In the courtyard.
By the time the two of them separated, Yu Wenqiu had gone full Steam Princess.
"So…" Yu Wenqiu finally spoke, her voice a low huff. "This counts as official, right?"
Gu Chengming found that a little funny. "Wasn't it official all along?"
At that she lifted her head and shot him a ferocious glare, though paired with her Steam Princess face it carried absolutely no lethality.
"Then you're not allowed to do that again! And from now on, every single day, at the very least—"
She jammed to a halt halfway through.
"At the very least what?" Gu Chengming asked.
"Never mind, I'm leaving!"
Catching the teasing note in his voice, Yu Wenqiu whipped around, feeling her dignity slipping past the point of rescue.
She marched toward the courtyard gate with a great show of being annoyed, walking fast enough that she might have been fleeing pursuit — and then braked hard just as she cleared the gate.
Gu Chengming had assumed she was already gone. He was turning away, resigned, when Yu Wenqiu leaned back around the gatepost.
Half her body poked into view. She looked at him standing there in the courtyard and huffed, "I'll let the rest of it go… but whatever it is Little Gu wants to do next, you have to stay safe."
"I still want to be happy with you for a whole lifetime."
That sentence carried a weight the previous two hadn't. Yu Wenqiu knew what Gu Chengming was going to do next.
He wouldn't sit idle. Prodigy or Dao-companion, either way he was fated to walk into one incident after another, each more dangerous than the last… She knew how little she could do about that, so all she wanted was for him to come back whole.
"I will," Gu Chengming said.
Yu Wenqiu turned her face away at last and left the courtyard.
Her footsteps faded down the path.
Out the gate, around the corner of the alley, the footsteps broke into a scamper — and then came a muffled sound crushed down as low as it would go, something that would have been a shriek if a pair of hands hadn't clamped over the mouth producing it.
Wuuuu it worked it worked it worked!!!
Yu Wenqiu crouched in the alley with her face in her hands, and, having confirmed there wasn't a soul around, finally abandoned every last shred of an Elder's dignity.
She stayed down there a good long while before standing, rubbing her aching knees, breathing deep three times until her face was under control again.
Then she straightened her robes, adjusted her hair-knot, and strode off toward the main street.
The osmanthus blossom at her temple had gotten a little crumpled.
But who cared…
Today was a good day.
…
On the third day after the tournament closed, Floating Isle City eased back into its ordinary rhythms.
The markets reopened. The spirit lamps were lit again.
Long queues snaked across the flying-ship berths of every major sect, looking uncannily like a train station during the New Year rush of his past life — except the people in line were cultivators, the luggage was storage pouches, and the green-painted carriages had been swapped for spiritual-qi-driven flying ships.
Gu Chengming was making his own preparations to leave.
The wreckage of the Inverted Cause Lotus had gone to Ji Yixi to be forged into a spirit artifact; the aftermath of the Secret Realm incident had been taken over by the imperial house.
Everything that needed handling had essentially been handled. Only a few loose ends remained.
One of them was a brief conversation with Sect Head Shen Qianqiu about the Yunyue Sect.
When Shen Qianqiu heard that Gu Chengming intended to travel to the Yunyue Sect to investigate the truth behind the Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art, he raised no objection. He only mentioned a few irregularities surrounding the Yunyue Sect of late, and urged him not to take any of it lightly.
The other loose end was saying goodbye to Fu Xiaoxiao.
Learning that Gu Chengming was about to leave Floating Isle City, Fu Xiaoxiao claimed his last evening.
There was no Dual Cultivation.
No need for anyone to doubt it — there really wasn't.
For Fu Xiaoxiao, there were moments when doing nothing at all lodged in the memory more firmly than skin against skin ever could.
She led him around the front entrance of the Harmonious Joy Sect's quarters, up a narrow stair set against the outer wall, and onto the roof.
On the glazed tiles of that roof, Fu Xiaoxiao sat cross-legged with her head tipped back, watching a sky crowded with stars.
The autumn wind came off the top of the cloud sea, carrying the faint spiritual qi peculiar to Floating Isle City. Fu Xiaoxiao put out a hand and caught a drifting thread of luminous motes — spillover from the city-guarding grand formation as it turned. In her palm they broke into fine glimmers, exactly like fireflies.
She played with them until she got bored, clapped the glow apart, and let her head tip sideways to pillow itself on Gu Chengming's shoulder.
Fu Xiaoxiao didn't ask where he was going next. She rarely asked questions like that, because she knew there'd be no precise answer. A cultivator's road was always walked one step at a time.
A long while passed before she spoke, her voice lazy, half-asleep, like something murmured out of a dream. "Next time it's your turn to come find me."
Gu Chengming smiled. "All right."
"It's always me chasing after you…" Fu Xiaoxiao mumbled, her voice getting smaller and smaller. "You really are a bastard."
There was no real complaint in it — it sounded more like a familiar, well-worn way of being spoiled.
Overhead the river of stars lay across the sky; below their feet the lights of Floating Isle City ran together into a warm yellow sea.
The two of them just sat there quietly. Neither broke the rare stillness.
He didn't know how much time had gone by when Fu Xiaoxiao's breathing turned even and long. He looked down and found she'd fallen asleep against his shoulder.
The next morning.
The Wenjian Sect was preparing to depart Floating Isle City.
Yu Wenqiu had already nagged him three times from the courtyard. Gu Chengming was checking the last few items of his luggage when a disciple came running with word that the Princess of Great Qian requested an audience.
Gu Chengming blinked, then realized she'd most likely come about the spirit artifact that had yet to be finished.
But it had only been a few days. That lotus wreckage carried ten thousand years of accumulated karmic residue from a Sixth Realm great cultivator; the crafting process ought to be extraordinarily involved. By the ordinary reckoning of artifact refinement, it should have taken months at minimum.
Then he remembered what Ji Yixi had said — the hidden branch of the Great Qian imperial house had craftsmen and resources of exactly that sort. An artifact refiner the hidden branch could call upon was surely no ordinary man.
About an hour later, Ji Yixi delivered the spirit artifact to the Wenjian Sect's quarters in person.
The instant the brocade case opened, a wisp of pale golden light floated up.
The artifact took the shape of a small lotus pendant, roughly the size of a thumb-pad, translucent, its pale gold petals stirring faintly.
"This is called the End Lotus," Ji Yixi said, pushing the case across to him. "It is a Fifth Realm spirit artifact. It can act upon any process whose ending is already determined, skipping the entirety of the middle and arriving directly at the conclusion."
Gu Chengming took the artifact, listened to the explanation, and froze. For a moment he suspected he'd misheard.
Ji Yixi apparently mistook his silence for confusion, and — unusually for her — added a few plainer words. "For example… suppose Commander Gu were wounded, and the wound had already been confirmed as non-fatal, requiring three months to heal by normal means. Using the End Lotus skips those three months of recovery entirely. The wound heals at once."
"Or travel. From point A to point B, with no variables along the way, a normal journey taking ten days. Use the End Lotus, and you arrive at point B immediately."
"There are limits, of course." She paused, and stressed it. "It only takes effect on events whose outcome is already fixed. If the result of a thing remains genuinely undecided — a battle whose victor is unknown, say — the End Lotus cannot skip it."
"In short… it cannot change the result. It can only skip the process."
Gu Chengming pinched the End Lotus between his fingers, stared at the tiny pendant with its faintly breathing petals, and felt his pupils quake.
Hold on. You people hand-forged me a SKIP button?!
As a veteran who'd cleared over a hundred galgames in his previous life, Gu Chengming was intimately acquainted with that particular key.
Press SKIP and you could fast-forward through scenes you'd already read, blow past the endless slice-of-life stretches, cut out all the irrelevant connective tissue. When you were grinding through different character routes on repeat, the SKIP button was every galgame player's closest friend.
And now someone had built the SKIP button into a spirit artifact and pressed it into his hand.
Admittedly, for Gu Chengming, the practical value of that function was fairly limited.
What was the difference between skipping the plot and skipping your life?!
It wasn't as if he were on a second playthrough.
— Then again, was the almighty save-and-load technique next on the production schedule?
[Hundred Bones Resonance, entirely failing to understand why Gu Chengming's face had gone through so many colors, asked in genuine puzzlement: It's just skipping, isn't it? This Emperor can skip past plenty of things with one punch too.]
[Qingxin Formula: Such as skipping past an enemy's life?]
[Hundred Bones Resonance: Exactly! Different roads, same destination!]
— Could the two of you try being normal.
Ji Yixi watched the complicated mixture playing across his face and tilted her head slightly.
"Not to your liking?"
"No. Very much to my liking." Gu Chengming tucked the End Lotus solemnly into his robes and thanked her sincerely. "It's only that the effect exceeded my expectations."
Ji Yixi nodded and said nothing more.
She turned to go, then stopped at the doorway and glanced back over her shoulder to add one more thing.
"Ah — the refiner who forged this artifact is from the Tianding Sect."
"If anything goes wrong with it later, you may contact Grandmaster Zong Baixing of the Tianding Sect. He is a partnered craftsman of the Night-Watch Bureau. Trustworthy."
Gu Chengming filed the name Zong Baixing away.
After Ji Yixi left, the quarters went quiet again.
Yu Wenqiu poked her head in at the door, saw that the outsiders were gone, and dropped the nagging. She only spared a glance for the newly acquired pendant at his chest, muttered something about certain people being generous with their gifts, and went off to organize the disciples' baggage.
Gu Chengming was in no rush to move. With a little time left before departure, he decided to sort through whatever intelligence he could put in order.
The place he was headed next wasn't somewhere you strolled into and strolled back out of intact.
…
The information on the Yunyue Sect came mainly from two sources: sect channels supplied by Shen Qianqiu, and a jade slip Ji Yixi had left behind, containing Great Qian's brief summary of recent regional anomalies.
Only after laying it all side by side did Gu Chengming register something he'd noticed at the time but that seemed genuinely odd in hindsight.
The Yunyue Sect hadn't come to this Grand Tournament.
And it wasn't only the Yunyue Sect. The Hunyuan Sect hadn't come either.
The Yunyue Sect sat in the Emerald Screen Range in Great Qian's southwest; the Hunyuan Sect lay in the Huntian Plain just north of that range.
Geographically the two weren't far apart. Both were pillars of the southwestern cultivation region, both orthodox schools with names and faces to maintain, and neither had ever missed a Grand Tournament in the event's entire history.
This time both were absent at once.
And the reasons the two sects gave were vague in remarkably similar ways. The Yunyue Sect's public explanation was that an important inheritance ceremony was under way within the sect, leaving no personnel to spare for the tournament.
The Hunyuan Sect was blunter still: unstable fluctuations had appeared in the spirit veins around the sect, requiring their full strength to suppress; regrettably they could not attend.
Taken separately, each excuse held up. Set beside each other, they became very interesting indeed.
Two great sects of the same region, both absent from the cultivation world's most important gathering, both for internal reasons?
The jade slip Ji Yixi had left recorded finer details. The population of rogue cultivators near the Emerald Screen Range had dropped sharply over the past half year, and when asked why, most were evasive.
The Yunyue Sect's external contact had contracted drastically within the past year; the once-frequent traffic between sects had all but ceased. The Hunyuan Sect's situation differed slightly.
The Hunyuan Sect hadn't sealed itself off, but its upper echelons had been traveling frequently of late, their movements secretive.
Someone had glimpsed the Hunyuan Sect's Sect Head near a certain forbidden ground deep in the Emerald Screen Range — an ancient ruin said to have lain abandoned for several thousand years. Rogue cultivators speculated the Hunyuan Sect was hunting for some antediluvian inheritance.
Over the past three months, cultivators around the Emerald Screen Range had one after another begun displaying drastic changes in temperament. People once mild turned violent and quick to rage; people once level-headed began sliding into obsession.
The symptoms were mild — not enough to tip anyone into qi deviation, but enough that those around them noticed.
It matched, point for point, what the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign had described of the effect the implanted baleful qi in the Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art had on a practitioner's temperament.
What if that implanted baleful qi didn't exist solely inside the Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art — what if it had already spread across a far wider area?
He'd originally meant only to go to the Yunyue Sect and dig out the truth behind the sword art. Now the water beneath all this looked far deeper than he'd imagined.
There was no use turning it over further, though. Everything that could be prepared had been prepared; the rest would have to be met move by move once he reached the Yunyue Sect.
He gathered the jade slip and the reports away, pushed open the window, and found that the sky had darkened without his noticing.
The lights of Floating Isle City were coming on in sequence. This last evening in the sky-city carried, unexpectedly, a faint flavor of parting sorrow.
There weren't many people here he'd have to wait years to see again — but what he'd lived through in this place had already become a memory worth keeping.
The last evening before departure.
The setting sun stained Floating Isle City's cloud sea a vast orange-red. Gu Chengming was making the final pass over his luggage in the guest room when a distinctly hearty voice carried in from outside the door.
"Is young friend Gu within? This old man is Zong Baixing, of the Tianding Sect — forgive the intrusion!"
It was a big voice, full-bellied, with a certain unabashed confidence peculiar to men who arrive uninvited.
Gu Chengming paused.
Zong Baixing? Wasn't that the very refiner Ji Yixi had named, the one who'd forged the End Lotus?
When a man came calling in person, one could hardly be discourteous.
He opened the door and got his first look at his visitor.
Zong Baixing appeared to be around fifty, lean-framed, with gaunt features and a head of salt-and-pepper hair tied carelessly at the back — at first glance he had a certain immortal, wind-swept air about him. Look closer, though, and his cuffs and collar were covered in scorch marks from furnace fire, with an old scar across the web of his left hand. Plainly a craftsman who'd spent decades in the company of spirit flame and forge.
"No need for nerves, young friend Gu." Zong Baixing cupped his hands with a chuckle. "This old man has come about that spirit artifact."
Having said it, he didn't wait to be offered tea or a seat. He strolled straight in, swept the room with one glance, located the most comfortable chair in the place with unerring precision, and dropped into it.
Then he fished a spirit-flame-tempered copper flask out of his sleeve and poured himself a cup.
— This man was far too comfortable far too fast.
Gu Chengming sat down across from him, still weighing his phrasing.
"Grandmaster Zong, you've come to—"
"Let's get to it."
Zong Baixing set the flask on the table, turning uncharacteristically serious. His gaze traveled past the teacup and settled on the spot inside Gu Chengming's robes where the End Lotus rested. "That artifact has a problem with it."
Gu Chengming's brows drew together at once.
Zong Baixing seemed to realize how alarming that had sounded, and waved both hands hastily. "Not a big problem! Doesn't affect its use! But there is, well… a somewhat troublesome aspect."
He put the flask down and started explaining. The artifact's function was to skip the process and arrive at the ending — but the karmic circuitry inside the End Lotus would develop a faint drift after prolonged use. Much as a new blade dulls with time, the karmic circuits wore down over repeated activations, and the precision of the skip would gradually decline.
It wouldn't compromise safety, but the effect would be degraded.
Gu Chengming nodded. That sounded perfectly reasonable.
What Zong Baixing said next was less reasonable.
"To my shame—"
His tone turned peculiar, occupying a very particular space between guilty and shameless.
"—this old man left that flaw in on purpose."
Gu Chengming: "?"
"When the commission came in, the Great Qian side only said it was an order from above. Nobody mentioned who'd be using it. This old man assumed it was an artifact for the Great Qian royal house, so he worked a little something into the karmic circuitry — so that every so often it would have to come back to the workshop for repairs."
The rest went without saying.
Repairs cost money, naturally. And when officials of Great Qian's Artifact Refining Pavilion carried it up to the Tianding Sect for servicing, the price they reported back upward would be padded a little besides. Those people were sharp; every repair trip meant another skim, with profit flowing to everyone up and down the line.
The Great Qian royal house didn't lack for money and wouldn't blink at a maintenance fee. The Refining Pavilion officials earned their courier's cut. The Tianding Sect earned the repair fee. Three parties, all winners.
Gu Chengming's face went through a considerable range of expressions.
— Doesn't your Tianding Sect understand Great Qian's bureaucracy just a little too well?
"But afterward this old man learned the artifact wasn't for the Great Qian royal house at all. It was for you."
"Leaving a back door in for the imperial house is business. Leaving a back door in for one of our own is just rotten… So today this old man made the trip himself, to clear that flaw out for you."
Gu Chengming was mystified.
"One of our own?"
He had no prior connection to the Tianding Sect whatsoever. Where did our own come into it?
Zong Baixing had clearly anticipated the question. He smiled, and didn't bother stringing him along.
"This old man and your master Ren Wencai are old acquaintances. We worked together once."
Understanding dawned, and Gu Chengming asked nothing further.
So: an accomplice from the days of clubbing people over the head in dark alleys.
He'd heard far too many versions of his master's glorious past from far too many mouths by now. Each new one added another increment to the running tally of exactly how many lives his master had blighted in his youth.
Zong Baixing glanced at him as though he'd guessed the thought, smiled, and let it go.
Then he took out his refining tools and began recalibrating the End Lotus's karmic circuitry. The whole process took roughly a quarter hour.
Zong Baixing worked with total absorption, fingers roaming across the artifact's surface, spirit flame guttering and flaring at his fingertips as those hair-fine karmic threads slid back into place one by one under his adjustments.
It was plain enough that the old craftsman's mastery of refinement ran genuinely deep. His reputation hadn't come from nowhere.
If only he talked a little less.
"Speaking of which, these past years have been rough on the Tianding Sect, truly rough."
Zong Baixing sighed as he worked, like a man who'd found the lid off his own conversation. "For sheer foundation, our Tianding Sect is an old name with some years behind it. But this cultivation world of ours is like running a shop — even good wine goes unsold down a deep alley."
"Your Wenjian Sect is another matter. You've produced a heaven-gifted talent like this young friend here. One morning's fame and the whole world knows you. Wherever you go, there's face waiting."
Gu Chengming offered a couple of polite words.
Zong Baixing waved them off with a sigh. "Enviable, truly. As for the disciples of our Tianding Sect — the only one who's turned out halfway decent is this old man's own…"
At that point Zong Baixing's voice paused.
"Ah, that reminds me."
His hands never stopped, but his eyes lifted from the artifact and settled on Gu Chengming.
"This old man has a disciple. Her name is Xu Huayi."
Gu Chengming blinked, and warmth and surprise both entered his voice.
"Fellow Daoist Xu? Then this really is a fine coincidence."
If he were being honest, Xu Huayi belonged to the small handful of people in the entire cultivation world he was on the best personal terms with.
They'd met before the Grand Tournament, then stood shoulder to shoulder through any number of incidents since. Her company was easy.
Zong Baixing handed the recalibrated End Lotus back, clapped the spirit-flame residue off his hands, and let that genial grin return to his face.
"There. The flaw in the karmic circuitry is fully removed."
"My thanks, Grandmaster Zong."
"No thanks necessary."
Zong Baixing stood, slid the copper flask back into his sleeve, and thought about mentioning something — then decided that where that girl was concerned, the words ought to come from her own mouth.
All a master could do was quietly lay the road this far.
In the end Zong Baixing only smiled, his tone as light as any ordinary parting courtesy.
"Young friend Gu—"
"Do keep in touch with Huayi when you have the time."
And with that he genuinely left.
The setting sun stretched his lean silhouette long across the ground. Those spirit-flame scorch marks on his cuffs stood out sharply in the dusk light, like a lifetime's worth of medals on an old craftsman.
Gu Chengming stood in the doorway and watched that back vanish around the corner of the long street.
Everything in Floating Isle City had settled.
The Wenjian Sect's flying ship set out at dawn, the cloud sea rolling beneath them, the morning light laying down gold.
Shen Qianqiu, Yu Wenqiu, Elder Han Che and the competing disciples all returned together. Gu Chengming stood on the deck and watched Floating Isle City shrink piece by piece into the cloud sea behind them, until it was nothing but a mote of light floating on the horizon, and then the layered waves of cloud swallowed it whole.
The voyage home was a great deal quieter than the voyage out.
The tournament high had burned off, and that grand adventure in the Secret Realm had wrung the last of everyone's energy out of them.
Disciples dozed in twos and threes against the cabin walls. Even the loudest few kept their mouths obediently shut.
— Probably still being hunted by projections in their dreams.
Gu Chengming wasn't sleepy. First he studied the End Lotus's operating method and constraints in detail, testing the spiritual power resonance several times over until he had a decent feel for the artifact's temperament. Then he opened the moonlight-colored jade slip the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign had left behind, and made a preliminary comparison between the original Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sword Art and the Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art as it existed today.
The scale of the divergence was staggering.
Without exaggeration, the present-day Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art retained perhaps twenty percent of the original's content. The other eighty percent had either been edited past recognition or replaced outright with something entirely unrelated.
More critically, the baleful qi the Sovereign had identified wasn't simply layered over the surface of the sword art. It was embedded deep in the technique's foundations like a parasite, fused seamlessly with the altered forms.
To strip out the baleful qi, he'd first have to restore the sword art. To restore the sword art, he'd have to go to the Yunyue Sect and trace it back to the source.
…
The flying ship traveled for several days.
When that towering sword-mountain standing at the summit of the cloud sea came into view, a cheer long held in check went up through the cabins.
The Wenjian Sect. Home.
Back at the sect, Shen Qianqiu wasted no time, convening a small-scale debriefing that same day.
The agenda wasn't complicated: announce the tournament results, arrange follow-up affairs.
When Shen Qianqiu formally declared that Gu Chengming had taken first place along with the Blood-Burning Realm-Breaking Pearl, and that Yu Wenqiu had taken second, every Elder and core disciple in the room applauded as one.
The grin on Ren Wencai's face was on the verge of overflowing, but he held to an Elder's bearing by main force, nodding again and again and managing only a string of "good, good."
Yu Wenqiu sat in the corner wearing a look of serene indifference to honor and disgrace alike. An Elder beside her murmured that Wenqiu had truly been remarkable this time; she demurred modestly, saying it was luck, only luck — while the delight in her eyes refused to be hidden.
Yu Wenqiu even had the sense of having lived a whole other lifetime. Stealing the show at the tournament, plus a confession that got accepted — you could fairly call it the highest point of her life, and the height of it left her feeling faintly unreal.
Something in her still didn't feel solid.
It felt much more solid when she was holding Little Gu.
Mm… once this wraps up, she'd go find Little Gu! But would he think she was too clingy—
…
The meeting wound down on a thoroughly cordial note.
The disciples filtered out. The Elders exchanged a few words in twos and threes and departed as well.
Yu Wenqiu had meant to invent a reason to hang back and wait for Gu Chengming, but seeing Ren Wencai had latched onto him and was going on and on, with no prospect of release anytime soon, she tactfully left first, intending to go wash up before anything else.
— After all that road dust, she could hardly go see anyone looking like this.
By the time Gu Chengming finally extricated himself from his master's rapid-fire stream of instructions, the sky had gone dark. The everlasting lamps of the sect were coming alight along the stone steps in sequence, lighting the path back to the rear mountain clean through.
After the meeting, Gu Chengming returned to the little courtyard on the rear mountain.
The moment he pushed the door open, the familiar sight of it came at him all at once.
The stone table. The teapot. The osmanthus tree in the yard. The plain wooden furnishings inside. All of it exactly as he'd left it, except for the thin film of dust on the tabletop and the window lattice, silently measuring out the days of his absence.
Gu Chengming stowed his luggage, tidied the room a little, then sat cross-legged on the bed and closed his eyes.
A great many things weighed on him at that moment — the Yunyue Sect investigation, the breakthrough to the Fourth Realm, repairing the Flowing Cloud Moon-Following technique, and that perpetually unresolved Eternal Life Sect question. Any one of them alone was worth a good long stretch of work.
But before he dealt with any of it, he wanted to do something he'd wanted to do ever since leaving the Secret Realm, and had never found the right moment for.
Open Love's Hundred Bones Resonance!
—
The scene shifted.
The instant Gu Chengming opened his eyes, he knew this place was nothing like the one in his memory.
The dark red desolation was gone. The oppressive iron-gray firmament was gone. So were the training grounds underfoot, once cratered and pitted by countless rounds of trading blows.
In their place lay a wide open plain drowned in silver-white moonlight.
Silver-white spirit patterns spread across the plain, the lines expansive and antique, identical to the ones he'd seen in the ruins of the Land of Nowhere. In the distance stood a half-formed palace, its outline vague, as though construction had begun only recently and been abandoned once the frame went up.
A silver moon hung in the sky.
Moonlight poured over the whole plain like water, plating everything in a warm, gentle silver.
There was no killing intent in the air, no weight of pressure — only the very faint, very fine hum of wind passing through the spirit patterns. And where the moonlight ran thickest, a figure was walking toward him.
White hair glinted silver under the moon.
The hem of a white training robe swayed lightly in the wind. Her stride was neither fast nor slow, her bearing correct, her chin slightly lifted, as though she were maintaining some dignified air appropriate to the arrival of a Heavenly Emperor — but the closer she got, the faster she went. Dignity became urgency, urgency became quick little steps, and by the last few she'd given up pretending altogether and simply broke into a run.
Hundred Bones Resonance stopped three paces from Gu Chengming and nearly failed to stop at all.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu. You've come at last."
The white-haired girl planted her hands on her hips, chin high, voice full-throated and magnificently imposing.
"This Emperor has awaited you here for some time—"
Then she looked at him, and the composure visibly gave out. She flung herself at him like a small white dog.
The force of the hug knocked Gu Chengming back half a step. The white-haired girl buried her face against his chest, arms locked tight around his waist.
"Missed you, Heavenly Emperor Gu." The words came up muffled from somewhere against his ribs.
Gu Chengming thought, you've been at my side this entire time — but what came out was a smiling, "I missed—"
He didn't finish. Hundred Bones Resonance lifted her head out of his chest, rose onto her toes, and kissed him without a moment's hesitation.
Hard, with everything she had in her — like someone who'd finally gotten hold of a treasure they'd longed for, whose first instinct wasn't to cradle it carefully but to throw their entire body at it.
Gu Chengming hadn't expected her to take the initiative like that.
— Though in hindsight it fit her perfectly. This Heavenly Emperor's guiding principle in life had always been that whatever you want, you take with your fists.
This time the taking had simply been done with lips instead.
When Hundred Bones Resonance let go, her face was pure satisfaction.
"Heheh."
She let out a smug little laugh. This Emperor got the kiss. This Emperor is amazing.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu."
"Mm?"
"I like you the most in all the world."
And then she laughed at her own words, eyes crinkling into curves, white hair like scattered silver under the moon.
Then she rose on her toes again and hooked her arms around his neck.
This time it wasn't a quick ambush. She leaned in close — close enough that their noses touched and their breaths crossed, close enough that her pupils held nothing but his reflection.
And then she bore Gu Chengming down to the ground.
— [CG / Love's Hundred Bones Resonance] unlocked.
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