The dark, muddy tea had dried, leaving a permanent, ugly purple ring stained deep into the porous stone of the table. It looked exactly like a bruise.
Xia Ruoyue had finished the cup. She hadn't broken eye contact once while swallowing the boiling garbage water. Then she had simply stood up, melted backward into the ambient shadows of the courtyard masonry, and vanished. She didn't say she was sparing my life. She didn't pledge undying loyalty. She just left the empty cup and disappeared.
That was six hours ago.
Now, the morning sun was dragging itself violently over the eastern ridge, casting long, pale light across the ruined sect. I was still sitting on the stone bench. My left thigh was a dull, continuous throb of inflamed, torn muscle, punishing me for every adrenaline spike of the last forty-eight hours. My mouth tasted like stale copper.
"Master!"
Zhou Bao's voice cracked across the courtyard, entirely devoid of any morning dignity.
I didn't jump. I just slowly turned my heavy head.
Zhou Bao was standing near the shattered outer gate, holding a heavy bamboo scroll wrapped in dark red silk. He was holding it away from his body, staring at the wood as if it were a live, ticking explosive.
"A courier from the Crimson Scale Sect just threw this at the gate," Zhou Bao stammered, waddling quickly toward me. His round face was pale, his eyes darting frantically. "He didn't even knock. He just threw it into the dirt and rode away."
I held out my hand.
Zhou Bao placed the heavy scroll into my palm. It felt unnaturally dense. The silk tie was sealed with a massive glob of dark crimson wax, stamped with Elder Zhao Feng's personal signet.
I broke the wax with my thumb. The sharp snap echoed loudly in the quiet morning air.
I unrolled the bamboo slats.
I didn't read it with my own eyes. I couldn't. The calligraphy was archaic and dense. Instead, the moment my eyes tracked the characters, Wei Liang's inherited memories surged forward to translate it. The forced integration of a dead man's legal education felt like an ice pick driving slowly into my left temple. I squeezed my eyes shut for a microsecond, swallowing the sudden wave of nausea.
It wasn't a threat of violence. It was much, much worse.
"Regional Territorial Inspection Law," I said. My aristocratic baritone was perfectly smooth, masking the fact that my stomach had just dropped entirely out of my body.
"Inspection?" Zhou Bao squeaked.
"A formal legal mechanism," I said, staring blankly at the black ink. "Elder Zhao Feng is officially invoking his right as a neighboring primary sect to audit Azure Void's operational status. He claims we are a dissolved entity harboring unauthorized, demonic cultivation methods."
I rolled the scroll back up. The bamboo clicked against itself.
"He's coming back in three days. If I lock the gates and refuse him entry, the Kingdom's laws consider it an admission of guilt. He gets Imperial backing to tear the walls down with an army."
Zhou Bao swallowed so hard I heard the wet click in his throat. "But... but Master, we don't have unauthorized cultivation methods. You don't have any Qi at all!"
"That," I said quietly, looking at the broken wax in my palm, "is exactly what he intends to prove to the magistrate."
I stood up. My torn hamstring complained bitterly, shooting a hot wire of pain up my leg, but I ignored it, smoothing the front of my dark robes. "Clean the courtyard, Zhou Bao. I need to think."
I walked away from the boy, heading toward the dusty sanctuary of the Sect Master's quarters. I closed the heavy wooden door behind me, letting the iron latch drop with a solid, definitive thud.
The absolute moment I was alone, my locked knees gave out. I slumped heavily into the wooden chair behind the desk and buried my face in both of my hands, digging the heels of my palms into my eye sockets until I saw static.
Three days, my brain screamed, fixating on the sheer, impossible absurdity of the timeline. He realized he couldn't murder us yesterday without causing a political incident with the Glacier Sect, so he went home and filed a zoning complaint. He's weaponizing property law.
"Old Geezer," I thought into the dark architecture of my mind.
"I am here, boy," the ancient god replied. His voice didn't carry its usual simmering irritation. It sounded alert. Calculating.
"You told me the Heavenly Dao executioner was coming within a month," I said, mentally trying to organize the colliding timetables of my impending doom. "It's been two weeks. Zhao Feng gets here in three days with an Imperial writ. Are we expecting God's assassin to drop out of the sky during a property inspection?"
A long, heavy silence stretched in my skull. It lasted three full seconds.
"The Heavenly Dao does not execute," Old Geezer said finally, with the strained, deliberate patience of an astrophysicist explaining gravity to a concussed pigeon. "It dispatches."
I lowered my hands from my face. I stared at the wood grain of the desk. "What does that mean?"
"It means," the ancient god sighed, the sound vibrating in my teeth, "that the dispatch requires confirmation of the bond count. It requires a threat-level assessment. It requires a resource allocation review before an executioner of the appropriate realm is formally assigned. The shadow formation you saw over the vault? That was merely the confirmation step."
I blinked. The dust motes danced slowly in the shaft of morning light cutting through my broken window.
"Are you telling me," I whispered aloud to the empty room, "that Heaven has paperwork?"
"The executioner assignment comes after the threat crosses a specific mathematical threshold," Old Geezer continued, completely ignoring my tone. "Which you have not yet crossed. The cosmos requires order. It requires documentation. It runs on divine bureaucracy."
I leaned back in the creaking wooden chair. I stared at the dark, lacquered ceiling.
The most terrifying, omnipotent, omniscient cosmic force in the universe was currently being slowed down by administrative processing times.
"This is somehow the most believable thing that has ever happened to me," I muttered. A slightly hysterical, genuine laugh bubbled up in the back of my throat. It tasted entirely like ash.
"Do not find this reassuring," Old Geezer warned, his voice suddenly dropping an octave, carrying the sheer, suffocating weight of three thousand years of genocide. "When they finish the paperwork, they will be very, very thorough."
"Right. One apocalypse at a time," I said, aggressively rubbing the back of my neck. "We survive Zhao Feng first."
I closed my eyes and forcefully pulled Wei Liang's legal memories forward again. It felt like digging my bare hands through a box of broken glass. I sifted through the bureaucratic structures of the Mortal Realm. Zhao Feng was using the law as a weapon. If you fight a legal weapon with a physical sword, you become a rebel, and he gets to call the Imperial army.
I needed a legal shield.
There.
Buried in a dense, archaic sub-clause of the Regional Sect Governance Charter, floating in the dead man's mind. Unilateral annexation or dissolution of a sect territory cannot be executed if an official observer from a High-Tier Sect is present and currently utilizing the grounds for documented research or diplomatic posting.
I stopped rubbing my neck.
I stood up, adjusted my sleeves, and walked out of the quarters.
I found Shen Yuebing in the eastern wing of the courtyard.
She was standing perfectly still in front of the dead, rotting willow tree. She wasn't doing anything. She was just existing, her immaculate white robes rejecting the ambient dirt of the sect. The air in a ten-foot radius around her was uncomfortably crisp.
I walked up and stood beside her. The sudden drop in temperature made my torn thigh seize up instantly, a deep, grinding ache in the muscle. I didn't look at her. I looked at the dead tree.
"Zhao Feng is returning in three days," I said quietly.
Yuebing didn't turn her head. Her pale blue eyes remained locked on the splintered bark. "I am aware. I heard the courier."
"He invoked the Regional Inspection Law," I continued, keeping my voice perfectly level. No begging. No desperation. "He intends to declare the sect defunct and claim the territory with Imperial backing. I can't stop him with force without committing treason."
Silence hung between us. The ambient temperature dropped another two degrees. My breath plumed white.
"There's a countermeasure," I said to the tree. "If an official observer from a High-Tier Sect is present on a documented, extended posting, the local authority can't unilaterally dissolve the sect."
I stopped talking.
I had stated the problem. I had stated the solution. I didn't ask her. I couldn't. The Soul Bond array punished transactional manipulation with organ failure, but more than that, I simply refused to beg her to stand between me and an army for a second time. If she stayed, it had to be her choice.
Yuebing stood there for a long, agonizing moment.
She didn't sigh. She didn't look at me. She simply reached into the wide, flowing sleeve of her pristine white robe.
Her pale, slender fingers produced a folded piece of heavy, expensive parchment.
She held it out toward me.
I looked down at it. It was addressed to the Elder Council of the Glacier Immortal Sect. It was sealed with a heavy stamp of pale blue wax.
I reached out and took the letter. My thumb brushed the seal.
The wax was completely, utterly cold. It had been set for hours.
"I will inform my sect of my extended posting," Yuebing said. Her voice was flat, carrying the melodic chime of a silver bell striking ice. "The ambient Qi environment here is... uniquely suited to my structural research."
I stared at the cold blue wax in my hand.
She hadn't written it after hearing the courier scream at the gate. The wax was stone hard. She had written it last night. After she stood by my side against thirty men. After she realized the Imperial politics involved.
She had written it before I even knew I needed to ask.
I looked at the side of her face. The perfect, glacial profile. The absolute lack of any micro-expression.
"Thank you," I said softly.
"Do not misunderstand, Sect Master Wei," Yuebing replied, finally turning her pale blue eyes to meet mine. They were completely devoid of human warmth, but there was an intense, piercing clarity in them that made my chest tighten. "I am here for the research."
"Of course," I agreed smoothly. "The research."
She turned and walked away, her silk slippers making absolutely no sound against the cracked stones. The temperature in the courtyard slowly began to rise as she left, the summer heat creeping back in.
Before my locked knees could even think about buckling in relief, the cold blue interface of the system panel snapped open.
[ SOUL CULTIVATION BOND ARRAY — STATUS UPDATE ]
[ Resonance Deepening ][ Target: Shen Yuebing — Stage 0.7 / 5.0 ]
[ Array Note: Structural alignment detected. ]
The phantom spike in my head throbbed.
"She lied to her own Elder Council for you," Old Geezer noted in the dark. He sounded quietly, genuinely fascinated. "A Glacier Sect prodigy anchoring herself to a sinking ship out of pure, unadulterated stubbornness."
I didn't answer him. I just stood in the morning heat, my torn leg screaming, my hands shaking slightly.
I ran my thumb over the cold blue wax of the letter again, feeling the sharp, rigid edges of the seal pressed into the parchment.