Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Tianlong let the laugh run itself out before he answered, the way a man like him would take his time even dying.

"What’s funny," he said, red welling at the corner of his mouth, "is you. All of you. Standing in my father’s hall, bleeding on his throne, sure you’ve won a war."

"Haven’t we?" Xinhua’s hand hadn’t left the sword in his chest. "You came to take it back. You’re the one dying on the floor."

"So I am." He said it like she’d handed him his own point. "You spent everything you had to put me here. A dead sect, a borrowed prince, a city full of corpses, all of it to kill the brother standing between you and the chair." His breath hitched, wet, and the amusement in his eyes didn’t dim with it. "And you never once stopped to ask the one question worth asking. Why the chair was empty in the first place."

Xuan felt a cold that had nothing to do with Qingyue’s ice start to spread through the hall.

’Mira.’

[ I know, ] she said, very quiet. [ Let him finish. I want to hear it too.]

"You think this was about the throne." Tianlong’s voice had gone thready, but he pushed the words out with the last of his pride, because he wanted them said, wanted the two of them to carry them out of that hall. "I bought armies for a throne. I burned a treasury and a name and twenty thousand men on wanting to sit in that chair." He looked, not at his sister, but past her, up, toward the dark hill and the palace and the thing torn open beneath it. "He spent twenty years making certain none of us looked beneath it."

The words dropped into the hall and lay there.

Xuan didn’t need them spelled out. He’d seen the vault torn open on the way up, the stair going down into a dark the eye slid off of, the wardens ringed around its mouth facing outward, guarding a hole in the world. He’d already worked out that the drunk had never wanted the chair. And now the man who’d known that drunk his whole life, a man who’d fought a war for a throne he could have reached for any time he pleased, was lying dead-and-not-yet-dead on the marble telling them the same thing with his last breath, and there was something in the telling that Xuan had not once seen on Tianlong in all of this.

The Second Prince, who’d walked into a hall full of monsters without blinking, was afraid of his own brother.

But Xinhua wasn’t looking up at the hill. She was looking at the man on the floor.

Whatever the words meant, whatever they’d all have to answer for when the cold in his eyes finished spreading, it wasn’t the thing sitting on her face. What sat there was smaller and worse. She’d just killed him. And whatever else he was, the Second Prince, the man who bought the war, the enemy who’d come to burn her out of his house, underneath all of it he was her brother, the boy from the cold palace who’d put a wooden sword in her hands before he ever learned to be cruel with a real one.

"You did it." His voice had nearly run dry. He looked up at his sister with the red on his teeth and something in his face that on any other man Xuan might have taken for tenderness, and on this one was only the last cruelty he had left to spend. "The soft one, the kind one, and you put a blade in your own brother for a chair." His mouth moved, not quite a smile. "There you are. That’s the sister I spent my whole life waiting for you to become. Shame you found her on the one day it would have been kinder to stay lost."

Xinhua didn’t rise to it. Maybe there was nothing left in her to rise with. She stayed there over him with her hand on the sword, and when she spoke it was low, and it was only for him.

"I know what I am now." Her voice cracked down the middle and held anyway. "You made sure of it a long time ago." She leaned closer, and something in her face broke and mended in the same second. "Go, Tianlong. There’s no one left in that cold palace who needs to be afraid of you."

He died looking at her. At the very end the pride and the cruelty drained out of his face and left only the fear behind them, the fear of his own brother, and for one breath it made him look like the boy she’d known before either of them learned what the chair cost.

Then he was gone, and the hall went quiet, and Xinhua knelt over her brother’s body on the steps of a throne that was, at last, completely hers.

They’d won.

Xuan made himself hold onto that. He stood in the cooling hall with the last of the escort dead down the room and the throne taken and the Second Prince of the empire lying still at his sister’s knees, and told himself they’d done the impossible thing. They’d walked into a city of monsters, and broken the man who came to take it back, and by every measure that had driven them down into this dead capital, it was finished. They had won the war.

The trouble was that a dying man with no reason left in the world to lie had just spent his final breath telling them it had never been the war.

Xuan looked up, past the throne, past the open doors, to where the hill kept climbing into the dark above the palace, to the torn-open vault and the stair going down and the thing that had spent twenty years making certain no one looked at it. Somewhere up there, over all of it, the brother nobody had bothered to watch was still sitting in the dark with whatever he’d dragged up out of the ground.

’Mira. He wasn’t bluffing. Was he.’

[ No, ] she said, and there was nothing dry left in her at all. [ Men don’t bluff with their last breath, Xuan. They confess. Whatever he was afraid of is real, and it’s still up there, and it just watched the four of you pour out everything you had winning the wrong fight.]

Xuan stood in the hush of a throne room they’d bled a whole city to take, his sword too heavy to lift and his people bleeding around him and the empire finally theirs, and understood that the hardest thing they had ever done had just turned out to be the easy part.

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