Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

The Fourth Prince came onto the Ancestral Terrace the way bad weather comes, without hurry and without the smallest doubt that the ground would still be there to walk on when he was done with it.

He looked, if anything, mildly put out. Xuan watched him cross the old stone toward the singing sword and understood that the man was annoyed, the way you’re annoyed at a chore you’d hoped to put off, and that the annoyance was the most dangerous thing about him, because a god who’s stopped being amused has stopped being careful with you.

"You made me come all the way down here." The soft voice carried across the terrace without seeming to try. "I’d have preferred to finish settling first. But you’ve got that thing ringing like a struck gong, and I find I can’t concentrate with it loose." He stopped a dozen paces off, and his mild eyes went to Marrow Dragon and stayed there, hungry and wary at once. "So. Hand it over, and I’ll make the rest of this quick and kind. Or don’t, and I’ll take it off your corpse and make it neither."

Xuan didn’t hand it over. He also didn’t answer, because his whole attention had gone somewhere else, down into the read Mira was building of the man in front of him, and what he found there was the first good news of the entire night.

’Mira. Tell me I’m seeing that right.’

[ You’re seeing it right. ] Even she sounded surprised. [ He’s weaker down here. Not much, but it’s real. Every step he took from the vault stretched the hold, and now he’s at the far end of his own leash, spending strength on keeping the thing shut that he’d rather spend on you. The crack we couldn’t reach up on the hill is wider down here. Still not wide enough to kill him. But it might just be wide enough to hold him. ]

That was the plan’s whole bet, laid bare in a single read. Not that they could beat him, but that dragging him out here had made him just holdable enough for the cage to have a chance. It was a thin bet. It was the only one they had.

Xuan gave the signal.

It wasn’t a shout or a raised hand, because the Fourth would have read either. It was a thing he and Pei had settled on hours before, a shift of his weight onto his back foot, and across the terrace Pei’s crew brought the first phase of the array up out of the old stone.

The change ran through the terrace like a held breath let go. The first Emperor’s wards, dormant three hundred years, woke where the new formation touched them, and a low pressure settled over the whole platform, faint but real, the pressure of a place remembering what it had been built to do. Lines of old script flickered under the stone, appearing and disappearing between cracks worn smooth by centuries, while Pei’s people fed fresh qi into channels no living formation master had ever expected to use again.

The Fourth felt it. Xuan watched him feel it, watched the mild face register the ground turning under him, and for the first time all night the man’s attention came fully off the sword and onto the stone.

"Ah," the Fourth said softly. "There it is."

And then it was a fight, and it was every ugly thing Xuan had braced for.

The Fourth moved, to leave or to reach the sword or simply to take the terrace apart, and the three of them were in his way before he finished the thought. Qingyue threw a wall of Snowstorm Veil between him and Xuan and iced the stone under his feet to steal a half-step. Xinhua came at him high with everything her Golden Core and her wounded ribs could give, the net at her call to foul his footing. Yan Wuji fought like a man who’d stopped expecting to see morning and had made his peace with spending himself well.

None of them could hurt him. They’d known that walking in. But hurting him was never the job. The job was seconds, and they bought them a brutal handful at a time, hurling themselves into his path and being thrown back out of it and picking themselves up to do it again, while the terrace hummed and Pei’s crew fed the array toward its second phase and Bo Ren stood on his keystone like the stone had grown him there.

Every few breaths another line in the terrace lit. Another section of the old ward took hold. Pei shouted numbers to his crew without ever looking away from the formation, and men who had spent their lives drawing arrays with ink were now holding trembling hands over stone hot enough to blister skin. Nobody stopped. There was nowhere left to step back to.

Xuan stood at the center of it and did the only thing he was any use for. He read, and he timed, and he spent nothing.

He read the Fourth’s stretched strength and found the beats where the man had to hand attention back to the thing he was holding, the tiny hitches where the leash pulled and the god had to steady his grip on the vault. He fed those beats to the others without a word any of them could hear, a lean here, a turn of his head there, and Qingyue and Xinhua and Yan Wuji learned to read him reading, to press in the half-second the Fourth was distracted and fall back the half-second he wasn’t.

Once, Qingyue caught his signal a fraction late and the Fourth’s backhand sent her skidding halfway across the terrace. She rolled, came up on one knee with blood at the corner of her mouth, and was already moving again before Xuan could decide whether to be afraid for her. There wasn’t room for fear yet. He stored it with everything else he intended to feel if they survived.

He held Pei off the second stage until the man was committed deep enough that pulling out of it would cost him something. And he did not lift the sword to fight with it, and he did not reach down into the enormous sleeping thing it had become, and he did not spend the one card that ended fights, because the plan lived or died on patience, and Xuan had exactly one chance to run out of it at the right moment.

For a while, it worked. For a while, they held a god on a stone terrace and fed a cage toward closing and nobody died, and Xuan let himself believe, for the second time in three days, that patience might be enough.

Then the Fourth stopped fighting them.

He stood still in the middle of the terrace, and he laughed the low, wet, genuinely amused laugh Xuan had last heard out of his dying brother, and Xuan’s stomach dropped, because he knew that sound now. It was the sound of one of them seeing the whole board a half-second before the other did.

"Oh, that’s clever." The Fourth turned slowly in place, taking in the humming wards, the array feeding toward its close, the old first-Emperor stone gone quietly hungry under his feet. "You didn’t lure me down here to fight me at all, you lured me down here to bury me. A box built into the old man’s wards. Stretched me off my anchor to soften me up first."

He looked at Xuan, and the mild annoyance was gone, and under it was the last thing Xuan wanted to see on that face.

Interest.

"You were going to hold me polite and patient while it shut. You know, if I’d been anyone else, that might even have worked."

Xuan’s whole plan had been built on the Fourth doing the careful thing, the twenty-years-of-caution thing, the thing that had kept a man hidden and alive: pull back the instant the ground turned against him, retreat, live to try again another year. Every model Xuan had ever run ended the same way, with the Fourth trying to leave, and the cage catching him on the way out the door.

The Fourth did not try to leave.

He planted his feet in the dead center of the trap that had been built to hold him, and he stopped splitting himself between the leash and the fight, and Xuan felt the whole of that stretched, straining strength gather and turn onto the cage, no longer divided, all of it pouring into one purpose.

It was, he understood with the cold clarity that only came to him at the very worst moments, exactly what he’d wanted. A Fourth Prince who ran was one they could never catch. A Fourth Prince who stayed to break the box was one already inside it, straining the very hold that made him sealable, handing them the fight they needed to close the cage.

It was also a great deal more force than a half-built cage was ready to take, aimed square at shattering it before it could shut, and coming down on every one of them right now.

Stone groaned beneath his feet.

One of the outer formation lines split with a sound like ice cracking across a frozen lake. Pei’s crew lurched as the backlash hit them, two men dropping to their knees, blood spilling from one nose onto the glowing script. Pei himself stayed standing, both hands buried in the array, and looked at Xuan with the expression of a man who had just been handed a burning building and told to keep the roof up.

"No," the Fourth said, pleasant and terrible. "I don’t think I’ll run. I think I’ll just break this from the inside, and cut the sword out of whatever’s left standing."

"Pei!" Xuan shouted, over the rising howl of a god who had finally stopped being careful. "Second phase, now! Everyone hold the line—"

And the Fourth Prince brought the whole of himself down on the trap.