Chapter 271: You already passed |
Even after getting Shrey on his side, Chen Ren’s work was far from over.
He had already spoken to two city lords. One had agreed to help him, and the other had not given a clear answer, but Chen Ren had a strong feeling that when the time came, City Lord Xiangrui would move.
Still, it was not enough. What he needed now were people.
As many cultivators as he could gather to support the plan.
Most of them would only be in the foundation establishment realm, but Chen Ren did not care because numbers still mattered. Even weaker cultivators could become useful if placed correctly. The real problem was that not everyone who might help him had reached the eighth floor yet. Even with the sixth floor becoming easier with the recent rumours, the seventh would still slow many of them down.
And Chen Ren was not sure he had that kind of time.
He could wait, of course, but waiting without knowing how long it would take was dangerous in its own way. The longer he delayed, the more likely it became that the whole shape of the eighth floor would change around him. More Guardian sect cultivators would continue climbing up, and he already had at least two among them who wanted him dead badly enough to become a problem the moment they found the chance.
So for now, most of the numbers he could count on were the ones on the eight floor already.
Li Xuan, of course. The twins as well, especially since they had already returned to the fifth floor for a short rest after gaining access to the eighth. Princess Yanyue, Yalan and whatever number of her royal guards had managed to make it from the seventh floor to the eighth.
There was also Zi Wen.
But Chen Ren had not heard anything from him in quite some time. He could only hope the man was still alive. He probably was. More likely than not, he was simply caught up in something and too busy to send word.
And then there was Frostpeak Sect. They might be willing to help him as well. At least Han Qingshi might.
Whether the rest of Frostpeak Sect would follow was another matter entirely, and Chen Ren knew better than to assume too much before testing it. For now, he focused on what he had already managed to secure.
After returning to the fifth floor, he gathered everyone and explained what he had accomplished.
That alone earned him more than a few looks of disbelief. The reactions were almost amusing in places. Most of those listening seemed half-convinced he was either exaggerating or had finally gone mad when he calmly informed them that he had not only spoken to one city lord, but two.
Once that was done, Chen Ren wasted no time.
He headed straight back to the eighth floor with Li Xuan and the twins. Before leaving, though, he sent Anji to the city lord castle with one simple purpose—to make sure the city lord knew the siege on the [Grand Aegis Array] would begin in a day. After that, whether Xiangrui chose to involve himself or not would no longer be Chen Ren’s concern.
When the four of them stepped onto the eighth floor, they moved at once toward the second city, where Chen Ren guessed Princess Yanyue and Yalan were most likely on to locate the common lift.
For that, he had specifically bought flying swords.
He still had no proper idea how to control one himself, so he left that problem to Li Xuan, who ended up serving as his unwilling driver. Li Qingfeng knew how to handle one as well, which made things simpler. Between the two of them, they were able to cross the distance between cities quickly.
Unlike the fourth city, the others had no barriers surrounding them. That did not make the journey comfortable.
The height alone was enough to make Chen Ren tense. As they flew, he found himself glancing downward more than once, watching the distance between them and the first city stretch farther and farther behind. The higher they moved, the less the land below seemed like something a person could ever hope to survive falling onto. In some stretches, the drop was so great that he could no longer even make out the lower ground properly beneath the drifting cloud and haze.
It was not a pleasant feeling.
Quietly, Chen Ren offered up a prayer to whatever pagoda gods might or might not exist that this floor did not also contain flying beasts between the cities, because dealing with that on top of everything else felt like exactly the kind of nonsense the pagoda would enjoy throwing at him.
The thought sent a small shiver through him. But before long, they reached the second city, and finding Princess Yanyue and Yalan did not take much effort at all.
They only had to follow the street. More specifically, the trail of destruction running through it.
Puppet bodies were scattered all along the road as though a massacre had taken place there not long before. Broken limbs, shattered torsos, cracked cores—there were so many remains strewn about that Chen Ren did not need to ask whether they had passed through this way. The answer was written plainly enough in the damage.
At the end of it, the group was waiting.
Princess Yanyue and Yalan were there alongside five royal guards who had apparently managed to make their way up from the seventh floor. And with them was someone else Chen Ren had already wanted to speak to—Han Qingshi.
The moment they saw him approach, the conversation among them stopped. Heads turned his way. Li Xuan brought the flying sword down and steadied it long enough for Chen Ren to jump to the ground.
Yalan was the first to speak.
“You’re finally here,” she said. “Have you given up on trying to break through the [Grand Aegis Array]? Because we’ve already located the lift to the ninth floor, and we can move right away.”
Princess Yanyue gave a slight nod as well, clearly expecting a yes from him. But Chen Ren simply raised his hand.
“There’s no need for that.”
Princess Yanyue’s brow lifted, and her expression shifted almost immediately in a frown. “Why not?”
“Because,” he said, “we are going to siege the [Grand Aegis Array] and reach the fourth city.”
For a few moments, no one said anything at all.
It looked as though every response they had been about to give him had simply died somewhere in their throats. Even Han Qingshi, who rarely looked impressed by much of anything, seemed more than a little surprised.
Being a Guardian sect disciple, he almost certainly knew exactly what array Chen Ren was talking about.
In the end, he was the first to break the silence.
Scratching at his head, Han Qingshi spoke, “Maybe I heard that wrong, but are you talking about the same [Grand Aegis Array] the princess here told me was around the fourth city?”
For emphasis, Han Qingshi even pointed toward the fourth city, far off to the left in the distance.
Chen Ren smiled. “Yes, that one.” Then he turned toward Yalan and Princess Yanyue. “I told you I would find a way, so I did.”
Princess Yanyue still looked unconvinced. She opened her mouth more than once as if to question him, then seemed to change her mind halfway through and turned instead toward Li Xuan.
“Is that true?”
Li Xuan looked a little surprised to have the question thrown at him, but after a moment he gave a nod.
“I don’t know whether the plan will work or not,” he said. “But Chen Ren certainly has one. And it’s viable enough that I’m willing to try it.”
With each word, Yanyue looked more stunned. Before she could start demanding details, Han Qingshi let out a laugh and strode toward Chen Ren at once. The man’s size made Chen Ren instinctively lean back a little as he approached, but the giant only grinned.
“So there really is a way,” he said.
Chen Ren nodded. “There is.” Then he asked, “How much do you know about the fourth city?”
Han Qingshi grunted. “Not much. Just that you want to get through the array and take something from inside.”
At that, Chen Ren let out a quiet breath of relief. Good. No one had mentioned the master lift yet.
He nodded, then shifted so he could look not only at Han Qingshi, but at Princess Yanyue and Yalan as well.
“I know all of you have questions,” he said. “I’m going to explain the plan right now, and after that you can tell me exactly how insane you think I am for coming up with it.”
He paused, then looked back at Han Qingshi. “But before that—Are you in?”
Han Qingshi smiled immediately.
“If you’re trying to break through an array everyone says can’t be broken,” he said, “then there’s no way I’m staying out of it.”
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***
Zi Wen felt like he was living through the most important and most exhausting day of his life.
From the moment he decided to try healing the wyvern, he had not truly rested even once. Every breath seemed to pull him in two directions at the same time. On one side was the wounded beast outside, still hovering near death. On the other was the final trial waiting over his head like a blade, promising to fall the moment his time ran out.
At least one thing had gone in his favor.
Finding a book on wyverns has been helpful. The little library actually had several of them, and by going through those, Zi Wen managed to learn far more about the beast outside than he had known before. It was an altis wyvern, a type of snow wyvern, though a far more dangerous and powerful one than the common kind, especially because it could fly easily even at extreme altitudes.
That was not the only thing he learned.
According to the book, the wyvern outside might not even be fully grown yet. Adults of its kind were supposed to have red scales, and this one did not. Which meant that, despite its size and strength, it was still considered young. A terrifying thought, really, considering that “young” might still mean it had already lived for centuries.
The book also helped with something more useful.
It described the anatomy of the creature in enough detail that Zi Wen could finally begin to understand what he was looking at, and it also listed the herbs most often used to treat injuries in an altis wyvern. Unfortunately, he had none of them.
So after that, he had gone hunting through the shelves again, this time looking for books on herbs and beast healing in general.
Eventually he found one that helped.
From there, he managed to piece together a rough method for making a medicinal paste that could at least help a flying beast recover from severe wounds. It was not ideal. In truth, it was only the best he could do with whatever herbs happened to be sitting in his spatial ring. Still, it was better than nothing.
So he got to work.
He ground together the herbs he had, combining them carefully while feeding his own qi into the mixture to bind it into something stable. Once he had enough, he carried it outside and began applying it to the wyvern’s wounds.
That brought another problem with it. The beast was enormous.
The amount of paste Zi Wen could make with his current materials was not.
So every time he used a batch, he had to be painfully careful. He could not afford to waste even a little of it. He would apply one mixture to the wounds he judged most urgent, then hurry back inside to prepare another batch meant for a different kind of injury, only to go back out and repeat the process again.
The wings took the most time.
There was too much bleeding where they joined the body, and Zi Wen ended up spending hours on that alone, carefully applying the paste while trying not to waste any of it. Fortunately, Whiskey helped and that surprised him a little, considering the little lunari had wanted to kill the wyvern not long ago, but in the end Zi Wen guessed Whiskey was still soft-hearted beneath all the panic and growling.
So the two of them kept at it.
Little by little, Zi Wen felt the wyvern’s breathing become steadier. Once he managed to stop most of the blood from leaking from its body, he became almost certain that it would survive.
Hopefully without deciding to eat him afterward.
But all of that had taken far too much time from the day he had been given to prepare for the final trial. By the time he was done, Zi Wen had only three hours left to go through the books in the library, and he had no real idea where he was even supposed to begin.
So in the end, he did the only thing he could.
He grabbed books at random and started reading through them as fast as possible.
One became five, then ten, then more. He flipped through dozens of volumes in a rush, but the faster he moved, the less of it truly stayed in his head. Some of the books were useful, some were dense, and half the time he felt as though the words were sliding through his mind faster than he could hold onto them.
Then, before he knew it, it happened.
Zi Wen had just been turning through a book titled “The Pale Territories” when the whole library suddenly trembled. He froze.
The walls around him shifted and turned red.
At once, the book in his hands broke apart into motes of light. Zi Wen only stared as the same thing happened to the shelves, the books upon them, and the rest of the room’s contents one after another, dissolving into drifting particles as though the whole place had only been waiting for this moment to vanish.
He stood up immediately. From his left, Whiskey let out a startled cry, clearly just as shocked as he was. For a brief instant, Zi Wen wondered whether he was about to be trapped there. But the door remained where it was, unchanged, and he let out a breath of relief at that—
Only for a cold wind to brush against the back of his neck. Zi Wen turned at once toward the wall where the words had been written before.
They were gone.
In their place, strands of wind energy had begun to gather. The air twisted and thickened there, slowly taking on a faint golden sheen. Zi Wen stood still, watching as the energy drew together into a shape. In a matter of seconds, it became the silhouette of an old man draped in long robes that seemed to brush the floor itself.
Then the figure’s golden eyes settled on him.
Zi Wen understood immediately what he was looking at.
This had to be the spirit left behind by the beast master who had designed the trial. He had heard stories before—of powerful cultivators leaving fragments of their souls behind to guard or pass on their inheritances—but hearing about such things and seeing one with his own eyes were two very different matters.
Before Zi Wen could say anything, the figure spoke.
“So,” it said, “you are the one who managed to overcome my trials and arrive before me.”
Its voice felt unnervingly close, as though it were speaking right beside his ear instead of from across the room.
Zi Wen took a moment to process the words, then nodded quickly. “Yes, I’m—uh—yes, Beast Master.”
The spirit gave a small nod and then drifted forward.
That movement alone made Zi Wen tense. Whiskey let out a startled yelp from the side, but the spirit paid neither of them much attention. It simply moved around Zi Wen in a slow circle while he stood there stiffly, not quite knowing what to do.
“You look… lanky,” the spirit said.
Zi Wen blinked.
“Your cultivation is weak.”
His face twitched.
“You do not have the spirit roots of a genius.”
The spirit kept going.
One point after another, it listed everything about him that was lacking, every shortcoming it could apparently find with only a glance. Each word landed with an uncomfortable sort of precision, enough that Zi Wen felt himself shrink a little more with every sentence, but he held his tongue and let the spirit finish.
Only when it finally fell silent did he speak.
“Despite my shortcomings,” Zi Wen said, trying to keep his voice steady, “I still want to do my best in your final trial, Beast Master.”
The spirit blinked. For the first time, it actually looked slightly surprised. Then it laughed.
Zi Wen frowned, raising an eyebrow. He could not tell what was supposed to be funny, and after a second he could not help but ask, “What?”
The spirit looked at him again with those same golden eyes. “You do not understand, lad,” it said. “There is no final trial.”
The words made him stare, and the spirit’s smile widened slightly.
“You have already passed it.”
***
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