Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Bo Ren’s tower had been a place to make plans in, once, a lifetime and about twelve hours ago. Now it was a place to bleed in and try not to come apart.

They’d made it back down into the lower city, back to the one ring of the capital that was still theirs, where Xinhua’s ward-net kept the grey wardens penned in the dead squares and the streets were quiet in the ordinary way instead of the wrong way. It should have felt like safety. It felt like a held breath. Every one of them kept glancing at the black hill through the tower’s high windows, at the palace they’d taken and lost in the same night, and waiting for the weight on it to come down the slope after them.

It didn’t. That was almost worse. A thing that chases you, you can at least understand.

They saw to the living first, because it was the only thing there was to do. Qingyue’s ribs were cracked where Tianlong’s qi had caught her. Xinhua had a saber’s line down her side and finger-bruises coming up dark around her throat. Bo Ren had lost more of his guard than he’d say, and the ones left standing moved like men who hadn’t slept in a week. Xuan himself felt scraped down to something under the skin, hollowed out by whatever the sword had spent of him when it woke, an emptiness that had nothing to do with qi and didn’t refill when he breathed.

And they saw to the dead, which was only Luo now, laid out on a cleared table with a cloak drawn over him because there was nothing else to give him. Yan Wuji sat beside the table and didn’t move and didn’t speak, and nobody made him. There was a particular quiet that came off a man who had run out of people to lose, and the whole tower gave it room.

It was Xinhua who finally said the thing out loud, because someone had to, and she’d never once flinched from the ugly job. She sat with her back to the cold stone, one arm across her ruined side, and looked round the ring of exhausted faces.

"So we’re agreed." Her voice came out rough. "We can’t beat him. Not the way we beat Tianlong, not with more of us or better timing or a cleverer plan on the same board. There’s no version of that fight where it goes differently, because he was never on our board to begin with." She let it sit a moment. "Which leaves us two doors. We hand him the empire and the sword and whatever else he wants and pray he simply leaves. Or we find a way to win that has nothing to do with being strong enough, because strong enough is one thing we are never going to be."

Xuan had been circling that same wall for an hour, and Xinhua had just put words to why he couldn’t get over it. So he stopped trying to get over it.

That was the thing about walls he could never make anyone else understand. The answer was almost never to hit the wall harder. It was to stop treating the wall as the problem at all. He’d spent his whole life small and outmatched, and the only reason he was still breathing was that he’d learned young that when you can’t win the fight in front of you, you change what winning means. You don’t kill the thing you can’t kill. You cage it, you bury it, you take it off the board so it can’t touch anyone ever again, and you call that winning, because to everyone still alive at the end, that is exactly what it is.

’Mira.’ He said it slowly, feeling the idea arrive the way they always did, all at once and finished. ’We’ve been asking the wrong question this whole time. Not "how do we kill him." "How do we stop him without killing him." How do you put a lid on something you can’t punch?’

Mira was quiet for a moment, which from her meant a great deal. When she spoke, the usual dry was gone, and in its place was a care Xuan had learned to be wary of.

[ You aren’t going to like where that question goes, ] she said. [ Because I know the answer to it. I’ve known since he came up that stair, and I’ve spent every minute since trying to find a reason it isn’t the answer, and I can’t. ] A pause. [ There’s a thing in the Shop, Xuan. I’ve never shown it to you, because there has never once been anything in this world it was meant for. A sealing apparatus. One use. Built to take a being of one very specific kind and shut it away somewhere it does not get out of.]

’And let me guess whose kind that is.’

[ His. ] Her voice had gone strange and careful, almost reluctant. [ The thing he is, underneath the Nascent Soul, the part of him I can’t read. The thing that answered your sword tonight. That apparatus was made to hold exactly that, by people who had exactly that problem, a very long time ago.]

Xuan felt the hair lift on his arms. ’How long ago?’

[ Older than the empire and the sects and every record you have a word for, and then older than that. ] She said it the way you’d read the edge of a map, past which someone had written here there is nothing we are allowed to know. [ And you’ve stood beside the end of a fight like this one before without ever knowing it. Yun Hai. The swordsman I gave you to train against, the one whose shard I keep. He didn’t die of old age, Xuan. He died cutting a thing very much like the one on that hill, out of a world very much like the one it crawled out of, and the reason his shard is worth keeping is that a piece of how he did it survived inside it. That apparatus and that man are the same story. I have both. I have never once told you why, and I am not going to tell you tonight.]

Xuan wanted to push. Every instinct that had kept him alive said a secret this size was exactly the kind of thing that got you killed the day you finally needed it and didn’t understand it. But he looked at the bleeding people around him, and at Luo under his cloak, and at the black hill through the window with the weight on it that grew a fraction heavier every hour, and he made himself let it go. For now.

’Fine. Keep your secrets,’ he thought, and there was no heat in it, because a tool you don’t understand is still a tool, and he’d fought with worse odds than a voice in his head that kept things from him. ’The apparatus. It can hold him. You’re sure?’

[ I’m certain it was built to. I’m certain it’s one use, and there is no second try if we get it wrong. And I’m certain of one more thing you need before you decide anything. ] The care in her voice hardened into something close to a warning. [ It was made to hold a being of that kind at full strength. He is not at full strength. Right now, with both hands full of what he tore out of that vault, he is a fraction of what he becomes the moment it settles into him. The apparatus can take the fraction. I do not know that it can take the whole.]

And there it was, the whole thing laid out cold. The plan was to seal a god in a box built for precisely this, using the one shot they would ever get, before the god finished becoming a god. It was insane. It was also, as far as Xuan could see, the only door left in a room made entirely of walls.

He got to his feet, ignoring the way his hollowed-out body complained about it, and looked round the ring of faces waiting on him, and told them what he could. He could put his hands on the one thing that would seal the Fourth. He couldn’t tell them how, or where it came from, and he needed them to trust him on that the way they’d trusted him on every impossible thing he’d pulled out of nowhere since he walked back into this dead city. It was real, it was one use, and the window on it was already closing. He left out the rest, the worlds older than the empire and the swordsman who’d died on this same problem, because none of them needed the mystery. They needed the job.

The trouble, when he’d finished, sat in the room as plainly as the plan.

"So we have the one thing in the world that can cage him." Bo Ren turned it over slowly, the old sword-master weighing it like a blade he wasn’t sure of. "Something you can lay hands on, from wherever it is you get the things you get and never say. Fine. I gave up asking how the boy does what he does a long time ago." He looked at Xuan, and there was no comfort in his ruined face, only the flat honesty of a man who’d fought a great many losing battles. "But a lock is not a trap. You’ve got the lock. You don’t have the walls to hang it on, or the ground to set it on, or a single spare pair of hands to build the rest, and you won’t find any of that in this tower. You need to build a machine that holds a god still long enough to shut the lid on him. And you need to build it fast, because every hour we sit here bleeding, the thing on that hill gets a little more impossible to shut."

Xuan looked out the high window, at the palace crouched black on its hill, at the torn-open vault beneath it where the most patient enemy he had ever had sat holding the thing that would make him unstoppable, settling it into himself one quiet hour at a time.

They had the lock. Now they had to build the trap around it, out of a dead city and a broken alliance and whatever a handful of exhausted people could still call in, and they had to finish before the clock ran all the way down.

And the clock had already started.

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