Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

\They needed a place to spring the trap, and it turned out Xinhua had been carrying the answer around in her head since she was a girl.

She spread a scavenged map of the capital across a crate in the yard and set her finger on a terrace in the middle rings, a wide stone platform ringed with old altars that Xuan had walked past twice on the way up the hill without a second look.

"The Ancestral Terrace." She tapped it. "First Emperor’s work. It’s one of the anchor-points the whole city ward-net was hung from, back when the net was built to keep exactly this kind of thing in its box. The old wards there still hold." She looked up. "Tie your formation into them, and you’re not building your trap on bare ground. You’re building it on something that was already meant to do half the job."

Xuan looked at where it sat on the map, and the second thing about it hit even harder than the first.

"It’s far from the vault. Not so far he won’t come, if we give him a reason. But far enough that coming costs him."

"That’s the part you’ll have to explain," Bo Ren said.

"He’s tethered." Xuan had turned it over enough by now to say it plain. "Whatever he pulled out of that pit, he’s still holding it shut. He can move now that it’s settling, but not freely, and not far."

"So?"

"So every step he takes from it stretches the hold thinner. Drag him all the way out to the edge of his own leash, and we don’t just get him on our ground." Xuan tapped the terrace. "We get him weaker than he’ll ever be again."

So they built it there.

Getting the formation up onto the Ancestral Terrace was its own quiet war, because the terrace sat in the contested middle rings where the net’s grip on the wardens thinned and the Fourth’s began, and every crate of components had to be hauled up through streets a patrol could turn into at the wrong moment. Xinhua held what net she could over the route, wincing at the cost of reaching that high. Frostmoon and Skyedge blades ran the perimeter in shifts. Pei’s Pavilion hands worked two days and a night laying the array into the old imperial stone.

Xuan watched the thing take form and understood, slowly, that Pei was better than she’d let on. The old wards fought the new design at every seam, first Emperor’s craft and the ancient thing Xuan had handed her refusing to sit easy together, and Pei found the compromises, the places where the two could be married instead of forced. She built a cage that used the terrace’s bones for its frame and Lian’s mortar for its joints and the core at its dead center for its lock, and when she finally stepped back from it, grey with exhaustion, even she looked a little frightened of what she’d made.

The whole time they built it, the Fourth did nothing. Xuan felt him up there through the strained edge of the net, a weight that never moved and never once sent a warden down to see what the ants were raising on his hill. It should have been a mercy. It sat in Xuan’s gut like a swallowed stone. A man who lets you build the gallows you mean to hang him from is a man who does not, for one single breath, believe it will hold.

With the cage built, the only thing left was getting the god to put his head in it.

Xuan had known since the tower what the bait had to be. He’d spent every hour since hunting a version of the plan where it wasn’t him, and there wasn’t one.

"He won’t chase," he told them, when they gathered in the terrace’s shadow that last evening. "We proved that. He let us run because nothing we did worried him. So we can’t drag him here. We have to make him want to come."

"Badly enough to leave the one thing he actually cares about," Xinhua said.

"Badly enough for that."

"And you know what he wants." It wasn’t a question. She’d been in the throne room. She’d heard the soft voice say hello, little dragon.

"He wants this." Xuan set a hand on Marrow Dragon’s hilt and felt the low hum answer. "Whatever it woke into, he’s wanted it his whole life. He’s the kind of patient that only breaks for the one thing he can’t talk himself out of."

"His pride, then. Like my brother."

"No. His greed." Xuan drew the blade a hand’s width, and even that made the air in the terrace tighten. "And there’s more to it than wanting. In the throne hall, when this woke, it reached out and touched the thing he’s holding. Made it fight him. He felt that, and it scared him."

Xinhua’s eyes moved to the sword. "So if it sings."

"If I stand on this stone and let it sing, he doesn’t just want to come take it. He can’t afford to leave it ringing, not while it’s rattling loose the thing he spent twenty years digging for." Xuan pushed the blade back down. "Greed brings him. The threat means he can’t wait to."

Then they divided it up, because a plan is only as good as knowing exactly who does what when a god walks into the yard.

Xuan would stand the bait, at the terrace’s heart, where the core waited under the stone. He’d hold the Fourth’s attention, read the man’s limiter in the moment, and spring the seal when the trap was full and the timing was right, not one breath before, because they had exactly one.

Bo Ren took the anchor without being asked. The cage had a keystone, a point in the old wards where the whole thing hung or fell, and it needed a body on it that would not move off no matter what came. The old sword-master looked at the job and simply nodded, the way a man nods at a thing he’s already decided.

"You could put a younger back on that stone," Xuan said, carefully.

"I know." Bo Ren’s ruined face did something that wasn’t quite a smile. "You still won’t, and neither will I. A young man wonders whether the ground he’s holding is worth dying on. I stopped wondering about that a long time ago." He looked up at the black hill. "Give me the stone, boy. I’ve held worse for worse reasons."

The rest fell in around the two of them. Qingyue, Xinhua, and Yan Wuji would buy the seconds, the three of them keeping the Fourth’s hands and feet and attention off Xuan and off the anchor for as long as flesh could manage, which would not be long. Pei and her crew would run the array through its phases from the terrace’s edge. Frostmoon and Skyedge would hold the approaches, and Xinhua would keep what net she could stretched over the whole terrace, to turn the Fourth’s own wardens back if he tried to call them down on the fight.

It was, Xuan thought, looking at all of it laid out, either the best plan he’d ever built or a very elaborate way for a lot of good people to die on a stone terrace in a dead city. Possibly both, in the way the best plans always were.

They finished at what passed for dusk in a city where the light had gone wrong. Everyone got into place. The terrace lay quiet under its old altars, the cage invisible in the stone unless you knew every mark of it, the core a cold weight at its center waiting on a door. And Xuan walked out to the heart of it, alone, with a sword at his hip that had slept longer than the empire and wasn’t sleeping now.

’Ready?’ he asked her.

[ No, ] Mira said. [ But we never are, and it’s never once stopped you.] A pause, and something almost gentle under it. [ Whatever happens on this stone, Xuan. You built something out of nothing and dragged a lot of people up out of the dark doing it. Whatever the sword does when I open it. Whatever the price turns out to be. That part was real.] A breath. [ Now. Let it sing.]

Xuan closed his hand around Marrow Dragon’s hilt, and let go of the grip he’d been holding it shut with since the throne hall, and let the blade sing.

The note went out across the dead city like a struck bell, low and enormous and old, and up on the black hill, at the mouth of the vault where the most patient enemy Xuan had ever had sat holding the world shut, something stirred.

And then, for the first time since he’d climbed that stair, the Fourth Prince left it.

He came down the hill toward the singing sword, unhurried and terrible and no longer safe behind his tether, and Xuan stood alone at the center of a trap built from a dead emperor’s wards and a maid’s mortar and a secret in his own skull, and watched a god walk into it.

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