Fate Unraveled

CHAPTER

17

OF THE STONE

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Jieyuan turned around to face the entrance pretty much together with Daojue, and he did it just in time to see Daojue snap his arms forward and send Gleaming End flying out of his hands, the spear cutting through the air like an arrow.

A grossly oversized crystal arrow bound straight for Weiming’s chest.

In the split-second before the spear reached Weiming, a gleamstone barrier winked into existence in front of her, over her upper body. Gleaming End went through it without stopping, the barrier doing its job with all the effectiveness of a paper umbrella in a thunderstorm, and continued with its flight, entirely unhindered, to burrow itself into Weiming’s chest.

Weiming’s body, much like the barrier, was run through without slowing down the spear in the slightest, and through the gleamstone barrier Weiming had summoned Jieyuan saw Gleaming End disappear past the illusory wall sealing the cave.

Blood, dark and red, bubbled around Weiming’s chest, from the gaping hole Gleaming End had left in its wake. A hole big enough, clear enough, that he could see past Weiming and into the illusory gleamstone wall behind her. A hole where her heart should’ve been.

The floating gleamstone barrier Weiming had summoned flashed out of existence as suddenly as it’d appeared. Weiming dropped her finesaber and brought up both hands to clutch at her chest. She stared at them—at Daojue, most of all—with a look of utter disbelief on her face. Blood spurted out of her mouth in a sickly, wet cough, and she stumbled forward, a step, then two, before falling to her knees. All the while, she didn’t take her eyes off Daojue.

Weiming’s mouth moved soundlessly, but all that she managed was another bloody cough before she slumped, fully collapsing onto the floor. And there she remained, lying completely still, motionless the way only the well and truly dead managed to be.

“Well.” Jieyuan eyed the dead inner elder. “That’s one way to solve our problem, I guess.”

Just to be sure, he took a few steps forward, getting himself close enough to get the corpse within range of his soulsense. And with that, he confirmed that there was nothing chromal or spiritual left behind in Weiming’s body besides the chromal gears she had on her, her soul having already been plucked by the Silver Stream.

Jieyuan wasn’t sure where to even begin. So much had happened in so little time, and most of it defied explanation. From Daojue somehow finding this cave, to Daojue somehow bonding the spear, to Weiming somehow finding them, and now to Daojue somehow getting the jump on her and killing her on the spot.

Somehow, somehow, somehow, somehow.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the only one in any position to answer all but one of those questions was Daojue. Daojue, who was just about the most obstinately secretive person Jieyuan had ever met.

Part of Jieyaun felt very much so vindicated, though. Just about triumphant, really. Because if there had ever been any doubt that Daojue was special? Well, those doubts had just been killed as surely as Daojue had killed Weiming. Killed good and dead.

He was about to turn back when Daojue rushed past him, past Weiming’s body, and then out through the illusory wall behind her, all without stopping.

Gleaming End, Jieyuan realized. Well, he reckoned Daojue was justified, at least in this case. In Daojue’s place, he’d have been in even more of a hurry to recover the above-Redsoul weapon he’d just launched out of sight.

Meiyao stepped up beside him. He suspected the dazed look she wore was mirrored on his own face.

“So,” he began, “that was that.”

Meiyao didn’t seem to hear him. She just stared down at Weiming.

Deciding to leave her to it, Jieyuan turned away and began looking around the cave. Daojue had stuck around them so far, so he reckoned there was no need to go running off after him. Once Daojue recovered his spear, he should make his way back. In the meantime….

Jieyuan’s eyes landed on the golden sphere lying beside the crystallized corpse of Protector Yuanzhi, but he eventually decided to leave it aside for now. He instead narrowed his eyes at the statue-like corpse of Protector Yuanzhi, looking it over more thoroughly, approaching it as he did. He likewise focused his soulsense on it.

His closer inspection only served to confirm the first impression he’d gotten. Yuanzhi’s robes and everything she’d had on her besides Gleaming End had been entirely converted together with her body into purplish gleamstone. Pursing his lips, he stepped away from it and ran his eyes around the cave, through its floors and walls. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Anything, really. Anything that wasn’t gleamstone.

He caught something on the edge of his soulsense, to his right. A small first-shade red form. Barely a moment and four quick strides later, he was standing over it. He eyed the little green crystal block on the ground, lying right beside the wall.

Crystal, but not gleamstone.

Jade.

He immediately picked it up.

“Did you find something?” Meiyao’s voice came from behind.

Turning around, Jieyuan found that even Meiyao had left her spot and moved closer, her eyes on him, curious.

He held out the object for her to see. “A jade book.” The last jade book he’d come across had been Rongkai’s, and it’d pointed him towards what could very well be a violetsoul’s inheritance. He didn’t need this one to have something quite at that level, though. He’d already be plenty satisfied if it could explain how exactly Yuanzhi had ended up that way.

Meiyao glanced from the jade book to Protector Yuanzhi’s crystallized form, and then back to it. “What does it say?”

“Haven’t looked through it yet,” Jieyuan said. He looked around the cave one last time, but it wasn’t that big, and by now there wasn’t a spot of it that his soulsense hadn’t brushed past at least once. He made his way back over to the entrance, Meiyao beside him. “But I say we should first figure out what to do about that”—he nodded at the one corpse that hadn’t been mysteriously transmuted into crystal—“and our plans for the short term. Stay in the cave? Leave the cave?”

Meiyao furrowed her brows. “I think we’re better off leaving. Weiming somehow tracked us down, and it’s clear that whatever it is she’s involved in, she’s not alone. So whatever method she used to find us, we have to assume that the others also have it, and that there will be more people coming after us. It’s unlikely that we’d be able to take them by surprise like Daojue just did, so that’d mean being stuck in an enclosed space with what might very well be another tenth-sign redsoul. Or even more than one.”

She narrowed her eyes down at Weiming’s corpse. “Our chances won’t be that much better on open ground, particularly not against a tenth-sign redsoul, let alone two or more, but I have another Radiant Light Haven talisman with me. It’s our best bet, and it won’t work in an enclosed space like this.”

“Radiant Light Haven? That’s the talisman you used earlier?”

Meiyao gave a slow nod. She seemed distracted. “Aunt Yuyan handed me two of them, right before the entrance trials. Told me to use them in case anything happened on a mission outside the sect, to buy myself enough time for someone else to arrive.”

“All right,” Jieyuan said. “So we’ve got a talisman that can stop a tenth-sign redsoul for… well, at least a while, and Gleaming End, which can stop a tenth-sign redsoul… well, permanently. We can work with that.” His eyes found Weiming’s corpse. “And that’s not everything, either.”

He made his way over to the body lying by the mouth of the cave and knelt down beside the little pool of blood spreading beneath it. Meiyao followed. Grabbing onto the body’s shoulders, he gently turned it over, face up. His throat tightened as he took in Weiming’s chalky, bloodless face. The eerie purple glow that filled the cave gave the dead woman’s still, placid expression a ghastly, spectral quality.

This… This was a tenth-sign redsoul. An inner elder. A cultivator who’d faced the First Pain over and over, for years, decades. Who’d nine times endured the Second Pain, climbing all the way from mundanity to the peak of Redsoul. And someone like that was dead now, just like this.

“Huh. She was young,” Meiyao said, kneeling beside him. “Probably not that much older than us. In her late thirties, at the most. Death has barely aged her.”

Jieyuan studied the woman’s face more closely and found that Meiyao was right. Weiming did look older than before, but only slightly so. Cultivators had their lives prolonged by their aura—at Redsoul, their lifespan was doubled to three hundred years—and the way they aged was adjusted accordingly. But upon death, in the absence of aura, their body would take on its natural age.

Looking at Weiming now, he’d put her in her mid-thirties.

He shifted his gaze away after a while, refusing to dwell on the matter any longer. There was no point to it.

Gently, he patted down Weiming’s robes while searching her body with his soulsense. From a pocket in her outer robe, Jieyuan fished out Weiming’s glyph-stretch pouch, then began throwing all the other artifacts he found on her inside it. Meiyao helped, removing Weiming’s armor—her fullgreaves and fullgauntlets, which were lying loose around the limbs they covered—and similarly packing it away inside the glyph-stretch pouch. Also into the pouch went the red skill seed Meiyao got from Weiming’s chest, under her robes. Jieyuan also found three jade books already inside the pouch, and he took them out and deposited them in an inner pocket of his outer robe.

Once they were done, the only chromal things left on Weiming’s body were the topaz robes and the white lightcoat she wore.

After putting Weiming’s glyph-stretch pouch away in another pocket, Jieyuan stood up together with Meiyao. He then looked back into the cave and nodded at the golden sphere lying beside Protector Yuanzhi. “What about that?”

“Leave it.” Meiyao barely spared the field-focus a glance. “The illusory field at the entrance is made specifically for this cave. Won’t work anywhere else.” And then she was walking away, stepping around Weiming’s body, before she disappeared past the illusory wall.

Jieyuan made to follow her but found himself stopping right at the entrance, and his gaze flitted between the two corpses before settling on Protector Yuanzhi’s crystallized form. And as he stared at it, he found all the reservations he’d initially felt over about the Gleamstone Forest, the reservations that had gradually faded over the last couple of days, resurfacing.

Suddenly he felt as if he wasn’t looking at the cave, but rather at some bizarre, crystalline perversion of a stomach, one into which Yuanzhi had been swallowed, claimed as its victim.

Well, that seemed as sure a sign to leave as any.

Without another backward glance, he moved his right leg through the fake wall, angled his right foot against the face of the cliffside, and aura-lashed it. His perspective changed, and he let himself be pulled out of the cave and into the open, his left foot soon joining his right one on the cliffside. Looking up and ahead, he found that Meiyao was already on the ground. Not too far away from her was Daojue, Gleaming End in hand.

Although Jieyuan had guessed that Daojue would return, he still felt some relief at the sight of his teammate. And at the sight of Gleaming End—because should they come across any other murderous tenth-sign redsouls, the crystal spear could very well be their only chance at survival.

The Gleamstone Forest stretched out before him, a sprawling expanse of glowing crystals. He did his best to ignore it.

He quickly climbed down and joined his two teammates on the ground.

“All right,” he immediately said, waving the two of them over before Meiyao could get into a discussion with Daojue. His eyes lingered on Gleaming End—he recalled all the questions that he still had about it, questions that, knowing Daojue, were likely to go unanswered—but they had more pressing matters to deal with right now. “I say our priority is getting ourselves away from here. Then we find somewhere to settle down and go through everything. In the meanwhile…”

He reached into his outer robe and took out the three jade books he’d gotten from Weiming. He tossed one to Daojue and another to Meiyao. “We go through this as we run and see if we can figure out how exactly Weiming tracked us down to the cave and whether we can do something about it. Sounds good?”

“Fine by me,” Meiyao said, closing her hand around the jade book.

As usual and to the surprise of nobody, Daojue said nothing, only accepted the jade book without a word.

“We head back, away from the Sixth Ring,” Jieyuan continued. He hadn’t come up with anything to say ahead of time, but since he’d already started, he kept at it. “Later we can decide if it’s better to stay here in the Inner Ring or return to the Outer Ring, but for now, we should make our way back at least to the Third Ring. We already have enough problems to deal with, and we don’t need to add high-sign gleam beasts to them. Meiyao, can you lead the way?”

Meiyao nodded before setting off without another word. As Jieyuan followed, Daojue beside him, he channeled chroma into the jade book he’d held onto. Its contents appeared in his mind’s eye, and he kept half his attention on it, the other on his surroundings.

It barely took him a few seconds to realize his jade book was a bust. Nothing important on it, just some inscripts and what seemed to be instructions on how to inscribe them. All that told him was that Weiming was an inscriber, or at least dabbled in inscribing. Not exactly the crucial, life-saving knowledge he was looking for.

Hopefully Meiyao or Daojue would have better luck.