Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

There was no clever way around it, in the end.

Xuan turned Lian’s problem over from every angle Mira could throw at it, and every angle came back to the same ugly place. The starmetal grew where the old power had soaked deepest, and the old power had soaked deepest around the vault, and the vault was the Fourth’s front door. No substitute, no shortcut. If they wanted the thing that would anchor the seal, they had to go up into his house and cut it out of the walls.

So they went. Not down to the pit, where the man himself sat holding the world shut with both hands, but up into the tainted middle rings where the vault’s spill had crept out into the stone, close enough to feel the wrongness of the place crawl on the back of the neck, far enough that the thing at the bottom might not trouble itself over a few more ants.

Xuan took the smallest team he could stand to bring: himself, Yan Wuji, and two of Hao’s steadiest hands with cutting tools, because a big party up there was a party that got noticed. He ran it the way he ran everything now, with the ward-net for eyes and the wardens’ patrol-lines for a clock. Mira read the leaked power like a map and marked the richest veins, the places where the stone had gone dark and glassy and hummed faintly under a bare palm. They cut fast, wrapped what they cut in warded cloth so it wouldn’t sing to the thing below, and moved between the patrols in the gaps Xuan had spent a whole war learning to find.

It nearly went wrong once. A black warden came down a colonnade off its usual line, drawn maybe by the cutting and maybe by nothing at all, and for a handful of breaths the four of them pressed into a doorway with the starmetal muffled against their chests while the thing stood in the open and turned its crowded skull one way, then the other, and decided in the end that whatever it had half-felt wasn’t worth the walk. When it moved on, nobody breathed for a long moment. Then they finished, and got out, and didn’t stop moving until the tainted rings were behind them and the ordinary dark of the lower city closed over their heads like still water.

Lian was waiting for the starmetal the way she waited for everything to do with him, which was already, and with a small crease of disapproval that he’d gone up there himself.

"You have a hundred people who could carry rocks." She took the warded bundle out of his hands and unwrapped it with the care of someone handling a sleeping snake. "And you walked into the monster’s front hall to do it in person. Again."

"It’s a specific rock. I know what it looks like. They don’t."

"You know what everything looks like." She didn’t say it as a compliment, exactly. It was an old, worn thing between them, the kind she’d been saying since she first noticed her dying young master understood matters a dying young master had no business understanding. "Sit. You look like a wrung-out cloth, and I can’t refine with you swaying at my shoulder."

He sat. It was easier to argue with the Fourth Prince than with Lian once she’d decided he needed to sit down.

She’d bullied a cleared storeroom in the base of the tower into a passable refining space, and she went to work, and Xuan watched a thing he’d set in motion years ago happen all over again in front of him. There had been a kitchen girl once, handed to a young master everyone had quietly written off, who’d spent two years keeping a dying boy fed and clean and company while his own body rotted out from under him and nobody expected either of them to come to anything. And then he’d put a gift in her hands, a rare and impossible gift he had never fully explained the source of, and it had woken something in her no one had thought to look for, and the kitchen girl had turned out to carry a Pure Jade Water Root and a talent for alchemy that Master Fu still hadn’t finished being annoyed with himself for missing.

Now that talent bent over a bench in a dead city and refined the one thing in the world that could cage the man who’d put the rot in him in the first place.

She worked in near-silence for a long while, the way she always did, the storeroom filling with the pine-and-mineral smell of her preparations and the small exact sounds of a craft she’d had only a handful of years and already half-mastered. The starmetal fought her. He could see it in the set of her jaw, in the way the stuff shrugged off every solvent and every heat until she found the one sequence it would answer. Twice she stopped, went still, and started a step back, and both times he kept his mouth shut and let her, because the one thing you did not do was help Lian in the middle of a refine unless you wanted to lose a hand.

"There," she said at last, very quiet, and lifted a small sealed vial of something that wasn’t quite a liquid and wasn’t quite a light. "That’s your mortar. Handle it like it’s the last of its kind, because as far as I know it is." She looked at him then, and the dry maid’s calm slipped for a second into something older and more worried. "Young Master. Whatever this is for. Whatever’s up on that hill." A breath. "You came back from a room I nursed you through dying in, once. I’d take it as a kindness if you came back from this one too."

Xuan didn’t have anything to give her that wouldn’t have been a lie, so he gave her the truth instead. "I’ll do my best. That’s all I’ve ever been able to promise you, and it’s carried us this far."

Lian nodded, once, and put the maid’s calm back on like a coat, and that was the end of it, because there was work to do and both of them had always understood that work came before feelings in a house that ran on order.

With the mortar done, the last piece was in place, and the thing Xuan had been half-afraid to look at directly was suddenly real.

He walked the tower and the yards below it that night and watched a machine he’d spent years building without ever knowing it was a machine. Hao’s people ran materials in from the middle rings in warded carts, counted and sorted and stacked by a Skyedge quartermaster who’d done the same dull job for a dying boy’s tiny household a lifetime ago. Pei’s Pavilion hands laid out array components across the courtyard by lamplight, checking each against a design not one of them had ever seen and raising it anyway on Xuan’s word. Frostmoon blades stood the watch on the tower’s approaches so the builders could build. Yan Wuji moved among the formation crews doing the flat, holy labor of making sure a thing got done right, because it was the only thing holding him upright.

Nobody in that yard could have built this alone. Skyedge brought the coin and the hands, the Pavilion the formation craft, Frostmoon the swords. Lian had the one reagent money couldn’t buy. And Xuan had the thing none of them knew about, the quiet voice in his skull that had spent the whole night doing the part of the work no eyes could see.

Because the core itself was Mira’s, and Mira’s alone.

He felt her at it over those hours, a low pressure at the edge of his mind, taking the starmetal mortar and the formation-grade stones and the anchor-iron and folding them into the sealing apparatus she’d kept in the Shop for a purpose no one in this world had ever needed until now. He didn’t follow a tenth of what she did. He’d stopped needing to. He just felt the thing take on weight and readiness in whatever place she kept it, a lock being oiled and loaded, waiting on a door.

’How does it feel,’ he asked her once, late, when the yard had gone quiet and most of the work was done.

[ Like holding a lit match in a room full of powder, ] Mira said. [ It does exactly one thing, once, perfectly, and then it’s spent forever. Which means we get precisely one chance to point it at the right god in the right moment.] A pause. [ No pressure, Xuan.]

By the time the sky over the dead city began to think about turning grey, they had it. All of it. The core, loaded and waiting. The formation, broken into a hundred crates of components ready to be carried and raised. The mortar, in Lian’s careful vial. The hands to build it and the swords to guard the building. Everything a person could need to cage a god.

Everything except the two things Xuan hadn’t solved, and both of them sat in his chest like swallowed stones as he stood on the tower and looked up at the black hill.

They still had to build the trap somewhere. Somewhere the ground itself would take their side, somewhere the Fourth’s own tether and his half-strength could be turned back on him, and choosing that ground wrong would throw away the only shot they’d ever get.

And once it was built, they had to get him to walk into it. A man who wouldn’t chase, who sat holding the world shut and let them scurry because he simply wasn’t worried. There was no dragging a thing like that into a trap. You could only offer it something it wanted more than it wanted to be careful.

Xuan looked down at Marrow Dragon humming quietly at his hip, and thought about a soft, ordinary voice saying hello, little dragon, and understood, with the flat calm of a man who had run clean out of better ideas, exactly what the bait was going to have to be.

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