Interlude: Shen Ruoxi
The eastern sanctuary held the silence of places that had forgotten how to make noise.
Shen Ruoxi stood at the window of the meditation chamber, watching snow fall through mountain darkness. The peaks beyond were invisible, swallowed by clouds and winter, but she knew their shapes by heart. She had walked these slopes three hundred years ago, when the sanctuary was new and her brother had first suggested she might one day need a place to die.
Or be reborn, she thought. Though the distinction seems increasingly academic.
The chamber was simple by her standards. Stone walls, formation-reinforced. A meditation platform at the center, surrounded by channels that would soon hold Wang Ben's array. Incense that hadn't been lit in decades. A single window facing east, toward a sunrise she might not live to see.
She pressed her palm against the cold glass and felt nothing.
Eight hundred and forty-seven years. That was how long she had existed in this form, this body that appeared young and moved like water and killed with the casual efficiency of a predator who had long since stopped counting prey. Eight hundred and forty-seven years of cultivation, of advancement, of becoming something more than the girl who had first touched qi in a village that no longer existed.
And for the last sixty-three of those years, she had been... this. Peak mortal shedding. The absolute ceiling of what the mortal body could achieve before the soul itself had to transform.
Sixty-three years of waiting.
Why now?
The question had followed her for months, ever since Wuyan had found the boy with the impossible knowledge and she had realized that protection might finally be possible. Why now, when she had waited so long? Why not wait longer, until certainty replaced hope?
The answer was simple, and she hated it.
Because waiting was killing her in ways that had nothing to do with cultivation.
She had known other cultivators who reached the peak and stopped. Peak core formation elders who spent centuries at their ceiling, comfortable in their power, unwilling to risk what they had for what they might become. Mortal shedding masters who looked at the nascent soul threshold and decided that survival was preferable to transcendence.
They lived long lives. Comfortable lives. They accumulated wealth and influence and disciples who admired their wisdom.
And they died, eventually, having never truly faced themselves.
Ruoxi had watched them. Had even pitied them, in the way a predator pities prey that refuses to run. They were safe, yes. But they were also finished. Complete in the worst possible sense, their potential crystallized into a form that would never change again.
She refused to become them.
The thought stirred something in her chest, something that might have been fear if she allowed herself to name it. She had killed mortal shedding cultivators. Had faced nascent soul opponents and survived through speed and cunning and the absolute unwillingness to die. But this was different. This was not combat, where her instincts could save her.
This was transformation. And transformation meant becoming something she couldn't predict.
Or becoming nothing at all.
One in three. Those were the odds, across all of recorded history. One in three cultivators who attempted the nascent soul breakthrough survived to speak of what they'd faced. The other two died, or worse, emerged as something that made death seem merciful.
She had watched three attempts in her lifetime. Had stood where Wuyan would stand tomorrow, watching cultivators she respected project their consciousness beyond the boundaries of flesh and reach for something greater.
None of them had returned.
The first had been a woman named Liu Qingfeng, seven hundred years ago.
Ruoxi had been young then, barely into core formation, still learning what her power meant. Liu Qingfeng had been her teacher's teacher, an ancient figure of absolute authority who had seemed as eternal as the mountains themselves.
The breakthrough had lasted three days. For three days, Liu Qingfeng's body had floated in the center of a protection array that now seemed laughably primitive, her face peaceful, her cultivation signature steady.
Then she had screamed.
Not a sound of pain. Pain, Ruoxi understood. Pain was physical, manageable, something the body could process and the mind could endure. This had been something else entirely. Terror, perhaps. Recognition of something that shouldn't exist. A sound that had nothing to do with the woman they had known and everything to do with whatever she had encountered in that space between flesh and transcendence.
Her body had burned from the inside out. Meridians rupturing, spiritual energy turning to poison, the delicate structure of her cultivation collapsing in ways that defied the laws they had been taught. By the time Ruoxi's master had reached her, there was nothing left but ash and the lingering echo of a scream that haunted Ruoxi's dreams for decades.
Inner demons, the elders had said afterward. She failed to overcome her inner demons.
Ruoxi had believed them. Had spent the next two centuries preparing her mind, examining her conscience, confronting every doubt and fear and shame that might crystallize into resistance during the breakthrough.
Then she had watched the second attempt, and the third. Had seen cultivators with spotless minds and clear consciences die screaming, while others burdened with guilt and regret somehow survived. The pattern made no sense if inner demons were the threat.
Unless the threat wasn't inner at all.
She turned from the window and moved to the meditation platform, her robes trailing behind her like dark water. The array channels were empty now, waiting for the formation work that would arrive with the boy and his father tomorrow. Soon this room would be alive with protective energy, barriers against threats that most cultivators didn't believe existed.
Wang Ben believed they existed.
That was the part she couldn't quite understand, the piece that didn't fit the pattern of a seventeen-year-old formation prodigy from a minor frontier clan. He knew things. Not guessed, not theorized. Knew, with the certainty of someone who had studied texts that shouldn't exist and learned truths that the cultivation world had forgotten.
Where did you learn such things, little formation master?
She had asked him once, obliquely, testing the waters of his secret. He had deflected with the skill of someone who had practiced the deflection many times, and she had let him keep his mystery because mysteries were entertaining and because she needed his array more than she needed his truth.
But she wondered.
Wuyan wondered too. Her brother had been watching the boy with increasing intensity, probing his knowledge through conversations that seemed casual but were anything but. Wang Ben navigated those conversations like a dancer on a blade's edge, revealing enough to satisfy curiosity without ever quite explaining how he knew what he knew.
He's hiding something, Wuyan had said last month, his voice carrying the particular frustration of someone who wasn't used to being unable to solve puzzles. Something significant. His knowledge has gaps in interesting places, as if he's learned from a source that was itself incomplete.
Does it matter? she had asked. If his array works, does it matter where the knowledge came from?
It matters, Wuyan had replied, because if I can't understand him, I can't predict him. And I don't invest in things I can't predict.
But he had invested anyway. Had watched Wang Ben build something that might save her life, had provided resources and protection and the weight of Phantom Gate reputation. Because whatever Wang Ben was, whatever secret he carried, he was also genuine in ways that their world rarely produced.
He treated her survival as something that mattered. Not as entertainment, not as investment, not as the casual concern of someone who would mourn briefly and move on. He had spent months of his life building protection for a woman he barely knew, because she had asked and because refusing to help was not something he seemed capable of.
How sentimental, she thought, and felt her lips curve into something that wasn't quite a smile. How terribly, wonderfully sentimental.
The night deepened around the sanctuary, and Ruoxi found herself counting enemies.
It was an old habit, one she had developed in the centuries when her power made her a target for everyone who wanted what she had or feared what she might become. Eight hundred years of existence meant eight hundred years of conflicts, of rivals eliminated and threats neutralized and alliances that had soured into enmity.
The Azure Silk Sect had wanted her dead since she crippled their young master three centuries ago. The remnants of the Iron Fang Sect, whose elder she had humiliated a century ago, still sent assassins every few decades. There were the families of cultivators she had destroyed in combat, the factions whose plans she had disrupted by existing, the countless small grudges that accumulated over a lifetime stretched across centuries.
If she died during the breakthrough, some of them would celebrate.
If she survived...
She let the thought trail off, because the calculation was too complex and too irrelevant. Tomorrow she would project her consciousness into a space where physical power meant nothing, where her eight hundred years of combat experience would be useless against threats that didn't fight in ways she understood. Her enemies could not reach her there. But something else could.
Something else always did.
Inner demons, the cultivation world called them. Psychological constructs, manifestations of doubt and fear, enemies created by the cultivator's own mind.
Ruoxi didn't believe that anymore.
She had seen too many clear-minded cultivators die. Had felt, in the moment before Liu Qingfeng screamed, something that wasn't psychological at all. A presence. A hunger. Something that noticed the cultivator's projection and moved toward it with purpose that had nothing to do with inner conflict.
Wang Ben's array was designed against external threats. Not inner demons, but external predators. The boy had never explicitly said this, had wrapped his explanations in terminology that sounded like enhanced traditional protection, but Ruoxi understood what he was really building.
A wall against things that came from outside.
You know the truth, she thought, not for the first time. Somehow, impossibly, you know what actually kills us during breakthrough. And you're trying to stop it.
The thought should have been comforting. Instead, it raised questions she wasn't sure she wanted answered.
If the threat was external, if things from beyond reality hunted cultivators during their most vulnerable moment, then what else was out there? What other truths had the cultivation world forgotten or denied? And what did it mean that a seventeen-year-old boy from a frontier city understood things that nascent soul masters had spent millennia failing to discover?
Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow you can ask him. If you survive.
Footsteps in the corridor. Familiar presence, carefully controlled, the weight of millennia compressed into something that could pass for human.
"You're brooding."
Wuyan appeared in the doorway, his expression carrying its usual blend of amusement and assessment. He was dressed simply, robes suitable for travel rather than ceremony, though on him even simple cloth seemed to carry authority.
"I'm contemplating," Ruoxi corrected. "There's a difference."
"The difference being that contemplation sounds more dignified?"
"Precisely."
He moved into the chamber, his cultivation signature barely perceptible despite the weight of power he carried. Nearly three thousand years old, her brother. The only family she had left, the only person in the world who remembered the village where they had been born, the life they had lived before cultivation transformed them into something else.
"The boy will arrive tomorrow morning," Wuyan said. "His father accompanies him. The array is ready for installation."
"I know."
"The location is secure. I've walked the perimeter myself. Nothing approaches this sanctuary without my knowledge."
"I know that too."
Wuyan was silent for a moment, studying her with eyes that had seen civilizations rise and fall. Then: "You're afraid."
It wasn't a question. Ruoxi didn't bother to deny it.
"Terrified," she admitted. "Is that what you wanted to hear?"
"I wanted to hear the truth." He moved to stand beside her, looking out at the same darkness she had been watching. "I can count on one hand the number of times you've admitted fear in the past five centuries."
"The past five centuries didn't include me attempting something that kills two out of three cultivators who try it."
"You could wait."
"I could." She turned to face him, letting him see what she rarely showed anyone. The exhaustion beneath the predator's mask. The weight of decades spent at a ceiling that felt increasingly like a cage. "I could wait another century. Another five centuries. I could remain exactly as I am until something finally kills me, and I could die having never known if I was capable of becoming more."
"That's not..."
"It is." Her voice was soft but absolute. "That's exactly what it is. I've watched cultivators stagnate, Wuyan. Watched them choose safety over growth, comfort over risk. They survive, yes. But they stop living. They become monuments to what they were instead of explorers of what they might be."
"You're not like them."
"Not yet. But I could be." She looked back at the window, at the snow still falling through darkness. "Sixty-three years I've been at this peak. Sixty-three years of telling myself I was preparing, that the time wasn't right, that I needed better protection or clearer circumstances. How many more years before the waiting becomes permanent? How many more decades before I stop being someone who's going to attempt breakthrough and become someone who never will?"
Wuyan didn't answer. He didn't need to. They both knew the truth of it.
"Wang Ben's array is the best protection I've ever seen," Ruoxi continued. "I don't understand how he designed it, and I don't care. What matters is that it works. What matters is that for the first time in sixty-three years, I have a genuine chance of surviving what's coming."
"One in three odds."
"Better than what I had before." She smiled, and for once there was no predator in it. Just a woman facing something she had avoided for too long. "I'm doing this, Wuyan. Tomorrow morning, I'm walking into that array and projecting my consciousness into whatever waits beyond. And when I come back, I'll either be nascent soul or I'll be dead."
"Or worse."
"Yes." She acknowledged it without flinching. "Or worse. But at least I'll have tried. At least I'll know that I didn't let fear decide my fate."
Wuyan was quiet for a long moment. Then he reached out and touched her shoulder, a gesture so rare that it startled her.
"I'll be watching," he said. "Every moment. If something goes wrong..."
"You can't help me in there. You know that."
"I know." His voice carried something she almost never heard from him. Genuine fear, carefully controlled. "But I'll be watching anyway."
She covered his hand with hers, just for a moment. Then the moment passed, and they were Shen siblings again, ancient and dangerous and utterly alone in a world that had long since forgotten what they'd lost.
"Get some rest," Wuyan said, withdrawing. "Tomorrow you attempt the impossible."
"Tomorrow I attempt the necessary," she corrected. "The impossible is just what it looks like from outside."
He left without another word, and Ruoxi returned to her vigil at the window.
The snow continued to fall.
Tomorrow, everything would change.
Or tomorrow, everything would end.
Either way, she was done waiting.
END OF CHAPTER 79