Chapter 241 |
Through the Wind Chime, the people of the Clear Wind Dao exchanged tense, hushed words. Xia Si was the first to put the question into words.
"Just how strong are the Mistborn?"
"No one knows," Wang Hongshi replied, his voice heavy. "From everything we've gathered, Mistborn exert absolute suppression over every significant figure we've ever encountered. No flukes. No upset victories."
"I'm afraid the Dao Master is in real danger this time..." Su Yaping said.
He stood on the roof of his residence, staring toward the Clear Wind Dao Academy. The aura fluctuations rolling in from that direction were immense yet eerily muted—the kind of stillness that carried its own dread. He ignored the concubine calling to him from beneath the eaves and spoke through the Wind Chime.
"Within the Dao Academy, I may be the only one who has actually seen a Mistborn act."
"What was it like?"
"Can the Dao Master win?"
"Senior Su—please, stop drawing it out."
Su Yaping sifted through memory. "What I witnessed was Xingdao City's City Lord, Song Xingdao, taking action. A Blood Ancestor under his authority had turned on the city—bit the hand that fed him, went mad with mind-spirit corruption, and tore apart a section of the Moon Tower. He was a high-ranking Blood Ancestor. You all know how they work: the more experts they devour, the stronger they grow. I'll say plainly—if I had faced that Blood Ancestor myself, I wouldn't have survived a single exchange. But..."
"But what?" Xia Si pressed.
Su Yaping closed his eyes. His body trembled, almost imperceptibly. "I can't fully describe what I felt in that moment." His face had gone pale—the look of a man still haunted by something he'd seen years ago.
"What happened? Tell us—they're about to start fighting over there!" Qiu Yiren's voice cut through, urgent and fraying. Among them all, she was clearly the most frantic.
"I don't know. All I saw was that Blood Ancestor—in full view of everyone present—instantly become someone else."
"What do you mean?" Xia Si frowned, standing rigid in her room with her fists pressed closed.
"I mean, his face. His body. In a single instant, he took the complete appearance of Xingdao's City Lord, Song Xingdao," Su Yaping said, his voice dropping. "Then the City Lord told everyone it had been a joke, turned around, and went back to his palace to rest. And afterward... everyone below the rank of Palace Master appeared to simply forget that Blood Ancestor had ever existed. His direct subordinates. His own family. All of them—as if he had never been."
"Then did that Blood Ancestor truly exist?" Wang Hongshi asked despite himself.
"He did. Because I still carry a Treasure Relic he once gave me. It still holds the faint signature of his power aura." A long pause. "He was my closest friend. My brother. That is one of the reasons I left Xingdao."
"So even you don't know the full extent of what Mistborn can do," Xia Si said quietly. It wasn't quite a question.
"I only know a fraction of it," Su Yaping continued. "Mistborn each possess a distinct and devastating form of Evil Energy—extreme speed, undying bodies, the ability to devour external matter to grow stronger. Beyond that, I can only guess. Almost all of them hold The Call and conventional martial arts in contempt. They don't practice techniques or secret arts in any recognizable form."
"They don't practice martial arts or secret arts?" Xia Si's brow furrowed. "How is that possible?"
"They're moving! They're moving—come on, everyone, keep up!" someone burst out through the Wind Chime.
"No one moves!" Wang Hongshi's voice sliced through the clamor. "We're too weak. Getting close would only distract the Dao Master—or worse, give her a hostage. Stay where you are and wait for word. Trust the Dao Master. Even if he can't win, his speed is unlike anything we've ever seen. He can run if he has to. As long as he's alive, there's a path back."
The anxiety in the channel eased, just slightly.
Right. The Dao Master's speed was in a class of its own. Even if he couldn't take her down—couldn't he simply outrun her? Alive was all that mattered. Alive meant another chance.
The people of the Clear Wind Dao fell into a subdued, watchful quiet, their attention drawn to the direction where Lin Hui and Tuyue had gone—out toward the sea.
…
Atop the Moon Tower that speared the clouds above Black Cloud's Inner City Core Zone, two tall figures stood in silence, looking out across the distant Outer Ring toward the coastline—watching the direction Lin Hui and Tuyue had taken.
"Third Sister still hasn't buried what happened back then." The lean, well-proportioned man holding a silver folding fan wore an easy smile. "But Tuyue really is bold, I'll grant her that. Wandering around the outskirts is one thing—actually coming into the Inner City to make trouble is another."
"And yet Ning Yue's been dead for years, and he still has two women at each other's throats over him." The other man was broader, solidly built, and shook his head with a slow, bemused grin. "Say what you will—the man lived well."
"All the same, this can't go on forever." The Second Brother sighed, turning his fan idly. "We need to find some way to make Third Sister let Ning Yue go. It's been so many years, and Corruption is drawing closer. None of us have centuries to spare anymore—why cling to the past? She doesn't even have an heir. The bloodline family she has now, she inherited from you, Eldest. That's hardly a proper arrangement."
"I've tried many things. It's not so simple." The Eldest's voice was measured. "With Third Sister, it isn't merely that she doesn't want to start a family. It runs deeper—it feels like a wound she keeps deliberately open. The person she valued most was stolen by a woman who wasn't her equal in beauty or strength. That kind of humiliation doesn't dissolve on its own."
"It can't be helped. That's what you get when your rival has no shame." The Second Brother laughed.
"Hm? That young man down there..." The Eldest's gaze sharpened. "Is he actually thinking of challenging Tuyue?"
The competing mind-spirit force fields of their Third Sister and Tuyue still blanketed the surrounding area, making it impossible to catch the details of any conversation from this distance. They had watched the three leave the Inner City, pass through the Outer City, and fly straight out over the water.
And it did, against all reason, appear that the young man called Lin Hui was preparing to fight.
"Interesting." The Eldest's curiosity kindled. "A mortal who challenges us openly—how long has it been?"
"Not as long as you'd think, actually. Sixty years ago, a top-tier Blood Ancestor tried to devour a Mistborn who was weakened and near death, believing they could absorb and replace them. Instead, they were treated as a restorative tonic—helped that Mistborn recover from several injuries, in fact."
"Cao Xuedao. Madman Cao." The Eldest's expression softened with something close to nostalgia. "I remember that one. I teased him when he was small. He told me, very seriously, that when he grew up, he intended to overturn the world's injustices and build a dynasty of his own from scratch. At the time he was nothing but the son of some minor assemblyman in the Inner Court." A quiet exhale. "Quite something."
"Here it comes." The Second Brother's tone shifted. "It's starting."
"A wager, then—how long does Lin Hui last? I say one second," the Eldest said.
"That's not fair, I was going to say one second too. You jumped in first," the Second Brother complained.
"Your own fault for being slow. Besides—given how fragile mortals are, one second is a generous estimate. A single moment of mind-spirit cognitive interference is enough to rewrite their thoughts entirely."
"Then why hasn't Tuyue simply done that already?" the Second Brother asked.
"Right..." The Eldest went still. His smile faded.
Their minds, moving at the pace thoughts move when you have lived for ten thousand years, arrived at the same conclusion almost simultaneously.
"Could it be that Tuyue genuinely cannot alter this one's cognition?" the Second Brother said slowly.
The Eldest weighed it. "It's possible. If she could, she would never have wasted weeks playing these soft, circuitous games. That's not her nature."
"Then this fight is rather more interesting than I expected," the Second Brother said.
"I'm revising my bet to two seconds," the Eldest said at once.
"Again? You jumped in again—I was going to say two seconds!" The Second Brother threw his hands up.
"Slow is slow, and there's no one else to blame. Go with three, then… Hmm?" The Eldest stopped. Something had crossed his expression—not quite puzzlement, not quite alarm. His gaze lifted and settled on the waters beyond the city's far edge.
"What is…" The Second Brother had gone equally still, staring in the same direction.
The easy amusement had left his face entirely. What replaced it was something rarer—genuine, unguarded astonishment.
…
Above the jade-green sea.
Tuyue hung in midair. Lin Hui stood on the surface of the water below her.
They faced each other across an open distance.
"This is already boring—let's finish it quickly." Tuyue stifled a yawn. "Once we're done here and back in the city, we can run a trial batch in the Deep Domain beneath the tower. Work out the optimal method, then start in earnest."
A trial batch in the Deep Domain—where a child could be brought to adulthood in a month, and the full span from conception to birth could be compressed into a single day.
In that moment, Lin Hui finally understood what the Deep Domain was truly for, as far as the Mistborn were concerned.
"Before we begin—I've never quite understood how Mistborn perceive ordinary people. Would you indulge me?" he said.
He wanted to map her thinking before anything else—to understand the patterns that drove her, so he could anticipate what came next.
The sea wind moved steadily around them. Mist rolled across the water. One above, one below—if not for the charged silence between them, they might have looked like two acquaintances sharing a quiet conversation at the edge of the world.
Swish.
Gongsun Xinlian's figure materialized in the distance, watching. The Mist did nothing to obstruct her line of sight.
This was deep-sea water, far from any coast—neither Crystal Sea nor Jade Sea, but the toxic stretch where the two converged. Strongly acidic, utterly without shipping lanes, and entirely without witnesses. It was precisely the right place for what was coming.
"Mortals?" Tuyue considered it with casual disinterest. "I don't hold any particular view of them. Mistborn were mortals once, too, so we judge by the mind. If your thinking can keep pace with ours, you earn a measure of standing in our eyes. If it can't—you're an insect. Crushable. Beneath notice." She shrugged lightly. "Was that what you wanted to hear?"
"So mind and consciousness are the only measures that matter to you."
"That's right. Now—let's be done with this." Her impatience sharpened into something faintly contemptuous. "Did you genuinely believe that defeating a Blood Ancestor qualified you to challenge us? Let me show you the distance."
She extended her right index finger, aimed it at Lin Hui, and tapped the air once—a gesture as casual as flicking dust from a sleeve.
A thread of mind-spirit force condensed from her fingertip—pure, massive, and terrifying in its compression. It crossed hundreds of meters in a fraction of an instant and arrived at Lin Hui. The force was so vast that the space around him began to buckle and smear, the air itself rippling into broad, churning swaths of multicolored light. It was nothing like the materialized crystal on a Blood Ancestor's glabella—that was a symbol, a fixed point. This was an environment. The entire volume of space enclosing Lin Hui had been transformed into a softly blazing stream of color.
It accomplished nothing.
A faint, near-transparent current of air held steady in the space before him, meeting the force head-on and turning it aside—quietly, completely, without yielding an inch.