors, and for the first time since they’d walked down into this dead city, she let herself believe it. Xuan watched her lift her foot toward the first stair, toward a throne that had already cost them a gatehouse, a swordsman’s whole heart, a boy named Jin, and a city full of the dead.

And then, far off and below, from the long south road that ran down out of the city toward the world, Xuan felt it.

A weight. The kind of pressure a cultivator learns to feel before he learns anything else, the approach of something powerful moving fast, and it was aimed straight up the hill at them, and it did not feel like rescue.

’Mira. Please tell me that’s Bo Ren’s people coming up behind us.’

[ Wrong direction for that, ] she said, and the calm had drained out of her. [ That’s coming up the south road, Xuan. From outside the city. From the direction of an army.] A beat. [ The man who spent twenty years under that vault stair isn’t the only prince who could still walk back in through the front door.]

Xuan stood on the palace steps with the throne three strides away and a monster’s dynasty yawning open at his left, and turned to look back down the hill at the thing climbing toward them out of the south, and understood that the fight for the city might not have been the fight at all.

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