A few hours earlier…
The Hall of Internal Affairs of the Qīngluán Clan was a coliseum where blood rarely stained the black marble floor, but heads rolled with the simple stroke of a brush. That night, the atmosphere beneath the immense crystal chandeliers smelled of hot wax, stagnant tea, and the cold sweat of men who could feel their own foundations crumbling.
At the head of the immense circular mahogany table, Elder Qīng Hǎi kept his teeth clenched.
The old cultivator was not made of common flesh. In his three millennia of life, he had ground his own Crystal Soul and infused it into his bones, forging an incandescent Artificial Physique tempered in the Blue Fire of the ancestral bloodline. At the 2nd Sub-realm of Immortal Establishment, he was one of the central pillars preventing the empire's ceiling from caving in. He had survived relentless Celestial Tribulations and brutal genocides at the borders. But what lay on the table before him was a massacre no sword could block.
The fiscal registration plates were blank.
Not scratched. Not burned. The key pieces were missing.
During the previous afternoon, while the clan seethed with rumors of the abyss and madness overtook the gardens, someone had cleaned out the main treasury. The master ledgers of the Northern Spirit Crystal mines — responsible for more than ten percent of the empire's entire wealth — the Eastern Spirit Ice routes, and the three Transport Authorization Seals had simply vanished from the iron drawer.
The physical wealth was still there, buried in the mountains, but the clan had been bureaucratically decapitated. No caravan could move along the roads, no ore could be legally extracted, and the emergency coffers could not be opened without the combination of the stolen plates.
"The Absolute Expropriation was officially ratified by the Central Council before sunrise," the rough voice of Qīng Luò, a counselor whose neck veins pulsed with the unstable energy of the 1st Saint Pillar, broke the funereal silence. The man flung a useless bamboo block onto the mahogany. "Qīng Mèng didn't waste a single millisecond. With the healer fairy ruined and the glass boy dead on the floor, she assumed the moral guardianship of the bloodline and invoked the Law of Compensation. The Northern mines and the Eastern routes are now under the direct administration of her faction."
Qīng Hǎi tightened his right hand. The exquisite porcelain cup he was holding cracked, crumbling to fine powder that sifted through his calloused fingers.
"Seventy-five percent," Qīng Hǎi hissed, blue flames igniting in the depths of his ancient irises, heating the air around him with a contained lethality. "That is the non-negotiable tithe of the administering bloodline. The Blue Fire bitch is one step away from swallowing the greatest source of wealth our clan possesses."
The naked reality cut through the council's illusions. The Bifronted Empire sold the image of an orthodox paradise where the strong protected the weak and justice prevailed. And indeed, the mortals in the streets lived in peace. But within the palace walls, politics was a silent slaughterhouse.
Over the past four decades, Qīng Mèng had woven a sticky, lethal web. The revered concubine had used her own body, calculated bribes, and the distribution of her Blue Fire across the beds of secondary branch patriarchs to accumulate debts of gratitude. She had waited in the shadows. And when Qīng Yì's pedestal crumbled, she struck.
"If she consolidates the logistics of the North, the balance between the bloodlines dies today," the Defense Elder murmured, cold sweat running down his temples and soaking his silk collar. "With seventy-five percent of the revenue flowing directly into her coffers, Qīng Mèng will have the resources to fund three armies of Saints within ten years. Our branch will be left with the scraps of imperial taxation. We will become vassals within our own house!"
"She has not consolidated the logistics," Qīng Hǎi's voice thundered, heavy as stone, silencing the entire hall in an instant.
The immortal cultivator rose. His heavy robe embroidered with silver threads dragged across the black marble, and the heat of the 2nd Sub-realm made the chandelier lights flicker.
"Having the imperial decree of possession in hand is one thing. Knowing where the keys are buried is another."
The Elder's ancient eyes swept the faces of the terrified men.
"Qīng Yì was a glass puppet drunk on his own legend," Qīng Hǎi continued, pragmatic arrogance hardening his features. "The one who managed the filth — the emergency smuggling routes, the extraction matrix passwords, and the imperial seals — was the woman of ink. The mortal secretary. Lín Jié. In preparing obscure escape routes to try to save that useless man from the council's punishment yesterday afternoon, she swept our table clean and walked off with our foundation in her own bag."
Silence reigned in the hall. The name of the stagnant bureaucrat — whom the nobility had always treated as a worthless piece of furniture — now carried the weight of a continent.
"Qīng Mèng may have the decree," Qīng Hǎi's knuckles cracked with blue sparks. "But Lín Jié vanished with the master ledgers, the physical authorization seals, and the maps of the hidden veins. Without the woman of ink to translate the logistics, Mèng's faction will take years to restructure the mines, and the extraction losses will bleed the clan's gold dry. We need Lín Jié's seals before the Matriarch's assassins find her."
The hall doors swung open. A scout from the military guard entered in haste, his chest heaving, dropping to one knee on the silk carpet.
"The outer ring informants spotted her last night, Elder," the scout reported, swallowing hard. "The secretary walked in a daze toward the Pavilion of the Autumn Wind. She crossed the isolation gardens and never came back out."
The blue flames retreated in the old man's eyes, replaced by a razor-edged coldness.
The Autumn Wind. The same pavilion emanating an anomaly the council had been trying to ignore out of sheer political terror. Qīng Hǎi was no impulsive youth; he knew the empire's fairies had been irrevocably ruined in there.
Yet the logic of a man three thousand years old, forged at the top of the orthodox food chain, refused to bow before clanless outsiders. He was the martial law of that mountain. The secretary was Qīngluán property. The clan's economic future depended on sweeping Lín Jié back under the council's rug before Qīng Mèng devoured her.
"Summon two Eclipse Guard Captains of the 2nd Saint Pillar," Qīng Hǎi ordered, straightening his heavy silk sleeves. The authority of centuries resonated in every syllable. "The isolation of that pavilion is over. We march to the cedar gates."
---
The darkness of night had already swallowed the Capital of Pale Gold with glacial indifference when the Elder marched through the outer ring gardens, flanked by his two elite warriors.
The walk began escorted by the scent of white lotuses and clean air. But as the silhouette of the Pavilion of the Autumn Wind emerged on the dark horizon, the atmosphere rotted. The floral incense was violently suffocated by a thick, rustic, nauseating smell of ozone, sandalwood, and a sweet musk that tugged at the gut.
Forty paces from the stone walls enclosing the private courtyard, the air ceased to be gaseous. It became an ocean of lead.
The two Eclipse Guards — Saint cultivators whose Nascent Divinities had been forged to project Domains and crush armies on battlefields — stopped walking.
The first soldier staggered, his steel-clad legs trembling violently. He attempted to eject his own crystal soul to form a survival dome and draw in oxygen, but the Law of the world around him simply refused to comply. The Nascent Divinity in the guard's chest whimpered in terror, crushed back against his ribs by a gravity that bordered on the absurd.
The sound of metal hitting the ground echoed through the garden. The second guard collapsed to his knees on the marble, his mouth opening and closing in a silent asphyxiation, while thin rivulets of dark blood began seeping from both men's eyes and ears.
Elder Qīng Hǎi remained standing, but his march halted.
The ancient immortal's eyes went wide. The framework of his own bones — calcined in Blue Fire and tempered through millennia of Immortal Establishment — cracked with a hollow, sickly sound. The elemental heat coursing through his veins instinctively retreated into the deepest recesses of his flesh. What seeped through the cracks in the rice-paper doors in the distance radiated no mortal magic, no clan's murderous intent. It radiated a cosmic, hungry predation. The entire space seemed to be curving, being drawn in toward that single locked room.
Qīng Hǎi's biological instincts screamed at him to turn back. Screamed that dust should not attempt to measure itself against the abyss.
But the bureaucratic arrogance of three millennia exacted its price. The clan was bleeding, the enemy faction was laughing, and he needed the seals. Grinding his teeth with force, Qīng Hǎi invoked the lethal energy of his 2nd Sub-realm. His immortal shell inflated, repelling the atmospheric crushing through the sheer, stubborn, futile resilience of his cultivation base. Leaving the two Saint guards agonizing on the stone path, the elder marched alone to the pavilion's entrance.
He stopped before the heavy cedar doors. The obscene smell of lust and sandalwood seeping through the cracks nearly dissolved his martial focus.
With bloodshot eyes, Qīng Hǎi raised his closed fist, poised to hammer the wood and demand the outsiders' submission.