[Son Coin: Inverted Cause Lotus (Completed)]
Hm... he had no idea how this thing had come to be, but a good result was a good result.
Setting aside whatever the Red Dust Immortal's meddling had set in motion, the more urgent matter right now was Love's Hundred Bones Resonance.
The two of them kept moving along the rim of the Fallen Immortal Abyss. The red-gold spirit veins were still creeping outward, and the safe ground left to them was down to less than a third of what it had been at the start.
Besides the windfall the Red Dust Immortal had inadvertently handed him, there was another gain, one that had been accumulating steadily this whole time.
The Hundred Emperor's favorability.
Ever since that bout of "acting," the number had shifted into slow automatic. He didn't have to do anything in particular; so long as the two of them stayed together, the figure would tick upward every few days.
The ticks weren't frequent, but the timing of each one was uncannily precise.
In Gal mechanics this was called passive favorability accumulation. It normally only activated once favorability crossed a certain threshold, and the trigger was usually some pivotal story event — an event that generally offered exactly two options, namely whether you picked inside or outside.
He and Hundred Bones Resonance hadn't gone through that particular pivotal event, but a kiss event certainly counted for something.
A single kiss producing an effect like this... or maybe it was just that the Hundred Emperor was absurdly innocent?
A body that powerful paired with a heart that pure — that was cheating!!
So Gu Chengming thought.
Of course, favorability wasn't the only thing that had changed.
On the CG panel, one of the skill slots previously marked [Locked] had flipped to [Unlocked].
The entry-level form of "Hundred Emperor, Aid Me" was back, with a boost of roughly double.
Gu Chengming tested it with a light pulse of intent. It hadn't fully returned to its strongest state, but that sense of the power fitting his body like a glove was there again.
He was about to be pleased about it when his gaze caught Hundred Bones Resonance sitting across from him, and something in him sank.
The outline of her right fingertips was blurrier than it had been yesterday, like the edge of a painting where water had bled the ink outward.
The girl was studying her own fingers with a slight frown. Noticing his eyes on her, she looked up quickly, curled her hand into a fist, and jutted her chin at him.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu, where are we going today?"
Gu Chengming looked at her, set the two facts side by side, and felt a premonition settle over him.
The answer was nearly self-evident. Hundred Bones Resonance's power was flowing back into itself — or worse, flowing back into Love's Hundred Bones Resonance.
They shared one origin to begin with. The Hundred Bones Resonance in front of him was more like a tributary that had been temporarily split off, and the main channel was reclaiming it.
Gu Chengming didn't voice the guess, because he knew she felt it too.
Over the next two days, his guess was confirmed piece by piece.
The CG unlock rate wasn't fast — a few points of unlock progress every couple of hours — but his access to Hundred Bones Resonance's technique-level abilities was returning bit by bit.
And bit by bit, her body was turning transparent.
It started at her fingertips, spread to her wrist, and by the end her entire right arm had become faint enough that from certain angles you could make out the rock wall behind it.
She never brought it up, but her behavior gave away the anxiety creeping in.
The girl began checking her hands more often, rubbing her fingers together, clenching a fist and opening it again, as if confirming something was still there.
When she ate spirit flowers she no longer tossed them down whole in that careless way of hers. Instead she would hold each one up in front of her eyes and examine it for a moment before putting it in her mouth.
Sometimes she stopped in the middle of walking and looked down at her own footprints.
The mark her right foot left in the sand was half as deep as her left's. Another day and it probably wouldn't leave a trace at all.
Hundred Bones Resonance stared at that shallow print, lips pressed into a line, then lifted her foot and stamped it down harder, as though that could make it deeper. Then she walked on as if nothing had happened, her strides a little longer than before, as if she meant to outrun the footprints thinning out behind her.
At last night fell.
The two of them rested in a cave sheltered from the wind. Hundred Bones Resonance sat against the stone wall with her knees drawn up and her chin on them, white hair falling on either side to hide most of her face.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu," she said suddenly, "if the one who stayed by your side were a stronger me..."
Her voice was muffled, half swallowed by her knees and her hair. It didn't sound like a question. It sounded like a statement of something she'd been turning over for a long time.
She stopped halfway and didn't go on.
She might not have understood the specifics of "Love's Hundred Bones Resonance," but her instincts told her what was happening.
Her strength was flowing back, and at the end of that flow was another version of herself.
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula was rather worried. It didn't much care for rival techniques competing for its master's affection, but it didn't want Hundred Bones Resonance to vanish either.]
[The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula: Fellow Daoist Gu, we have to do something.]
Gu Chengming was about to say something when the system panel threw up a prompt he'd never seen before.
[Hundred Bones Resonance CG: ■. Unlock condition: ?]
The CG's name was masked, and the unlock condition was a question mark.
But the timing of its appearance was too neat a coincidence — so neat that Gu Chengming grasped its meaning almost at once.
This was Hundred Bones Resonance's final CG.
In the logic of a Gal, the final CG marked the completion of a heroine's personal route. It was the terminus where every plot thread converged, the last stroke of a character's arc.
Once unlocked, the character's existence no longer depended on any external condition — it was "confirmed" by the system itself.
In other words, if he unlocked this CG, Hundred Bones Resonance wouldn't disappear.
She would go on existing in a form the system permanently acknowledged. Not as a cultivation technique, not as an appendage of the Love-form, but as herself.
Gu Chengming stared at that question mark for a long while, then closed the panel and turned to look at her.
The white-haired girl was still curled up, face buried between her knees. He couldn't tell whether she was asleep or only pretending.
Her half-transparent right hand hung at her side, fingertips glowing faintly in the dark, as if she might dissolve into the air at any moment.
"Hundred Emperor." Gu Chengming's voice reached her. "I won't let you disappear."
Two breaths of silence.
Then, muffled, from between her knees: "This Emperor is not going to disappear. This Emperor is a Heavenly Emperor. How could a Heavenly Emperor disappear?"
Gu Chengming reached over and ruffled her hair. The girl seemed to enjoy it a great deal.
[Hundred Bones Resonance favorability: 460/Unto Death, Unwavering]
Meanwhile, elsewhere.
Inside the Secret Realm, at the edge of the Fourth Realm district.
Yu Wenqiu crouched in the branches of a dead ironbirch, the perception field of the Clairvoyant Eye spread out before her, violet light flickering unsteadily at her brow like a lamp running low on oil.
The Clairvoyant Eye had always been a hungry technique. Yu Wenqiu's reserves of spiritual power were perhaps more generous than most people's, but against this technique they still fell short.
Which meant calling her small fry really wasn't unfair — after all, aside from reading storybooks, Elder Little Yu couldn't sustain anything for more than ten minutes.
"Broke again." She clicked her tongue, withdrew the divine ability, and rubbed her temples.
Interference from the Royal Court's spirit veins was getting worse. The Clairvoyant Eye's effective range had shrunk from dozens of li at the outset to under ten, and the signal came and went in fits. Finding Gu Chengming was getting harder by the hour.
She shifted position. Squatting on one leg that long had made her knee ache.
In the distance the sky was still that oppressive red-gold. Since the Royal Court's founding it hadn't shown any other color, and staring at it long enough made her chest feel tight.
Yu Wenqiu fished a piece of dry rations from her sleeve and gnawed at it. Burning that much spiritual power brought the body's hunger along with it.
A cultivator at her level shouldn't have to worry about a meal, but the Royal Court had siphoned off most of the Secret Realm's spiritual qi, and even grain abstention had become difficult.
This life was worse than pulling night watch back at the sect.
"Elder Yu." Su Qingmeng's voice came from below. "I have an idea."
Yu Wenqiu turned her head. Su Qingmeng stood beneath the tree, hand resting on her sword hilt.
"The Clairvoyant Eye senses through fluctuations of spiritual power, which is why the spirit veins disrupt it so easily. Sword intent is different. Residual sword intent clings to the material layer. It doesn't travel through the spirit vein channels."
"I've sparred with Fellow Daoist Gu for a long time. I know the signature of his sword intent well."
"If he's drawn his sword anywhere in the Secret Realm, I can recognize what's left behind."
Yu Wenqiu raised an eyebrow. She had to admit the reasoning was elegant. The Clairvoyant Eye was a wide-area sweep — accurate, but easily jammed. Sword intent tracking was a directed search — narrow, but immune to the spirit veins. Combine the two, and—
"You set the bearing, I sweep the area?"
Su Qingmeng nodded.
Yu Wenqiu dropped down from the tree and clapped her hands. "Fine. Let's try it."
The partnership didn't run smoothly at first. The Clairvoyant Eye required stillness and a settled mind, while sword intent tracking required moving and searching. One of them needed to stop, the other needed to walk, and their rhythms refused to line up.
On the first day they circled the same dead forest three times. Yu Wenqiu tripped over tree roots twice, and Su Qingmeng ended up standing around like a punished disciple several times, waiting for Yu Wenqiu to finish.
"Elder Yu, are you done?"
"Wait a bit, almost got a lock — broke. Starting over."
The second day went much better.
Alternating between the two senses covered nearly twice the ground either could manage alone.
"There's a trace over here." Su Qingmeng stopped abruptly, fingertips brushing lightly through the air.
Yu Wenqiu was there in an instant, the Clairvoyant Eye locking onto the area.
"Bearing south-southeast," she confirmed. "No spirit pressure from Royal Court projections nearby."
"The exact location looks like... the Fallen Immortal Abyss?"
"Let's move."
Things got complicated on the afternoon of the second day.
While crossing a dried-out riverbed, they ran into a group of cultivators being hunted by three projections.
Seven or eight people, running until their lungs gave out, ranging from Second Realm to Third Realm, the crests of different sects still visible on their robes. Clearly a band thrown together on the fly.
Yu Wenqiu's steps slowed. She glanced back at Su Qingmeng, who looked back with a blank face. The meaning was clear enough: your call.
Fourth Realm spirit pressure unfurled. Three arcs of sword light tore through the air, and all three projections were cut down in less time than it took to drink half a cup of tea.
The rescued cultivators collapsed on the ground, gasping. "Thank you for saving us, Senior!"
"Which sect is Senior from?"
Yu Wenqiu waved a hand. "No need for thanks. All of you should hurry up and—"
She didn't finish. Shouting came from upstream along the riverbed — another group being chased by projections.
Yu Wenqiu struck again, cut down the projections, then turned to leave.
These people didn't dare go far and couldn't find anywhere safe to settle, so naturally every last one of them latched onto her.
"Senior, can we follow you?"
"Yes, yes! With a Fourth Realm expert around we'd be so much safer!"
"Take us with you, Senior!"
Yu Wenqiu looked around at the dense press of nearly a hundred people crowding her, and the expression on her face went through a remarkable range.
I only wanted to find one person. How did I end up the big sister in charge?
[System notice: Yu Wenqiu has obtained the title "Leader of the Resistance"]
No such notice existed, of course, but Yu Wenqiu felt that if it did, it would have popped up right about now.
She drew a deep breath and looked over the crowd.
Disciples from every major sect were mixed in — some from the Myriad Dharma Sect, some from Tianji Pavilion. The oldest was barely past twenty; the youngest looked like a green girl who'd only just established her foundation. Every one of them filthy and battered, and every one of them with a stubborn refusal to lose burning in their eyes.
Yu Wenqiu sighed.
With the group grown that large, their pace naturally slowed. Yu Wenqiu shepherded the lot of them from place to place while continuing to track Gu Chengming with Su Qingmeng.
The two goals should have been at odds, but she soon discovered an unexpected benefit.
More people meant more sources of information. These disciples weren't strong, but they'd been scattered across the Secret Realm far longer than she had, and they knew a fair amount about the projections' patrol routes, the blind spots in the spirit vein coverage, even the way the terrain had shifted in each district.
A Tianji Pavilion disciple pulled out a rough map he'd drawn himself. "Here, here, and here are the gaps between projection patrols. Every hour there's a window of about a quarter hour."
A Myriad Dharma Sect disciple added, "At the border between the Fourth Realm district and the Third Realm district there's a fissure in the spirit veins. The Royal Court's red-gold veins reach it and just stop, like they can't get across."
Yu Wenqiu's ears pricked up. "Can't get across?"
"Mm. We saw it when we passed by. The red-gold veins spread to the edge of the fissure and it's like something blocks them. And those projections don't want to go near that area either."
Yu Wenqiu and Su Qingmeng exchanged a look.
An area the projections avoided. An area the spirit veins couldn't cover.
They didn't hesitate. That same day they led the group in that direction.
They arrived at dusk. The red-gold dome overhead was noticeably dimmer above this stretch of land, and the glow of the spirit veins halted about thirty paces ahead, like a tide meeting a dike, lapping weakly at the edge but unable to climb an inch higher.
Beyond those thirty paces lay a space of absolute quiet.
No red-gold spirit patterns. No projection spirit pressure. Even the movement of the air was slower than outside.
And at the very center of that space, a gash lay across the earth.
Calling it a gash wasn't quite right. It was more as though some sword had fallen from the heavens and split space itself open, and along the edges of the rift a sword intent so keen it chilled the blood still lingered.
Yu Wenqiu stopped ten paces from the sword scar, her peach-blossom eyes narrowing.
Su Qingmeng went closer, halting five paces away.
Yu Wenqiu nodded to herself. Here, her Clairvoyant Eye worked far better than it had outside. Freed from the red-gold spirit veins' interference, her perception turned crystal clear.
She sent her spiritual sense deep into the scar, trying to trace the origin of that single strike. Images surfaced in the Clairvoyant Eye — blurred, ancient, like peering through layers of fog into another age.
She saw a figure standing on this land, sword in hand.
The face was indistinct, but the presence around that figure made Yu Wenqiu's breath stop for a moment.
It was something far beyond the Fifth Realm.
Then the figure raised the sword, drew, and brought it down.
The image in the Clairvoyant Eye cut off there.
Yu Wenqiu withdrew the technique and let out a long breath, thinking that once again it was a Wenjian Sect predecessor who'd bailed them out.
"Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign..."
Su Qingmeng turned to look at her.
Yu Wenqiu explained, "The historical projections in the Secret Realm are replications made from the lingering dharma-remnants of ancient great cultivators. But some of those remnants are too powerful to be fully absorbed by the Secret Realm's rules, so they're preserved in another form."
She pointed at the scar beneath their feet. "This is what the Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign left behind in this Secret Realm. Not a projection, not a remnant — the afterglow of a single strike. Its sword intent is strong enough that even the Royal Court's spirit veins can't intrude, and the projections don't dare come near."
The nearly hundred disciples behind her stared for a beat, then broke into a cheer they'd been holding in for far too long.
"We're safe?!" "The projections can't get in?!" "Thank the heavens!"
Watching them celebrate, something in Yu Wenqiu's chest loosened.
At the very least they had a temporary foothold, and in this area, free of spirit vein interference, the Clairvoyant Eye could work at full strength.
Using it as a base to keep searching for Gu Chengming would be several times more efficient than before.
That night, the disciples got a rare stretch of peaceful sleep.
The air near the sword scar ran a few degrees colder than outside, but it lacked the stifling, irritating heat of the red-gold spirit veins. Instead there was a clean, bracing chill, like a mountain breeze in late autumn.
Yu Wenqiu took the night watch beside the scar. Su Qingmeng sat cross-legged three paces behind her, her long sword laid across her knees, half asleep and half awake.
It struck Yu Wenqiu that she was doing a pretty convincing job as leader of the resistance.
If only Little Gu were here too — let him see that she got her shining moments now and then.
The edge of the Fallen Immortal Abyss.
Hundred Bones Resonance's left arm had started going transparent too. She sat on a boulder and held both hands up against what was left of the daylight, turning them this way and that. Her right hand was nearly gone; her left had only just begun to change and still held most of its solidity.
"Tch." She dropped her hands, indignation in the sound.
Gu Chengming sat beside her, staring blankly at the system panel.
The CG unlock rate was accelerating. Hundred Bones Resonance's technique abilities had already recovered to nearly seventy percent, which meant her time as a manifested being might come down to a few last days.
And the unlock condition for that final CG was still a question mark.
[Hundred Bones Resonance CG: ■. Unlock condition: ?]
Gu Chengming ran everything he knew through his head again.
Favorability at 460, Unto Death, Unwavering — already the highest tier the system defined. Every prerequisite CG unlocked or unlocking.
By ordinary Gal logic, those conditions were more than enough. And still the final CG refused to light up. So the condition wasn't in the system.
The condition was in Hundred Bones Resonance herself.
Gu Chengming turned to the white-haired girl beside him. She was drawing idle circles in the dirt with the left hand that still had substance, humming some little tune she'd picked up somewhere, wildly off-key.
"Hundred Emperor."
"Mm?" Her finger stopped on the ground and she tilted her head at him, mildly puzzled.
"If you could make one wish." Gu Chengming looked into her eyes, serious. "What would you want most?"
Hundred Bones Resonance's mouth opened.
Any number of answers flashed through her mind.
To become an emperor. To campaign across all the heavens. To stand unrivaled beneath the sky, shoulder to shoulder with Heavenly Emperor Gu above the Nine Heavens.
She had blurted every one of those out before, each time with total conviction, each word landing like a dropped stone.
But right now, sitting at the edge of a wasteland about to be swallowed by the red-gold spirit veins, feeling her own body dissolve a fraction at a time, those grand wishes suddenly seemed very far away. Farther, and less distinct, than the person in front of her.
Something new stirred in her.
A sentence rose to her lips, and she forced it back down.
That sentence was too heavy. Heavy enough that she wasn't sure she'd earned the right to say it, least of all looking the way she did now, ready to vanish at any moment.
If she said it, it would sound like a farewell. Like last words.
Hundred Bones Resonance didn't like last words.
Last words were for the weak. A Heavenly Emperor had no need of them.
So she chose the answer that sounded most like herself.
She shook a fist at him. "Once I've beaten that counterfeit, then I'll come make my wish to Heavenly Emperor Gu..."
And finally, let us turn the view to our lady mole.
On the fifth day of Su Qiuzhi's undercover career, she broke through a realm.
That kind of progress, back in the Harmonious Joy Sect, would have taken at least half a year of brutal secluded cultivation. She had managed it in five days, and hadn't done any proper cultivating the entire time.
Su Qiuzhi sat cross-legged on a spirit-patterned stone platform on the Royal Court's outskirts, feelings decidedly mixed.
At this rate she was going to end up the Royal Court's second-in-command. Being a mole had never been this excruciating.
Not physically excruciating. Spiritually destabilizing.
All she had to do was feed that Heavenly Emperor intelligence about Gu Chengming.
Naturally, every scrap of it was worthless — things like "Fellow Daoist Gu prefers light food" and "Fellow Daoist Gu likes to circulate his qi through one full cycle before washing up in the morning," the most harmless trivia imaginable. Yet Love's Hundred Bones Resonance listened attentively every single time, and rewarded her afterward. Generously.
Su Qiuzhi figured she was the best value-for-money information broker in the entire Secret Realm: selling street-stall junk at auction-house prices.
More absurd still, the longer she stayed in the Royal Court, the wider her reputation as the Heavenly Emperor's confidante spread. Cultivators loitering around the Royal Court's outskirts would step aside on their own when they saw her coming, and now and then a projection would even clear the way ahead of her.
Every so often Su Qiuzhi remembered why she'd come.
I'm here to be a mole.
But every time that thought surfaced, another thought shoved it back down.
A mole has to stay alive to pass along intelligence.
Staying alive requires cultivation. Cultivation requires resources. And where do resources come from?
Lord Heavenly Emperor, food, hungry.
Su Qiuzhi squeezed the flask of red-gold spirit wine in her sleeve — the one she still hadn't brought herself to pour out — and drew a deep breath.
Hold the line, Su Qiuzhi. You are a woman with principles.
Where exactly those principles lay was a separate question.
That night a projection brought word: the Heavenly Emperor summoned her.
Su Qiuzhi straightened her robes and followed her escort through layer after layer of checkpoints, into the Royal Court's core district once more.
All along the way, projection guards lining the spirit-patterned corridors turned aside to let her pass, and a few even inclined their heads slightly.
Su Qiuzhi walked through without a flicker of expression, spine straight, pace neither hurried nor slow.
Her acting had improved by leaps and bounds these five days. She wondered whether she could parlay it into a stewardship post once she got back to the sect.
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance wasn't seated on the throne. She sat cross-legged at the edge of the high dais, feet dangling and swinging, toying with a spirit stone in one hand, as casual as someone daydreaming on their own back steps.
"You're here. Sit."
Su Qiuzhi sat three paces from her. A projection brought spirit wine; she accepted it but didn't drink.
Last time she'd nearly defected after finishing a cup. This time she was going to learn from experience.
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance didn't seem to care whether she drank. Her gaze settled on the far rim of the red-gold sky, and she began to speak.
She talked about things she and Gu Chengming had been through, old episodes, things Gu Chengming had once said.
Su Qiuzhi felt as though her fingers had brushed the edge of something.
This Heavenly Emperor hadn't sprung out of thin air. The memories she recounted were too specific to be hearsay. They sounded lived.
But if she was the one who'd lived them, then what was her relationship to the people around Gu Chengming?
The longer they talked, the more certain a particular suspicion became: there was someone at Gu Chengming's side whom Su Qiuzhi knew nothing about. Someone who looked exactly like the Heavenly Emperor in front of her and shared the same memories.
A white-haired confidante.
She is what that person looks like in the future.
Once Su Qiuzhi worked that out and reexamined everything this Heavenly Emperor had done, the puzzle snapped together all at once.
All of it — founding the Royal Court, campaigning across the heavens, hunting for an Imperial Consort — was, at bottom, her own clumsy way of expressing a feeling that the "beauty" at Gu Chengming's side didn't dare admit to.
With that in mind, Su Qiuzhi asked, carefully, "If the Heavenly Emperor truly kept Gu Chengming at her side... what then?"
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance was quiet for a moment, then laughed, bright and unbothered. "Then she'd have no excuse left to keep running away."
Su Qiuzhi's position had suddenly become very delicate.
She was undercover. Her mission was to get intelligence to Gu Chengming and help him deal with the threat the Royal Court posed.
But what if the Royal Court's master had never been a threat to begin with? What if this whole thunderous Heavenly Emperor spectacle was, from beginning to end, nothing but a confession so clumsy it was painful to watch?
Su Qiuzhi tipped her head back and drained what was left in her cup.
Damn it all — I came here to spy. Could you please say something about grand conspiracies spanning the heavens, something involving the Great Dao?
Who asked to hear about your love life!
Glug, glug, glug.
Bitter wine down the throat, an ache in the heart.
Meanwhile, in the outside world — Floating Isle City.
Floating Isle City's city-guarding grand formation had been running for six straight days. The spiritual light circulating through its patterns had faded from its original deep azure and now carried a faint grayish-white cast.
The Otherworldly Heavenly Demons hadn't withdrawn. Fifth Realm great cultivators took turns anchoring the Formation Eye — Shen Qianqiu, Zhongli Yuan, and the sect heads of the Myriad Dharma Sect and Tianji Pavilion had drawn up a rotation, eight hours each.
In the council hall of Wavewatch Pavilion, Mohist Gate Grand Elder Liu Chongji stood before a water mirror gone completely black. "The disciples' spirit soul projections are being assimilated," he said heavily.
"Once the Royal Court took over the Secret Realm, the spirit soul stabilization mechanism the Mohist Gate's spirit veins used to maintain failed. The Royal Court supplied replacement spiritual qi, but that red-gold qi is incompatible with the disciples' own spiritual power attributes."
"Their spirit soul projections will be eroded and rewritten, and in the end merged into the Secret Realm's structure of law."
"What does merged mean?" Zhongli Yuan of the Taiyi Sword Sect pressed.
"It means they will become part of the Secret Realm." Liu Chongji's voice sank lower. "They'll never come back."
Silence fell over the hall.
It was worse than dying. Death was at least an ending. What did becoming part of the Secret Realm mean?
It meant your spirit soul remained, your consciousness perhaps still existed, but you were no longer you. You would become a thread of spiritual qi circulating in the spirit veins, a parameter in the turning of its laws, a brick in the wall of the cage itself.
"How much time is left?" Shen Qianqiu asked.
"At the current rate of assimilation—" Liu Chongji closed his eyes. "Seven days."
In Ji Yixi's residence, the spirit lamp burned low.
She had held the Record of the Myriad Worlds in its perceptive state far too long. The situation inside the Secret Realm shifted from moment to moment; the Royal Court's spirit veins were still expanding, and the maneuvering among the various powers pressed on.
And she was the only person in Floating Isle City who could pierce the spirit vein interference and observe the Secret Realm's interior.
In those three days she had discovered two things.
The first concerned timing. The Royal Court's spirit vein operation was not seamless.
Every day at the hour of Chen, when Love's Hundred Bones Resonance released the "Bestowal," red-gold spiritual qi spread evenly from the Royal Court's core across the entire Secret Realm. That process required her to disperse her own power to every last capillary of the spirit vein network.
Dispersal meant dilution. For the roughly quarter hour the Bestowal lasted, the defenses of the Royal Court's core district dropped to about thirty percent of normal. Projections reacted more slowly, spirit vein perception lost precision, and even the strength of the spatial lockdown fluctuated.
It was the only window for approaching Love's Hundred Bones Resonance.
The second thing concerned the Red Dust Immortal. The Royal Court's red-gold spirit veins now covered more than ninety percent of the Secret Realm. On the surface the whole network ran smoothly. But at the very bottom layer, deep in the crevices the red-gold light never reached, Ji Yixi's Record of the Myriad Worlds caught a layer of causal weaving that had nearly fused with the Secret Realm's substrate.
It wasn't part of the Secret Realm, and Love's Hundred Bones Resonance hadn't laid it.
The Inverted Cause Lotus.
The Red Dust Immortal's handiwork.
A parasite seed doesn't act on its own. It simply lies quietly against the Secret Realm's foundations, breathing with the spirit veins, rising and falling with its laws. For as long as Love's Hundred Bones Resonance controlled the Secret Realm, it stayed entirely invisible, consuming no energy, producing no ripple.
It had exactly one trigger condition: a second transfer of control over the Secret Realm.
Once triggered, it would run that power along the causal channels the Red Dust Immortal had buried in advance, feeding it into the Inverted Cause Lotus.
And once the Inverted Cause Lotus was repaired, the Red Dust Immortal could invoke the Returning River again.
This time, he wouldn't make the same mistake.
Ji Yixi condensed this discovery into a causal imprint as well.
"After defeating the Royal Court's master, do not lower your guard. That one—"
Next came the problem of delivery.
The passage between the Secret Realm and the outside world was sealed by the Royal Court, and every conventional means of communication had failed. But the essence of the Record of the Myriad Worlds was "observation," and observation itself builds a causal connection between observer and observed.
That connection was fine as spider silk, fragile enough that the slightest external force would snap it. But it existed.
Ji Yixi compressed the information in the jade slip into the barest possible causal imprint and sent it out along that thread.
Whether it arrived, she had no way to confirm.
But as sharp as Gu Chengming was, he ought to receive it.
After sending the imprint, Ji Yixi's fingertips trembled faintly. Establishing that causal thread had all but drained the last of her spiritual power reserves; right now she was too weak to stand without effort.
She leaned back against her chair and rested with her eyes shut for a while, then let out a rueful little laugh.
I've done what I can. The rest is up to him.
Outside the window the sky had already turned pale — another night without sleep. The spirit lamp finally burned through its last thread of spiritual power, the flame guttering out, and the residence sank into the deepest dark before dawn.
The edge of the Fallen Immortal Abyss.
Gu Chengming woke before dawn with a blurred fragment of information lingering in his mind. He had received Ji Yixi's message.
"After defeating the Royal Court's master, do not lower your guard. That one—"
"That one" could only mean the Red Dust Immortal. There was no second candidate.
Don't lower your guard after defeating the Royal Court's master — because defeating the Royal Court's master meant control would transfer, and a transfer of control would trigger the parasite seed.
Which meant he wasn't facing one battle. He was facing two.
And the interval between them might be no longer than an instant.
Gu Chengming turned to look beside him. Hundred Bones Resonance was curled up against the stone wall, white hair spilling across the ground, arms wrapped around her knees. Morning light slanted through a crack in the rock and fell across her. Her right arm and half her shoulder were nearly transparent now; he could clearly see the gray grain of the stone behind them.
With just the two of them, even using the Bestowal window to reach the Royal Court's core, there was no way to handle Love's Hundred Bones Resonance and the parasite seed at once.
He needed help.
And help was already looking for him.
…
Within the sword scar left by the Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign, Yu Wenqiu sat cross-legged at the cliff's edge, the violet light of the Clairvoyant Eye flickering at her brow.
Free of the spirit veins' interference, this region had restored her divine ability to full strength, and her perception range had expanded back out to dozens of li.
Four hours earlier, Su Qingmeng's sword intent tracking had locked onto Gu Chengming's latest position.
A collapsed stretch of ground on the southeastern edge of the Fallen Immortal Abyss. The residual sword intent was less than half a day old, which meant he was still active nearby.
Yu Wenqiu extended the Clairvoyant Eye along that bearing, across wasteland, ravines, fields of broken stone—
Two figures, moving fast along a dried-out watercourse.
The one in front was Gu Chengming. The one behind wore Wenjian Sect sword cultivator's formal robes so filthy the base color was unrecognizable — white hair, white training clothes, identical to the Heavenly Emperor she'd glimpsed on the throne of white bone when she'd spied on the Royal Court with the Clairvoyant Eye.
Yu Wenqiu withdrew the Clairvoyant Eye and stood up.
"You found him?" Su Qingmeng asked.
Yu Wenqiu drew her Dharma Sword, poured spiritual power into the blade, and three feet of sword light bloomed.
"The white-haired one is with him."
Su Qingmeng's hand settled on her hilt as well.
Gu Chengming sensed them coming when he reached a bed of broken stone at the end of the watercourse.
Fourth Realm spirit pressure, undisguised, closing fast.
He'd barely started to pull Hundred Bones Resonance aside when a blade of sword light dropped out of the sky and drove into the ground precisely between them, sending stone chips flying.
Yu Wenqiu landed out of the light, peach-blossom eyes half-lidded, Dharma Sword held level before her, point aimed straight at Hundred Bones Resonance.
A second figure came down behind and to her side — Su Qingmeng, long sword already unsheathed, sword intent cold as frost.
Hundred Bones Resonance jumped, then bristled. "?!"
Isn't this Heavenly Emperor Gu's attendant?! the girl thought. She really has been body-snatched by some heretic cultivator — daring to point a sword at This Emperor!
Gu Chengming threw one arm out to hold Hundred Bones Resonance back and raised the other hand toward Yu Wenqiu in a "calm down" gesture, wedged between them like a neighborhood auntie mediating a hallway dispute.
The two of them faced off across him, spirit pressure and momentum grinding together, while the man in the middle took it from both sides and developed a splitting headache.
Su Qingmeng stood back, hand still on her hilt, though her gaze had shifted from wariness to assessment. She was studying Hundred Bones Resonance — the white-haired girl's residual sword intent resonated with Gu Chengming's in a way that suggested a shared origin, and there was genuinely no hostility about her, however impolite her mouth was.
"Elder Yu." Su Qingmeng spoke quietly. "She means no harm."
Yu Wenqiu glanced at Su Qingmeng, then at the look on Gu Chengming's face — a man about to split down the middle where he stood — and finally, grudgingly, put the Dharma Sword away.
The explanation that followed took Gu Chengming roughly the time it takes to drink a cup of tea.
He couldn't say Hundred Bones Resonance was a manifested cultivation technique, so he vaguely described her as a "causal variable produced by the Returning River," sharing an origin with the Royal Court's Heavenly Emperor but standing on entirely opposite ground, and currently helping him deal with the Secret Realm's crisis.
The group returned to the camp within the Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign's sword scar. When they arrived, nearly a hundred disciples were resting in twos and threes around the scar, and every one of them turned a curious stare on the people Yu Wenqiu had brought back.
"Who's the white-haired one?" "That's not the Royal Court's Heavenly Emperor, is it?!" "Don't panic, don't panic, Elder Yu brought her back, so she can't be an enemy... right?" "But she looks exactly like—"
Hundred Bones Resonance paid the stares no mind at all. If anything she puffed out her chest and swept a satisfied look around the camp. "Not bad. Heavenly Emperor Gu commands quite a fine army."
Ignoring that, Gu Chengming laid out everything he currently knew for Yu Wenqiu and Su Qingmeng, point by point.
When the briefing was done, he proposed a rough framework for action.
Tomorrow at the hour of Chen, they would use the Bestowal window to break into the Royal Court's core. He and Hundred Bones Resonance would take Love's Hundred Bones Resonance head-on, while Yu Wenqiu led the resistance in tying down the projections on the perimeter to buy them time.
As he said it, Gu Chengming glanced down at the Son Coin sitting in his system panel.
[Son Coin: Inverted Cause Lotus (Completed)]
He still had no idea how the thing was supposed to be used, but that hardly mattered.
In a Galgame, key items always popped up on their own with instructions attached the moment you hit a major route decision!
In the corner of the system panel, another CG prompt blinked quietly.
[CG: Infinite Love / Unlock condition: ?]
The question mark was still there, but Gu Chengming had stopped being anxious about it.
The answer to that question mark wasn't in the system, and it wasn't on any preset script line.
It was tomorrow, in the ending he would write with his own hands.
The hour of Chen.
The red-gold sky brightened for a heartbeat. The Bestowal arrived on schedule.
At the very moment the spiritual qi began spreading from the Royal Court's core across the realm, Yu Wenqiu opened her eyes.
"Go."
Three forces moved at once.
The eastern group of thirty swung wide around the flank and unleashed spells in unison, spiritual light crisscrossing the air. They advanced in alternating waves according to a formation drilled beforehand — their attacks weren't enough to hurt a Fourth Realm projection, but the display was loud enough that no one could gauge their actual numbers. Another squad cut in through the junction using the patrol gaps they'd mapped over the past days, detonating dozens of pre-planted spirit-explosion talismans and turning half the sky red.
The projection host reacted more sluggishly than expected; during the Bestowal their movements really had slowed a notch.
But numbers were still the problem. Dozens of Fourth Realm projections converged from every direction and stacked three layers of spiritual light barriers across the front line, pressure bearing down like a weight. Yu Wenqiu stood at the very head of the frontal formation, Dharma Sword raised crosswise, Fourth Realm spirit pressure fully open.
A disciple behind her looked at the black mass of projections ahead and his voice shook. "Elder Yu, that's so many Fourth Realm projections, how are we—"
Yu Wenqiu didn't answer. She sheathed the Dharma Sword, raised her left hand, and turned her palm forward.
The violet light of the Clairvoyant Eye gathered at her brow. This time, she wasn't using it to see.
The essence of the Clairvoyant Eye was "observation" and "transference."
Transference was a high-tier application of the Fourth Realm Clairvoyant Eye. Yu Wenqiu had never used it in real combat, because the cost was ruinous — every use burned away a great deal of spiritual sense. But today she had no room left to be sparing.
A light pattern like a vertical pupil surfaced between her brows. The Clairvoyant Eye turned at full power and dragged forth the sword scar carved into the deepest part of her memory.
The Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign. A half-transparent sword scar rose out of the air in front of her.
The projection formation froze the instant it appeared. The difference in station embedded in that sword intent locked every one of those ancient projections in place, weapons raised but unable to fall.
The airtight interception line was split straight down the center by the scar, opening a corridor ten paces wide. The corner of Yu Wenqiu's mouth lifted.
Blood ran from her left nostril. She wiped it with her sleeve and jerked her chin toward the corridor.
"The road's open!"
Su Qingmeng was moving at once, sword out of its sheath, sword intent spreading along both sides of the corridor to force back the projections trying to close it.
"I'll hold the mouth for you, Elder." Her tone stayed level. "Keep the scar up."
Yu Wenqiu nodded and wasted no words on it.
She knew she couldn't hold long. The cost of transference was devouring her spiritual sense at a visible rate.
Her temples throbbed and the edges of her vision were already darkening. But she only had to last this quarter hour.
At the far end of the corridor lay the Royal Court's core. Two figures shot past her side and drove straight into its depths.
Gu Chengming and Hundred Bones Resonance.
Half of Hundred Bones Resonance's body had gone transparent, and still she ran half a step ahead of him. Yu Wenqiu watched the white-haired girl use what remained of her solid half to block the stray shots flying in from either side of the corridor, cursing all the while — "as if petty thieves like you could stop This Emperor" — and felt, quite suddenly, that she'd lost again.
Wait. No. Now was not the time to think about that.
Yu Wenqiu clenched her teeth and poured every scrap of attention back into holding the Clairvoyant Eye steady, violet light swaying at her brow, the sword scar flickering in the air.
Behind her, the nearly hundred disciples split to both flanks of the corridor under Su Qingmeng's direction and clamped down on the projection host with everything they had.
Through the corridor. Through the outer defenses.
The spirit-patterned passage leading to the Royal Court's core was far quieter than the world outside. Red-gold light flowed through the patterns underfoot, and the designs on the walls were orderly and severe.
But the air still held the leftover warmth of the dispersed Bestowal qi, like walking into a room where the stove had just gone out.
At the passage's first bend, Su Qiuzhi leaned against the wall, waiting.
She wore the Royal Court's standard robes, the token of the Heavenly Emperor's confidante at her waist, two escort projections at her back. At the sound of footsteps she didn't even change her posture. She merely lifted her eyelids.
At the far end of the passage, two figures burst through the curtain of spirit-patterned light.
The projections guarding the corridor turned instantly and raised their weapons—
Su Qiuzhi spoke at once. "The Heavenly Emperor gave instructions. Let them through."
The projections hesitated a beat, looked at the token at her waist, lowered their weapons, and returned to their posts.
Gu Chengming stepped out from behind the light curtain. Their eyes met.
Su Qiuzhi didn't say much. Her gaze slid off him and settled on Hundred Bones Resonance behind him.
Half the white-haired girl's body had gone transparent, her left hand clenched into a fist. Su Qiuzhi's lips moved.
She had spent these days in the Royal Court. She had seen with her own eyes what Love's Hundred Bones Resonance looked like on that throne of bone, and heard with her own ears those recollections about Gu Chengming. And this dissolving white-haired girl in front of her was the owner of those memories.
She wanted to say something, but in the end she didn't.
Gu Chengming looked at Su Qiuzhi in that outfit, and for a moment his brain refused to catch up.
Sister, what exactly are you wearing?
But since she was plainly helping him, he pieced enough together and quickly offered his thanks.
Whatever had actually happened, he'd hear the explanation later.
"Don't thank me," Su Qiuzhi said vaguely. "About that Dual Cultivation business, later we're going to—"
Gu Chengming had already charged off with Hundred Bones Resonance in tow.
"Hey! I wasn't finished!"
The two figures vanished into the depths of the passage. Su Qiuzhi stood where she was, her expression somewhere between annoyance and resignation.
She glanced down at the token at her waist, then toward the far end of the corridor.
Su Qiuzhi sighed and turned to walk the other way.
The disciples outside were fighting for their lives, and the projections could pull back to the core district at any moment. She needed to stall in these corridors a while longer. However long she could manage.
She was the Heavenly Emperor's confidante, after all.
One last shift on the payroll. Stand it properly, then clock out.
The Royal Court's core.
Red-gold spirit patterns spread across the floor in a great net. Atop the high dais, the throne of white bone was gone, replaced by an imperial seat condensed from pure law.
No guards. No projections. Even the glow of the spirit patterns was dimmer here than in the passage.
It didn't look like an emperor's palace. It looked like a room deliberately emptied out, as though its owner had known well in advance that guests were coming today and had cleared away everything that might get in the way.
Faint red-gold spiritual qi hung in the air, warm without scorching, like autumn afternoon sun on your skin.
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance sat upon it, chin propped on one hand.
Her gaze crossed the empty hall and landed on the two figures coming through the entrance.
Hundred Bones Resonance walked half a step ahead of Gu Chengming, arms spread wide, putting herself between him and the throne.
"You came." Love's Hundred Bones Resonance rose from the imperial seat, red-gold spirit pressure unfurling slowly. "Half a day earlier than This Emperor expected."
Her eyes moved from Hundred Bones Resonance to Gu Chengming and lingered there for two breaths.
Then she struck without warning.
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance wasn't using her full strength.
But "not full strength" and "can't kill you" are two different things.
The first fist came down. Hundred Bones Resonance crossed both arms to block, and the red-gold fist wind punched straight through the guard, blasting her white hair back, dragging two deep furrows in the floor beneath her feet. She skidded five paces before she found her footing.
Ten flying swords burst from his body, and his Sword Domain unfurled in the same breath, pink light closing in to pin Love's Hundred Bones Resonance in place.
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance didn't so much as glance at the sword formation.
A casual sweep of her hand, and red-gold causal force surged out like a tide. The ten flying swords spun once and were flung back to where they'd started.
The gap was enormous.
Gu Chengming grasped that the instant his sword formation was batted away.
Worse still, she held partial authority over the Secret Realm's laws. Within the Royal Court's core district, she was the rules themselves.
But she truly wasn't going all out. Gu Chengming could feel the restraint packed inside those fists — an adult arm-wrestling a child, applying exactly enough force to win and not quite enough to snap the wrist.
Against the second fist, Hundred Bones Resonance charged in. Her right fist had almost no substance left, but it stayed clenched all the same, crimson blood-and-qi force condensing on that phantom surface as she met the blow head-on.
Knuckles met. Space cracked.
Then Hundred Bones Resonance flew.
She slammed into the base of the dais, bone fragments spraying, her whole body driven into the heap of white bones.
Gu Chengming rushed over and pulled her out. She coughed twice, blood at the corner of her mouth, and grinned anyway.
"It's fine, This Emperor can take it—"
The wind of the third fist was already on them.
Gu Chengming hauled her aside, and the blow shaved past them both, blasting a crater two paces across in the ground behind.
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance drew her fist back and tilted her head at them.
"What exactly can you take?"
Hundred Bones Resonance wiped the blood from her mouth and glared.
"When you meet a truly powerful enemy, what will you be able to do?"
The fourth fist came wrapped in red-gold blood-and-qi and the afterglow of causal law, crushing space itself until it groaned.
Hundred Bones Resonance gritted her teeth and met it, both fists crossed. She held for half a breath before the fist wind swept her up and hurled her down, and she rolled several times before stopping.
Her body was more transparent than a moment ago. The strain of fighting was accelerating her dissolution.
Gu Chengming's Sword Domain spread again, ten flying swords forming up to buy a breath of room.
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance stood outside the formation, in no hurry. She only watched Hundred Bones Resonance push herself up off the floor — bracing on the one hand she had left, knees shaking, forcing herself upright.
"You can't do anything at all. You can't even hold on to your own body."
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance took another step closer.
"All you can do is stand in front of him with your arms spread, and protect nothing."
"Is this everything you have to give him?"
Hundred Bones Resonance's fist tightened, and despair began to seep into her eyes.
Then Gu Chengming moved.
He dismissed the sword formation. All ten flying swords returned to their sheaths.
Hundred Bones Resonance turned to look at him, stunned.
Gu Chengming closed his eyes and began marshaling everything inside him that could still be used.
Son Coin: Great Void Sword. Son Coin: Tianji Reckoning.
Then he swallowed, all at once, every last thing he had prepared beforehand.
Gu Chengming activated it without hesitation.
Meridians drained of spiritual power were flooded full in an instant, his blood-and-qi boiled up again, and organs bruised by the fist wind knit whole in the reversal of cause and effect.
Peak condition. Still not enough.
The Huiyuan Sword Formula's Sword Domain spread to its limit. The Qingxin Formula steadied his mind. Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method reinforced his foundation. The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula drew his aura in as tight as it would go.
Countless medicinal forces tore his meridians apart.
And then—
"Hundred Emperor, aid me."
He had meant to save it until every preparation was in place. Every plan had been shredded instead.
Blood-and-qi was ripped out of every limb and bone and forced into his fists. His meridians began to fracture under the overload, the vortex of spiritual power in his dantian pouring outward at ten times its natural rate, his foundation shuddering.
The skin of his arms split dry, veins standing out in ridges, bones creaking and cracking under the pressure.
Within a few breaths, "ruined body" was a fair description of Gu Chengming.
This was not the Love Laboratory. In that room, dying meant starting over. Here, nobody could say what dying would mean.
And Hundred Bones Resonance saw it — the fissures crawling up his arms, the blood spilling past his lips, a young body decaying at speed under the cost.
Her pupils blew wide. She lunged and caught his wrist with the one hand she had left.
That hand was half transparent now. It could barely grip anything solid.
"Stop it!"
He didn't stop. He turned his head to look at her. The white-haired girl's face was full of panic, tears swimming in her eyes — and because her body had grown so unreal, even the tears had become half-transparent motes of light.
Gu Chengming smiled.
He remembered the question she'd asked him.
"If the one who stayed by your side were a stronger me..."
"Like I told you—" His voice was soft, the taste of blood already rising in his throat, yet his tone was impossibly steady. "I don't need a stronger Hundred Bones Resonance."
Hundred Bones Resonance went still.
Then he laughed and added, as if it were a joke:
"If the one riding to war across all the heavens with me isn't you—"
"—then I wouldn't mind carving my way through the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths."
Hundred Bones Resonance stared at him, dazed.
The tears finally fell. Half-transparent motes slid down her cheeks and scattered into starlight in the air.
She wanted to say something. Her lips moved a few times, and no sound came.
Because she had finally understood.
Not: you're strong, so I need you. Not: you can help me, so I choose you.
It was: you are you, so it can only be you.
And he had been saying that sentence, in one form or another, countless times already.
A Heavenly Emperor does not cry. A Heavenly Emperor is unmatched in the world; what need has she of tears?
But she wasn't a Heavenly Emperor.
She was just an idiot who loved someone and had never dared admit it.
[CG: Infinite Love — unlocked.]
[Description: Hundred Bones Resonance has finally recognized her feelings for you.]
[Pour all of that favorability into this single strike.]
Hundred Bones Resonance took Gu Chengming's hand.
Her remaining left hand was nearly too faint to see, and the sensation at his fingertips was like holding a wisp of smoke about to scatter.
But she gripped harder than she ever had.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu."
Her voice no longer shook.
Tears still clung to her face, but her eyes had gone bright again — that brash, blazing brightness that belonged to Hundred Bones Resonance alone.
"I love you."
She stepped forward, and her figure overlapped with his.
Her half-transparent body turned to white light, gathering from her limbs toward her center, flowing up along Gu Chengming's arm and sinking into his meridians.
It felt like someone had embraced him from behind. The instant the white light poured in, the fissures on his arms began to close.
Cracked skin regained its suppleness. Bulging veins settled. Shattered bone reassembled inside the glow.
[Hundred Bones Resonance favorability: 500/Unto Death, Unwavering]
Light spilled out of his body. White. Warm. Not blood-and-qi force, not spiritual power, not sword intent.
It was pure feeling itself, with no excuse and no disguise mixed into it.
[CG: Infinite Love]: the higher Hundred Bones Resonance's favorability toward Gu Chengming, the greater the power of this strike.
White light gathered on his knuckles. The Huiyuan Sword Formula's Sword Domain resonated with it, and the pink glow was caught up, drawn in, fused. The two colors twisted and coiled together across the surface of his fist and became a light that was neither sword intent nor fist intent but something past telling apart.
This wasn't "Hundred Emperor, Aid Me." That had been an all-or-nothing gamble that burned everything to ash.
This was two people's strength truly becoming one.
Gu Chengming raised his fist, and the light lit the entire Royal Court core, the red-gold spirit patterns paling before it.
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance stood ten paces away, watching white light spill from his knuckles, watching Hundred Bones Resonance's affection condense into something with substance.
She didn't dodge. She didn't guard. She laughed.
"She finally said it."
The words were quiet.
Infinite love.
The fist fell.
White light swallowed everything.
The red-gold sky shuddered and split, cracks radiating outward from the Royal Court's core all the way to the borders of the Secret Realm.
Love's Hundred Bones Resonance's form dissolved slowly in the white glare.
It began at her fingertips, exactly the way Hundred Bones Resonance had faded, only in reverse: Hundred Bones Resonance had gone from substance to phantom, while she went from phantom to light.
She didn't struggle.
When only her upper body remained, she lifted a hand, and in the instant her fingertips brushed his knuckles, red-gold and white briefly blended. Like two rivers long since parted, meeting again at the mouth of the sea.
Then she embraced him. What was left of her body turned to red-gold light and flowed in along his shoulder, his arm, his chest, joining the white light that had entered before it.
White and gold wound together, turned once in the depths of his Sea of Consciousness, and went still.
The red-gold sky began to come apart.
Fragments fell like faded colored glass. The spirit veins darkened in sequence from the Secret Realm's edges toward its center, like lamps going out one by one before dawn.
The throne shattered.
The dais of bone, robbed of the spirit veins that held it up, collapsed with a roar, broken bones scattering across the ground.
The Primordial Divine Domain Myriad Dharma Dominion Origin Nine Heavens Hundred Bones Royal Court.
The curtain came down for good.
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