Book 3: Chapter 43: The Merchant Emperor |
Jun moved through the streets of YellowHearth City at the head of three thousand cultivators and tried very hard not to think about what she was doing.
The formation stretched behind her in columns of eight that filled the wide boulevard from wall to wall. Boots struck stone in a rhythm that had been drilled into them over weeks of dawn-to-dusk sessions. Left, right, left, right. The sound rolled ahead of them like a wave, bouncing off building facades and scattering through alleyways and side streets. Merchants abandoned their stalls. Pedestrians pressed themselves against walls.
A cart driver took one look at the approaching column, unhitched his ox, and led the beast into a bakery of all places.
The pale green banners caught the wind above them. Dozens of them, carried by standard bearers spaced every twenty paces along the column's length. The Jian with its white tassel snapped and rippled against the morning sky.
Jun kept her eyes forward.
Wu Xui ran beside her silently. Her expression locked into the flat mask she always wore.
They pushed through the inner city's western gate.
The guards didn't stop them nor did they even try. Eight men in mismatched armour watched as three thousand cultivators poured through the archway like water through a broken dam and did absolutely nothing except flatten themselves against the stone and prayed that the column would pass without noticing them.
Jun's perception swept ahead.
Oh, Shui. Ancestor is going to so mad at us! How could you start a war? He probably is looking right now and has that frown on his face.
The slums opened before them. The column adjusted without breaking stride, narrowing from eight abreast to six, then four as the roads constricted. Refugees scrambled out of their path. A few beggars watched from doorways with expressions that suggested they'd seen armies before and this one did not impress them at all… Which made sense. The Neutral bloc and the Demonic Bloc were fielding hundreds of thousands.
They cleared the refugee camps and hit the scrubland between the outer walls and the river.
Jun could see a distant army around a ridge and the warehouse cluster beyond it.
The faint shimmer of red miasma climbing the slope in tendrils that reached for the sky like grasping fingers.
She pushed harder and the column surged behind her.
Three thousand bodies accelerating in unison, boots pounding scrub grass flat, Qi signatures flaring as the front ranks sensed what waited ahead and their bodies responded before their minds could catch up. Fear, excitement, adrenaline, and the specific electric tension of people who had trained for weeks and were about to discover whether any of it mattered.
Jun crested a rise in the road—
And froze.
The column crashed to a halt behind her. Bodies collided. Someone swore. A spear clattered against a shield. The ripple of arrested momentum travelled backward through three thousand people in a wave of stumbling, cursing, and the frantic redistribution of weight.
Jun didn't notice any of it.
Her eyes were locked on the figure standing in the middle of the road ahead.
He filled it completely.
Not in the way a large man fills a doorway.
In the way a mountain fills a valley.
In the way a dam fills a river's path.
He stood at the intersection where the scrubland road met the wider track leading toward the northern docks, arms folded behind his back, chest that looked like it had been carved from the same stone as the city walls. Tall enough that Jun had to tilt her chin up to find his face. Shoulders wider than two of her standing side by side. A jaw cut so sharp it could have been used as a weapon in its own right, angular and clean, framed by hair pulled back in a topknot of burnished gold that caught the morning sun.
His robes were white trimmed with gold thread so fine it looked woven from actual sunlight.
His eyes were the colour of molten amber.
They found Jun's and held.
Behind him, arranged in a loose crescent that blocked every approach to the docks, stood two hundred cultivators in matching gold-and-white armour.
Each one radiated a Qi signature that pressed against the ambient air and made the scrub grass around them lean away. Spears, halberds, curved swords, and weapons Jun didn't have names for gleamed in their hands.
Jun's hand found her sword's pommel.
The She-Devil screamed to life.
The man huffed. “Is that all? You may leave, My Loyal Guards… I’ll handle this personally–”
He turned to face her properly.
Jun felt her heart catch in ways she had never experienced except before her Ancestor. Not even Shao Yating had caused her to feel so… small.
"Three thousand." The man's voice rolled across the distance between them, deep and unhurried. It carried the resonance of a cultivation base so vast it coloured the air around his words in faint gold. "Three thousand armed cultivators marching through my city without permission and without so much as a courtesy notice to my administration."
His amber eyes swept the column behind her. Three thousand faces staring back. Pale green banners snapping in the wind. The Jian with its white tassel repeated across a hundred surfaces.
His gaze returned to Jun.
"I am Luo Bai…” He paused and took a single step roward her.
Jun stepped back.
Realization dawning upon her.
“–Merchant Emperor of Yellow HearthStone City." His arms unfolded and settled at his sides. His fingers were thick and calloused. Each one carried enough ambient Qi to make the air around his hands shimmer like heat haze. "And you are trespassing."
Jun's grip tightened on her pommel, her hands trembled.
Three thousand cultivators at her back and every single one of them had gone silent. The drilling, formations, punching, foundation work, and the weeks of one-two combinations thrown until knuckles bled, all of it compressed into this single moment where a sixteen-year-old girl stood at the head of an army she'd never meant to build and faced a man who owned the ground beneath her feet.
A power house that had held Zi Zhen and the tides of the Demonic Cultivators from flooding these lands.
"We're passing through," Jun said, her voice trembling against her will. “We have no quarrel with you or your city."
"Passing through." Luo Bai's lips twitched into a ghost of a smile that carried no warmth. "With three thousand soldiers in formation? Under banners I don't recognise. Toward the northern docks where, I'm told, another army of similar disposition has already assembled." His amber eyes narrowed. "You think I'm blind, little girl? You think I don't feel every Qi signature that moves through my walls? The training you’ve had them do?"
Jun said nothing.
"I felt your army the moment it formed in Cultivator Row. I felt the other one, the one with the red banners and the mushroom, leave the western slums a few hours before yours. Two armies converging on the same point within my territory. I felt the foreign forces the mushroom army faces and the power that resides there." Luo Bai took a single step forward. The ground beneath his feet cracked. "That is not passing through. That is an invasion."
His Qi unfurled in gold.
Bright, blinding, liquid gold that poured from his frame like sunlight given weight and substance. It crashed outward in a wave that flattened the scrub grass in every direction and pressed against Jun's column with enough force to make the front rows stagger backward. The air turned thick and viscous making it hard to breathe. The temperature spiked.
Sweat broke across Jun's forehead and down the small of her back, all at once.
Jun's knees buckled.
She caught herself and locked her legs. Her ego would not let her fall and kneel.
The giant man, the Merchant Emperor Luo Bai, huffed at her.
Behind her, three thousand cultivators hit the ground because he released slightly more of his intent and aura.
Not all at once though. This was a theatrical show of power, not meant to incapcitate immediately. .
The weakest went first, Qi Initiates in the outer ranks whose foundations couldn't withstand the ambient pressure of a being that outclassed them by realms they hadn't known existed. They dropped like puppets with cut strings, faces hitting packed earth and bodies crumpling where they stood. Then the foundation establishment of the outer court. Older members that had some talent, but not enough to enter the inner court fell face first next.
The sound of three thousand people collapsing was not a crash, but rather a cascade of rolling thunder in the form of armour, weapons, flesh, and pride hitting the ground in waves that started at the edges and swept inward.
The inner disciples lasted longer as their green sashes tightened at their waists, faces contorting and veins standing out on necks and foreheads.
They fought it, but that was a losing battle. It took a moment longer and their eyes rolled backward and they fell unconscious.
The five patriarchs dropped last.
Guo's white hair splayed across the dirt. Liang's beard dragged through mud. Fen's knuckles cracked against stone as he tried to push himself up and failed. Sho's shovel-hands pressed flat, arms shaking, before his elbows gave and his face met the ground. Duan, the last to fall, managed seven seconds longer of defiance before his newly healed joints betrayed him and he collapsed sideways.
Wu Xui—
Wu Xui stood unharmed.
Her Qi erupted from her core in a corona of deep crimson that wrapped around her frame and held. Her expression never changed.
Jun's own knees hit the dirt.
The impact jarred through her spine and rattled her teeth. The golden pressure bore down on her shoulders like hands pressing her into the earth. Her sword arm shook. The She-Devil shouted inside her mind, pouring confidence, fury, and borrowed strength through the connection, but even the weapon spirit's influence couldn't fully counter the weight of a cultivation base that dwarfed everything Jun had ever faced directly like this.
She activated her own aura.
The Liquid Core behind her sternum roared to life. Pressure erupted from her frame in a pulse of green-tinged Qi that pushed back against the gold and carved a pocket of breathable air around her body. The She-Devil's silhouette flickered into existence behind her, translucent, blade-edged, grinning at Jun’s fight for honor and dignity instead of dropping and letting it happen. She was proud.
Jun raised her head.
Luo Bai's amber eyes widened by a fraction. His golden aura pressed harder and Jun's pocket compressed and shrank…
But it held.
"Interesting," he murmured.
A sound split the air behind Jun.
Metal singing against leather and the displacement of atmosphere by something moving fast enough to blur. A Qi signature she recognised before she turned, white flame and purified foundation, dense and vast and carrying the specific signature of a man whose body had been remade by a healing potion that cost more than this city.
Zhong Da landed between Jun and the Merchant Emperor.
His single arm hung at his side. The prosthetic, the Arm of the White Feathered Swan, blazed with white fire that licked along the metal fingers and climbed his shoulder in tongues of flame so bright they left afterimages of said swans. His borrowed blade was gone.
In its place, two massive swords hovered at his flanks.
Jun had only seen them in the bleak forests and never out and about. Zhong Da had kept them hidden and sealed away since the day they entered Neutral Bloc territory.
Each blade was longer than he was tall. Broad, single-edged, with fullers that ran the length of the steel and glowed with Qi so concentrated the air around them warped and bent. They orbited him in slow, lazy arcs that carved trails of white flame through the morning air. The heat they radiated made the gold pressure around them hiss and recoil.
Zhong Da's aura unfurled to meet the Merchant Emperor Luo Bai’s own.
White spread from him in waves that pulsed.
Blinding absolute white that erupted from his core and his prosthetic arm simultaneously. The flame of the White Feathered Swan merged with his healed cultivation base and produced something that crashed against Luo Bai's golden aura. The collision point hung in the air between them, gold and white grinding against each other in a boundary that crackled, sparked, struggled against one another, and made the ground beneath it split in a line that raced outward in both directions.
The scrub grass between them ignited.
Pebbles lifted from the earth and hung suspended.
Bolts of lightning carved the earth around them and threatened to kill any that it touched.
Jun's pocket of breathable air expanded as the golden pressure fractured under the competing force and was pushed back. She gasped and sucked in air that tasted like ozone and burning metal.
Luo Bai's amber eyes left Jun and found Zhong Da.
His expression shifted. The dismissive amusement that had coloured his features since his arrival cracked along its edges. His pupils contracted and his golden aura surged, pressing harder, and Zhong Da's white flame surged to match it.
The boundary between them screamed.
"You are unworthy to speak with the descendant of our Clan." Zhong Da's voice carried no strain as it was delivered with the absolute conviction of a man who had kowtowed before a being that made both of them look like insects and had internalised that hierarchy so completely that a Merchant Emperor registered as a minor inconvenience. His twin blades spun faster. White flame trailed from their edges in spirals that tightened around his frame.
Luo Bai's head tilted.
His amber eyes measured Zhong Da from boots to prosthetic to the twin blades that orbited him in their burning arcs.
The assessment took a couple of seconds only before his expression finally settled into something harder and stripped of the casual superiority he'd worn like a second skin.
The Merchant Emperor Luo Bai smiled. "You are strong. Not as strong as I am, but strong enough to be the patriarch of a mighty clan or sect." His gaze flicked to the prosthetic arm, the white flame, the twin blades, and then back to Zhong Da's face. Doing the same assessment once more to make sure it was right the first time. "And yet you serve her? What is this clan called?"
"We are members of the Hu Clan—"
"Hu?" Luo Bai's amber eyes flickered. Something moved behind them. "As in the Hu that were slaughtered not so long ago?"
Jun's core surged at the mention of her family.
The green-tinged Qi that had been holding her pocket of breathable air erupted outward in a shockwave that cracked the earth beneath her knees and sent fragments of stone spinning into the air. The She-Devil's silhouette behind her solidified, edges going razor-sharp, grin stretching wider. Jun's Liquid Core pulsed a few times in rapid succession, each pulse stronger than the last and feeding power into her limbs, spine, legs, and her jaw that had locked so tight the muscles in her neck stood out like bridge cables.
She could feel it in her chest and blood.
In the marrow of her bones too.
The Righteous Heavenly Demoness of the Grass Trees mutation stirred beneath her skin.
"They were weak." Luo Bai's voice carried to Jun, but his amber eyes hadn't moved from Zhong Da. "And the weak deserve to die—"
Jun roared without meaning to.
The sound tore from her throat and carried her Liquid Core's full weight behind it. Everything was behind that single shout. The mutation, the bloodline, the Dao she'd been cultivating since her Ancestor first placed a sword in her hands, the She-Devil's fury layered on top of her own, and beneath all of it, threaded through every frequency like a vein of gold through quartz, the ghost of a Greater Dao that had soaked into her after staying so long around her Ancestor without knowing it.
The golden pressure shattered around her.
Jun stood.
Her legs shook and vision pulsed red at the edges. Her sword was in her hand still in its sheath.
"Y-You take that back! Or I swear I'll make you regret them!" Jun’s shout vibrated with Qi and Greater Dao intent that made the air around her words ripple.
Luo Bai's amber eyes found hers…
Only to laugh.
The sound was rich, full, genuine, and utterly devoid of concern. It rolled across the battlefield and bounced off the ridge and came back doubled. His golden aura pulsed brighter in absolute amusement. His arms folded behind him once more and his chin lifted and his molten eyes looked down at her from a height that had nothing to do with his physical stature.
He gave Zhong Da and Wu Xui a look. "Not you nor your bodyguard could defeat me. Until then, I say what I think and I care not for your pathetic emotions—"
Jun charged.
Her sword cleared its sheath in a draw that split the air. Qi blasts erupted from the blade's edge in a dozen crescent arcs of green-tinged energy that screamed toward the Merchant Emperor's chest. The She-Devil's silhouette lunged with her, translucent blade mirroring the real one, doubling the attack pattern into overlapping strikes that left no gap, pause, exit, or room for the words he'd just spoken to exist in a world where she still drew breath.
The ground beneath her feet exploded with each step she took.
Zhong Da's twin blades roared to life behind her.
Wu Xui moved to back him up.
And Jun closed the distance with murder in her eyes.