Chapter 15
"You know," Huan Zheng said one night, sitting atop a pile of state documents he had yet to sign—because he deliberately stacked them to look busy when in truth he was simply too lazy to read them, "the true king of this kingdom has already recovered two weeks ago."
"But he chose to remain in his bed, pretending to be ill, because he wants to see how far you can take his kingdom."
Ling Xu, who was writing an आदेश letter to build new irrigation systems, stopped, her pen trembling between her fingers.
"What?"
Huan Zheng yawned, then added in the same flat tone as if he were reporting the weather.
"He said, 'Let them continue. I am already old. This kingdom needs a leader who is young and hungry—not one who is merely full and forgetful.'"
Ling Xu fell silent.
She stared at the candle burning on her desk.
Then she looked at Huan Zheng, who was already half-asleep atop the pile of documents.
Then she looked at the palace ceiling, cracked in several places.
And for a moment, she felt something strange in her chest.
Not the hunger of the Cancer plague.
Not burning vengeance.
But something warm and unfamiliar, like sunlight appearing after a thousand years of rain.
"Huan Zheng," she called softly, "tomorrow we will execute the traitors. I already have the list of their names. And after that… we leave. This kingdom must return to its rightful king."
Huan Zheng did not respond with words.
He simply raised his left hand slightly, giving a casual gesture that—strangely—felt like a sincere agreement.
The execution of the traitors took place in the palace's back courtyard, beneath a sky as gray as ash.
And Ling Xu—for the first time in her life—did not hide her face behind a mask or hood.
She stood before dozens of men and women who for years had plundered the kingdom from within, taking rice from the mouths of children, seizing land from farmers who had nothing left but that land.
And when the palace executioner—a trembling old man—stepped forward with his rusted sword, Ling Xu raised her hand.
"Not him," she said, her voice flat yet reaching the very back rows.
"I will do it myself."
And one by one, the traitors died.
Not by sword.
Not by poison.
But by grayish-green threads emerging from Ling Xu's fingertips—threads of the Cancer plague that she had learned to control after weeks of struggling against the voices in her head that whispered of destruction.
They screamed.
They begged.
They cursed.
But Ling Xu heard nothing—what she heard was only the beating of the Star fragments transferring hands, from the traitors' chests into her palms, one by one, like rain falling onto thirsty earth.
150 fragments, then 300, then 600, then 988.
And when the last traitor, a war general of the same Third Level Lower Star as her, fell to the ground with his eyes still open, Ling Xu stood atop a pile of pulsating fragments in her palm, with 988 newly seized Humanity Star fragments.
Beside her, Huan Zheng—who had been sitting on a rock with his hands in his pockets the entire time—let out a long breath.
"7700," Huan Zheng said suddenly, his voice as lazy as ever, yet his eyes were no longer lazy—they shone in a strange way, like stars that had suddenly decided not to hide behind the clouds.
"I now have 7700 fragments. Just a little more to reach the Ninth Level of Common Star. Just a little more."
Ling Xu turned her head, sweat on her forehead mixing with blood.
Not her blood—because she had not been injured at all—and for a moment, she saw something behind Huan Zheng's lazy mask, something she had long tried to ignore but was now becoming too obvious to overlook.
"Huan Zheng," she called, her voice hoarse from exhaustion but also from curiosity that had lingered too long, "how can you cultivate Star fragments? I've asked every physician I've met, read every book I could find, even asked the spirits in the forest—and none of them know."
"It's as if that ability… doesn't exist. As if that ability exists only in you."
Huan Zheng did not answer immediately.
He stood slowly, feeling every grain of dust clinging to his robe.
Then he walked toward Ling Xu with the same lazy steps as when he used to walk into the battlefield—slow, unhurried, like someone who knows the world will wait.
"You want to know, Miss Poison?" he finally said, and for the first time, the laziness in his voice did not feel fabricated—it felt real, like an old wound that had never truly healed.
"Fine. I'll tell you. But not here. Not atop a pile of corpses still emitting the fragrance of Cancer."
He turned and walked away from the execution yard, which was slowly being covered by the evening mist.
Behind him, Ling Xu stood still with 988 fragments in her right hand and a thousand questions in her mind.
And in the distance, the true king who had recovered from his illness stood on the palace balcony, crying silently, because he knew that the two strangers who had saved his kingdom would soon leave—and never return.
The journey across the land-cities of the Gods felt like swimming through an ocean whose depths had never been touched.
Each region had its own rules.
Each official had their own ambitions.
And each night, Ling Xu slept in a different inn, with the number of Star fragments in her chest continuously increasing like a rising tide that never receded.
From the Fifth Level of Lower Star, she crawled her way up to the Eighth Level of Common Star after eradicating a slave-trading network in Yunning City—where thirty-seven criminals with cultivation levels ranging from the Sixth to Seventh Level of Common Star died to her grayish-green threads, and from their chests she seized more than two thousand fragments at once.
"You're starting to look like an executioner, Miss Poison," Huan Zheng said one afternoon, sitting atop the roof of an emergency clinic while peeling an apple he never ate.
"Not a physician. What happened to your oath not to harm?"
Ling Xu, who was cleaning her dagger from still-warm blood, only gave a faint smile—a smile that did not reach her eyes, because her eyes were busy counting the remaining fragments in her palm.
"My oath to heal never forbade me from cutting away what is rotten," she replied.
"And believe me, Huan Zheng—they are more rotten than a corpse left under the sun for a week."
And when her journey reached the final city in the land region, Tianque City—surrounded by walls of black jade a hundred meters high—Ling Xu stood on the threshold of the Eighteenth Level of Singular Star, with more than eight hundred thousand fragments pulsing within her chest.
Meanwhile, Huan Zheng—who for months had only been seen sleeping atop an ox cart pulled by an old mare—suddenly yawned in the middle of the road.
And in that single exhale, the sky above Tianque turned a pale purple, and all cultivators within a five-kilometer radius felt a pressure that made their knees tremble like dry leaves in autumn.
"Thirty-Second Level of Supernatural Star," Ling Xu whispered, her eyes widening as she felt the Qi wave emanating from Huan Zheng's body.
Not wild and destructive Qi.
But cold and measured, like the water of a lake in the depths of winter—too deep to measure.
"You… you're already at the peak threshold of the Star Foundation. Soon, you will break through into the First Level of the Bright Sky."
To be continued…