CHAPTER
32
IN THE HEART
JIEYUAN
—∞—
That was the second Fusongshi he’d killed. First an inner disciple, now a core disciple.
In a way, it was like he was moving up in the world. Maybe too fast, though. At this rate, he’d be dealing with a core elder next, and he wasn’t even halfway through Redsoul yet.
Jieyuan didn’t stand on ceremony. He crouched down and went about collecting the woman’s belongings. With Weiming, and Sunqiu, he’d at last had a measure of respect for them, as fellow cultivators who’d faced and endured the Pains–but while he did, in a way, appreciate the core disciple’s industriousness in tracking him down, her threats of torture hadn’t exactly endeared her to him.
He was quick about it. The woman didn’t look like she’d been lying about following him in secret, but he didn’t want to take any chances.
Most of it was fairly standard fare. Armor, weapons, none of which any better or preferable to those he already had, courtesy of Weiming, so into the woman’s glyph-stretch pouch they went. He found a skillseed on her chest, and in one of her inner pockets, he found a pair of tenth-sign talismans just like the ones Meiyao had given him.
The skillseed went into the pouch, but the talismans he tucked into his robes for easy access. The woman also had a tenth-sign Redsoul ring on her with a spirit-song he didn’t recognize, but he couldn’t really spare the time to puzzle it out, so he stored it away with everything else. Inside the pouch were a couple of jade books, but after a brief skim he found nothing worthy of note. Most important of all was the cloudcraft he found wrapped around her wrist in bracelet form, which he immediately bonded and donned.
Standing back up, Jieyuan tossed the woman’s glyph-stretch pouch inside his, turned around, and continued on his way. If he hadn’t been in a hurry before, he was now. He’d be getting his business here done as fast as he could, and then he was heading straight back to the sect.
The woman had been a core disciple, so she’d have definitely been important in the Fusongshi Clan—and from how she’d talked of Sunqiu, she was likely of the core bloodline. If somehow the Fusongshi found out about him, then they’d be out for blood. They’d been trying to off him even before he’d killed Sunqiu. Killing Sunqiu should’ve only made matters worse, and now that he’d murdered a core disciple of theirs, they would be particularly committed to seeing him dead if they somehow got wind of it.
Really, if it weren’t for Meiyao and Daojue, he wouldn’t even be returning to the sect. Revolution, the woman had said. Gleaming Nobles’ Revolution. Whatever that was—and Jieyuan could make a guess or two—he wanted no part of that. The Gleaming Stone Sect should’ve been a stepping stone. A brief stopover on his way up the cabal ladder. He already got into plenty of trouble on his own, thank you very much.
He’d chosen to follow Daojue and Meiyao around because he reckoned they were part of something greater. A conspiracy in a Redsoul sect wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind. Whatever he stood to gain from getting involved in this wouldn’t matter much, because soon he wouldn’t be a redsoul anymore, and pretty much everything he had in his glyph-stretch pouch now would be rendered worthless. Still, he was in for the long haul, and if this was what he had to deal with, then he’d pull through.
The stretch of forest ahead didn’t look any different from the rest of the Fatebloom Woods. Had it not been for the woman’s reaction, he wouldn’t have even known he was now past the boundary of the distracter field. Although supposedly this area should be safe, he still kept his wits about him. The Yikongwei had been awfully vague about what exactly lay at the Heartseat.
He walked for about a minute before he arrived at a clearing, the trees around him opening up in an almost perfect circle.
Jieyuan didn’t take a single step forward, seized by dazed incomprehension.
This was the Fatebloom Woods. The Gleamstone Forest was many, many miles away.
So, pray tell, what in the Heavens was a gleamstone statue doing here?
In the center of the clearing, next to what looked like a small, half-grown stump of a trunk of a fatebloom tree, stood the crystalline form of a man facing up, holding a sword in his right hand, pointing at the skies.
The statue was directly across him, its front facing him, and Jieyuan could see the man’s expression. The gleamstone was warped in a visage of rage, and the man had his mouth open, like he was mid-speech. Jieyuan could almost hear him—a challenge, or maybe a vow. Whatever it was the man spoke—had been speaking—was of defiance.
It was like a moment frozen in time. A final stand stretched forever.
“Well, then.” Jieyuan stepped into the clearing, slowly, eying the crystallized man warily, confused. It seemed like though he was done with the Gleamstone Forest, the Gleamstone Forest wasn’t quite done with him yet. “This is curious.”
Further behind the man, closer to the trees, was a small log cabin. Golden, made from fatebloom wood, but Jieyuan only gave it a passing glance before returning his attention to the man. As the gleamstone caught the morning sunlight, it gleamed in a thousand different hues, and as Jieyuan approached the colors seemed to shift and blend and mix in a pretty close approximation to what he reckoned a rainbow turned solid would look like.
It was clearly gleamstone Jieyuan was looking at it, but it was unlike any form of it he’d come across before. All the others tended to have a predominant tone—three, at the most. In Protector Yuanzhi’s case, that color had been violet. The crystallized man, though, seemed to gleam with all colors—and that was all colors—equally. The gleamstone was also clearer, more translucent.
Jieyuan heard a dim, faint thumping sound. It got stronger and clearer as he approached, but he couldn’t tell where it came from. It was when he was only a couple feet away, still studying the crystallized man, that he happened to see, out of the corner of his eye, the top of the stump beside the man.
Or rather, what was on it. In it.
The half-grown fatebloom tree was about of height with the man’s waist, and its top was caved in, concave, bowl-like. And lying on top of it was a heart. A beating heart.
It was gold in color, streaked with green veins. At the top was a crown of crimson, thick, tubular blood vessels. Under the sunlight, it seemed to glow as much as the gleamstone statue right beside it.
For the second time in about as many minutes, Jieyuan found himself shocked into stillness.
The Heartland. That was what the Yikongwei called the Fatebloom Woods. The Heartseat. That was what they called the center of the woods, where he was currently at. Heart. He’d assumed that they’d used Heart in the metaphorical sense. As in, something important to them. Something dear to them.
“A literal heart,” Jieyuan murmured. It was about the right shape and size for a human heart. A little smaller than two fists held together, looking like a fleshy, slightly oval clump of flesh. Except it came in the color palette of the fatebloom woods—gold, red, and green—and seemed to be doing a fairly good job beating on its own, outside a body.
The faint thumping he heard was its beating. Evenly, rhythmically, steadily. One, two. One, two. As far as he knew, though, hearts beat to pump blood, and there didn’t seem to be any of that going on around. Though he could detect the tangy, metallic scent of blood wafting up from the Heart. Faintly, but it was there.
This close, he should’ve been able to sense both the heart and the statue with his soulsense, but neither registered to it. Since both the statue and the heart had to be chromal, that could only mean they were above Redsoul.
He shifted his gaze from the heart to the statue, then back to the heart. His soulsense was of no help here, and further staring didn’t seem likely to unravel their mysteries.
The crystallized man was probably the Yikongwei Founder. How he’d ended up this way was a mystery, but it might be that he took an ill-fated trip to the Gleamstone Depths like Protector Yuanzhi did. The problem with that theory was that he’d been working under the assumption that the Yikongwei Founder was at Violetsoul. And if he’d still ended up that way, then the Gleamstone Depths were far more terrifying than he’d previously thought.
Studying the man more closely, he found that the supposed Yikongwei Founder looked young. It was hard to tell for certain, what with how he was made from gleamstone now, but looking at the crystal lines of the man’s face and trying to imagine them on living flesh, he would’ve put him in his early twenties, if not younger still. Handsome, too, in a sharp, intense way, though he wasn’t sure how much of it was the man’s defiant expression as he stared up at the skies. They were also about the same height, with similar builds.
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As for the heart… Jieyuan circled the trunk, looking at it from different angles. It was clearly something important to the Yikongwei Clan. But what was it? Humans didn’t have spirit-shadows. When cultivators died, in the absence of their soul and aura, their bodies became mundane again. And this was definitely a human heart, or at least it used to be. The question, then, was whose heart it was and what it was supposed to be now.
Finding nothing else—everything the man had on him had been converted into gleamstone and fused into his body—Jieyuan made his way over to the golden cabin.
It was a small, simple cottage. As he drew closer, though, he found that it wasn’t a standard log cabin like he’d thought it was—or at least as standard as a log cabin could be, when it was made from chromal wood. Because while it was made of wood, it wasn’t made of logs. Rather, the cabin was made entirely out of one, unbroken piece of wood. And it wasn’t as if it’d been carved out of a gigantic fatebloom tree, either. There were no signs of it being cut. No sharp edges, no signs of cutting or trimming. It was smooth, like it’d simply grown that way out of the ground.
Standing in front of it, looking at its base, where it met the ground, that impression was reinforced. Barely visible, stretching out from underneath the cabin and burrowing into the ground, were emerald-green roots, like the roots of fatebloom trees. Its spirit-shadow was at fifth-sign Redsoul, too, exactly like a fatebloom tree.
“Sure,” Jieyuan said. After the gleamstone statue and the heart, a tree grown like a cabin was… quaint, at best.
The cabin didn’t have a door, just two small steps in front of the open doorway. He climbed them, pausing at the entrance. In the middle of the cabin, there was a small, raised block of wood, growing directly out of the floor and half-lit by the sunlight coming from the doorway. Lying next to it was a small pile of jade books.
Detecting nothing dangerous and hoping that was indeed the case—because if there were protections or traps inside, he probably wouldn’t have been able to sense them with his soulsense, being at Redsoul—he walked inside, to the stack of jade books and picked one up.
Like all jade books, it was just at first-sign Redsoul—pretty much the first thing, besides fatebloom wood, that was perceptible to his soulsense in the Heartseat.
Channeling chroma inside it, text appeared in his mind’s eye, and he quickly scanned it.
His brows furrowed as he was met with lines of warped, barely discernible text. No—it wasn’t like Yuanzhi’s jade slip. Those hadn’t been intelligible, but that was because they were in the Liangshibai code. He had still been able to easily visualize them.
This was different. He couldn’t even tell if this was in code or not because he couldn’t make out the words. It was like it’d been corrupted, somehow. Jieyuan had never heard of that happening to a jade book before. As he was quickly going through its contents, though, he came across a word that he could read, somehow clear and readable despite all the blurry, indistinct text around it.
That word was Liangshibai. He kept on skimming the jade book, and two more readable words popped up, together. Gleamstone and Serpent. Gleamstone Serpent. And then, a couple of words down, Corruption. It wasn’t a fairly extensive text—just a few pages’ worth of content—and all three terms appeared a few times throughout.
Jieyuan opened his eyes. “Corruption…” He recalled Protector Yuanzhi, crystallized. Then the man who was likely the Yikongwei Founder, also crystallized. Corruption could refer to how the jade books themselves had been corrupted, but he wasn’t sure if that was the appropriate term for that, if there even was a term for whatever it was that had happened to the jade books. No, it seemed pretty clear to him that corruption, here, had more to do with the Liangshibai. And the Gleamstone Serpent, which should be some gleam beast.
Pocketing the jade book, Jieyuan picked another one up. This one was similarly short, but unreadable from beginning to end. Into the pocket it went. The third one he picked up turned out to have a readable word, at the start of the second line.
Linzushen.
Linzushen. Linzushen. Meiyao’s family name, inherited from her mother. Jieyuan gripped the jade book tighter, but not so tight as to crush it.
So far he hadn’t managed to find out anything about Meiyao’s origins, and he hadn’t gotten around to asking Meiyao herself, either. She was prickly, to say the least, on any topic that involved her family, and he had an inkling that her mother might be a particularly sore subject.
A little further in that same text, he came across another readable word. Primordial.
“Primordial.” The word didn’t really ring any bells, and there was no context whatsoever to even begin guessing at what it referred to. “Linzushen. Primordial. Linzushen. Primordial…”
All names were made up of glyphs, each with a distinct meaning. He hadn’t really paid much attention to it before, because the glyphs of a name usually didn’t mean much, but the ones in Linzushen meant forest, ancestor, and deity. “Ancestor, deity, primordial.” Put that way, the words did seem closely related. Turned out he did have some context, after all.
Nothing else on the jade book was readable, and he stored it away with the rest. Seeing there were still more than a handful of them left in the pile, he sat down on the raised wooden platform and picked up the fourth jadebook.
This one provided him with six readable words: Tianzijun. Miwanxue. And Immaculate Blood Pearl, all together.
Tianzijun. Daojue’s family name. Daojue, who was similarly of mysterious, unknown origins. Miwanxue appeared to be another family name, and he’d bet on this Immaculate Blood Pearl being some sort of artifact. Once again, though, the lack of context meant he couldn’t get anywhere. But when he tried breaking down the names, he got something like last time. While the glyphs making up Tianzijun didn’t seem to have to do with anything, Miwanxue was “to seek, complete, blood.” He’d bet that the Immaculate Blood Pearl had to do with them.
Cutting off the flow of chroma, Jieyuan regarded the jade book in his hand thoughtfully. It was curious, to say the least, that the family names of both his teammates had come up. He recalled Maeva saying how it was like that he was as much part of the Weave Mystery as Daojue and Meiyao were. That he might have been meant to get his hands on Rongkai’s belongings, on the Absolute Will Command and the Yikongwei jade book.
Now it looked like the Yikongwei Clan was somehow connected to both the Tianzijun and Linzushen Clans, and all of a sudden Maeva’s theory was looking all that much more likely.
The next jade book came with four more terms, none of which he recognized. Qianxing. Jiandaozhi. Absolute Sword Sect. Heavens-Piercing Bureau. A given name, a family name, the name of a cabal, and what seemed to be the division of a cabal, though a very oddly named one. The Jian in Jiandaozhi meant sword, so that was a connection with the Absolute Sword Sect, but that was all that stood out to him.
The fifth jade was the one with the most visible terms, though no less clear for it. Heavenly Vessel, Heavenly Way Sect, Divinity, Sucheng, and Duowen.
Normally, when Jieyuan took the time to read something, it was to clear up his doubts on a given subject. That wasn’t what was happening here. With these jade books, the more he read, the more confused he got. Confused and suspicious—suspicious of how these terms, specifically, had remained clear while everything else was mysteriously obfuscated. It was like he was being given a few clues, but not enough to come to any sort of conclusion. Like a breadcrumb trail leading nowhere. Like it was intentional.
Only three more jade books were left, and as he reached for them, he realized that one of them, unlike the others, wasn’t perceptible to his soulsense. It was clearly in front of him, a little jade cube, impossible to tell apart from the other two beside it, but his soulsense told him that there was nothing where it sat. He considered it, but then picked the two that he could sense.
The first one turned out to be entirely unreadable, but when he started on the second one, he found that the very first word was visible, and it was Fate.
After some lines of unclear text came Authority, followed shortly thereafter by Irregular. All three terms were repeated many times throughout. Further down, two new terms started popping up, Fatebloom Heart and Huaxin, and always very close to each other. Both of them always appeared over a dozen times, and always very close to each other. The Fatebloom Heart was definitely the heart he’d found outside. As for Huaxin…
“Hua, flower. Xin, heart. Huaxin. Flower heart? Bloom heart?” The name had to be connected to the Fatebloom Heart, though he couldn’t tell in what way.
Jieyuan then reached for the last jade book—the one he couldn’t sense—and after a moment’s hesitation, channeled chroma into it.
And then he wasn’t sitting in the cabin anymore, but outside, in the middle of the clearing. And it wasn’t morning, but nighttime, and he was staring up at the starry sky as he sat cross-legged on the ground.
And while he was still Jieyuan, he had another identity now.
He was also Yikongwei Beidao, tenth-sign violetsoul and founder of the Yikongwei Clan.