Dawn light slanted through the window lattice, laying neat panels of brightness across the floor.
Outside the door, Yu Wenqiu's voice came a second time, a thread of suspicion in it now.
"Little Gu, why's it gone quiet in there? Are you still asleep... I'm coming in, all right?"
Gu Chengming's pupils shrank. He glanced down at the fluffy white head tucked into the bedding beside him, then up at the door already easing open, and in that sliver of a moment he made the fastest judgment call of his entire cultivation career.
He seized the quilt and hauled it up, burying the white-haired head — and the person attached to it — in a sealed, airtight bundle.
His voice carried out of the room, two notches quicker than usual but still steady. "A moment, Elder. My robes aren't in order yet."
Yu Wenqiu's foot stopped with the door half open. Little Gu was always up and immaculate before daybreak. And today he wasn't decent?
The wisp of Red Dust Art residue she'd sensed yesterday morning rose unbidden in her mind, and an ugly premonition rose with it.
It couldn't be. That wretched woman from the Harmonious Joy Sect hadn't gone and—
"Elder?" Gu Chengming's voice came again, composure fully restored. "I'll be right out. Please wait in the courtyard for a moment."
Her hand stayed frozen on the doorframe. She started to speak, then closed her mouth and pulled the door shut after all.
Leaning against the pillar outside, she drew three deep breaths and forced herself to believe that Little Gu had simply cultivated too late last night and overslept.
A muffled, indignant grunt came from under the quilt. Gu Chengming patted the lump through the bedding, signaling for patience. The footsteps outside finally receded, and once he was sure the door was shut, he let out a long breath.
Then he looked down. The quilt was heaving violently, and a white-haired head poked out from under its edge, snow-bright hair scattered in a mess across her face. A pair of eyes, far too bright for their own good, glared at him through the gaps in the strands, filled with confusion, grievance, and complaint.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu, why did you just try to smother This Emperor?"
Her voice wasn't loud, but it came from deep in the chest, the last syllable tilting upward with all the bearing of a formal accusation.
Gu Chengming didn't answer right away. The sight in front of him had taken over his attention completely.
The white-haired girl had a bold, gallant cast to her brows and eyes; her clothes were crumpled into a wad from sleeping badly, and the way she'd burrowed her way out of the bedding made her look exactly like a cat freshly dug out of a snowdrift...
The genuine article. Hundred Bones Resonance.
Not a text box in his Sea of Consciousness, not a phantom in the Love Laboratory, but a living, breathing person crouched on his bed rubbing her eyes.
Meanwhile the dialogue boxes were popping up one after another.
[Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method: Excellent... No. Hold on. There is something very strange about this.]
[Huiyuan Sword Formula, biting her finger: So jealous so jealous so jealous so jealous so jealous so jealous—]
[Huiyuan Sword Formula: I've wanted to hug Chengming for ages, waaah!]
[Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art: You're deafening.]
Gu Chengming dragged his eyes off the boxes and back to the person in front of him.
Hundred Bones Resonance had climbed fully out of the covers. She sat cross-legged on the bed, turning her hands over and over in front of her face, pinching her own cheek, then snapping her head up with her eyes ablaze. "Eh?! It's real! This Emperor seems to have a body!"
Before he could get a word out, her reaction came faster than he'd braced for — and was far harder to fend off.
She launched herself at him bodily, both arms hooking around his neck with enough force to snap it. Considering that her true form was a body-refining cultivation technique, the exaggeration might not have been much of one.
A fuzzy white head rubbed shamelessly against his cheek, and rubbed hard, like a very large dog that had finally found its owner.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu! I've finally met you in the flesh!"
He could barely breathe under the pressure of her arms, but he didn't push her off.
Truthfully, something did stir in him at that moment. Hundred Bones Resonance was one of the techniques that had been with him the longest, and one of his favorites.
A Gal master was supposed to love all conquest targets equally, sure — but there were different flavors of love.
He caught her wrists, resigned. "Let go first, Hundred Emperor. You're about to strangle me."
She clearly had no desire to let go, but an order from Heavenly Emperor Gu carried higher priority. After two breaths of internal struggle she reluctantly released him, retreated half a step, and sat down properly — though her eyes stayed glued to him, startlingly bright.
[Huiyuan Sword Formula, sighing: I want to hug Chengming too.]
[Qingxin Formula, side-eyeing her: You're the only one who's actually gotten a taste...]
[Huiyuan Sword Formula, immediately guilty: That's different— no wait! How do you know that?!]
[Red Dust Phantom Body Formula, frowning: The pressing matter is working out why Fellow Daoist Hundred has a body of flesh at all, is it not?]
That was exactly what Gu Chengming wanted to know. "Hundred Emperor, do you know how you came to be here?"
She tilted her head. "This Emperor only remembers helping Heavenly Emperor Gu cultivate all through last night, and then... falling asleep? When I woke up I was already here."
She looked down at her hands again, curled them into fists, feeling the solid texture and the feedback of real strength. The bewilderment lasted about a heartbeat before pride swept in to replace it.
"It must be that the Heavenly Dao has finally opened its eyes and granted This Emperor the standing to fight at Heavenly Emperor Gu's side."
She squared her shoulders, chin lifting. "Which is only as it should be!"
Gu Chengming looked at that everything-is-under-control expression and said nothing for two breaths.
Do you genuinely not know, or do you genuinely not care?
He set the question of her materialization aside for the moment and turned his attention to the system interface.
Behind the flood of chatter boxes, the anomalies on the status panel had become impossible to ignore.
First was the Hundred Bones Resonance status column. The area that should have displayed technique rank, blood-and-qi bonuses, and the state of each CG skill was now entirely blanketed by two words: [LOCKED].
His stomach sank. He tried to circulate the "Hundred Emperor, Aid Me" CG, and it dragged like a rusted hinge.
The baseline bonuses of Hundred Bones Resonance were still there — blood-and-qi intensity, physical toughness — but that was all.
Every CG amplification, every exclusive skill multiplier, had dropped to zero.
It was as if the system had switched Hundred Bones Resonance from "cultivation technique" mode into "person" mode. Her power had been drawn out of his Sea of Consciousness and shaped into this body of flesh and blood standing before him — and the price was that he had lost all high-tier access to the technique itself.
What surprised him more, though, was the favorability panel. At some point, Hundred Bones Resonance's favorability had climbed to four hundred.
And he remembered it clearly: before the Grand Tournament's opening ceremony, it had been just past three hundred.
So the question was — when had those sixty or seventy points been earned?
He reached back for the last scene he could still recall.
Wavewatch Pavilion. The opening ceremony. The man in moon-white brocade. The shattered spirit artifact. Time flowing backward.
And then waking this morning with a Hundred Bones Resonance in his bed. Everything between was a blank sheet.
Favorability didn't grow out of nothing. From three hundred to four hundred, something significant must have happened.
Maybe he had completed some crucial task in that deleted stretch of memory. Maybe Hundred Bones Resonance had gone through some upheaval drastic enough to send the number soaring.
Either way, he couldn't remember a thing.
And then there was the time reversal set off when the man in moon-white brocade crushed that spirit artifact at the ceremony—
Gu Chengming drew a deep breath and strung every thread together in his mind.
Hundred Bones Resonance made flesh. The technique locked. Favorability spiking. Memory erased. Time rewound. There had to be a causal chain running through all of it — and through that man in moon-white brocade, his line about "we meet again," and the clue Ji Yixi had given him before. The Eternal Life Sect's hidden hand was anchored to a name.
His gaze darkened. He needed more information, and right now there was only one person who could give him answers.
But before he went out, he had to handle the one in front of him.
"Hundred Emperor."
"Present!"
She snapped her spine straight on reflex, hands planted on her hips, the picture of someone awaiting deployment.
Gu Chengming looked her in the eye, serious. "I have something extremely important to take care of outside."
"You stay in this room. Don't go out. Don't make loud noises. Don't have contact with anyone."
"Can you do that?"
Her eyes flickered.
"Rest easy, Heavenly Emperor Gu!" She thumped her chest, voice ringing. "This Emperor may burn to battle the heavens once more, but since Heavenly Emperor Gu has given an order, This Emperor shall hold position! A brief spell of lying low — as if This Emperor could not manage it!"
"This little room shall be This Emperor's temporary palace. Any who dare intrude shall be cut down at the threshold!"
She finished by cupping her fists at him with perfect gravity.
Having heard out that stirring pledge, Gu Chengming felt considerably less reassured than before. "...That won't be necessary. Just stay put, Hundred Emperor."
She nodded hard. "This Emperor will not cause Heavenly Emperor Gu the slightest trouble!"
Odds are you absolutely will.
But there was no time to worry about that now.
He gave her one last look, satisfied that she wouldn't cause chaos in the immediate future, straightened his robes, and pushed out the door.
Yu Wenqiu was no longer in the courtyard.
She had probably gone ahead to meet up with Shen Ganqiu and the others.
Gu Chengming strode through the guest courtyards and caught the group at the gate of the Wenjian Sect's grounds just as they were setting out. He cupped his hands to Shen Ganqiu, explained that he had an urgent matter to confirm, and asked that the sect proceed to the opening ceremony without him.
Shen Ganqiu's face registered doubt. He studied Gu Chengming a moment, saw that his expression was grave but not panicked, and nodded.
"Go and return quickly. If you can't make the first half of the ceremony, enter the Secret Realm on your own during the second half. We'll wait for you inside."
"Understood, Master."
Gu Chengming cupped his hands again and turned to go.
Standing in the ranks, Yu Wenqiu watched his hurrying back recede, her brows drawing together.
Something was off about Little Gu today.
She wanted to chase after him and ask, but the column had already started moving, and she could only press the doubt down for now.
Floating Isle City was just waking. The sect columns were converging toward Wavewatch Pavilion, the main avenue thick with people and bright with banners; cutting against that current would cost time and draw eyes.
He picked a quiet side lane instead and moved fast, fishing out from his robes the communication artifact Ji Yixi had given him. The instant spiritual power poured in, the patterns on the jade pendant lit with a dark gold glow.
He tucked it away, turned into the next alley mouth, and accelerated toward the Eastern District of Floating Isle City.
Morning wind swept the edge of the cloud sea, stirring up a haze of gold.
In the eastern quarter of Floating Isle City's inner city, the secluded residence came into view.
The gate wasn't locked. When Gu Chengming pushed through, the courtyard was empty, nothing there but an old locust tree swaying quietly in the wind.
He crossed the central court. The window of the inner room stood half open; he didn't even knock, just stepped over the threshold.
Ji Yixi sat behind the low desk, several faintly glowing jade slips laid out before her.
Today she wore a plain white house robe, far simpler than the pale green palace dress of last time, her hair merely gathered loosely at the back of her neck. She looked as though she'd just surfaced from meditation.
Midair, the fist-sized black dragon was coiled on a roof beam. Seeing Gu Chengming come in, the little dragon tucked its tail in without meaning to — a touch traumatized by its "daddy."
Ji Yixi raised her head and asked with concern, "What brings Commander Gu to me?"
"Something's happened."
He skipped the pleasantries, sat down across from her, braced one hand on his knee, and got straight to it.
"At the opening ceremony of the Grand Tournament—"
He paused, arranged his words, then described it as clearly as he could.
"Halfway through the ceremony, every cultivator in the place was frozen by some kind of power. A man in a moon-white brocade robe walked up onto the stone platform. He took the ■ from the hands of the Mohist Gate Elder—"
His voice blurred.
No. It wasn't his voice that blurred.
He spoke perfectly clearly, every syllable crisply enunciated. But the words seemed to shatter the moment they left his lips, and by the time they crossed to the other side of the desk they had become a meaningless drone.
Ji Yixi's expression confirmed it. She tilted her head slightly, like someone straining to make out a sound from far away, then shook her head.
"From 'he took the' onward, all I heard was noise."
His brows knotted. He tried again.
"That man's appearance was—"
A drone.
"He was holding a—"
A drone.
"After he crushed that spirit artifact, the whole world began—"
Drone, drone, drone.
Three attempts, three failures.
Anything touching on the specifics of the man in moon-white brocade — his appearance, his methods, his motive, even that line of his, "we meet again" — was intercepted by some power that overrode everything else. Not a single usable syllable made it across.
Gu Chengming shut his mouth. He wasn't especially discouraged, though something in him sank a little.
This blockade wasn't acting on him. It was acting directly on the information itself.
This Red Dust Immortal really does cover all the angles.
He cursed inwardly and switched tracks fast.
"I can't talk about him for now. Something's blocking it." He looked straight at her. "Let me ask a different question."
Ji Yixi inclined her head.
"You gave me a clue once before." His voice dropped. "You said the Eternal Life Sect's hidden hand was anchored to a name. Do you remember?"
Her reaction dropped his heart another half inch. Her voice was soft, but her tone left no room for doubt. "I have never told you any clue about a 'name.'"
A chill ran up his spine.
In his memory, Ji Yixi had told him plainly and unambiguously that the Eternal Life Sect's hidden hand was anchored to a name.
But in the Ji Yixi of the present, that conversation had never happened.
Two possibilities.
One: the "previous timeline" he had lived through had been completely overwritten when that man triggered the rewind. Everything Ji Yixi had told him in the erased timeline had died with the timeline itself, and in this brand-new present she genuinely never said those words.
Two: the timeline in his memory was false from the start, an illusion that man had deliberately constructed.
Neither answer was remotely comforting.
And across the desk, in that brief silence, Ji Yixi seemed to have guessed something.
"You've already been through ■■, haven't you?"
She had spoken, but by the time the sentence reached his ears two of the words had dissolved into a grating burst of static — exactly the same interference he'd hit trying to describe the man in moon-white brocade.
He frowned. "What did you just say? I couldn't catch two words in the middle."
Ji Yixi's expression changed. Without hesitation she threw the Record of the Myriad Worlds into full circulation.
Under its influence her pale irises turned nearly transparent, and the information of countless parallel world-lines poured into her consciousness like a flood.
She was using the power to observe ten thousand world-lines to force her way through a blockade imposed by the laws of heaven and earth.
It was a dangerous way to fight.
The essence of the Record of the Myriad Worlds was observation, not interference.
Turning the force of observation on a law-level information seal was a genuinely hazardous act.
The spiritual energy in the room began to churn. The jade slips on the desk rattled and chimed against the wood, and the little dragon overhead was startled enough to slip off the beam, flailing in midair to right itself, its draconic face wearing an unmistakable "here we go again."
After roughly three breaths a brief fissure opened in the barrier of law, and Ji Yixi seized the window.
"You've been through the Returning River, haven't you?"
This time every word reached his ears with perfect clarity.
The Returning River. He turned the phrase over in his mind. He had never heard the term, but the plain meaning of the words already suggested most of it.
"Is it connected to a Dharma-Station?"
At the question, her spiritual power ebbed and the perceptive state of the Record of the Myriad Worlds withdrew with it. Those three breaths of forced confrontation had clearly cost her; her fair complexion had gone a few shades paler.
"Cause depends upon the sea of effect; effect pierces back to the wellspring of cause. Trace the light upstream, and hang the kalpa upside down."
"That is the core ability of an ancient Dharma-Station, the Inverted Cause Lotus. With causality as the warp and time as the weft, it rolls back everything that has already happened and runs it again."
Gu Chengming listened in silence.
"The cost of invoking the Returning River is enormous. Even a being who commands a Dharma-Station would not use such a method lightly."
She paused, meeting his eyes.
"Unless, in the previous timeline, his plan failed. Failed so badly that he had no choice but to overturn everything and start over."
At the word "failed," Gu Chengming's brow twitched.
In that deleted stretch of memory, the man in moon-white brocade had crushed the spirit artifact with absolute composure, without a trace of a loser's awkwardness.
But turn it around... it was precisely because he had failed that he had to rewind.
The point he had rewound to was before that failure occurred.
Which made the man's next move perfectly clear —
Avoid the last failure. Reach the same goal by a different route.
The two of them exchanged a look, each understanding the other. The facts and the inferences were all there; they simply had no way, for now, to speak the full picture into shape.
Ji Yixi let the matter drop and pushed on to the next key point.
"The Returning River is not without a flaw."
Her tone eased slightly, but the seriousness in her eyes didn't dim by a hair.
"The Heavenly Dao conserves. Every reversal of time, every reset of causality, tears fresh fractures into the original track of fate. And within those fractures, new causality that never existed before is born — new variables."
"Such a variable belongs to no known world-line. It is a product the Returning River itself spawns, the Heavenly Dao's backlash against defiance, and its correction."
She raised a hand and tapped the desk lightly with a fingertip. "Find that variable, and the Returning River can never run perfectly again."
Hearing that, Gu Chengming found himself recalling the scene he had woken to that morning, and his expression grew rather complicated.
Well. No need to go looking. He was fairly certain he now understood exactly why Hundred Bones Resonance had a body in the real world.
Ji Yixi caught the subtle drift in his attention.
"What did you think of?"
He started to speak and stopped. He could hardly say the variable is currently in my bed.
He weighed his phrasing. "...I may already have a lead on the variable."
"I need a little time to confirm it."
They traded a few more brief points of intelligence about the Secret Realm.
Ji Yixi reminded him that since the Returning River had already been invoked once, in this new timeline the other side would almost certainly adjust its strategy — and the Grand Tournament's Secret Realm, as the node where every faction converged, was all but guaranteed to be the board on which they placed their next stone.
Gu Chengming committed it to memory, rose, and took his leave.
On his way out of the residence he glanced back. Ji Yixi had already bent over the jade slips again, and the little dragon was sprawled on her shoulder, turning the pages for her with the tip of its tail, its technique thoroughly practiced.
He looked away and retraced his route at a fast walk.
Honestly, he'd braced for some measure of trouble. But he truly had not expected that in the span of two hours the Hundred Emperor could make quite this much of a mess.
Looking at what could fairly be described as the ruins of the small courtyard, Gu Chengming's mouth fell open.
In the wall on the side nearest his room was a round hole roughly five feet across, the brick along its rim shattered outward in a radiating pattern, cracks spreading from the center to the edges. From the direction of the fracture surfaces, the hole had been blown open from the inside.
The courtyard itself was in better shape than he'd feared. The good news: the main structure was more or less intact, the stone table hadn't cracked, and the pot of tea he'd brewed that morning still sat on it, entirely undisturbed. The bad news: there was a heap of something sprawled facedown in the middle of the yard.
It was a humanoid object in black robes with scarcely one unbroken patch of skin left anywhere on it. A large section of its ribcage had visibly caved in, and its face was swollen past any recognizable feature. The only identifiable thing left was the black robe, tattered but still showing faint traces of its pattern.
Eternal Life Sect, obviously.
His eyes moved from the ruined meat on the ground to the white-haired girl standing beside it.
Hundred Bones Resonance stood barefoot on the flagstones, the sleeves of her white training robe rolled to the elbows, baring a stretch of forearm both sleekly shaped and solid. There was a smear of blood on her right fist, and clearly not hers.
At the sight of Gu Chengming she lit up on instinct, then flickered briefly guilty, and finally looked at him with an air of great innocence.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu." The girl's voice carried the careful caution of someone caught in the act. "I really did stay obediently in the room."
When he said nothing, the pressure got to her — and then her spine straightened and her hand shot out to point at the ground. "He came to me!"
Her volume was back, and the righteous confidence came back with it. "This Emperor sat in the room and went nowhere. This petty thief smashed through the wall and barged in himself!"
Gu Chengming pressed a palm to his forehead.
All right. Not the Hundred Emperor's fault, admittedly.
Eternal Life Sect agents slipping into sect quarters to cause trouble during the tournament's opening ceremony was entirely predictable. Floating Isle City was a mixing pot of every kind of creature, and with every sect's core disciples and elders off at Wavewatch Pavilion, the grounds were at their most thinly defended. It was the ideal moment to move.
This particular friend from the Eternal Life Sect had simply been rather short on luck.
Nearly everyone in the Wenjian Sect's quarters, himself included, had left. Of all the rooms in the compound, the one he broke into happened to contain a body-refining cultivation technique made flesh.
Gu Chengming crouched down, turned back the man's robes, and drew several jade slips and a token from a hidden inner pocket.
The contents of the slips were encrypted; he wasn't cracking them any time soon. The token had nothing clever about it — an ordinary Eternal Life Sect contact token, with traces of undissipated spiritual power still clinging to it. The man had most likely exchanged messages with someone waiting outside before he broke in.
"How did he get in?" Gu Chengming asked.
Hundred Bones Resonance thought back. "I sat in the room and didn't move, like you said. Then I heard something over by the wall, and a man in black dropped into the courtyard."
"He froze when he saw me, then charged for the room. Naturally This Emperor could not let him touch Heavenly Emperor Gu's belongings."
She flexed her fist.
"So I hit him. Once."
Gu Chengming looked again at the mound of pulped flesh with its twisted limbs, collapsed chest, and obliterated face.
All right. Very familiar style.
So the title Murderous Demon of Snowfall Pass was really the Hundred Emperor possessing my body all along?
The white-haired girl was watching him with wide, hopeful eyes, a barely perceptible unease flickering in them.
She had already braced herself for a scolding. She hadn't thrown the first punch, but the result was lying right there, and either way she'd made trouble for Heavenly Emperor Gu.
Instead Gu Chengming just sighed and reached over to press a hand on her head.
"Nicely done."
Her eyes blazed to life. The unease evaporated faster than she'd flattened the man, and smugness rushed in behind it. "But of course!"
She planted both hands on her hips and lifted her chin, the arrogant swagger proper to a Heavenly Emperor fully restored.
"A mere petty thief, fit to break into This Emperor's palace?!"
Since the Eternal Life Sect had made a move, they clearly did have hidden pieces placed inside Floating Isle City.
That fit the conclusions Ji Yixi had deduced earlier. Even if the information about the "name" no longer seemed to exist in this timeline, the threat itself was real enough.
This fellow, beaten into pulp by Hundred Bones Resonance, might be exactly the opening he needed.
Gu Chengming glanced down at the captured jade slips.
Encrypted contents needed a specialist, and the number of people in Floating Isle City capable of breaking Eternal Life Sect ciphers was not large.
He slid the slips into his robes and looked up at the sky.
"Let's go," he said to Hundred Bones Resonance.
She blinked. "Go where?"
"Time we went and raised some hell in the Grand Tournament."
At the words "Secret Realm" and "raise some hell," her breath stopped dead for an instant.
The Secret Realm! The Grand Tournament!
For someone who had once been able only to watch from inside a Sea of Consciousness, and who now finally possessed a body of flesh while styling herself the supreme Heavenly Emperor, those two phrases held absolute, irresistible allure.
A "Secret Realm." A "Grand Tournament." Wasn't that a stage tailor-made for a peerless monster like her?
All those self-important prodigies from every sect, those elders with their noses in the air, those ancient inheritances hidden in the dark — every one of them was a stepping stone on her road back to the summit!
Flames seemed to kindle in her golden eyes, and a sweeping epic unfurled itself in her mind: enter the Secret Realm, seize opportunities, play the pig to devour the tiger, slaughter across realm boundaries, and finally, before the eyes of the multitudes, shatter the Dao Hearts of every so-called genius with a single punch, then stand shoulder to shoulder with Heavenly Emperor Gu above the ninth heaven while ten thousand sects came to pay homage!
Now that was the script a Heavenly Emperor deserved!
Her eyes shone until the light nearly spilled over.
"As you command, Heavenly Emperor Gu!"
She stepped up to his side in a single stride, her gait springy, white hair streaming in the morning wind.
[Huiyuan Sword Formula lamented inwardly: She finally has a body and doesn't think to do a single meaningful thing with it. What a waste of heaven's gift.]
Gu Chengming sighed along with her.
Somehow my "Hundred Emperor, Aid Me" has turned into "Endless War God, Come Forth."
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