Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

The weight climbing the south road gave Xuan a simple, ugly choice, and he made it in about a second.

’How long until it reaches us?’ he asked, already knowing he wouldn’t like the number.

[ Not long, ] Mira said. [ It’s moving faster than anything with legs has a right to. Whatever it is, it’ll be on this hill before you’ve caught your breath.]

’Then we don’t catch our breath. We take the throne before it gets here, and we deal with whatever’s coming from behind a door that’s already ours.’

He turned to the others - to Xinhua, white and swaying and three strides from the thing she’d bled a city for, to Qingyue and Yan Wuji and Bo Ren all waiting on his call. "We go now," he said. "All of it, right now. Whatever’s on that road, I’d rather meet it sitting on the winning side of this throne than standing in the yard explaining why we’re not."

The palace didn’t give it to them for free. Nothing in this city had.

The courtyard still had beasts in it, the Fourth’s posted sentries, and they came awake to the intrusion all at once, not the blind grey hunger of the lower streets but the black, purposeful kind, turning off their stations to meet the people crossing their ground. There was no time to be clever. Xuan didn’t have the room to thread gaps anymore, so he quit threading and started cutting.

Storm Dragon came off Marrow Dragon in a spinning wheel of cuts, four into five into six, and where the Armorcleave edge crossed a warden’s plates it sheared them open instead of ringing off, and the courtyard filled with the sound of grey things coming apart.

Qingyue turned at his flank inside a cloud of her own, Snowstorm Veil dropping the yard into white and cold, and in it she was a blur no warden could track while every one of them stood lit up plain to her. Frostbind caught a black arm mid-swing. Crystal Edge took it off at the joint.

Bo Ren fought like a man half his age remembering how. The old sword-master cut a lane through the courtyard with an economy that made Xuan’s flashier work look like showing off, no wasted motion, every stroke going where a warden couldn’t afford to take it, and his guard poured through the space he cleared.

And Yan Wuji went out ahead of all of them, because grief had turned him into the fastest thing in the palace, taking the throne-hall doors with a shoulder and a blade and cutting down the last loyalists posted inside before Xuan had finished crossing the yard.

By the time Xuan came through the great doors, the fighting was already ending. The last loyalists lay where Yan Wuji had left them, the last beasts were dying in the yard behind, and ahead, past a long floor of cracked marble and dead torches, up a short flight of black stone steps, sat the empty throne of the Wei.

It wasn’t much to look at, in the end. A high seat of dark wood and old gold, the arms worn smooth by three hundred years of hands, sitting alone in a hall gone cold and dark like everything else in the city. Xuan had expected it to feel like more. Thrones in stories always did.

Then he looked at Xinhua looking at it, and understood the throne was never the thing. The thing was what it meant to the woman walking toward it.

She crossed the hall slowly, and Xuan let her go alone. She’d earned the walk. He watched her climb the steps she’d been born too far down the line to expect to climb, past the place her father had stood, to the seat he’d sat in, and stop in front of it with her bandaged hand at her side and the blood of a dead city still on her boots.

"There were four of us," she said, quiet, to no one and to all of them at once. "In that cold palace, when we were small. And every one of us wanted this chair." She looked at the worn gold under her hand. "I told myself I was the one who wanted it for better reasons. I don’t know anymore if that’s true, or if I just tell it to myself better than the others did." Her voice caught, and steadied. "It cost a boy named Jin, and a city full of people who never picked a side. I’m going to sit in it anyway. I’d just like to remember, when I do, that none of it was free."

She put her hand on the arm of the throne and started to turn, to sit.

"Then don’t let me interrupt."

The voice came from the great doors behind them, and Xuan felt the bottom drop out of the room before he’d even turned, because he knew that weight now. It was the thing that had been climbing the south road. It had arrived, and it stood in the doorway of the throne hall in a traveling cloak, with a dozen of the hardest-looking cultivators Xuan had ever set eyes on ranged at its back.

He was older than Xinhua, with the same face their father must have worn, and the pressure rolling off him sat a clear step above anything else in the room. He looked at his sister with her hand on the throne, and he smiled the way a man smiles at a child caught reaching for something off a high shelf.

"Hello, little sister." The Second Prince came a slow step into the hall, and his escort came with him. "You’ve been busy."

Xuan’s mind was already running the numbers, and he hated every one of them. Xinhua was gray and half-spent from carrying the net. He’d emptied his best card on a gatehouse floor. Yan Wuji had been fighting since the lower rings, and Bo Ren’s guard was thinned to what could climb a hill. And across the hall stood a fresh Golden Core a rung above the princess, with a dozen picked blades at his shoulder and nothing left to lose but a throne he’d already decided to burn before he’d hand it over.

They’d taken the city and the palace and climbed all the way up to the last chair in the empire. And the one person left in the world who could still take it back had just strolled in through the front door.

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