BEFORE THEM lay a bridge.
It began at the edge of the cliff and extended endlessly toward the horizon. At the far end, a stone door was set against the firmament. It was impossible to guess its true size; it stood among the clouds, wreathed in scarlet flames that the torrential storm with all its thunder and lightning couldn't douse.
"Shizun, do you remember? You told us this story once yourself. A very long time ago, demons wreaked havoc upon the world. After Gouchen the Exalted helped Fuxi vanquish them, the demon tribe was banished from the mortal realm."
Taxian-jun stared out at the massive stone door hanging in midair, hands behind his back. "Defeated, the Demon Lord and his armies fled. Upon returning to the demon realm, in the humiliation of his defeat, he sealed all doors that linked his world to the world of mortals. From then on, those of the demon race would never set foot in the mortal realm again."
He paused. "But nothing is absolute. As a precaution, the Demon Lord left one passage remaining…the door you see in front of you."
Thunder pealed, lightning crashed.
"The Martyr's Gate."
Chu Wanning wasn't looking at the door. Since the moment they'd arrived on the cliffs, his eyes had been trained on the massive bridge linking the demon realm to the backwoods of Sisheng Peak. He'd first been stricken by the sight, then his face had gone pale. At last, he'd seemed to shatter, his face crumpling with black despair. His head snapped around. "Mo Weiyu, are you insane?! This bridge—"
"It's beautiful." Taxian-jun's only reaction to Chu Wanning's outburst was a faint smile. "What's wrong?" he asked, though he knew the answer. "Don't you like it?"
Like it?
Not one piece of wood had been used in the construction of the wide and impossibly long bridge. Not one iron nail. Every inch was made of human bodies: One corpse stacked upon another, reaching into the horizon, all of them crushed into this dead man's bridge that stretched out into the skies. There were the bodies of men and women, young and old, compacted together all the way to that majestic gate. The number of dead was impossible to guess.
"Since this is the Martyr's Gate, of course it requires a Martyr's Path." Taxian-jun was perfectly at ease, as if all these corpses were no more than streetside pebbles or logs chopped from the nearby forest. He whistled, and a beam of dazzling blue light lit up along the bridge's length. Something seemed to be rushing toward them.
"But there are some secrets about the demon realm even Shizun doesn't know." Taxian-jun turned back to Chu Wanning and grinned. "If Shizun doesn't mind, this disciple will enlighten you."
Chu Wanning said nothing.
"Shizun knows that during the battle between Fuxi and the Demon Lord, Gouchen the Exalted turned traitor and forged the first true sword in the world for Fuxi. The Demon Lord held a grudge for this and exacted vengeance on Gouchen the Exalted. Though he couldn't touch the God of a Thousand Weapons, he could punish those of Gouchen's tribe. After the battle, he banished them from the demon realm."
Taxian-jun watched as the spot of blue light grew brighter, his voice low and measured. "The demon race has always possessed potent spiritual energy. But their power cost them in stamina; only the meat and grains of the demon realm could sustain their spiritual cores. After Gouchen the Exalted's tribe was lost in the mortal realm, their cores withered without the sustenance of their homeland. In the end, most became powerless wretches. The only demonic traits they retained were the ease with which they could cultivate and breed."
Taxian-jun paused, turning back to Chu Wanning. "Shizun's realized by now which race Gouchen the Exalted belonged to, right?"
The last thing he wanted to do was play question and answer with Taxian-jun, but what choice did he have? Chu Wanning clenched his jaw. "The Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts."
"You got it." Taxian-jun made a show of clapping for him, then smiled. "The Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts—once a formidable power in their own right. To perpetuate their bloodline, their constitutions evolved over time to become the perfect cultivation vessel. When bodies so uniquely suited for dual cultivation also possess powerful spiritual cores, their descendants beget more descendants, and each generation will be stronger than the last. But the doors to the demon realm had closed forever. Cut off from their supply of spiritual energy, their powerful cores withered, leaving only bodies rich with spiritual energy.
"Of course," said Taxian-jun, eyes dulling as if reminded of someone in particular, "they also possessed the staggering beauty of the demon race."
Chu Wanning didn't need him to elaborate on this detail. The cultivation world viewed Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts in one of two ways: flesh to be consumed, or cultivation vessels to be fucked and used. Hadn't Song Qiutong been auctioned off at the Xuanyuan Pavilion for this exact reason? Even someone as outwardly rational as Jiang Xi didn't view Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts as human beings, let alone the crowds of cultivators who weren't bastions of morality in the first place.
"When the strong possess beautiful faces and alluring bodies," said Taxian-jun, glancing surreptitiously at Chu Wanning, "that's the perfect finishing touch. But if these traits fall to the weak, those who possess them become as vulnerable as dark feathers on snow or a white fox in the shadows. They are doomed to be violated or slaughtered."
That blue glow was coming closer, ever closer…
"In the beginning," Taxian-jun continued, "the Butterfly-Boned clan still had enough demonic power to hold their own among mortals. But gradually their power weakened and disappeared. The result is what we see now. In those days of antiquity, the strong preyed on the weak, and the pure-blooded Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts quickly died out. The survivors hid their identities in order to avoid the same fate."
"How did they hide?"
"Wow," said Taxian-jun. "That's the first time you've opened your mouth to ask a question of me." His eyes flickered. "It's actually quite simple. You probably remember how Song Qiutong cried golden tears. This is a trait unique to the demon race. To hide your identity, you only need not to cry."
Chu Wanning said nothing. It was simple enough to say, but not at all simple in practice. Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts were impossibly beautiful, conspicuously so. If some cultivator suspected them, there was no shortage of ways to force them to shed tears.
"The undiscovered Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts managed to live on. Some retreated to live in seclusion in the mountains, while others chose to marry mortals. The children of such couplings were sometimes human, sometimes demon. Children can't control their crying. If the demonic blood ran stronger in them, all it took was for them to scrape their knee and shed a few golden tears for disaster to befall both parent and child. Winding up with a human child was nothing to celebrate, either; the demon bloodline remained dormant in them. Who knew when another Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast would pop up somewhere in the family line."
Chu Wanning frowned as a name came to mind. "Song Xingyi…"
"Yes, the Jade-Hearted Lord Song Xingyi from hundreds of years ago." Taxian-jun nodded. "You're right. As the generations wore on, sometimes an extremely lucky child would be born, one who didn't cry golden tears or have the obvious constitution of a cultivation vessel. They appeared just like normal humans, but the potency of their demon bloodline allowed them to form a spiritual core very quickly. Their spiritual energy was no weaker than that of any pure-blooded demon. But such children were impossibly rare. In thousands of years, the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts that rose to the level of zongshi can be counted on one hand." At this, he spread his fine-boned fingers and waggled them before Chu Wanning, half in mockery and half in genuine interest.
After a beat, he continued. "Many Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts yearned to go back to the demon realm. If only they could go home, they'd never have to live through this kind of terror; they'd never have to go all their lives holding back their tears; they'd never fear being sold off as a cultivation vessel or dismembered for consumption. In the years of chaos when cultivators hunted Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts to increase their own power, they'd never again have to scar their faces for fear their beauty would doom them to death or worse."
He'd spoken so soothingly for so long that the blue light hurtling toward them had resolved into distinct shapes: a team of five horses pounding down the Martyr's Path, pulling a carriage behind them.
"But returning to the demon realm was no easy task," said Taxian-jun. "The Demon Lord despised Gouchen the Exalted. To him, Gouchen was a traitor that'd gone over to the gods; his entire line deserved to be wiped out, eternally blighted. Of course he wouldn't let the pitiable Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts return home."
Chu Wanning said nothing. The storm raged above them, filling the air with the damp stink of petrichor.
Taxian-jun watched the carriage approach. It was a long moment before he continued. "Then the first Demon Lord died, and his successor took the throne. The new ruler was more lenient."
Something shifted in Chu Wanning's eyes. "He allowed the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts to return?"
"Yes," said Taxian-jun, smiling. "But as Shizun can see, he set conditions that cannot be met without the use of the forbidden techniques. If the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts wanted to come home, there were certain things they had to do."
Chu Wanning's heart juddered. He could see the outline of the story taking shape.
Taxian-jun gestured airily at the bridge of corpses before them. "Look at the Martyr's Path. It is the only bridge that links the mortal world to the demon realm, and it requires the willing sacrifice of living humans for its construction." He chuckled. "Finding one person willing to die for another's cause is an enormous stroke of luck; finding five such people would be an unthinkable fortune. A hundred would be a total absurdity. Everyone has their own life to live—who would willingly die to let descendants of demons go home?"
Chu Wanning looked up. "Hence the Zhenlong Chess Formation."
Taxian-jun hadn't expected him to reply. He paused and bared his teeth in a grin. "Indeed."
He looked back over the majestic sprawl of the Martyr's Path and narrowed his eyes. "Over the years, this venerable one has used the Zhenlong Chess Formation to make every last one of them willingly lay down their lives."
"How many did you kill?"
Taxian-jun looked at him, fixing Chu Wanning with those eyes so dark they glinted purple. "Everyone."
Chu Wanning flinched.
"Almost everyone."
The bridge before them seemed to stretch on without an end. Insulated by the sounds of pouring rain, they might have been surrounded by silence or by the screaming, sobbing, shrieking, howling, and begging of the dead. Chu Wanning trembled, but it wasn't from the cold.
"Do you know how long this bridge has to be?" Taxian-jun went on peaceably. "This venerable one slaughtered almost everyone in this world—there might not be more than ten thousand souls left alive. Yet this bridge is only half built. The deaths of the final ten thousand aren't enough to fill the gap."
Silence.
When he spoke at last, Chu Wanning's voice was shaking. "And that's why you had to open the Space-Time Gate?"
"You're always leaping to the worst conclusion," said Taxian-jun. "But you're right. Only by opening the Space-Time Gate of Life and Death and collecting thousands more Zhenlong pawns from another world can this bridge be made complete."
Rain beat down around them, sluicing off the barriers shielding them from the storm. They stared at each other, brown eyes boring into purple-black until a bolt of lightning lit up Chu Wanning's snarl of maddened fury. "You're all insane!"
In the wild light of the storm, all Taxian-jun did was sneer. "This venerable one knew you'd react this way." He turned aside; the carriage had drawn close enough to make out some details of its build. "Space-Time Gate, Zhenlong Chess." He paused. "Better still if you have Rebirth. Once all three techniques have been used, the gate to the demon realm will open, and the Butterfly-Boned clan can go home at last."
Chu Wanning was shaking. Rage and terror had rendered him mute.
Taxian-jun kept his eyes on the carriage and spoke with a rare empathy. "I'm sure you want to know why they had to use these forbidden techniques for the Demon Lord to allow their return. But it's actually very simple. Gouchen the Exalted created the three forbidden techniques; they represent the once-absolute power of the demon clan. Later, Gouchen saw them as the source of catastrophe and asked Fuxi to proscribe them and tear the records to pieces. It was because of Gouchen that the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts were condemned, so of course they'd have to denounce him and declare themselves his enemy. They had to stand against Gouchen the Exalted and violate Fuxi's heavenly authority to win the demon realm's forgiveness."
With a long whinny, the demon horses at the head of the carriage broke through the flames of the Martyr's Path and into the baleful rains of the mortal world. They stood poised and proud at the end of the bridge.
Taxian-jun's black robes fluttered in the wind. He stroked the bare skull of one dark steed and turned back to Chu Wanning. "Use the forbidden techniques, defy Gouchen the Exalted, and make an enemy of Fuxi—all to regain their place as the rightful descendants of demons. Shizun, now do you understand? Everything Hua Binan has done was for the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts."