Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

The help came up out of the south a little before first light, and for once in what felt like a year, Xuan stood on Bo Ren’s tower and watched something approach the city that he was glad to see.

It wasn’t an army. The army was three days behind, moving at an army’s pace. This was the fast part of one, a hard-riding column of a couple hundred that had left the freed walls of Northreach the hour they broke and hadn’t slowed since, because when the person you owe everything to sends word he needs you, you don’t stop to pack.

At the head of it, looking like a merchant dragged backward through a war, was Hao.

They were, most of them, faces Xuan half-knew. A Skyedge quartermaster who’d once counted stones for a boy nobody expected to live out the year. A pair of mine-hands from the Blood Fang campaign, grown into men now and riding with swords on their backs. Frostmoon blue scattered through the ranks, Pavilion white, the plain grey of Skyedge itself. All of them had every reason to be three days south resting on a wall they’d just won, and they’d turned north instead, because somewhere in the last few years Xuan had done a thing for them or for theirs, and a debt in the sects is heavier than gold. It had all come due at once, and it had come to help.

Xuan met Hao in the tower yard. Hao took one look at the state of all of them and didn’t waste breath on being glad.

"You look like death warmed over and served cold." He swung down off a horse that looked worse than he did. "Whole city’s yours, the Second’s dead, and you’re all bleeding in a watchtower. So the rider undersold it."

"When has a rider ever undersold anything to make it look worse."

"Fair." Hao’s gaze went past him to the black hill and the palace on it, and his face tightened. "That the new problem?"

"That’s the one."

He didn’t ask more in the yard. Hao had ridden through enough of Xuan’s disasters to know the briefing came inside.

Over Bo Ren’s chalk-scarred table, Xuan laid it out flat and fast. There was a way to seal the thing on the hill. It needed a trap built around it, a real one, walls and ground and a formation big enough to hold a god still for the time it took to shut the lid. And they had until it finished settling into whatever it had dragged out of the earth, which was not long.

Hao folded his arms. "What do you need, and where do I get it?"

"Materials. Formation-grade spirit stones, a lot of them. Anchor-iron, array flags, cores. More than we can carry and more than this ring of the city has lying around."

"Then we take it from the ring that does." Hao tipped his chin at the hill. "It’s the imperial capital, Xuan. There’s an armory up there stocked to wall off a province, a treasury full of stones, and nobody left alive to sign for a grain of it."

"The ring with the stock," Xinhua said dryly, from her seat against the wall, "is the ring with the monsters. And the god."

"Everything worth having is guarded by something." Hao shrugged. "That’s most of my trade."

The Pavilion had sent formation people up with the column, three of them, led by a lean grey woman named Elder Pei who’d built half the arrays on the Pavilion’s home peak and had the manner of a person who found most problems beneath her. She looked at the marks Xuan sketched on the table, the geometry Mira was feeding him in pieces he passed off as his own, and her mouth went thin.

"I’ve never seen a formation like this." It plainly cost her to say it. "It isn’t sect work. It isn’t imperial either. Where’s it from?"

"Somewhere old. You won’t have seen it. Nobody has." Xuan met her look. "Can you build it?"

"If your marks are right, I can build anything off them." She frowned at the sketch. "Are they right?"

"They’re right. Build it."

Yan Wuji hadn’t said a word through any of it. He’d gone to the Pavilion people when they came in, and there’d been a short, quiet thing between them Xuan didn’t intrude on, because Luo had been theirs too, and the Pavilion had buried four of its own on this errand now. When the work got parceled out, Yan Wuji took the formation detail without being asked. A man who’s run out of grief needs somewhere to put his hands, and building the box that would bury the thing that killed his sword-brothers was as near to purpose as he had left.

Xinhua did the part only she could do. She couldn’t build a formation or cut a reagent, and her ribs wouldn’t let her lift much heavier than a brush, so she lifted the thing that weighed most in a city like this instead. Her name. A princess with a sword is just a rebel. Put her on a throne, even one she’d held for a single night, and she’s an empire, and the surrendered soldiers and the frightened clerks and the handful of clans who’d stayed bought did what her seal told them, which was to hand every man and every stone they had to whatever the boy from the dead sword school asked for. It all moved faster with her weight behind it. Everything did.

The work started inside the hour, because there was no hour to spare.

Hao took a crew up into the middle rings with a list and a very clear understanding of how fast to move and how quiet to be, because the imperial stores were exactly where they needed them and exactly where the Fourth’s wardens now walked their patient rounds. Twice that first day the ward-net twitched under Xuan’s hand as one of the black ones drifted too near a scavenging crew, and twice the crew froze and waited it out and lived, because the thing on the hill was busy with something more important than a few ants hauling off spare iron.

That was the part that sat wrong with Xuan the whole day.

The Fourth knew they were down here. He had to. And he wasn’t doing a single thing about it, and the only reason Xuan could find for that was the worst one available. The man wasn’t worried. He was letting them scurry because whatever they scurried together would come to nothing, or because he’d be whole before they were ready, and either way it ended the same. Xuan filed the thought with all the others and kept working, because a man who stops to be afraid of the clock only wastes more of it.

There was one more thing that sat wrong, and it hung at his hip. Marrow Dragon hadn’t gone back to sleep. Whatever had woken in the throne hall was still there, a low hum under his palm whenever he touched the hilt, patient and enormous and not entirely his. He’d tried once, in a quiet corner of the tower, to reach for it the way he reached for everything else the sword could do, and it had answered like a door swinging open onto a room too big to see the far wall of, and he’d shut it again fast, because his Foundation body had taken one look at what was on the other side and told him plainly that opening it all the way would be the end of him.

’Mira. What did the sword become.’

[ Something I’m not ready to explain, ] she said, which was becoming a theme. [ Profound rank is real, and you can lean on it. But you can’t hold it open at Foundation, no more than you could throw the mountain-blow twice. A heartbeat, or a breath if you’re desperate. Use it like the last card it is, and put it away.]

’That’s twice today you’ve told me not to ask.’

[ It’s a day for it. ] A pause, and something under her voice he couldn’t name. [ You’ll get your answers, Xuan. Not tonight, maybe not for a long time. But you’ll get them. And I don’t think you’re going to like most of them.]

By the end of that first day they had more than Xuan had let himself hope for. Hao had pulled enough stock out of the imperial armory to build Pei’s array twice over. Pei had the design broken into a hundred small jobs, and hands enough to work them. The trap was going to exist. For about the length of one breath, Xuan let himself feel like they might actually drag this insane thing off.

Then Lian arrived, and took the feeling away from him.

She’d come up with Hao’s column, the same lean, ink-stained alchemist who’d kept Skyedge’s furnaces lit through everything, and Xuan had put her on the one part of the job no amount of money or hands could touch: the reagent that would bind his sealing core into the heart of Pei’s formation, the mortar that held the whole thing together. She’d spent the day with the core and the list of what the binding needed, and she came to find him in the tower yard with the flat calm of a person about to ruin somebody’s evening.

"Formation’s fine. Stones are fine. Your mystery core is..." Lian made a small face. "I’m not going to ask what it is. But the binding-reagent that anchors it is the problem, and it’s the one kind your friend’s coin purse can’t solve."

"Tell me."

"It needs a base I can’t fake. One ingredient, no substitute, and there’s no version of the array that holds without it." She held his eyes. "Fresh-cut starmetal. And there’s exactly one place within three days of here soaked in enough of the old power to have grown any."

Xuan already knew. He’d known it the second she said the word old.

"The vault."

"Where else." Lian’s voice didn’t soften. "The one thing that seals the thing on that hill only grows in the same hole it crawled out of. You want to bind your god, someone has to walk back up into the monster’s house, down the stair you all barely walked off of, and cut it out of the walls of the pit itself."

Behind her, through the tower window, the black hill sat quiet under its dead palace, and somewhere at the bottom of it the most patient enemy Xuan had ever had went on making himself whole, one hour at a time, in the exact place they now had no choice but to go.

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