The eastern meridian’s blockage troubled her more than she allowed her expression to reveal. Such obstructions were rare in a well-maintained temple, and their appearance often preceded larger systemic failures. She withdrew her hand from the crystalline leaves and consulted the brass divination compass hanging from her sash, its needle trembling between the characters for “obstruction” and “deliberate interference.” The distinction mattered greatly. Natural blockages could be cleared through standard purification rituals. Deliberate interference suggested sabotage, a concept so foreign to celestial administration that the accusation alone could trigger an Upper Court investigation.
She moved to the registry alcove where the soul-transit scrolls hung suspended in preservation arrays, their rice-paper surfaces inscribed with the names and karmic weights of every spirit that had passed through Heaven’s Gate in the past lunar month. Her fingers traced the columns with the automatic precision of seventeen years’ practice, searching for irregularities. The numbers balanced perfectly: four hundred and sixty-three ascensions, two hundred and twelve descensions, all properly documented with the requisite seals and counter-signatures from the Lower Courts.
Yet something felt wrong. The scrolls were too perfect, their calligraphy too uniform, lacking the minor variations that naturally occurred when different scribes worked different shifts. She lifted one scroll closer to the sap-light, angling it until the fibers became visible. There: a faint shimmer where ink had been scraped away and rewritten, so skillfully done that only someone intimately familiar with the temple’s documentation practices would notice.
Her left hand moved instinctively to the jade seal at her waist, the one that authorized her to lock down the temple and summon an audit team. But she hesitated. False accusations against fellow celestial officials carried severe penalties. She needed more evidence, needed to understand the scope of what she was seeing. The eastern meridian blockage suddenly took on new significance: not a symptom of neglect, but perhaps a deliberate redirection of spiritual flow.
The registry alcove’s preservation arrays hummed with constant vigilance, maintaining the scrolls at precisely seventeen degrees and forty-three percent humidity. Conditions specified in the Administrative Practices Manual, Volume Twelve, Subsection on Documentary Integrity. Xiu-Lan had memorized all forty-seven volumes during her initiation, a requirement that separated competent administrators from exceptional ones.
She selected the Mortal Ledger first, its silk ribbon marked with her personal seal, and began the cross-referencing process that constituted the temple’s primary function. Each name in the soul-transit records must appear in identical form across all three scrolls, with matching timestamps accurate to the quarter-hour. Discrepancies triggered mandatory investigation protocols, though in seventeen years she had encountered only two: both clerical errors, swiftly corrected, earning the responsible scribes remedial calligraphy training rather than censure.
Her finger paused on an entry dated three days prior. The name appeared in the transit record and the Mortal Ledger, but the corresponding line in the Karmic Balance Sheet showed a weight calculation that deviated by point-zero-three measures. Negligible to most observers, but mathematically impossible given the other two values.
Someone had altered the numbers.
Xiu-Lan’s hand moved with practiced precision across the scrolls, her brush marking verification seals beside each matched entry. The three-scroll system had been established during the Fifth Dynasty reforms, after the Cascade of Broken Names had sent two thousand souls into incorrect reincarnations. A disaster that required three centuries of karmic litigation to resolve. The memory of that catastrophe lived in every administrator’s training, a cautionary tale told in hushed tones during initiation ceremonies.
She had never questioned the redundancy. Each cross-reference took approximately seven minutes per soul, and the temple processed between thirty and fifty transits daily. The mathematics of devotion, her master had called it. Tedious precision that prevented cosmic chaos.
Until now, the system had seemed flawless.
The golden seal-stamps materialized at dawn on the first day of each season, their appearance announced by a soft chime that resonated through the temple’s jade pillars. Xiu-Lan would find them pressed into the master scroll’s silk backing, each character perfectly formed in celestial script that shimmered with residual divine authority. She never witnessed their arrival, the Upper Courts’ mechanisms operated beyond mortal perception, but she would trace the raised characters with reverent fingers, reading phrases like “exemplary adherence to protocol” and “zero discrepancies in quarterly audits.” The words kindled a warmth in her chest that she recognized as pride, though she immediately tempered it with the understanding that such commendations merely acknowledged baseline competence. Excellence in the celestial bureaucracy meant invisibility: perfect execution that required no comment. These stamps represented the minimum threshold, not exceptional achievement.
Still, she kept a private tally in her meditation journal: seventeen consecutive commendations across four years. A record that placed Heaven’s Gate Temple in the ninety-seventh percentile of Middle Branch facilities.
She would spend hours explaining the architecture of consequence to her disciples, demonstrating how a single misplaced character in the transit logs could create resonance errors that accumulated across decades. The Fallen Phoenix catastrophe had begun with fourteen overlooked entries. Fourteen souls whose passages went unrecorded, creating gaps in the cosmic ledger that widened like cracks in porcelain until reality itself fractured along those fault lines.
The karmic threads appeared to her trained sight as gossamer filaments of silver and gold, layered across reality like spider silk after rain. Some thick as rope binding parent to child, others fine as breath connecting distant ancestors to their descendants, and the rarest ones pulsing with the crimson of unresolved debts that spanned multiple lifetimes.
Each thread carried its own texture, its own weight against her spiritual perception. The familial bonds felt warm, like sunlight through amber, while the ancestral connections whispered with the voices of the long-dead, a constant murmur at the edge of hearing that most cultivators learned to ignore. The debt-threads, though. Those burned cold, sharp as winter wind, and they sang with a discordant note that made her teeth ache if she focused on them too long.
She had learned to read the patterns, the way threads clustered and diverged, the places where they frayed or strengthened. A soul preparing for reincarnation showed loosening connections to its current life, threads unraveling like old rope. A possession victim displayed foreign threads wrapped around their core, parasitic and wrong. Bureaucratic forgeries were the most insidious: they mimicked legitimate bonds but lacked the organic irregularity of true karmic formation, too perfect in their symmetry, like calligraphy executed by someone who understood the strokes but not the spirit.
Her most difficult cases involved untangling the knots where multiple threads converged, where debts and bonds and ancestral obligations wove together into gordian complexity. The Broken Wheel Incident had presented her with a tangle involving forty-seven souls across six incarnations, a mess that took three months of careful documentation and another two of ritual severance work. She had needed to petition the Upper Registry twice for permission to cut certain threads, and even then, the spiritual backlash had left her bedridden for a week.
The temple’s jade gardens had been the perfect environment for such delicate work, the crystalline leaves filtering the sap-light into wavelengths that made the threads more visible, more tractable.
The Seventh Ordination marked the threshold where spiritual sight transcended mere perception and became true understanding. Xiu-Lan had spent eleven years in the sap-light chambers, cross-legged on jade platforms while amber luminescence played across her closed eyelids, learning to silence the clamoring demands of mortal senses. The first three years yielded nothing but frustration and migraine. The next four brought fleeting glimpses: threads appearing for heartbeats before dissolving back into the invisible substrate of reality.
The breakthrough came during a winter meditation when she finally understood that she had been trying too hard, grasping at the threads instead of allowing them to reveal themselves. After that, the world transformed into layered transparencies of connection and obligation.
But seeing alone proved insufficient. Master Yun’s six-year tutelage taught her the crucial distinctions: how possession-threads writhed with a sickly iridescence, how soul-theft left jagged gaps in a victim’s karmic tapestry, how bureaucratic forgeries maintained their too-perfect symmetry even when examined from oblique spiritual angles. Each false connection carried its own signature of wrongness, subtle as the difference between genuine jade and clever imitation.
The Registry’s precedents occupied the temple’s eastern wing. Ten thousand scrolls in lacquered cases, their silk ribbons color-coded by dynasty and jurisdictional domain. Xiu-Lan had spent seven years among them, inhaling dust and possibility, until the critical three hundred rulings lived in her mind like a second architecture of thought. The Twin Soul Paradox of the Third Age, with its seventeen nested exceptions. The Reincarnation Substitution Doctrine that the Upper Courts still contested in memorials edged with passive-aggressive calligraphy. The Broken Chain Precedent that technically permitted karmic severance under conditions so specific that only twice in recorded history had they applied.
She knew the arguments, counter-arguments, and the political compromises embedded in seemingly neutral language.
Among those seventeen hunts, three still troubled her meditation. The tax collector had been routine. Shadows cannot hide from one who reads karmic weight. The concubine’s fragmentation had required delicate reassembly, like mending shattered porcelain. But the Weeping General’s severed threads bore marks she recognized now, years later: the same technique, the same hand that would later burn her temple to ash.
She had unwrapped the bow only twice since receiving it: once to demonstrate proper handling to her senior disciples, once during the Broken Wheel Incident when a merchant’s accumulated karmic debts had crystallized into parasitic chains that were slowly crushing his descendants. Each time, the weapon had felt heavier than jade, colder than winter iron. Not in her hands, but in her chest, where duty and compassion waged their eternal war.
Xiu-Lan broke the crimson seal with ritual precision, her thumbnail finding the wax’s designated fracture point. A technique taught to all Registry keepers to prevent accidental desecration of official documents. The seal crumbled in the prescribed manner, releasing a faint scent of sandalwood and iron that marked authentic Upper Court correspondence. Administrator Feng’s credentials unfurled before her: stamped with the Bureau’s lotus-and-scales emblem, counter-signed by three separate verification officials whose names she recognized from quarterly reports, bearing the correct phase-of-moon watermarks that shifted from silver to gold as she tilted the parchment. These watermarks were impossible to forge. They required celestial ink mixed with moonlight harvested during specific astronomical conjunctions.
The decree cited Statute 847, subsection twelve: emergency audit powers during suspected realm-breach incidents. Her fingers traced the characters, each brushstroke conforming to the standardized calligraphy that all bureaucratic documents required. The legal language was impeccable, referencing precedents from the Third Dynasty reforms and invoking the Mandate of Celestial Oversight that superseded local temple autonomy in matters of cosmic security.
Yet something felt wrong.
Her disciples watched from the vault’s threshold, their young faces reflecting the amber sap-light that pulsed through the temple’s walls like a nervous heartbeat. She could read their uncertainty. They had been trained to question, to verify, to maintain the sacred skepticism that prevented corruption from taking root. But they had also been trained to obey legitimate authority, and everything about this decree appeared legitimate.
Xiu-Lan’s left hand, still unmarred, still strong, rested on the vault’s secondary seal while her right held the decree. The spiritual essence trails she could perceive showed nothing unusual about the document itself. No taint, no deception, no curse-work woven between the characters.
The wrongness came from Administrator Feng himself, standing just beyond the threshold with that patient, expectant expression of bureaucratic inevitability.
Feng entered the registry vault with the careful steps of someone accustomed to sacred spaces, his boots whispering against jade floors as he surveyed the endless scroll-racks that spiraled upward into shadow. The amber sap-light caught the three-cloud insignia on his gray robes: authentic Bureau embroidery, the silver thread work precise to the regulation stitch count. Everything about him proclaimed legitimacy: the correct ritual bow upon crossing the threshold, the proper hand positioning when approaching consecrated records, even the breathing pattern of someone trained in archival meditation techniques.
Yet he avoided looking directly at the scrolls themselves.
His gaze slid past them, over them, around them: the careful not-seeing of someone who feared what true perception might reveal. Xiu-Lan’s tracking instincts flared like touched flame. She had spent seventeen years reading spiritual essence trails, and Feng’s aura held an absence where curiosity should have lived. No genuine scholar approached the registry scrolls with such studied indifference.
She positioned herself between him and the deepest archives, where the most sensitive soul-records were kept, her hand drifting unconsciously toward the ceremonial blade at her waist. Protocol forbade drawing weapons in the vault’s presence.
Protocol might need to be broken.
Feng’s fingers moved across the jade tablet with administrative efficiency, tracing the seventeen names as though conducting routine verification. “The misclassification created a cascade failure in the reincarnation queue,” he continued, each word measured and empty of genuine concern. “These souls have been suspended in bureaucratic limbo for three years.”
Xiu-Lan studied the tablet, her tracking senses probing the spiritual residue clinging to its surface. The names were authentic. She remembered processing several herself. Yet beneath the proper formatting, she detected something wrong: a faint resonance of curse energy, so carefully masked that only someone trained in essence-trail detection would notice. The tablet itself had been handled by something corrupted.
Her left arm began to ache, a phantom warning of fire yet to come.
The vault’s ambient temperature dropped as Feng’s ritual began to take shape. Xiu-Lan’s tracking senses flared: the geometric pattern wasn’t for auditing at all, but rather a containment array, one designed to trap rather than verify. Her disciples continued their work, oblivious, while Wei-Lin reached for another bundle. The curse resonance intensified, making her scarred arm throb with prophetic heat.
Her fingers closed around the talisman’s cool jade surface. Protocol demanded she activate it immediately: any unauthorized ritual in the registry vault constituted a Class-Seven violation. But Feng stood between her and the exit, and her disciples remained absorbed in their cataloging, unaware. If she was wrong, if this was merely unorthodox technique rather than corruption, she would destroy her temple’s reputation with the Upper Courts. The hesitation cost her three heartbeats. Three heartbeats too many.
Xiu-Lan’s hand tightened on the talisman until the jade’s edges bit into her palm. The activation sequence required only a pulse of qi and the formal denunciation: three words in the High Celestial tongue that would seal the vault and summon enforcement spirits from the nearest garrison. She had performed the procedure twice before: once for a corrupted merit accountant, once for a spirit attempting to falsify reincarnation papers. Both times the system had functioned perfectly, the guilty parties contained within moments, her temple’s diligence noted in the annual reviews.
But those violators had been minor functionaries, not officials bearing the vermillion seal of the Upper Registry.
Feng continued his preparations with methodical precision, arranging the components in a formation she didn’t recognize from any approved manual. His movements held the fluid certainty of long practice, not the hesitance of experimental technique. Whatever he intended, he had done this before. Perhaps many times.
She calculated distances with a tracker’s instinct. Fifteen paces to the vault entrance. Feng positioned between her and escape. Twenty-three disciples scattered throughout the chamber, most with their backs turned, absorbed in the endless work of soul accounting. Wei-Lin stood closest, still waiting for guidance, her young face tight with suppressed alarm.
If Xiu-Lan was wrong the accusation alone would mark her temple as presumptuous, questioning their betters. Censure would follow. Reduced allocations of cultivation resources. Unfavorable duty assignments. The slow bureaucratic strangulation that destroyed ambitious sects more efficiently than any demon invasion.
But if she was right, and did nothing…
The black candles began to weep shadows that pooled on the floor like liquid night. The void-iron talismans hummed with a frequency that made her damaged cultivation base ache in recognition. And Feng finally looked up, his eyes meeting hers across the chamber with an expression of mild curiosity, as if noticing an insect he’d forgotten to crush.
Xiu-Lan’s fingers traced the talisman’s edge as Wei-Lin’s whispered catalog of violations accumulated like evidence in a trial scroll. Each item her disciple named should have been sufficient grounds for immediate detention. Possession of execution-marked talismans alone carried mandatory investigation protocols. The pre-Celestial script was worse: such texts were restricted to the Archive of Dangerous Precedents, accessible only to officials of the Fifth Circle or higher.
But Feng’s documentation formed an impenetrable wall of bureaucratic legitimacy. The crimson seal couldn’t be forged: it contained verification threads visible only under celestial light, which Xiu-Lan had already checked twice. His inspection authority derived from three separate departments, each signature properly witnessed and dated. Even the requisition forms demonstrated fluency in the labyrinthine language of official requests, citing obscure precedents from the Compendium of Necessary Exceptions.
To challenge him, she would need to file formal objections through seven different offices, each requiring physical testimony and documentary proof. The process took months. Meanwhile, her temple’s own records would face counter-scrutiny: every minor clerical error, every delayed petition, every questionable judgment call from seventeen years of service exposed to hostile examination.
The system protected its own. She had always believed that was its strength.
The weight of Wei-Lin’s gaze pressed against her like physical accusation, but Xiu-Lan had spent seventeen years learning that personal instinct bowed before institutional authority. She had watched lesser officials destroy their careers on hunches, seen entire temples censured for procedural irregularities born from righteous suspicion. The crimson seal glowed faintly in the lamplight, its verification threads pristine.
“Prepare the ceremonial chamber according to his specifications,” Xiu-Lan said, releasing her disciple’s shoulder. “And Wei-Lin: document everything. If irregularities exist, the records will reveal them through proper channels.”
Her senior disciple’s jaw tightened, but she bowed with perfect form. “As you command, Master.”
The formality felt like distance opening between them, a crack that would soon become an unbridgeable chasm of ash and regret.
The words left Xiu-Lan’s mouth like a binding oath, each syllable sealing her disciples’ fate. Wei-Lin’s shoulder trembled beneath her palm. A final, silent plea that Xiu-Lan ignored, choosing institutional doctrine over the instinct that had guided her through decades of spiritual adjudication. She felt the moment crystallize, irreversible, as trust transformed into the obedience that would lead them all into fire.
Wei-Lin’s bow held the rigidity of a snapped blade. Obedience masking betrayal. She turned without meeting Xiu-Lan’s eyes, her footsteps too measured as she descended toward the meditation halls. Alone now, Xiu-Lan watched Feng’s pale hands arrange void-iron talismans in configurations that pulled at her qi like hooks through silk. Her cultivation base contracted, whispering warnings in a language older than bureaucratic protocol. She forced her breathing steady. Trusted the paperwork. Ignored the recoil.
She catalogued the scene with the instinct of someone trained to record transitions between states. Forty-three souls in perfect formation, their qi signatures harmonizing in the meditation pattern she had designed. Each one a thread in the tapestry of order she had woven across seventeen years of dawn offerings and careful instruction.
Wei-Lin knelt beside the junior student. The correction was gentle, Wei-Lin’s hand guiding the brush through the proper stroke sequence. The girl’s face held that expression of concentration Xiu-Lan had seen a thousand times, tongue pressed between teeth, brow furrowed.
This is what I have built, Xiu-Lan thought, her unmarked left hand tightening on the Bow’s wrapping. This is what the Upper Courts will remember when they grant us the Eighth Ordination.
The registry scrolls in the vault behind her contained seventeen years of flawless accounting. Not a single soul misrecorded. Not one petition lost. The Celestial Auditors had praised her efficiency in their last inspection, noting her temple’s records as exemplary among the Middle Branch institutions. The recommendation for advancement had been written in vermillion ink. The highest endorsement.
She had prepared the ceremonial robes already, commissioned from the silk-weavers of the Canopy Courts. Forty-three sets, one for each disciple who would ascend with her when the decree arrived. The cost had required three years of saved stipends, but it would be worth it to see them properly attired when they took their oaths before the Upper Registry.
In the garden, someone laughed. Probably Dao-Ming, who found humor even in the most austere sutras. The sound carried on the eternal breeze, mixing with the crystalline chime of jade leaves. The sap-light shifted from amber to gold as the celestial hour turned, painting everything in warm radiance.
Perfect. All of it perfect.
The accounting complete.
Behind her, Feng’s breathing shifted. The measured cadence of meditation breaking into something irregular, syncopated. The sound scraped against her spiritual senses like fingernails on jade. The registry vault’s atmosphere thickened, pressure building as forbidden components began their resonance.
She knew those frequencies. Had studied them in theoretical texts marked with warning seals. Harmonics that existed in the spaces between sanctioned cultivation methods, in the gaps the Celestial Auditors deliberately left unmapped. They shouldn’t manifest here, in consecrated space, beneath seventeen years of accumulated blessings and proper ritual.
The Bow trembled. Her fingers ached to unwrap it.
But her eyes remained fixed on the garden. On Wei-Lin’s hand guiding the brush through its arc. On the junior student’s face transforming as comprehension dawned: that precise moment when confusion crystallized into understanding. On Dao-Ming’s lingering smile. On the sap-light painting them all in gold.
These small perfections suddenly felt fragile as porcelain. Precious as final breaths.
She had authorized this. Signed Feng’s petition in vermillion ink. Chosen to trust the hierarchy that had never failed her.
Her left arm, still whole, still strong, refused to move.
The Bow of Severed Threads grew warm beneath her palm, its ancient wood vibrating with warning frequencies she’d studied but never felt. Some deep instinct urged her to unwrap the silk bindings, to pivot on her heel, to sever whatever forbidden connection Feng was forging in the vault behind her. Her fingers twitched. The authorization scroll she’d signed in vermillion ink seemed to burn in her memory, each brushstroke now a chain binding her to protocol, to hierarchy, to the celestial order that had shaped her entire existence. She had chosen trust over instinct. Chosen bureaucratic propriety over the animal scream of her spiritual senses. Her left arm remained paralyzed by duty, strong and whole and utterly useless.
In the garden, Wei-Lin’s youngest apprentice, barely fourteen, his cultivation core still unformed, broke meditation posture, head tilting toward the vault with the instinctive precision of a bird sensing distant thunder. Their gazes locked across the sap-lit expanse. His eyes asked the question his training forbade him to voice. Xiu-Lan shaped her lips into a smile of perfect serenity, a benediction of false safety, and gestured him back to stillness. He obeyed. He trusted.
The crystalline leaves’ chiming fractured into dissonance, each note splitting like bone. Sap-light stuttered, once, twice, casting shadows that crawled backward against their source. In that suspended breath, choice crystallized with terrible clarity: turn and break seventeen years of oaths, or trust the celestial order she had served with flawless devotion. Her hand remained on the vault’s doorframe. The decision had been made long before this moment.
The vault’s threshold burned cold beneath her palm. Jade inscribed with seventeen years of protective wards, each one she had carved herself during the new moon meditations. Behind her, Wei-Lin’s footsteps echoed through corridors that suddenly felt too long, too many turnings between the meditation pavilion and the consecration chamber. The wrongness in the sap-light pulsed like a failing heartbeat, casting her shadow in juddering intervals across the floor.
She could still stop this. One word of command, the proper invocation, and the temple’s defensive arrays would seal every chamber. Wei-Lin would be trapped outside the consecration chamber, safe in ignorance.
But the scrolls,
Through the vault’s narrow window, she watched the jade garden’s transformation accelerate. The blackening spread like ink through water, crystalline structures collapsing into themselves with sounds that mimicked human screaming. Seventeen years she had tended those leaves, each one grown from seeds blessed by the Upper Courts, each one resonating with the pure frequencies of celestial law.
They were dying in a pattern. Methodical. Deliberate.
Her cultivation sense, honed through decades of tracking spiritual essence, traced the corruption’s source: not the garden itself, but the sap-channels beneath, where Administrator Feng had descended an hour ago with authorization scrolls bearing the Vermillion Seal. Retrieving historical records, he had said. Routine audit of karmic adjudications dating back three centuries.
She had believed him. Had opened the vault herself, proud that her temple’s perfect accounting warranted such high-level review.
The wet crackling intensified. Through the window, Wei-Lin reached the consecration chamber’s doors, still running toward the wrongness with the fearless devotion of youth. Twenty-three years old. Three months from her own ascension ceremony. The brightest student Xiu-Lan had ever trained.
Her hand left the doorframe.
The decision, she would understand later, had already unmade her.
The registry scrolls ignited simultaneously across all forty-three archive chambers, not with natural flame but with that same oily iridescence that defied every principle of celestial fire. The wrongness of it sang through her tracking sense: corruption moving with bureaucratic precision, chamber by chamber in perfect hierarchical order.
Administrator Feng was not retrieving records. He was erasing them.
The realization struck with the weight of falling stars. Three centuries of karmic adjudications, every soul her temple had processed between realms, every transaction that proved. What? Her mind raced through possibilities even as her feet remained frozen. What pattern could forty-three chambers of perfect accounting reveal? What truth required a Vermillion Seal and systematic destruction?
The sap-light flickered. Through the window, Wei-Lin’s hand touched the consecration chamber’s door.
Xiu-Lan’s fingers curled against the doorframe, nails scraping jade. The Upper Courts had sent Administrator Feng. The Upper Courts had authorized this. Which meant the corruption reached higher than one official, deeper than one temple, wider than,
The screaming began. Not the garden. Her disciples.
The garden’s crystalline leaves shattered above her. Not from heat but from the sonic pressure of her own desperate speed. Her left arm extended without conscious thought, fingers already forming the Bow of Severed Threads from pure qi manifestation, an eighth-ordination technique she had no business attempting. The weapon materialized wrong, unstable, burning through her meridians like acid through silk.
She felt something fundamental break inside her cultivation base: not a clean snap but a tearing, as if the seventeen years of patient accumulation were parchment ripped against a blade’s edge. The Seventh Ordination’s carefully balanced essence scattered into chaos, seeking any channel that might contain her velocity, her terror, her absolute refusal to arrive too late.
The bow screamed in her grip, hungry and incomplete.
The threshold’s heat struck her like judgment itself. Administrator Feng stood waist-deep in the sap-pool, his ceremonial sleeves rolled back, hands submerged in luminescence gone sick and oily. He was extracting something: threads of darkness that writhed against the amber light, corruption given form. Wei-Lin and six disciples encircled him, their combined qi forming unauthorized wards that pulsed with forbidden geometries, protecting what should never be protected.
The bowstring sang against her palm: a note of absolute severance. In that crystalline instant before release, her mind performed its final accounting with bureaucratic precision: Seventh Ordination rank, seventeen years of flawless service, the Eighth Ordination’s golden seal forever beyond reach, her name struck from every celestial registry, forty-three disciples whose screams would begin in three heartbeats, and Wei-Lin’s face (beloved Wei-Lin) turning toward her with dawning comprehension and irreversible betrayal.
The arrow’s flight left a trail of silver dissolution through the air, its trajectory perfect, Xiu-Lan had trained for seventeen years to make such shots. The Bow of Severed Threads sang its cutting note as the karmic thread snapped with an audible crack that echoed through the temple’s vaulted chamber. For one crystalline moment, she thought she had succeeded.
Then the consecration basin convulsed.
The sap had already turned the color of old bruises. Feng’s ritual had corrupted it beyond mere taint. The thread’s severance didn’t stop the process; it merely released what had been building. The blackened liquid erupted upward in a geyser that defied natural law, climbing toward the ceiling in a column of writhing essence that stank of burnt offerings and broken oaths.
Where the corrupted sap touched the temple’s ceiling, bureaucratic script appeared. The same golden characters that normally recorded blessings and official decrees. But these ran backward, their strokes inverting as Xiu-Lan watched in horror. Each reversed character unmade a law. The protective wards that had guarded this branch for eight centuries began to unravel like calligraphy dissolving in rain.
She felt it in her cultivation base. A sickening lurch as the spiritual architecture supporting the temple’s sanctity collapsed. The air grew thin, then thick, then wrong. Reality itself seemed uncertain about its own rules within these walls.
Feng stood at the ritual’s center, untouched by the chaos he had unleashed. His robes didn’t even flutter in the spiritual windstorm tearing through the chamber. The oily corruption in his qi signature had spread, visible now as a dark nimbus around his form. He was no longer attempting to hide what he had become.
The sap continued its ascent, painting the ceiling with laws unmade, protections dissolved, and something far worse. A space being prepared for a purpose Xiu-Lan’s mind recoiled from comprehending.
Feng turned toward her, and the smile on his face had calcified into something no longer human: a bureaucratic mask worn by something that had consumed the official beneath. His eyes reflected not light but inverted celestial script, golden characters running backward through black pupils. The corruption had progressed beyond mere taint. He had become a living violation of divine law.
He raised one hand in a gesture that mimicked the blessing-mudra taught to all Registry officials. But the spiritual current that flowed from his fingers carried the opposite intention: a command that bypassed mortal will entirely. The burning disciples responded as though pulled by invisible strings. Their bodies, wreathed in celestial fire that should have reduced them to ash instantly, instead moved with terrible precision.
They formed a circle around the corrupted sap column, their screaming mouths becoming nodes in a geometric pattern. Xiu-Lan’s breath caught. She had seen this configuration once, in texts the Registry had ordered burned three centuries ago.
The Seal of Concealed Evidence. A formation that transformed witnesses into containers, trapping testimony within dying flesh where no divination could reach it.
The Bow of Severed Threads sang its discordant note with each release. Xiu-Lan’s arrows materialized from condensed qi, each shaft finding purchase in the invisible architecture of Feng’s working. Karmic bonds between administrator and tree, between corrupted sap and living wood, between his authority and the branch’s fundamental structure. Thread by thread, she unmade his connections.
But the ritual possessed a hideous elegance. For every severed link, two more erupted from the wound, pulsing with that characteristic oily sheen. She watched in mounting dread as her own arrows became anchor points, her resistance transformed into structural supports. He had anticipated her intervention. Welcomed it. Her desperate opposition was being woven into the formation’s geometry, her spiritual signature becoming complicit in whatever abomination he was birthing into celestial record.
She was not disrupting the ritual. She was completing it.
The consecration basin erupted in flames that burned wrong: celestial fire twisted through with void-essence, consuming flesh but preserving screaming souls just long enough. Xiu-Lan lunged forward as her disciples convulsed, their life-threads pulled taut, then severed with bureaucratic precision. The blackened sap drank their essence greedily, and she watched the World Tree’s bark accept the inscription: Voluntary Ascension Protocol, Forty-Three Petitioners, Approved by Temple Authority. The lie became eternal record.
The bowstring sang a note of absolute severance. Her name vanished from the Registry’s jade tablets. Her cultivation achievements, twenty years of devotion, seven ordinations, countless petitions approved, dissolved into bureaucratic void. The World Tree’s bark no longer recognized her touch. She became absence itself: no rank to challenge, no authority to countermand, no official existence for Feng’s corrupted protocols to detect or eliminate. A phantom with singular purpose.
The transformation happened in the space between one heartbeat and the next, Feng’s brush completing a character that should not exist in any celestial lexicon, the ink on the petition scrolls writhing like living things, and suddenly the temple’s protective wards weren’t defending against external threats but trapping everyone inside, sealing the doors with bands of golden light that her disciples pressed against uselessly.
Xiu-Lan felt the shift in the World Tree’s recognition before she understood it consciously. The bark beneath her feet, which had always resonated with her spiritual signature, went cold and foreign. The temple’s registry tablets began to smoke, the characters rearranging themselves with the sound of grinding stone.
“Master!” Young Disciple Lin’s voice cracked with terror. She was clawing at the golden bands, her fingers already blistering. The others rushed to the windows, but those too had sealed, the paper screens hardening into barriers of compressed qi that repelled their desperate strikes.
Feng continued his calligraphy with methodical precision, each stroke rewriting reality itself. The petition scrolls (documents that should have been inert administrative forms) pulsed with dark authority. Xiu-Lan recognized fragments of the script: reclassification protocols, purification mandates, the bureaucratic language of authorized elimination. He was transforming her temple from a protected sanctuary into a designated corruption site, her disciples from registered cultivators into condemned entities.
The sap channels in the walls began to glow with sickly luminescence, no longer the warm amber of divine circulation but something that made her cultivation base recoil. The World Tree itself was accepting Feng’s rewritten decree, its ancient systems unable to distinguish between legitimate authority and this obscene forgery.
“Administrator Feng.” Xiu-Lan’s voice cut through the rising panic, steady despite the ice flooding her meridians. “By what mandate do you alter celestial registry without tribunal oversight?”
He looked up from his work, brush still poised, and smiled with bureaucratic courtesy that made her skin crawl. “Oversight, Registrar Xiu-Lan? I am the oversight.”
The arrow flew true, trailing silver threads of karmic severance that should have cut through any spiritual connection, but the jade seal in Feng’s hand blazed with authority that transcended mere cultivation: this was the World Tree’s own recognition, stolen and perverted into a weapon of bureaucratic annihilation.
Xiu-Lan felt the precise moment the registry accepted his falsified decree. The temple’s designation shifted in the cosmic ledger, and with it, every protective covenant that had sheltered her sect for three centuries simply ceased to exist. Her disciples weren’t being attacked by external force. They had been administratively reclassified as corruption requiring cleansing.
The arrow struck Feng’s shoulder, severing nothing, because he had already severed everything that mattered. The threads meant to cut his dark channeling found no illegal connection to sever. By the World Tree’s compromised recognition, his actions were perfectly legitimate.
“You see, Registrar?” Feng’s voice remained conversational even as silver blood seeped around the arrow shaft. “I don’t break celestial law. I am celestial law.”
His hand moved to complete the final character, the one that would trigger the purification protocol.
The word carved itself into existence. Not through air but through the World Tree’s administrative substrate, bypassing sound entirely to manifest as pure hierarchical command. Xiu-Lan felt the registry’s recognition ripple outward like a judicial sentence, and then forty-three soul-flames ignited in perfect synchronization.
Her disciples didn’t scream. They couldn’t. The divine fire erupted from within their own cultivation cores, their carefully refined spiritual energy weaponized against them through bureaucratic reclassification. Each body became a torch of celestial judgment, burning with the terrible purity of lawful execution.
The registry believed this was righteous purification. The World Tree’s own essence fueled the flames. Feng hadn’t attacked them. He had simply filed the correct paperwork, and reality itself had become the executioner.
The first arrow severed Master Liang’s thread. He collapsed, flames extinguishing mid-breath. She pivoted, drew, released. Second disciple freed. Third. But her damaged left arm trembled, slowing each draw by a heartbeat she didn’t possess. Fourth arrow. Fifth. The mathematics of failure crystallized: forty-three souls, three seconds per shot, two minutes seventeen seconds required. The branch would be ash in ninety seconds. She kept firing anyway, because stopping meant choosing which disciples deserved abandonment.
Feng ascended through the central sap channel with the unhurried grace of legitimate authority, robes pristine against the amber current. The lacquered case containing forty-three soul-transit records rested beneath his arm like routine paperwork. He glanced back once before the golden flow bore him upward toward courts that would never question his seals. The sap channel sealed behind him with bureaucratic finality.
The ceremonial urns stood three paces distant. An impossible distance measured in the currency of seconds Wei-Lin no longer possessed. Xiu-Lan saw his calculation in the arch of his spine, the desperate mathematics of survival that made him believe water consecrated for ancestral offerings might quench flames born of corrupted divine mandate.
His fingers spread wide, as if greater surface area could somehow bridge the gap between flesh and salvation. The gesture held terrible beauty: the same hand position he’d used when demonstrating proper petition mudras to the younger disciples just that morning. How carefully he’d explained the difference between supplication and command, the subtle curl of the thumb that transformed request into demand.
The celestial fire recognized no such distinctions.
It moved with the inevitability of bureaucratic decree, consuming the space between Administrator Feng’s outstretched palm and Wei-Lin’s reaching hand. The flames held colors that had no names in mortal languages. Shades of violated law, of divine authority turned septic. They burned not with heat alone but with the weight of corrupted celestial mandate, fire that consumed karma itself.
Wei-Lin’s silhouette remained visible for one breath longer, backlit by the inferno spreading through the temple’s wooden halls. His hand still stretched forward, fingers still splayed in that eternal gesture of hope. Then the fire found the spaces between his meridians, the gaps in his cultivation base where mortality persisted despite years of disciplined practice.
Shadow became his only legacy: a dark impression burned into the jade-wood floor where he’d stood. Then even that dissolved into ash that scattered on the superheated wind, gray powder that might have been a man or might have been ancient scrolls or might have been the temple itself.
Still his hand remained in Xiu-Lan’s vision, reaching, always reaching, fingers spread toward water that would never come.
Master Yao’s body became a temple of its own making, curved over the three smallest novices in the final architecture of sacrifice. His broad back, scarred from decades of ascetic practice, marked with the ordination brands of seven successful tribulations, formed a vault against the celestial fire’s hunger.
Three heartbeats. Xiu-Lan counted them in the suspended time that catastrophe creates, each pulse an eternity and an instant. Beneath his sheltering form, she glimpsed small faces pressed against jade-wood flooring, eyes squeezed shut, lips moving in the protection sutras they’d memorized but never imagined needing.
“Shifu,” they called, the word muffled against his robes. “Shifu, Shifu.”
The flames found the spaces between his shoulder blades first, seeking the meridian points he’d spent fifty years opening through meditation. Divine fire cared nothing for spiritual achievement. It poured through those carefully cultivated channels, using his own enlightenment as kindling.
The children’s voices rose higher, thinner. “Shifu.
The voices that had called her name, “Xiu-Lan! Elder Xiu-Lan! Help us!”. Came from every corner of the compound at once, a desperate chorus of forty-three disciples fragmenting into raw animal terror. She tried to count them, to locate each one, but the sounds multiplied and overlapped until they became a single shrieking mass that her mind could not parse into individual souls.
Then the screaming stopped.
Not gradually. Not voice by voice as rescue came or consciousness fled. All at once, as if Administrator Feng’s corrupted ritual had severed every throat simultaneously.
The flames kept roaring, wood and flesh becoming light and heat, but that sudden silence carved itself deeper into her bones than any sound could have: the absence where her disciples had been.
Through smoke dense as funeral incense she watched Junior Disciple Mei burst from the dormitory wing, robes and hair transformed into a living torch. The girl’s training held for three lurching steps, proper form even as her skin blackened, before equilibrium failed. She tilted sideways with terrible slowness, a falling star swallowed by the infinite dark between branches, her scream extinguished by distance before impact.
The temple’s lacquered pillars, each one inscribed with protective sutras that had weathered three centuries of storms and spiritual upheavals, became vertical rivers of flame that leaped hungrily toward the branch’s sacred heartwood. The bark itself began to blacken and crack with sounds like breaking bones, divine sap boiling into toxic vapor. She understood with horror that Feng had not merely murdered her sect but poisoned the World Tree’s living flesh, corrupting the cosmic axis itself.
The bow’s resistance manifested as physical force: the string cutting into her fingers, the limbs trying to twist away from their target. Weapons forged in the celestial armories carried their own understanding of proper use, their own sense of cosmic order. To aim the Bow of Severed Threads at oneself violated every principle encoded in its jade-and-starlight construction.
But Xiu-Lan had spent twenty years in the Celestial Registry’s archives. She knew the loopholes in divine law, the spaces between regulations where necessity could override propriety. She whispered the Rite of Extreme Circumstance, invoking the clause that permitted self-harm to prevent greater cosmic violation. The bow shuddered in her grip, then went still: not accepting, but no longer actively resisting.
Around her, the temple’s death accelerated. Burning disciples had stopped screaming, which was somehow worse than the screaming itself. The silence of ash and ending. Through the smoke, she glimpsed Feng’s silhouette disappearing into the upper sap channels, his corrupted qi leaving an oil-slick shimmer in the amber light.
Her left arm had already begun to burn, flesh blackening from proximity to the celestial fire that consumed everything it touched. The pain existed somewhere beyond pain, in a realm of pure information: her body reporting its own destruction with clinical detachment. Soon the fire would reach her core, her cultivation base, the accumulated spiritual work of three decades. Then nothing would remain to pursue Feng through the bureaucratic heavens.
The arrow of severance materialized on the string, formed from her own karmic threads made visible and solid. She could see them. Gossamer lines connecting her to the burning temple, to each dying disciple, to her position in the celestial hierarchy, to her destined ascension. Beautiful, intricate, damning. They would anchor her here while everything burned.
She released the string.
The arrow struck true, piercing the space where her heart’s karmic center pulsed with accumulated destiny. Not flesh, but something deeper: the architecture of obligation and connection that bound her to the celestial order itself.
The threads unraveled with surgical precision. First went her bond to the temple grounds, the sacred contract that made her its guardian and warden. She felt the land reject her, ancient wards turning hostile as she became unauthorized presence in her own sanctuary. Second, the connection to her rank, Seventh Ordination Keeper of the Southern Registry, dissolved like calligraphy in rain, her name erasing itself from celestial rosters even as she watched.
Third, and most terrible: the threads binding her to her forty-three disciples. Each severance registered as a small death, a betrayal written in spiritual essence. They would burn alone now, without her qi to ease their passage or her authority to petition for their souls’ proper recording. She was abandoning them to administrative oblivion, to becoming mere casualties in records no one would read.
The bow clattered from nerveless fingers as the severance completed, leaving her hollow, unauthorized, free.
The fourth thread connected her to Master Yun-Wei, whose calligraphy still adorned the temple’s burning walls, whose voice had shaped her understanding of celestial law across twenty years of patient instruction. Severing it felt like swallowing broken glass. The backlash tore through her primary meridian, leaving spiritual scar tissue that would never fully heal. She felt his distant awareness flicker in confusion as she vanished from his perception, a student simply ceasing to exist mid-thought.
The fifth thread bound her to her forty-three disciples, and this cut deepest of all. They would burn truly alone now, without her qi-signature to anchor their dying consciousness, without her authority to file the proper transit petitions. She was condemning them to administrative nonexistence, souls lost in bureaucratic cracks, denied the reincarnation cycles their cultivation had earned.
The void expanded with each severance, reality itself recoiling from one who unmade their own existence. She became a hollow in the celestial record, a blank space where a person should be. The flames bent around this wrongness, divine law unable to burn what had erased itself from cosmic ledgers. Yet fire cared nothing for metaphysics. It took her flesh regardless, mortal meat answering to mortal physics even as her spirit became untouchable absence.
The cord shimmered gold-white as it parted, five years of dawn meditations and sacrifice unraveling in an instant. Her dantian convulsed, qi pathways crystallizing into rigid channels that would never again flex toward advancement. The Eighth Gate, that threshold she had touched in dreams, tasted in her morning practice, slammed shut with the finality of a coffin seal. She had purchased her existence with her future.
The luminous thing pulsed in his hands like a captured star, but wrong: diseased light that made her eyes water even through the dimensional fold. Each throb revealed faces pressed against its surface from within, mouths open in silent testimony, eyes wide with the knowledge that had killed them. Witnesses. A hundred souls compressed into a single piece of evidence, their deaths transformed into unbreakable proof through necromantic bureaucracy she had never imagined possible.
The flames parted around Feng as though acknowledging his authority over even elemental law. His crimson robes remained pristine, untouched by the ash of her disciples that swirled through the burning temple. She watched his lips move, recognizing the cadence of a sealing incantation: he was binding the evidence-sphere, making it impossible to destroy without releasing every testimony simultaneously into the celestial records.
Through the membrane of her void-pocket, reality rippled like disturbed water. She caught fragments of the names embedded in that writhing light: Vice-Minister Qiao of the Reincarnation Bureau. Auditor-General Wen from the Karmic Accounts Division. Judge Advocate Lin of the Celestial Courts themselves. Officials whose authority spanned multiple branches, whose corruption must have required decades to establish, whose exposure would shake the entire Registry structure.
Feng turned then, his gaze sweeping across the burning hall with the methodical assessment of one completing an inventory. His eyes found her void-pocket. She felt his attention like a blade testing a seam. For three heartbeats he studied the dimensional fold where she cowered, and she saw the calculation in his expression: the cost of ensuring her death versus the probability she would survive long enough to matter.
He smiled, thin and pitying, and turned away. Already dead, his dismissal said. Her cultivation crippled, her sect destroyed, her testimony worthless without proof. He had assessed her as a problem that would solve itself.
The evidence-sphere convulsed in his grip, and she understood with sick clarity what she was witnessing: not merely proof, but a weapon forged from atrocity itself. Each soul compressed within that diseased luminescence had been murdered specifically for this purpose. Their final moments harvested, their knowledge extracted through techniques that violated every principle of celestial law. The Registry’s own bureaucratic magic, twisted into necromantic testimony that could not be dismissed or suppressed.
Vice-Minister Qiao’s seal glowed among the writhing faces. Auditor-General Wen’s signature burned in characters of bone-light. Judge Advocate Lin’s authority mark pulsed like an infected wound. Names she had revered, officials whose decrees had shaped her entire cultivation path, now revealed as architects of systematic corruption spanning decades.
Feng’s fingers traced sealing glyphs across the sphere’s surface, each gesture binding the evidence tighter, making it impossible to destroy without triggering immediate release into every celestial record simultaneously. A dead man’s switch constructed from murdered souls. Insurance against his own superiors, she realized. Blackmail dressed as preservation of truth.
The channel opened with a sound like tearing silk and breaking bone, reality itself protesting this violation of cosmic order. Sap that should have flowed amber and pure now writhed upward in black tendrils, each one inscribed with stolen authority seals that overrode the World Tree’s own defenses. She watched the unauthorized pathway carve through dimensional barriers that had stood for ten thousand years, watched wards designed by the First Architects simply dissolve like rice paper in rain.
The tree screamed as Feng’s corruption forced open a direct route to the Canopy Courts. No checkpoints. No审查. No witnesses except her, and she didn’t matter anymore.
Then he smiled, not triumph, but the patient expression of a clerk correcting a minor ledger error, and spoke directly to her hiding place: “Registry Keeper Xiu-Lan, your sect’s dissolution has been properly documented. Your survival constitutes an administrative anomaly.” He adjusted his sleeve with bureaucratic precision. “The records will correct themselves.”
The sap channel sealed behind him with a sound like breaking seals. She emerged from her void-pocket into air thick with ash and the acrid stench of burned merit. The corruption spread before her eyes: black veins threading through silver bark, each crack releasing wisps of tainted qi that made her cultivation base recoil. The tree itself was screaming in a frequency only those attuned to celestial law could perceive, a bureaucratic violation written into living wood.
She knelt in the ash beside what had been Disciple Mei-Lin. Identifiable only by the jade cultivation token that had somehow survived the flames. The proper funerary prayers rose to her lips, protocols drilled into her through decades of celestial service: the Seventeen Invocations for Righteous Passage, the Petition for Swift Reincarnation, the Bureaucratic Acknowledgment of Meritorious Service. But her throat closed around words that felt obscene in their inadequacy, formulaic phrases designed for natural deaths, peaceful transitions, orderly processing through the reincarnation courts.
There was nothing orderly about this.
Mei-Lin had been nineteen. She’d been practicing the Autumn Wind Meditation that morning, her form finally perfect after three years of adjustment. She’d laughed at breakfast, teasing another disciple about his calligraphy. She’d had a mother in the mortal realm who lit incense every new moon, who still believed her daughter served with honor in the celestial hierarchy.
Xiu-Lan’s fingers trembled as she gathered the token, still warm from fires that had burned hot enough to melt jade-reinforced stone. The metal seared her palm but she welcomed the pain, needed it to anchor her against the howling void opening in her chest. She added it to the growing collection in her sleeve. Seventeen tokens so far, each one a name, a face, a future unmade. Twenty-six disciples remained unaccounted for, their tokens presumably melted into the ash or consumed entirely.
The sleeve grew heavier with each addition, a physical weight that seemed trivial compared to what it represented. She would carry them all. She would find every single token if it took days. And then she would carry them up through the branches, past every sealed ward and turned back, all the way to the Upper Registry itself if necessary. Someone would acknowledge what had happened here. Someone would record their names properly.
Someone would answer for this.
The neighboring temples’ wards shimmered visible in her peripheral vision, opalescent barriers humming with deliberate indifference. She stared at them, ash still falling like corrupted snow, and felt understanding crystallize into something harder than grief.
This was not mere caution. This was policy.
Someone had ordered the quarantine. Someone had decided her branch was already lost. Someone had calculated forty-three lives against political risk and found the mathematics acceptable. The wards had risen with practiced efficiency, suggesting protocols already in place, contingencies already drafted in some administrator’s files. Procedure for Catastrophic Contamination. Section Seven, Subsection Twelve: Immediate Isolation.
How long had those orders existed? Had they been written before Feng arrived, or after? Had someone known what he intended, had they prepared the other temples for exactly this outcome?
She rose slowly, tokens clinking in her sleeve like accusations. The wards pulsed steadily, patient and implacable. Behind them, she could sense the other temples’ inhabitants, hundreds of cultivators, administrators, clergy, all maintaining their barriers with flawless discipline.
All following orders.
All complicit.
She approached the nearest channel, its amber luminescence dimming as she drew close. The sap recoiled from her presence like water from oil, the bureaucratic qi within recognizing an anomaly, a record that could not be filed. The tree’s consciousness encountered her severed threads and found only absence where connection should exist.
Unauthorized entity. Classification: impossible. Access: denied.
The channel sealed completely, jade bark flowing over it like scar tissue. She moved to another. The same rejection. A third. The pattern held. The World Tree, that great cosmic registry, could not accommodate what she had become. She existed now in the margins of its ledgers, a notation without category, a soul that had erased its own entry.
Pursuit through official channels was impossible. She would have to climb.
The Bow of Severed Threads lay half-buried in ash, its string still resonating with the violence of her self-mutilation. When her functioning hand closed around the grip, the weapon sang: a keening note of recognition and hunger. It had tasted ultimate severance, the cutting of one’s own fate-lines, and now craved more. Feng’s threads. The connections binding him to rank, to immunity, to the continued drawing of breath. The bow shuddered with anticipation, almost eager.
She stood at the branch’s edge where healthy jade gave way to blackened corruption. The disease spread in real-time. Hairline cracks propagating through the bark’s surface like a slow-motion shattering, each fracture weeping dark sap that smelled of burnt offerings and broken oaths. The tree was dying. She was dying with it. Below, the root hollows promised concealment, exile, survival. Above, only the sealed temples of those who had abandoned her. Xiu-Lan adjusted the bow across her shoulders and stepped into the void, choosing descent over dissolution.
The hollow reeked of decay and forgotten offerings, its walls lined with bioluminescent fungi that cast her shadow in sickly green. She pressed her back against the curved interior, feeling the tree’s pulse through the wood. Slower here in the depths, almost lethargic compared to the frantic rhythm of the temple districts above. Each beat sent tremors through her spine, a reminder that even wounded, even corrupted, the World Tree endured.
Her breath came in shallow gasps. The air tasted of rot and old incense, the residue of prayers abandoned mid-utterance. Someone had died here, perhaps multiple someones. The fungi fed on their spiritual essence, transforming devotion into this wan phosphorescence. She had studied such phenomena in her novitiate years, when the celestial order still made sense, when cause and effect followed proper bureaucratic channels.
Now nothing followed proper channels.
She tried to inventory her possessions without moving. The bow lay within arm’s reach. Her right arm, the functional one. The registry scroll had survived tucked against her chest, its seal still intact. Her master’s jade chop pressed cold against her hip where she’d secured it in her sash. Three items salvaged from an entire temple complex. Three items to represent four hundred years of accumulated spiritual authority, two hundred disciples, seventeen generations of lineage holders.
All ash now. All names struck from the celestial records by whatever corrupted hand had orchestrated the catastrophe.
The tree’s pulse quickened slightly, responding to her spike of rage. She forced her breathing to steady, drawing on meditation techniques that felt impossibly distant. Emotion was a luxury. Grief was a luxury. She had neither the spiritual reserves nor the time to indulge in what her body wanted. To curl around her ruined arm and keen for her dead.
Instead, she listened. The Root Hollows were never silent. Outcasts whispered in adjacent chambers. Forgotten spirits drifted through the walls. Somewhere close, someone was crying.
Her left arm screamed as she shifted position, the burns having progressed beyond mere injury into something the celestial physicians would have classified as spiritual necrosis. The flesh had transformed through stages during her three-day cling to the dying branch. First the angry red of mortal fire, then the charred black of divine flame, and finally this: a mottled gray-white corruption that resembled cracked porcelain more than human tissue. Where the Heaven’s Gate Catastrophe had burned deepest, the skin had taken on a translucent quality, revealing not muscle and bone beneath but something that looked disturbingly like script. Celestial characters half-formed in scar tissue, as though the fire had tried to write a decree directly into her flesh.
She could no longer feel her fingers. When she attempted to flex them, nothing responded. The hand remained curled in its last conscious position, frozen mid-gesture in what her pain-fogged mind recognized as the third form of the Supplication to Absent Masters.
Even her body mocked her with prayer.
The fluid leaking from her wounds wasn’t blood: nothing so simple, so mortal. It ran thinner, catching the hollow’s dim bioluminescence and throwing it back in sickly amber threads. Her cultivation base, that carefully constructed edifice of seven ordeals and thirty years’ discipline, was hemorrhaging through the spiritual cracks the Catastrophe had torn in her foundation. Each drop that struck the jade-bark floor hissed like water meeting forge-heated iron, releasing wisps of steam that carried the acrid-sweet smell of her own essence combusting into nothing. The vapor formed brief characters before dissipating. Fragments of techniques she’d mastered, names of forms she’d perfected, all burning away into the Root Hollow’s stagnant air. She watched her life’s work evaporate, one hissing drop at a time.
Her fingers closed around the bow’s grip, and the contact sent a jolt through her damaged meridians. Not pain exactly, but recognition. The weapon remembered her, even diminished as she was. Its celestial bronze sang a single pure note against her palm, defiant amid the ruin. The string thrummed beneath her thumb, still capable of severing karmic threads, still hungry for the hunt. She clutched it to her chest like a drowning woman gripping driftwood.
The hollow’s darkness pressed close, thick with the smell of rot and desperate survival. She felt them before she saw them: pale eyes reflecting bioluminescent sap-glow, watching from crevices and shadow-pockets. Outcasts. Curse-bearers. Spirits too minor or too broken for the celestial registers. They studied her ruined arm, her tattered crimson robes, calculating whether she represented threat or opportunity. Whether her flesh would feed the roots by dawn.
Her fingers trembled as she laid out the salvaged items on relatively dry bark. The Bow of Severed Threads came first, positioned with the reverence due a sacred instrument. Its string still hummed with residual power despite the catastrophe, a low vibration that resonated in her damaged cultivation base like accusation. She had carried this weapon for fifteen years, had trained until her fingers bled to master its peculiar requirements. The precise spiritual pressure needed to manifest its cutting threads, the meditative state required to perceive karmic connections, the moral clarity demanded before each severing.
It should have protected her disciples.
The thought came unbidden, as it had every waking hour since the flames. She had been in the archive chamber when the ritual began, researching a discrepancy in the quarterly reports. By the time she reached the main hall, the forbidden formation was already active, her master already consumed, her junior disciples already screaming as divine fire ate through their meridians. She had drawn the bow, manifested the threads, tried to sever the ritual’s connections to its power source.
Too slow. Too weak. Too late.
Her hand hovered over the weapon now, reluctant to touch it again. The bow had survived unscathed while everything else burned: her disciples, her master, the temple itself, the very branch that had supported their sect for three centuries. What did it mean that the instrument of severing remained whole while all connections it should have protected were cut forever?
She forced her trembling fingers to still, pressed her palm flat against the bark. The bow was a tool. Tools held no guilt. She had failed, yes, but the weapon itself bore no responsibility for her inadequacy. She would need it for what came next: for the hunt, for the vengeance, for the severing of one final karmic thread.
The corrupted official who had orchestrated the catastrophe would learn what the Bow of Severed Threads could truly accomplish.
The registry scroll she unrolled with agonizing care, her damaged left arm barely able to maintain the proper tension. The outer layers crumbled at her touch, ash flaking away like shed skin, but the inner text remained legible in the hollow’s dim bioluminescence. She squinted, forcing her exhausted eyes to focus on the dense columns of names, ranks, jurisdictions. The bureaucratic architecture of the celestial hierarchy that had allowed corruption to fester unchecked.
There. Third column, seventeen names down. The official who had signed the authorization for her temple’s “special audit.” The one who had appeared unannounced with his retinue of silent enforcers. The one whose smile had never reached his eyes as he examined their records, asking pointed questions about discrepancies she hadn’t noticed, anomalies that seemed to materialize under his scrutiny.
She traced the characters with her fingertip, committing them to memory though they were already burned into her mind. His name. His rank. His jurisdictional authority. The scroll was evidence, yes, but more importantly it was a map. A guide through the labyrinthine celestial bureaucracy to the one throat her bow needed to find.
The seal’s warmth pulsed against her scarred palm: not the heat of flame but something deeper, a resonance that spoke of her master’s final moments. She turned the jade disc slowly, studying the carved characters that proclaimed authority she no longer possessed. Seventh Ordination. Heaven’s Gate Temple. Keeper of the Lower Branch Records. All titles now meaningless, tainted by association with catastrophe.
The seal should have died with her master, its qi dissipating as the old woman’s spirit ascended for judgment. That it still held warmth meant something: a final gift, perhaps, or a burden. Evidence of legitimacy that any official would dismiss the moment they saw her damaged cultivation base, her ruined arm, her desperate circumstances.
She closed her fist around it anyway. Let them dismiss her. She would make them listen.
The robes settled against her shoulders like a shroud of accusation. Each tear in the fabric told its own story, here, where she’d dragged a dying disciple from the flames; there, where falling debris had nearly crushed her. The crimson that once commanded respect in every temple corridor would now invite only suspicion, marking her as catastrophe-touched, as someone whose presence brought questions no official wished to answer.
She laid the items in a precise row on the blackened root surface, each positioned according to the ritual arrangements her master had drilled into her during the first ordination. The bow to her right, where her strong hand could grasp it. The scroll before her, aligned with the cardinal directions inscribed on its bronze caps. The seal to her left, where her ruined arm could at least guard it while she slept. The robes she still wore, because removing them meant acknowledging she might never rightfully don them again.
Water came first. She crawled to where condensation pooled in a root crevice, her movements reduced to the graceless scrabbling of something that had forgotten it once walked upright through temple halls. The moisture gathered in a depression where two roots twisted together, no more than a handful, but she pressed her cracked lips to the jade-smooth surface and drank directly from the stone. Her silver-streaked hair had long since escaped its severe bun, the binding burned away with everything else, and now the loose strands trailed into the water, absorbing what her mouth could not reach.
Too weak for dignity. The thought surfaced through the haze of pain with bitter clarity. She had been Seventh Ordination, authorized to commune with ancestral courts, entrusted with maintaining the celestial records for an entire temple sect. Now she drank like a beast, and the tree’s wards pushed at her with the same impersonal force they would apply to any corrupted thing that did not belong.
Her left arm hung useless, the burns still weeping despite her crude bindings. She had wrapped them with strips torn from her inner robe, the white silk now stained with fluid and soot. The pain came in waves that made her vision darken at the edges, but she had learned to breathe through them during the three days on the smoking branch. Shallow breaths. Count to four. Release. The meditation techniques of her first year as an initiate, before she had learned anything of power.
When the small pool was exhausted, she rested her forehead against the root’s surface. The jade was cool against her fevered skin. Around her, the Root Hollows stretched in twilight shadow, illuminated only by the faint amber glow of sap channels far above. She could hear movement in the darkness: the outcasts and forgotten spirits who made their homes here, watching this newest addition to their ranks.
The charred offerings she’d consumed on the branch sustained her barely, their bitter ash taste still coating her throat like a funeral shroud. Divine essence so degraded it provided only enough qi to keep her heart beating through the tremors that wracked her body. The flesh of consecrated doves reduced to carbon, rice cakes that had been blessed for ancestral communion now nothing but grit between her teeth. She had eaten them methodically during those three days, forcing down each blackened fragment while the Scorched Bough groaned beneath her and the wards built their pressure.
Her cultivation base tried to process the corrupted essence and failed. The qi pathways along her meridians sputtered like dying candles, unable to refine what she fed them. She could feel the damage spreading: hairline fractures in her spiritual foundation that would never properly heal, not without resources she no longer possessed. Seventh Ordination, and she would remain there, stuck at a rank she had achieved fifteen years ago, her potential consumed in the same flames that had taken her disciples.
The ash sat heavy in her stomach, sustaining nothing but her refusal to die.
She tore strips from her inner robe to bind the burns, the silk parting with soft protests under her trembling right hand. Each movement of her left arm sent white lightning through her shoulder, the nerves screaming protests that her damaged cultivation base could no longer properly suppress. She bit through a wadded corner of cloth to muffle her sounds: not screams, she would not permit herself screams, but involuntary gasps that might carry through the hollow’s acoustic peculiarities.
The Root Hollows harbored things that tracked wounded prey by sound: feral spirits who had forgotten their celestial oaths, corrupted guardian beasts whose temples had crumbled centuries ago. Worse still were the patrols. Officials sent to ensure no witnesses survived to contest the official narrative of the Heaven’s Gate Catastrophe.
The silk darkened immediately, fluid seeping through the weave: not blood alone but something more viscous, tinged with the residue of divine fire that mortal burns should never carry. Her cultivation base, fractured beyond repair, could neither circulate healing qi nor suppress the spiritual contamination spreading from the wound. Each breath brought the bitter taste of ash and failure, her body’s resources depleting faster than scavenged condensation could restore.
The binding complete, she let herself collapse against jade-bark, each item positioned with deliberate care, bow, scroll, seal, within reach of her functioning hand. Her master’s seal pressed into her palm, its carved surface a final anchor to purpose. Shock descended like winter fog, consciousness fragmenting into scattered embers. The hollow’s darkness welcomed her, indifferent to rank or ruin.
Fever painted visions across the hollow’s curved walls: her disciples burning, their mouths open in silent screams as celestial fire consumed their carefully cultivated cores. The Heaven’s Gate Catastrophe replayed in fragments: the forbidden ritual circle drawn in phosphorescent ink, the corrupted official’s face obscured by ceremonial veils, the moment the dimensional boundary cracked and divine fire poured through like judgment made manifest.
Her body convulsed, left arm jerking against jade-bark with wet sounds that echoed through the hollow. The burn scars wept clear fluid that smelled of scorched incense and failed cultivation. Each pulse of pain brought clarity, then dragged her back under.
In the fever’s grip, she saw the World Tree’s records scrolling past. Names struck through, lineages terminated, her temple sect reduced to a single line of crimson notation: Disciplinary Action Completed. Registry Amended. The bureaucratic efficiency of their erasure was more horrifying than the fire itself.
Her intact hand cramped around the bow’s grip, fingers locked in rigor. She could not release it even when lucidity returned in brief windows. The weapon had become extension of purpose, the only proof that she had been someone who mattered, who had authority, who had disciples worth avenging.
Between fever spikes, she became aware of the hollow’s rhythm. The shuffle of outcast feet, the whisper of spirits too damaged to ascend, the drip of contaminated sap from wounded bark above. This was the World Tree’s basement, where bureaucratic order discarded its mistakes and failures. Where she now belonged.
Her master’s seal burned against her chest, its carved surface pressing accusation into her flesh. She had survived. Her disciples had not. The arithmetic of that failure was inescapable, recorded somewhere in the tree’s infinite bark, another notation in celestial ledgers she could no longer access.
Dawn would come. She would endure. The alternative was unthinkable.
They moved like a procession of the damned, each bearing their particular failure etched in spiritual flesh. The fox-spirit’s remaining tails dragged through dust, the missing four severed for crimes she could only imagine. The bureaucrat’s form flickered between corporeal and void, his incomplete execution leaving him trapped in administrative limbo. Neither dead enough to reincarnate nor alive enough to petition for clemency. The unregistered children were worst of all, their features blurred like water-stained ink, denied even the dignity of official existence in the celestial records.
Their eyes lingered on her crimson robes, on the bow that marked her as temple-trained, on the seal that still bore legitimate authority despite her fall. She watched them catalog her ruin with the expertise of those who had long practice identifying hierarchy even in degradation. Some showed pity. Others, a bitter satisfaction at seeing the celestial order’s representative brought low.
A few paused longer, as if considering whether to offer aid or simply waiting to see if she would die and leave salvageable possessions. She tightened her grip on the bow. The message was understood. They shuffled onward.
The outcasts’ withdrawal left her suspended in a peculiar isolation. Neither fully abandoned nor acknowledged. She could feel their awareness like pressure against her skin, the weight of collective observation from those who understood precisely what her presence meant. A celestial functionary, fallen. Evidence that the hierarchies they’d been cast from were not immutable after all.
The fox-spirit paused at the edge of visibility, her remaining tails twitching with what might have been sympathy or calculation. For a moment, Xiu-Lan thought she might speak, might offer some fragment of knowledge about survival in these depths. But the spirit’s eyes caught on the bow, on the seal, on the authority that even ruin could not fully erase, and she turned away.
Xiu-Lan was grateful for their distance even as loneliness threatened to drown her.
The bow’s wood held memory of proper form, of temple courtyards where disciples had practiced under her instruction. Her master’s seal pulsed faintly against her sternum, its carved jade still carrying fragments of his authority, his disappointment that she had survived when so many had not. She forced her lungs to expand, contract, expand again. Pain became rhythm. Rhythm became endurance.
Dawn arrived not as revelation but as administrative fact. The World Tree’s sap channels dimming their amber glow, yielding jurisdiction to pale sunlight that filtered through root tangles overhead. She had survived. The thought carried no triumph, only the hollow acknowledgment of another entry in the ledger of her diminished existence. Around her, the Root Hollows stirred with the movements of those whom celestial order had discarded.
The inventory continued beyond flesh and bone. Her spiritual meridians (those invisible channels through which qi flowed like bureaucratic decrees through the World Tree’s sap veins) were compromised in seventeen distinct locations. She could feel each fracture with the precision her training demanded: three major breaks along the left arm’s essence pathways, corresponding to the burn damage; five hairline cracks radiating from her lower dantian where the explosion’s shockwave had struck; nine scattered ruptures throughout her secondary channels, the result of forcing her damaged cultivation base to sustain her through three days without proper meditation.
She flexed her right hand, watching the fingers respond with gratifying normalcy, then attempted the same with her left. The hand twitched, three fingers curling while the others remained stubbornly inert. The spiritual essence that should have flowed smoothly from her core to her extremities now leaked through the cracks, dissipating into the ambient qi of the Root Hollows like official correspondence lost in bureaucratic shuffle.
Worse than the physical damage was the sensation of wrongness in her cultivation base itself. Where once her core had been a perfectly ordered reservoir, spiritual essence arranged in the precise mandala patterns of the Celestial Registry’s orthodox methods, now chaos reigned. The explosion had not merely cracked the vessel; it had shattered the fundamental structure. She could feel her qi attempting to circulate through her morning cultivation cycle, only to encounter the breaks and scatter, unable to complete the circuit necessary for advancement.
She pressed two fingers to her wrist, checking the pulse points her master had taught her to read. The rhythm was irregular, stuttering where it should flow smooth. Each heartbeat pushed spiritual essence against the cracks, widening them incrementally. Without proper treatment, resources available only in the Middle Branch temples or higher, the damage would become permanent within a lunar cycle.
The Seventh Ordination had taken her three years to achieve: three years of dawn meditations in the Heaven’s Gate Temple, of copying ten thousand characters of celestial law with perfect brushwork, of fasting through the winter solstice while maintaining the altar flames. It had been a plateau, yes, but a triumphant one: the final consolidation before ascending to the Eighth Gate, which would grant her master-level authority to conduct major rituals, to petition the Upper Registry directly, to inscribe her name in the permanent records.
Now that gate stood sealed before her, not by lack of comprehension or insufficient virtue, but by simple mechanical failure. Her cultivation base could not generate the pressure required for breakthrough. The spiritual essence that should have built like water behind a dam, rising inexorably until it burst through to the next level, instead leaked away through seventeen fractures. She was a cracked vessel attempting to hold an ocean.
The mathematics were brutally clear: advancement required sustained circulation at eighty percent capacity for a minimum of forty-nine days. She could barely maintain thirty percent for an hour before exhaustion forced her to rest.
She attempted the Ascending Phoenix circulation: the first pattern any initiate learned, simple as breathing. Qi rose from her lower dantian, sluggish and thin. It reached the meridian junction at her solar plexus and immediately began bleeding away through the fractures, wisps of spiritual essence dissipating like steam from cracked pottery. She pushed harder, forcing more qi into the circulation, trying to compensate for the loss through sheer volume.
The pain struck instantly. A sensation like glass grinding in her bones. The fractures widened under the pressure. She gasped, released the circulation, felt what little qi she’d gathered scatter completely.
Three more attempts yielded the same result: gather, circulate, hemorrhage, collapse. Each cycle left her weaker than before.
The thought came with seductive gentleness: surrender. Let the roots grow through her bones, let her name fade from the celestial records like so many others who had fallen from grace. The Hollows would accept her. They accepted everyone eventually.
Her disciples’ faces rose before her, burning, screaming, reaching for her as the flames consumed them.
She spat blood and stood.
She had one scroll, one seal, one bow. The bureaucratic architecture of heaven ran on documentation, jurisdiction, evidence. Her master had taught her to navigate the celestial courts before teaching her to draw a bow.
If her cultivation was broken, she would become something the conspirators hadn’t anticipated: not a warrior, but an auditor armed with proof.
The scroll’s construction spoke volumes to one trained in celestial administration. Fireproof vellum from the Phoenix Archives, reserved for documents meant to outlast dynasties. Ink mixed with phoenix ash and ground starstone. Each character would resist not just flame but deliberate erasure magic. The binding threads were woven from silk taken from the World Tree’s own bark, making the scroll recognizable to any celestial court as authentic, unalterable evidence.
Someone had prepared this document knowing it would survive an inferno. Knowing there would be witnesses who needed to be eliminated. Knowing those witnesses might, against all probability, live long enough to read it.
The realization settled into her bones like winter cold. The Heaven’s Gate Catastrophe hadn’t been a ritual gone wrong. It had been a purge with documentation. Bureaucratic murder disguised as divine accident. Her temple hadn’t stumbled upon corruption. They had been deliberately positioned to witness something, then systematically destroyed, with this single scroll left behind like bait in a trap that had already sprung.
Xiu-Lan’s damaged left arm throbbed as she held the vellum steady. The characters swam in her vision, but she forced her eyes to focus. Each name represented a link in the conspiracy. Each seal mark indicated jurisdiction, authority, the specific bureaucratic power required to authorize what she’d witnessed.
The scroll listed seventeen officials across six celestial departments. Feng was merely the executioner: the lowest-ranked name on the entire document. Above him stretched a hierarchy of corruption reaching into branches of the World Tree she’d never been permitted to access.
Her master had taught her that heaven’s bureaucracy possessed one inviolable principle: every crime required documentation, every action needed authorization, every decision left a paper trail that could never be fully erased.
They had left her this scroll because they believed she was dead, or soon would be.
They had miscalculated.
She traced the first name: Junior Archivist Feng of the Eighth Terrace, Subsection of Karmic Debt Reconciliation: the official she’d seen complete the forbidden ritual, his hands weaving mudras that turned her disciples into living torches.
His seal mark was fresh, stamped with the vermillion ink reserved for emergency authorizations. The date beside it corresponded to the Hour of the Serpent, three days before the Catastrophe. Someone had granted him permission in advance. Someone had known exactly when he would need to act.
Xiu-Lan’s finger moved to the second name: Senior Auditor Lin of the Fifth Terrace, Department of Celestial Taxation. A bureaucrat whose jurisdiction had nothing to do with karmic reconciliation or temple oversight. Yet her authorization seal appeared twice on the document: once beside Feng’s name, once in the margin beside a notation about “resource reallocation.”
Resource reallocation. As if her disciples were line items in a ledger. As if their lives were inventory to be liquidated.
The third name made her breath catch: Magistrate Qian of the Third Terrace, Office of Heavenly Corrections. His seal was the oldest on the document, dated six months before the Catastrophe.
This hadn’t been murder. It had been a scheduled execution.
Xiu-Lan held the scroll to the amber light filtering through the roots above. The indentations caught the glow differently than undamaged vellum. She angled it, squinting through the pain that pulsed behind her eyes. Three strokes. The radical for “Heaven” or perhaps “Great.” Then two more characters, their ghost-shapes tantalizingly familiar.
She’d spent fifteen years copying celestial documents. Her fingers knew the weight of every brush stroke, the rhythm of bureaucratic titles.
The middle character resolved first: “Registry.” The third came slower: “Keeper.”
Great Registry Keeper. A position that existed only in the Upper Courts, beyond the canopy where she’d never been permitted to ascend. Someone who could authorize the alteration of reincarnation records themselves. Who could erase souls from the cosmic ledger entirely.
Her ruined hand trembled as the implications crystallized. Six officials coordinating across jurisdictions required authorization from someone who transcended territorial boundaries. Someone who could command silence from multiple temple sects simultaneously.
The Overseer’s redacted title bore the distinctive triple-seal mark: reserved for those who answered directly to the Celestial Emperor’s inner cabinet.
This wasn’t corruption. This was conspiracy at the highest echelons of divine governance.
The seal warmed beneath her touch, and for a heartbeat she felt her master’s presence: his steady hand guiding hers through a thousand bureaucratic rituals, his voice teaching her that heaven’s order was worth preserving. He had died believing in that order.
She would use his faith to burn it down.
She tested the bow’s string. Still resonant despite years of pursuit, though drawing it sent sharp pain through her scarred left arm up to the shoulder, reminding her that three full draws would be her limit before the limb went numb entirely. The weapon hummed beneath her fingers, its jade frame inscribed with the names of every karmic thread she’d severed. Too many. The Bow of Severed Threads was meant for surgical precision, cutting only those connections that had become corrupted beyond redemption. She had wielded it like a butcher’s cleaver in those first grief-mad months, severing any thread that might lead to Feng, leaving a trail of disrupted destinies and broken oaths across the lower branches.
The temple elders had been right to strip her of rank. She could admit that now, in the hollow’s dim solitude. A Celestial Registry official who cut threads indiscriminately was no better than the corruption she hunted.
But the bow had taught her restraint through pain. Each careless severance had transferred a portion of karmic weight to her own damaged cultivation base, accumulating like scar tissue around her spiritual core. She could feel them now. Forty-seven threads she’d cut without proper authority, forty-seven weights pressing against her advancement. The Seventh Ordination had become her prison, and she had forged the bars herself.
She set the bow aside with deliberate care, flexing her left hand. The fingers responded sluggishly, the burn scars tight across her knuckles. Three draws. Perhaps four if she accepted permanent damage. She would need to choose her targets with the precision she’d once been trained for, back when the Celestial Registry had trusted her with such power.
The bow could sever connections. But first she needed to trace them: to follow the bureaucratic threads from these seven visible names up through the hierarchy’s tangled web until she found where Feng’s authority truly nested.
The scroll lay open before her, seven names glowing faintly in the amber sap-light. She traced each character with her scarred finger, committing them to memory through the old Registry techniques: Wu-Shan, keeper of the Eighty-First Branch archives. Mei-Ling, petition clerk in the Sap Channel Authority. Five others, scattered across the Middle Branches like deliberate fragments of a shattered mirror.
Each one a thread leading toward the redacted void where Feng’s true authority resided.
She had tried brute investigation in the early years. Confronting minor officials, demanding answers, threatening severance. It had earned her nothing but expulsion orders and the growing suspicion that marked her as unstable. The bureaucracy protected its own, especially when corruption had metastasized through proper channels, wearing the mask of legitimate authority.
No. She needed to become what she’d once been: patient, methodical, invisible within the very system she navigated. These seven would not be confronted. They would be observed, their transactions catalogued, their connections traced with the delicate attention she’d abandoned in grief’s first fire.
The Registry had taught her to hunt through paperwork, not violence.
It was time to remember those lessons.
The meditation faltered before it began. Her qi stuttered through cracked meridians like water through broken channels, each circulation sending needle-sharp warnings through her spiritual network. She forced the technique anyway, feeling her consciousness extend outward in trembling threads. Searching for the distinctive resonance of corrupted divine essence.
Four hours. Perhaps less if she pushed harder.
The limitation burned worse than her physical scars. Once, she could have maintained essence-tracking for three days without pause, could have followed a target across entire branch systems. Now her damaged cultivation reduced her to brief, desperate bursts of perception. The Heaven’s Gate Catastrophe had crippled more than her body; it had severed her from the spiritual capacity that made her an effective hunter.
She would have to compensate with mortal cunning instead.
The fragments played behind her closed eyelids with merciless precision: Feng’s mudra held for exactly three heartbeats, the starwood incense mixed with rendered phoenix fat, the geometric formation requiring seven anchor points. Her disciples’ cultivation bases had ignited from within, their carefully nurtured spiritual cores transformed into celestial fuel that burned with colors no natural fire could produce.
Each detail catalogued. Each element a recognizable signature.
She traced the visible seal fragments with her scarred fingers, committing their qi signatures to memory. Each department controlled resources that could fuel such a ritual: virtue essence, karmic bonds, seasonal qi, soul records. The pattern suggested coordination, a conspiracy that required access across multiple celestial bureaucracies. Five departments meant five potential hunting grounds, five trails to follow through the World Tree’s labyrinthine branches.
The Treasury seal showed a phoenix clutching scrolls. Standard iconography, but the phoenix’s left wing bore an additional flourish, a minor variant used only during the Jade Emperor’s third administrative reform, seven centuries past. That dated the conspirator’s appointment, narrowed the pool of candidates. The Office of Karmic Reconciliation’s seal was more troubling: perfectly orthodox in design, which meant whoever held that position possessed impeccable credentials, had survived multiple celestial audits. Such officials didn’t corrupt easily. They were either coerced or true believers in whatever doctrine justified consuming disciples’ souls.
The Department of Seasonal Transitions seal carried traces of autumn qi, still faintly detectable despite the redaction. She’d felt that particular signature before, during the catastrophe. The unnatural cold that preceded the flames, winter’s essence forced into summer’s domain. A deliberate inversion of natural order, requiring authority over the celestial calendar itself.
The Registry of Incarnate Souls seal made her hand tremble. This department controlled reincarnation queues, soul purification protocols, the fundamental machinery of cosmic justice. If someone there had participated in Feng’s ritual, they could have erased her disciples from the reincarnation cycle entirely, made their destruction permanent beyond even divine intervention. The thought threatened to crack her focus.
She forced her attention to the fifth void, the deliberately burned seal. Fire damage was specific. Not the ambient destruction from the catastrophe, but targeted obliteration applied after the scroll’s creation. Someone had wanted this particular conspirator’s identity protected more thoroughly than the others. The burn pattern suggested phoenix fire, which meant either the Treasury conspirator had done this, or someone with access to imperial flame.
She pulled out her notation brush, added a new annotation: Fifth conspirator: highest rank or most vulnerable to exposure. Priority target once identity established.
The pattern had taken her four years to extract from fragmentary records, each data point purchased with bribes she could barely afford or stolen during brief infiltrations of branch archives. Seventeen months. The celestial bureaucracy operated on nested cycles but seventeen months corresponded to nothing in official protocol. It was deliberately irregular, designed to evade pattern-recognition wards that monitored standard intervals.
She’d marked each convergence point on her makeshift map: the Forty-First Branch where three hundred souls vanished from reincarnation queues, dismissed as clerical error. The Nineteenth Branch temple that reported “unexpected spiritual turbulence” the same week Feng filed requisitions for purification incense in quantities sufficient for mass soul-binding rituals. The Eighty-Eighth Branch’s collapsed sap channel, officially attributed to natural decay, occurring precisely when Feng’s travel documents placed him two branches away: close enough for a cultivator of his rank to strike undetected.
Seventeen months. Seventeen convergences over the past decade. Her disciples had been the eighteenth.
She was determined there would not be a nineteenth.
The bow lay beside the scroll, its string humming faintly with residual power. She’d managed to sever three of Feng’s karmic threads during the catastrophe before the flames drove her back. Somewhere in the celestial bureaucracy he was operating with diminished capacity now, unable to fully manipulate certain connections. Relationships that should have answered his summons now failed, alliances that should have shielded him from scrutiny now wavered. A wound she intended to reopen and deepen.
She traced the weapon’s limbs with her scarred fingers, feeling the residual echo of those severed threads. Each cut had cost her. The bow demanded payment in the archer’s own karmic weight, and she’d burned through decades of accumulated merit in those three desperate shots. Her path to higher ordination had collapsed with those releases.
Worth it, if it meant Feng stumbled.
The corruption tainted the ink as she ground it, threading dark veins through the black that shouldn’t exist. Her hand cramped (the scarred one) but she forced precision into each character. Form Seventeen: Unauthorized Consumption of Soul-Essence. Feng’s name headed the column. Below it, gaps where redacted names should appear, marked with accusatory blank spaces. The scroll would convince no magistrate, but it organized her certainty into something resembling evidence.
The Karmic Reconciliation temple kept notoriously meticulous records: a bureaucratic virtue that might finally serve her purpose. She traced the route again: down through the unstable heartwood passages, across the Seventy-First Branch’s abandoned meditation platforms, then up the eastern trunk face where patrol schedules left a four-hour gap at dawn. The climb would drain her damaged cultivation base dangerously low, but requisition records couldn’t falsify themselves.
She needed to think like Feng would. The crimson robes could be dyed with bark tannins, though the process would take three days and leave her vulnerable during the soaking period. Alternatively, she could layer scavenged outer garments over them, but that added bulk would compromise her mobility during the temple infiltration.
Starvation she’d learned to manage through meditation techniques that slowed her metabolism, though each session left her cultivation base more fractured. The abandoned shrines dotting the lower branches still held offering bowls. Stale rice cakes, dried fruit left by spirits who’d fled or perished. Undignified sustenance for a former temple master, but dignity had burned with her disciples.
The temple authorities presented a more complex calculus. Her absence from the catastrophe site violated the Nineteenth Protocol of Hierarchical Sacrifice. Survivors of sect-destroying events were required to self-immolate within three days to preserve bureaucratic order. That she’d fled instead marked her as both coward and heretic in celestial law. The execution order would be automatic, requiring no investigation or trial. Any clerk who recognized her crimson robes would be obligated to report her location.
Yet she needed those very authorities’ records. The Karmic Reconciliation temple processed all requisition requests for ritual materials across seventeen branches. If Feng had prepared for the catastrophe, and he must have, given the scale of the forbidden ritual, he would have requisitioned components months in advance. Phoenix ash, void-touched incense, soul-binding talismans. Items that would leave traceable bureaucratic footprints even if the names were redacted.
She ran her scarred fingers along the bow’s string, feeling the weapon’s hunger for severed connections. Perhaps she wouldn’t need to hide at all. Perhaps she could walk into that temple as what she’d become: a ghost seeking names to haunt.
The defensive wards posed their own threat. Each temple maintained autonomous security protocols, layered enchantments that responded to unauthorized spiritual signatures. Her damaged cultivation base broadcast irregularity. Fractured qi patterns that wards interpreted as either curse-taint or demonic infiltration. The Karmic Reconciliation temple would be especially sensitive, processing as it did the spiritual residue of countless petitions.
She could attempt to mask her signature, but that required sustained concentration she couldn’t maintain while navigating hostile territory. The alternative was speed. Move through the temple’s outer archives before the wards fully analyzed her presence, perhaps seven minutes before alarm talismans activated. Seven minutes to locate requisition records spanning months, identify patterns in redacted entries, and escape before temple guards sealed the exits.
The despair whispered its familiar litany: too many variables, insufficient strength, inevitable failure. She’d burned through her life’s accumulated merit and still her disciples remained ash. What made her think she could succeed where celestial authority itself had chosen silence?
She tightened her grip on the bow. Because Feng had taught her one final lesson. That the corrupt feared exposure more than they feared death.
Her damaged cultivation base complicated everything. The curse-tainted sap channels offered the fastest routes between branches. Glowing arterial pathways that could transport her across dozens of levels in hours rather than weeks of treacherous climbing. But her Seventh Ordination foundation couldn’t filter the corruption as it once had. Before the catastrophe, she’d navigated tainted channels with ease, her spiritual defenses burning away impurities before they reached her meridians. Now those same defenses were fractured, porous. One miscalculation, one moment of insufficient focus while the corrupted sap flooded through her system, could leave her spiritually crippled. Unable even to draw the Bow of Severed Threads. Her last remaining advantage, rendered useless by her own weakness.
The Root Hollows’ temporal distortions made rationing meaningless. Three days could pass as one, or stretch into weeks of subjective hunger. She’d learned this during her first desperate month as a fugitive, emerging from a hollow to find her carefully preserved rice reduced to dust, her water skin holding only memory. Her body bore the cost of those early mistakes. Each miscalculation carved itself into weakened muscles, into bones that ached with cold she could no longer cultivate away.
The bow’s string hummed true beneath her scarred fingers: still capable of severing karmic threads, though her cultivation could no longer guide the arrows properly. She whispered each disciple’s name as ritual, not surrender: Li-Wen who loved calligraphy, Dao-Ming who sang during dawn meditations, little Ping who’d never completed his first ordination. Their deaths demanded accounting. She would be their ledger, their petition, their instrument of correction in a corrupted bureaucracy.
The registry chamber occupied a forgotten administrative node, its jade walls still dutifully recording transactions despite the absence of any living clerk. Xiu-Lan settled cross-legged before the luminous script, letting her damaged spiritual sense extend into the flowing characters. Each petition created ripples in the bureaucratic current. Applications for reincarnation slots, disputes over territorial boundaries, requests for cultivation resources. The patterns revealed more than their authors intended.
Official Feng’s former jurisdiction over the Forty-Seventh through Fifty-Second Branches showed normal traffic density until three years before the catastrophe. Then: a gradual thinning, like blood draining from a limb. Petitions still flowed, but their resolutions grew sparse. Appeals vanished into administrative silence. She traced the gaps with her fingertips, feeling where the sap channels had been deliberately rerouted, their records scrubbed with authority she could no longer challenge directly.
But redaction itself left traces. Where Feng’s name should appear in co-signed decrees, the script twisted into bureaucratic euphemisms. The surrounding officials’ signatures remained visible, creating a constellation around an invisible center. She began sketching the network on salvaged paper, using the old cartographic techniques her master had taught for mapping spiritual geography.
The work demanded precision her damaged cultivation barely supported. After two hours, her left arm trembled uncontrollably, the burn scars aching as if freshly made. She forced herself to continue. Three more names emerged from the negative space: Sub-Minister Qian of the Registry of Ascensions, Clerk-Adjutant Bao who processed soul-debt transfers, and someone in the Canopy Courts whose redaction was so thorough only their bureaucratic rank remained visible: a Fifth Circle Administrator, high enough to authorize the ritual that had consumed her disciples.
She added them to her private scroll, beneath Feng’s name. The conspiracy had architecture. She would map every supporting beam before bringing it down.
The merchant spirit arrived at the hollow’s entrance with the nervous formality of one conducting business outside proper channels. Xiu-Lan received him according to the old protocols, offering tea she couldn’t afford and courtesies that cost nothing. His request was straightforward: trace a rival’s accumulated soul-debt before their arbitration hearing in five days. The debt’s origin would determine jurisdictional authority, and thus the arbiter’s likely ruling.
She worked through the night, following the karmic thread through seventeen branch districts and two centuries of transactions. The trail led through Sub-Minister Qian’s former jurisdiction. A connection she noted carefully. When she delivered the documentation, the merchant paid in information tokens stamped with current registry access codes and guaranteed passage through three middle-branch districts where her outcast status would otherwise bar entry.
Small work. Beneath her former station. But it established what she needed: a reputation as someone who could navigate the celestial bureaucracy’s labyrinthine records without triggering the oversight wards that monitored official inquiries. Word spread through the networks of minor spirits and unaligned deities. Within a month, three more clients sought her services.
The Bow of Severed Threads became her currency in the shadow economy beneath celestial notice. A merchant deity needed a debt-obligation quietly dissolved before his ascension review. She obliged, accepting payment in archived petition logs. A minor thunder god sought release from an inconvenient marriage contract: the thread parted soundlessly, and he traded her three months’ access to the Storm Registry’s filing chambers. Each severance left the bureaucratic record pristine, as though the connection had never existed, while each grateful client opened new doors, shared new whispers.
She compiled their confidences like a scholar assembling fragments of shattered scripture. Names recurred. Jurisdictional boundaries aligned too precisely. The pattern emerged slowly, like constellations resolving from scattered stars. Not mere corruption, but architecture.
Her ledgers grew dense with annotations: seventeen names circling a hollow center, their jurisdictions like spokes around an axle she couldn’t yet perceive. Each official’s authority touched resource extraction: sap refineries, essence condensers, soul-processing facilities in the Root Hollows. The pattern suggested something worse than theft. This wasn’t corruption feeding personal greed. This was infrastructure, methodical and protected, harvesting something from the Tree’s lowest depths.
The conspiracy’s architecture revealed itself through systematic erasure. Requisition forms that referenced non-existent facilities, transport manifests with destination fields left blank, seventeen officials whose jurisdictional boundaries touched like puzzle pieces around a void. All pathways led downward, toward the Root Hollows where outcasts and forgotten things dwelled. Whatever they harvested required infrastructure spanning twelve branch districts, resources she couldn’t trace without the very celestial authority they’d stripped from her.
The isolation pressed against her like physical weight. In the first months after the catastrophe, she had harbored foolish hopes. That sympathetic officials might quietly provide intelligence, that surviving disciples scattered to other sects would send word, that someone in the vast celestial bureaucracy would see the injustice and act. She had checked. Methodically. Exhaustively.
The few surviving Registry clerks who’d once shared tea ceremonies with her now averted their eyes when she passed through the sap channels, their fear of association more powerful than any residual loyalty. She’d approached Junior Archivist Mei-Lin in the Forty-Ninth Branch temple, a woman who’d wept at Xiu-Lan’s ordination celebration. Mei-Lin had turned away mid-conversation, suddenly remembering urgent filing duties. Scholar-Official Tan had been more direct, hissing through clenched teeth: “You’re marked. Whatever touched your temple spreads through connection. I have a family to protect.”
The pattern repeated across twelve branches. Former colleagues became strangers. Temple doors that once opened at her approach remained sealed. Even the tea houses where off-duty celestials gathered fell silent when she entered, conversations dying like snuffed candles until she left.
She’d tried approaching the matter laterally: offering her tracking services to minor officials with boundary disputes, hoping to rebuild credibility. They’d accepted her work, used her results, then paid her in untraceable spirit stones and asked her never to return. Her name, it seemed, carried contagion.
The ancestral spirits offered no comfort either. The communion rituals that once brought guidance from her lineage now produced only silence, as if her forebears had been struck from the celestial records along with everything else. Whether they’d been destroyed, forbidden from contact, or had simply abandoned her as a failed inheritor, the result was identical: she walked alone through a bureaucracy designed to crush individuals without institutional backing.
Her cultivation base, frozen at Seventh Ordination, became a cage more confining than any prison. The damage manifested in humiliating ways: techniques that once flowed like breathing now sputtered and died half-formed. When she attempted the Thousand-Li Perception to track Feng’s essence signature, her qi channels burned with feedback, leaving her gasping in alleyways between the branch temples. The Bow of Severed Threads still answered her call, but firing it drained reserves she could no longer replenish through meditation.
The political dimensions cut deeper. Eighth Ordination was the threshold. The minimum rank to petition the Middle Courts, to access restricted archives, to activate her sect’s remaining treasures locked in dimensional vaults. She’d attempted the advancement ritual three times in her hollow, each failure leaving her weaker. The catastrophe had cracked something fundamental in her spiritual architecture, a fracture that wouldn’t heal because it existed partially outside normal cultivation theory.
She’d consulted medical texts in abandoned libraries, finding only vague references to “mandate wounds”. Injuries inflicted when one’s celestial purpose was severed. The cure, if it existed, lay in the same direction as everything else: forward, through Feng, into the corruption itself.
The evidence itself seemed alive with malice. Witness testimonies she’d transcribed in her own blood, the most permanent ink, would fade by morning, characters bleeding into meaningless stains. Documents stolen from branch archives dissolved mid-reading, transforming into requisition forms for incense quantities, transfer orders shuffling minor functionaries between irrelevant posts. The redacted names on her conspiracy scroll shifted positions when she wasn’t looking, as if mocking her efforts to decode them.
Worst were her own memories. When she tried to recall Feng’s exact words during the ritual, her mind slid away like fingers on oiled jade. She’d seen the forbidden sigils he’d drawn, she knew she had, but their shapes refused to solidify in recollection. The catastrophe had encoded its own erasure into reality itself, rewriting witnesses along with evidence.
She catalogued what remained of them in her mind each night: Disciple Mei’s laugh like wind chimes, now a shriek. Young Bohai’s careful calligraphy, his hands now clawing at nothing. Seventeen names, seventeen voices trapped in the spaces between existence and void. They couldn’t die properly. Couldn’t rest. Couldn’t be forgotten while she still breathed to remember them.
The Bow of Severed Threads required three arrows per week to maintain its spiritual resonance. She had materials for forty-seven. Her damaged cultivation base could sustain two significant techniques before requiring meditation recovery. Feng’s last known jurisdiction was twelve branches above, a four-day climb for someone with full mobility. For her, seven days minimum.
She wrote each calculation in ash on stone, building an architecture of survival from scarcity.
She traced her finger across the scroll’s redacted sections. Black voids where celestial authority had erased names like brushstrokes through wet ink. Twelve co-conspirators, the pattern suggested. Twelve officials whose jurisdictions had experienced “accidents” similar to Heaven’s Gate in the past forty years. Temple fires attributed to careless novices. Cultivation deviations blamed on improper technique. An entire monastery’s worth of disciples lost to a “spontaneous qi eruption” that the official reports classified as natural phenomenon.
The redactions themselves told stories. Three characters visible before each void. Bureaucratic titles. “Administrator of,” “Keeper of,” “Registry.” Feng had been Celestial Auditor of Karmic Accounts, Fourth Rank, which granted him access to soul-binding rituals under the pretense of reincarnation management. What authorities did his accomplices wield?
She pulled her damaged left arm closer, flexing fingers that responded sluggishly. The burn scars ached in the hollow’s damp cold. Phantom pain from flesh that had healed wrong, nerves that would never fully reconnect. During the catastrophe, she’d tried to sever the ritual circle’s power flow with her bare hands. Foolish. Desperate. The kind of choice that marked the difference between a living hunter and a dead hero.
Her cultivation base pulsed weakly at her core, a cracked vessel that could no longer hold the qi necessary for advancement. Seventh Ordination. She’d been two breaths away from Eighth when Heaven’s Gate burned. Now the spiritual channels in her left side remained permanently scarred, creating an imbalance that made higher techniques impossible. She could maintain the bow’s resonance, execute basic tracking arts, survive. But she would never ascend to the power needed to challenge a Fourth Rank official directly.
Which meant she needed leverage. Evidence. Allies, however unlikely. Or a weapon more devastating than cultivation alone.
She began drafting her initial offerings: three discrepancies she’d documented in reincarnation ledgers during her final year at Heaven’s Gate, minor enough to seem insignificant but valuable to the right buyer. A notation error in the Seventy-First Branch’s merit calculations. An unauthorized sap channel diversion near the Eighty-Second. A missing requisition form for soul-binding talismans that had never been properly accounted for.
Small threads. But corruption always left threads.
The question was whether she could pull them without alerting those who’d woven the larger tapestry. Information brokers served multiple masters. A careless word, a pattern recognized too early, and Feng’s network would know she’d survived. They’d already demonstrated their willingness to erase entire temples. One damaged cultivator posed no moral obstacle.
She would need to fragment her inquiries, approach different brokers with different pieces, never revealing the full scope of her investigation. It would take longer. Triple her timeline, perhaps. But patience was survival, and survival was the only path to vengeance.
She rolled the scroll carefully, binding it with a strand of her own hair for the security ward.
The hollow’s dampness seeped into her bones as she considered the architecture of trust. Each broker would need to be approached with calculated ignorance. A supplicant seeking minor clarifications, never the full pattern. The reincarnation ledger discrepancy could go to Old Widow Chen, who specialized in merit calculations. The sap diversion would interest the fungus-farmer collective near the Eighty-Fourth, always hungry for routing intelligence. The missing requisition forms might tempt the paper-spirit archivists, obsessive collectors of bureaucratic gaps.
She would need to become six different people, each with plausible reasons for their narrow curiosities. Six identities meant six sets of mannerisms, six cover stories, six carefully maintained lies. The curse of memory was that she’d need to remember them all perfectly: one slip would unravel everything.
Her fingertip traced each void where celestial ink had been unmade by authority she couldn’t challenge. Twelve absences. Twelve threads leading to Feng or beyond him. The arithmetic allowed no mercy: nine months per investigation to gather proof without triggering defensive protocols. Sequential work only. Parallel inquiries would create recognizable patterns in the bureaucratic flow.
One hundred eight months. Nine years minimum, assuming she survived each phase.
The arithmetic of futility settled into her bones like winter cold. If the rot reached the Palace itself, if those who judged corruption were themselves corrupted, then evidence became merely kindling for her pyre. She’d be hunting shadows that devoured light, pursuing justice through a system designed to protect its own decay.
Yet her hands smoothed the scroll flat, began the first notation. Feng’s name. The Seventy-Third Branch. Heaven’s Gate. Her disciples deserved witness, even futile witness.
The scroll lay before her in the Archive’s amber light, twelve temple names inscribed in her careful hand. Xiu-Lan had spent three months verifying each location through bark-records and survivor testimonies: those few who would speak to a disgraced cultivator. She marked them now with measured precision: Heaven’s Gate on the Scorched Bough, naturally, but also the Peach Blossom Sanctuary seven branches clockwise, the Hall of Ascending Virtue twelve branches down and three radial segments east.
Her brush moved across the parchment, connecting the points. The pattern emerged like bones beneath skin.
Not random. Never random.
The twelve temples formed a geometric configuration she recognized from her studies of celestial cartography. A resonance array, the kind used in grand workings that required multiple anchor points across vast distances. She traced the lines with her scarred left hand, feeling the familiar ache where spiritual channels had been seared shut. The pattern’s center of gravity pointed upward through the tree’s architecture, toward the Canopy Courts where the highest officials maintained their palaces.
Xiu-Lan calculated angles using the bark’s natural coordinate inscriptions. The array’s focal point would be somewhere in the Upper Registry’s administrative heart: perhaps the Hall of Karmic Reconciliation, or the Chamber of Celestial Audits. Locations she could never access without proper bureaucratic clearance, which her disgrace had permanently revoked.
She set down her brush and studied the completed diagram. A ritual geometry this precise required years of planning, intimate knowledge of the World Tree’s structure, and authority to access all twelve temple sites without suspicion. Feng couldn’t have orchestrated this alone. The corruption reached higher than a single administrator.
The scroll curled slightly at its edges, as if recoiling from the truth it contained. Xiu-Lan rolled it carefully and sealed it with wax, pressing her thumb into the soft surface. Evidence, but not proof. Pattern, but not purpose.
She would need to ascend. Somehow.
The information brokers, mostly disgraced clerks and failed cultivators, taught her the shadow economy of the Middle Branches: which seals could be replicated, which officials accepted bribes, which records were cross-referenced and which existed in isolated archives vulnerable to alteration.
Xiu-Lan learned their language of euphemism and careful omission. She traded her spiritual tracking services for forged transit tokens, for copies of personnel rosters showing which administrators had transferred between the twelve destroyed temples, for whispered warnings about which sap channels were monitored.
The brokers respected her silence, her refusal to ask about their own falls from grace. They appreciated that she paid in tangible services rather than promises, that she never lingered after transactions were complete.
One broker (a former registry clerk with ink-stained fingers and nervous eyes) specialized in movement patterns of high officials. For three months of tracking work, he provided her with Feng’s travel records: a web of visits to each temple site in the months preceding their destruction.
“This information,” he’d whispered, sliding the copied documents across a root-hollow table, “could get us both erased from the celestial census.”
Xiu-Lan had simply nodded and added the records to her sealed scroll.
The brokers taught her their shadow economy through careful demonstration. In a forgotten hollow lit by failing luminescence-wards, a disgraced seal-master showed her how to layer legitimate transit tokens with expired permissions, creating documents that passed cursory inspection. Another broker, a former archivist with trembling hands, revealed which record-keeping systems cross-referenced automatically and which relied on manual verification, their isolation making them vulnerable to selective editing.
She learned the vocabulary of corruption: “administrative flexibility” meant bribery, “archival discrepancies” meant deliberate erasure, “personnel rotation” often preceded temple destructions. The brokers never spoke directly, communicating through implication and careful document arrangement.
They recognized in her a fellow exile, someone who understood that survival in the margins required its own rigorous discipline. Perhaps more demanding than the celestial protocols they’d all abandoned or been cast from.
The technique required stillness that contradicted her training. Not the controlled meditation of cultivation, but absolute receptivity. She would press her ruined palm flat against jade-bark, letting the scar tissue’s damaged meridians become antenna rather than channel. The corrupted qi sang against her burns, a discordant resonance that mapped Feng’s passage through the branches. Each echo carried a temporal signature, allowing her to distinguish yesterday’s contamination from last week’s fading traces.
She forged transit papers granting herself access to mid-branch administrative districts, signed them with a fabricated supervisor’s name from a dissolved department, and walked past three checkpoint guards who merely verified the paperwork’s format. The system’s rigidity became her weapon. Where temple guardians wielded righteousness, she wielded procedure: each forged document a blade that cut through bureaucratic certainty without triggering its defenses.
The seal-wax burned against her scarred flesh with a familiar agony. Xiu-Lan held her left arm steady over the candle flame, watching the stolen wax soften to precisely the consistency required. Not liquid enough to blur, not solid enough to crack. Her damaged nerves screamed protests she had learned to ignore.
In the root hollow’s amber dimness, she worked with the methodical precision of ritual. The first attempt produced a seal too shallow, its characters illegible. She scraped it clean and began again. The second attempt cracked as it cooled, the impression fragmenting like her cultivation base had seven years ago. She breathed through the frustration, through the phantom smell of burning disciples that always accompanied failure.
The temple guard incident had revealed what her righteous training never taught: bureaucratic systems possessed no wisdom, only patterns. Low-level clerks verified format, not truth. They checked that seals matched registry templates, that calligraphy followed prescribed stroke order, that paper bore the correct watermarks. None examined whether the signing official actually existed.
Her years reading celestial decrees, once a sacred duty, now a survival skill, had trained her hand in every administrative script from the Vermillion Edict style to the common Clerical Standard. She could forge a supervisor’s signature with the same precision she once used to copy sutras.
The third attempt emerged perfect. The wax cooled into crisp characters declaring her a junior archivist assigned to inventory reconciliation. A position so mundane, so buried in the Registry’s vast hierarchy, that no one would question it. No one would remember it.
She held the forged permit up to the hollow’s bioluminescent moss, examining each stroke. The irony tasted bitter as ash: she had become what she hunted. Where Feng corrupted through power, she corrupted through procedure. Both of them weaponizing the celestial order’s own mechanisms.
But her corruption served justice. She repeated this to herself as the wax hardened, as her arm throbbed, as the line between hunter and hunted blurred further into shadow.
The Thirty-Second Branch archives smelled of preserved paper and accumulated centuries. Xiu-Lan’s forged permit granted her access to the inventory reconciliation section: seventeen chambers of requisition records that junior archivists maintained with mechanical devotion.
She worked during the meditation hours, when even the most diligent clerks retreated to their breathing exercises. Her damaged cultivation made proper meditation impossible, transforming her spiritual weakness into practical advantage. While others sought enlightenment, she sought evidence.
The light-capture talismans were expensive, purchased through a spirit merchant who accepted her tracking services as barter. Each talisman could preserve one page’s worth of text, freezing the characters in crystallized essence. She moved through the archives like smoke, photographing requisition orders, sap-channel diversion authorizations, resource allocation amendments.
The pattern emerged gradually, then all at once. Before Heaven’s Gate burned, unusual sap diversions. Before the Plum Blossom Sanctuary collapsed, identical paperwork. Twelve other temples, twelve sets of requisitions bearing Feng’s subordinates’ seals.
She left everything precisely positioned, dust patterns undisturbed, no trace of her presence except in the stolen knowledge now burning in her mind like her arm had once burned.
The merchant guild contact materialized through whispered networks. An intermediary who understood that questions diminished value. Their lost shipment had tumbled into a collapsed hollow on the Nineteenth Branch, where unstable root systems deterred official recovery teams. Xiu-Lan descended into the lightless tangle, her damaged cultivation still sufficient to sense the cargo’s residual essence markers. Four hours navigating spaces where one misstep meant falling between dimensional folds. She emerged with their goods intact, refusing spirit stones in favor of something more valuable: cartographic intelligence.
The maps the merchants provided showed what official registries deliberately concealed: forgotten sap channels, abandoned administrative passages, routes between branches that shouldn’t exist according to celestial geography. Pathways perfect for a hunter who needed to move unseen.
The bureaucracy’s vast indifference became her ally. She learned which seals carried weight, which offices never cross-referenced their records, which hours found guards drowsiest at checkpoints. Her calligraphy improved until forged permits matched authentic documents stroke for stroke. The system’s assumption of its own inviolability created blind spots wide enough to hide a woman with nothing left to lose but vengeance itself.
None could trace the pattern connecting them. A disgraced registry clerk, a hollow-keeper with gambling debts, a sap-tender whose daughter needed expensive medicine. Each believed their small compromise served only survival. But Xiu-Lan saw the architecture beneath: Feng had built his corruption not through grand conspiracy, but through a thousand minor necessities, each participant isolated, each transaction deniable.
The realization settled over her like frost: she had been thinking too small. Feng hadn’t merely committed crimes; he had transformed the celestial bureaucracy itself into an instrument of concealment. Every form that required three witnesses instead of five, every protocol that permitted “emergency discretion” during maintenance periods, every regulation allowing temporary record suspension. These weren’t accidents of administrative evolution. They were deliberate architectures of permission.
She rose from the maps, pacing the hollow’s circumference. Her left arm ached as it always did when her thoughts turned dark. How many officials had Feng recruited not through corruption but through reform? How many had championed his “efficiency improvements” believing they served the greater celestial order? The elegance was monstrous. Each change individually defensible, collectively catastrophic.
The twelve incidents weren’t merely covered up. They had occurred in spaces Feng had systematically carved into the bureaucratic structure, blind spots woven into policy itself. Heaven’s Gate hadn’t burned because oversight failed. It burned because oversight had been legislated away, procedure by procedure, amendment by amendment, until that particular branch on that particular night existed in a pocket of perfect administrative invisibility.
Xiu-Lan returned to her maps, seeing them now not as crime scenes but as test cases. Each incident had refined the system, identified weaknesses in Feng’s architecture, prompted new regulatory adjustments. The pattern wasn’t just predictive: it was iterative. He was still building, still perfecting his infrastructure of erasure.
Her scarred fingers trembled as she marked Branch Forty-Nine. If she was right, this next incident wouldn’t just destroy another temple. It would cement another procedural change, another gap in the celestial order. Feng wasn’t covering his tracks. He was paving roads through the very concept of accountability itself.
She had three months to become not just his hunter, but his saboteur. The pursuit had evolved beyond vengeance. She was fighting institutional rot disguised as progress.
The schedule scrolls lay before her like a battlefield map. She traced the convergence points where sap-flow reversal would create those crucial blind spots. The administrative darkness Feng had learned to exploit with surgical precision. Branch Forty-Nine emerged from the data with terrible clarity: a minor temple processing reincarnation petitions, staffed by three elderly clerks who still used manual record-keeping. Traditional. Vulnerable. Invisible to the reformed oversight protocols.
Her scarred fingers moved across the bark-paper, calculating transit times through the middle branches. Two weeks to reach the intercept point if she traveled light. Another week to survey the temple’s routines, identify Feng’s likely approach vectors. That left a month to prepare: to become not the grief-stricken survivor he might expect, but the trap he wouldn’t see until it closed.
She marked three surveillance gaps in the branch’s patrol routes, artifacts of Feng’s own efficiency reforms. The irony tasted bitter. She would use his architecture against him, turn his blind spots into killing grounds. This time, she wouldn’t arrive too late to save anyone.
This time, she would be waiting.
The wine cup trembled in her grip, and she set it down before the shaking could spill what remained. Forty-seven names spoken, but thousands more existed in the pattern she’d uncovered. The weight of them pressed against her chest like accumulated grave earth.
She had survived when they had not. Had fled when Wei-Lin burned. Had hidden while Dao-Ming’s screams cut short. The guilt was a familiar companion now, worn smooth by seven years of carrying it through the branches.
But guilt could be transmuted into purpose. Each name she’d spoken was also a witness, their deaths testimony she would force the Upper Registry to hear.
The vision crystallized with dangerous clarity: herself kneeling before the Jade Tribunal, scroll evidence unfurled across marble floors, forty-seven names, no, thousands, inscribed in her own blood if necessary. The Registry officials’ faces shifting from dismissal to horror as the pattern revealed itself. Feng stripped of his seals, his false merit erased. Justice not as vengeance’s twin, but as restoration’s architect.
The fantasy lasted three heartbeats before discipline reasserted itself.
The hollow’s rough walls no longer pressed inward with suffocating grief. She arranged her stolen maps by branch number, marked sap-channel schedules in cipher along the margins. Her fingers traced the route to Forty-Nine with the precision of ritual: three transfers, two rest points, optimal timing during the autumn reversal. Purpose had architecture now. Even her nightmares grew quieter, replaced by waking calculations.
The sap channel’s convulsion came without warning: one moment she moved through the amber pathway’s familiar warmth, the next the walls contracted like a dying throat. Xiu-Lan felt the flow reverse, felt the tree’s essence reject her presence with bureaucratic finality. The ejection burned. She tumbled through dimensional membranes and struck stone hard enough to crack ribs.
Temple guards materialized before she could rise. Their robes bore the Third Ordination’s crisp insignia, their faces the blank courtesy of functionaries performing duty without curiosity.
“Papers.”
She produced the forged credentials with steady hands despite the pain lancing through her chest. The guard studied the seal, and she watched his expression shift: not suspicion, but something worse. Pity.
“This pattern was obsoleted by emergency decree. Three days ago.” He returned the papers with careful neutrality. “You couldn’t have known.”
The words carried unspoken meaning: You’re too far below to matter. The decrees don’t even reach you anymore.
“I’m tracking a rogue spirit,” she said, assembling the half-truth with practiced ease. “Seventh Ordination, authorized under the Wandering Mandate protocols. The guard’s tone remained professionally empty.”Pending review of unauthorized cultivation activities in the lower branches.”
She felt the trap close. Not around her specifically. Around everyone like her. The bureaucracy tightening, access points sealing, the tree itself reorganizing to exclude the displaced and desperate.
“I understand.” She bowed with precise correctness, ignoring how the motion ground broken bone. “I’ll seek alternative routes.”
The guard nodded, already dismissing her from relevance. She limped away from the sealed channel entrance, watching fresh wards bloom across its surface like frost. The primary route she’d spent two years mapping had become impassable overnight.
Behind her, she heard the guards resume their patrol, their footsteps fading into administrative silence.
Her information network unraveled with surgical precision. The tea merchant who’d traded gossip for spiritual cleansings ascended to Branch Seventy without warning, leaving only a formal notification scroll that reeked of coercion. The record-keeper who’d leaked filing patterns transferred to a canopy court beyond her reach. His replacement refused even eye contact. The exiled scribe who’d taught her forgery techniques simply vanished. She found his hollow abandoned three days later, his tools scattered as though he’d fled mid-work, and a single character burned into the wall with curse-fire: “Silence.”
She understood the message. Someone was pruning connections, isolating hunters like her. Not killing. That would draw attention. Simply removing the infrastructure that made pursuit possible, cutting supply lines with bureaucratic efficiency.
Xiu-Lan stood in the scribe’s hollow, cataloging what remained. A broken ink stone. Scattered papers bearing half-finished seals. The acrid smell of fear. She committed the scene to memory, adding it to her internal ledger of debts unpaid. Then she salvaged what tools she could carry and withdrew before whoever had done this returned to ensure thoroughness.
The official’s signature proved false within hours of her collapse: a clerical error, not conspiracy. She’d recognized this even as the seizure began, felt the wrongness in the essence pattern, but momentum had already carried her past the point of safety. Three weeks pursuing a phantom. Her body’s rebellion was not punishment for failure but for recklessness, for forgetting that damaged foundations required different calculations.
Lying in the hollow’s darkness, she felt the Seventh Ordination’s structure fracture further, like porcelain developing new cracks under pressure. Each breath drew qi that her meridians could no longer properly circulate. The gap between her current state and the Eighth Ordination, once merely difficult, now seemed insurmountable. She had traded future advancement for present desperation, and gained nothing.
The hollow stank of her own fever-sweat and corrupted qi. She catalogued each new limitation as though recording temple inventory: left arm mobility reduced by another fifteen degrees, spiritual perception range halved, recovery time tripled. The Bow of Severed Threads lay untouched beside her: even drawing it now risked complete meridian collapse. Mathematics of diminishment, arithmetic of decline. Yet beneath the clinical assessment burned the same certainty that had sustained seven years: Feng would answer for Heaven’s Gate, regardless of what answering cost her.
She worked methodically through the new limitations, testing each forgery stroke with her damaged meridians. The obsolete seal pattern required precise qi control she barely possessed. Her hand cramped after each character. She rested between strokes, breathing through the pain, recalculating success probabilities with each tremor. Forty percent chance of detection. Acceptable. The desperate information sources would meet her in three days, in hollows where administrative oversight had lapsed into blessed neglect.
The revelation came during a moonless night when exhaustion finally drove her to rest against a section of bark she’d passed a hundred times before. Her scarred palm made contact with the jade surface, and the tree’s consciousness opened to her like a scroll unfurling across centuries.
The bark remembered everything. Not just the official transactions that glowed in fresh sap-script, but deeper impressions pressed into ancient growth rings: whispers the tree had witnessed but never been permitted to formally record. She learned to read these hidden archives through meditation, her damaged meridians somehow attuned to the tree’s own wounded essence.
Feng appeared in these memories, younger, less confident. The bark showed her his visits to the Scorched Bough in the months before Heaven’s Gate burned. He’d arrived at odd hours when administrative oversight shifted between departments, always glancing over his shoulder, always checking the sap-channels for observers. The tree had noticed. The tree always noticed.
More disturbing were his companions: figures the bark rendered as deliberate absences, voids in the shape of bureaucratic robes. High-ranking enough that even the World Tree’s memory flinched from recording their features directly. They’d performed calculations around a jade table that no longer existed, consulting documents that left no trace in official channels.
Xiu-Lan pressed deeper into the meditation, ignoring the pain lancing up her arm. The tree was showing her a conspiracy, evidence preserved in living wood that no celestial court had bothered to subpoena. Because who thought to question the World Tree itself? Who remembered that Jian-Mu had been a witness before it became mere infrastructure?
It’s been trying to testify all along, she realized, her breath catching. To anyone who would listen.
The tree shuddered beneath her touch. Not rejection, but recognition. Finally, someone heard.
During the third winter, trapped in a root hollow by an unseasonable storm, she felt the tree’s pain directly: a deep ache where corruption spread like rot through living wood. The sensation arrived not as metaphor but as visceral truth: her own nerves screaming with the tree’s distress, her damaged meridians suddenly conducting agony that belonged to something infinitely larger than herself.
Without conscious decision, she began channeling her damaged cultivation base into the affected area. Her qi was pitiful, a candle flame offered against a forest fire, yet she poured everything through her scarred palm into the blackened bark. The tree shuddered. Its entire branch system convulsed with what might have been shock or gratitude.
For three days her fever burned as if she’d contracted the blight herself. She dreamed in sap-flow patterns and root-language, experiencing the corruption as the tree did. Not mere damage but betrayal, authority turned septic, trust weaponized. When she finally woke, weak as rice paper, a thin line of healthy bark had formed around the corrupted section. Her left arm moved with slightly less pain, the chronic stiffness eased by shared suffering transmuted into mutual healing.
The partnership deepened through languages no celestial academy taught. She learned to read intention in the angle of leaf-fall, to distinguish between natural creaking and deliberate message. When temple guards patrolled too close to her hiding places, branches would shift with calculated timing. Not obviously, never triggering wards designed to detect unauthorized manipulation, but with the organic unpredictability of living wood that nonetheless created perfect cover.
The tree guided her to witnesses: a minor land god who’d seen Feng’s entourage pass with suspicious cargo, a forgotten archive-spirit maintaining records the bureaucracy assumed destroyed. Each revelation came through subtle direction: sap glowing brighter along certain paths, bark growing warm beneath her palm when she faced the correct direction, leaves rustling in patterns that matched coordinates she’d learned to decode.
Their collaboration existed in bureaucracy’s blind spot, unauthorized yet undeniable.
Her offerings became conversations. She brought spring-water for exposed roots, cleared parasitic growth from records the tree deemed precious, spoke her discoveries aloud like reports to a commanding officer. The tree answered through resonance in wood and stone: revealing hidden caches where ancient manuals lay preserved, where evidence survived bureaucratic purges, where canopy grew dense enough to shelter her from celestial patrols seeking the disgraced hunter who refused to disappear.
The realization struck during meditation against the tree’s heartwood: her damaged meridians had fused with the World Tree’s sap channels. Each pulse of luminescent flow echoed through her own qi pathways. She could taste corruption in the sap before official records registered anomalies, sense Feng’s movements through disturbances in the tree’s circulation. Her body was becoming a living extension of Jian-Mu’s awareness, trading human advancement for something older, stranger. The patient, inexorable consciousness of wood that outlasts dynasties.
The fourth year marked the true metamorphosis. Xiu-Lan abandoned the last pretense of her former identity, letting her Registry credentials lapse into bureaucratic limbo. She stopped seeking audiences with officials who turned her away, stopped presenting evidence that disappeared into administrative voids. Instead, she descended deeper into the Root Hollows’ labyrinthine darkness, where the tree’s foundation twisted through dimensions mortal cartographers never mapped.
The outcasts recognized her transition before she did. They stopped flinching when she approached, began leaving offerings of information at her chosen meditation spots: a scrap of overheard conversation, a pattern in patrol schedules, rumors of sap-channel disruptions that matched Feng’s operational signature. She learned their economy of survival: how to render herself invisible through stillness rather than technique, how to read the micro-variations in root-glow that signaled approaching danger, which forgotten shrines contained caches left by previous fugitives.
Her speech compressed into essential fragments. Wasted syllables meant wasted breath, wasted attention, wasted opportunity. The flowery protocols of celestial discourse, those elaborate frameworks of rank and deference she’d mastered as a disciple, became foreign as a dead language. She communicated in gestures, in weighted silences, in the efficient shorthand of those who lived between the bureaucracy’s documented moments.
The Root Hollows taught her patience of a different quality than meditation ever had. Not the disciplined emptiness of cultivation practice, but the predator’s watchful stillness. She observed how the pale fungi spread across bark over months, how water found paths through impossible angles, how the tree’s own growth slowly consumed and transformed whatever remained stationary too long.
Her body learned these rhythms. Her damaged meridians, unable to advance through orthodox channels, began mapping themselves to the tree’s own circulation. She became topology rather than hierarchy, network rather than individual: a node of awareness woven into Jian-Mu’s vast, slow consciousness.
Her network grew through careful reciprocity, each connection forged with the precision of ritual binding. The disgraced clerks taught her to read the tree’s bark-records for patterns the celestial auditors missed: transactions that balanced perfectly on paper while concealing resource diversions, personnel transfers that created convenient absences during critical moments. Failed cultivators shared techniques deemed heretical by orthodox temples, methods that worked with damaged meridians rather than against them.
The minor spirits proved most valuable. Forgotten godlings of threshold and margin, they inhabited the spaces between official designations: the gap where one branch’s jurisdiction ended and another’s began, the hollow behind a relocated shrine, the moment between filing and processing. They saw everything the bureaucracy ignored.
She paid them not in incense or formal offerings but in acknowledgment. Speaking their deprecated names, remembering their obsolete functions, treating their information as valuable rather than dismissible. For beings erased from official registries, recognition itself became currency.
The web she wove possessed no central authority, no documented hierarchy. It existed as relationship and memory, invisible to audits, impossible to purge through administrative decree. She had built an anti-bureaucracy, structured precisely to survive in celestial civilization’s negative space.
Her Seventh Ordination state, once a mark of incomplete ascension, now registered to celestial wards as ambient spiritual noise, indistinguishable from the tree’s own fluctuations. She practiced moving through checkpoint arrays at the Middle Branch temples, feeling the scanning energies pass through her damaged meridians without purchase, like water through broken pottery.
The irony wasn’t lost on her. The Heaven’s Gate Catastrophe had shattered her advancement, trapping her at a rank considered barely adequate for administrative work. Yet that same spiritual mutilation granted her access no intact cultivator could achieve. She could stand three paces from a celestial auditor, her presence dismissed as background resonance.
Her body had become a bureaucratic error. Too malformed to register, too persistent to erase. The perfect instrument for hunting those who wielded procedure as a weapon.
The transformation occurred without ceremony. Her meditation shifted from seeking spiritual restoration to weaponizing her limitations. Each nightmare became a training exercise: she’d force herself to remain in the burning memory longer, extracting details her conscious mind had missed. The ritual circle’s geometry. The counter-signatures on authorization scrolls glimpsed through smoke. Her disciples’ deaths, methodically catalogued as evidence rather than loss. Grief crystallized into documentation, sorrow into prosecutorial precision.
The woman in the amber-lit water bore no resemblance to Registry Keeper Xiu-Lan of the Heaven’s Gate Temple. That woman had believed in celestial justice, in proper channels, in the restoration of order. This one understood that justice was a blade you forged yourself in the dark, sharpened on years of patient hunting. She pressed her scarred palm against the bark, feeling the tree’s corrupted pulse, and smiled without warmth. Perfect.
The Bow of Severed Threads sang as she drew it, the weapon’s familiar weight grounding her even as Kwan’s construct launched itself across the shrine with the precise footwork she’d drilled into him for three years. She loosed. The arrow passed clean through its chest, severing nothing, because these weren’t karmic threads. They were memory given form, guilt crystallized into jade and malice.
“You promised we’d ascend together,” the Kwan-thing hissed in her dead disciple’s voice, that slight lisp he’d never quite overcome. Its fist grazed her shoulder, and the touch burned cold, spreading frost across her already-scarred arm.
Xiu-Lan’s cultivation base stuttered, damaged meridians failing to channel qi properly. She couldn’t match their speed, couldn’t overpower constructs that felt no pain, no exhaustion. The shrine’s walls closed in as more materialized each one wearing faces she saw every night in her dreams.
“I tried,” she gasped, dodging behind a pillar that exploded an instant later. “I went back for you. They shrieked in unison, and the word resonated through the curse-tainted sap channels, making them flare violent crimson.”You saved yourself! You always save yourself!”
Her foot caught on something: the dropped scroll, its bureaucratic script glowing faintly. In that split second of distraction, Mei’s construct caught her across the ribs, sending her sprawling. Blood filled her mouth. The constructs advanced in formation, perfect synchronized movement she’d choreographed herself, and through the haze of pain she understood Feng’s cruelty completely.
He’d studied her disciples. Recorded their techniques before burning them alive. Saved them specifically for this.
The scroll lay inches from her hand, its curse residue pulsing in rhythm with the constructs’ approach. Someone else had been here. Someone else had survived Feng’s attention.
She grabbed the scroll and rolled.
The scroll’s curse residue burned against her palm as she pressed herself against the altar’s far side, its bureaucratic script searing phantom characters across her vision. Three more constructs materialized from the sap channels. “You abandoned us,” they chorused, and the harmonics made her teeth ache. “You felt the ritual collapse and you ran, Master. You always run.”
Her fingers found an arrow by muscle memory alone. The constructs moved with her own teaching, exploiting every weakness she’d trained them to recognize. Mei’s form feinted left while Kwan’s circled right, textbook flanking. The shrine’s floor cracked under their synchronized assault, sap channels rupturing to spray luminescent fluid across crumbling stone.
The scroll pulsed again. Stronger now, as if responding to the constructs’ presence. Through her blurring vision, Xiu-Lan glimpsed fragments of text: Celestial Mandate… Sealing Protocol… Subject Twelve…
Someone had documented this. Someone had been here, studying Feng’s work.
Someone cursed, like these constructs. Someone still alive.
The Bow of Severed Threads sang a discordant note as she drew it past the Seventh Ordination’s safe threshold, her damaged cultivation base fracturing the qi flow into jagged pulses. Each arrow required brutal force of will to manifest, spiritual essence tearing through her cracked meridians like broken glass. She targeted the shimmering threads connecting the constructs to Feng’s ritual array. Karmic bindings that pulsed with stolen soul-light.
The first shot cost her a mouthful of blood. The second made her vision white out at the edges.
Her fingers trembled on the bowstring. The constructs circled closer, wearing her disciples’ patient, predatory grace. Mei’s form tilted its head with familiar curiosity.
“You taught us endurance, Master,” it whispered. “Let us demonstrate.”
The first construct’s binding severed with a wet snap, her arrow dissolving into scattered light: but the cost drove her to one knee, spiritual essence flooding from her meridians in hot rivulets that steamed against the cold jade floor. Kwan’s mockery was already moving, launching the combination strike they’d perfected together years ago, the one she’d praised him for. The altar exploded into razor-edged fragments. Splinters carved burning lines across her scarred forearm, blood mixing with luminescent sap.
The second binding snapped under her arrow, karmic threads unraveling like burning silk, but the Bow of Severed Threads shrieked its protest: a hairline fracture spider-webbing along the upper limb, jade inlay cracking. The construct dissolved into weeping light. Then the remaining two surged forward in perfect synchronized assault, executing the Crane-and-Serpent formation she’d taught them, their stolen voices rising to a condemning chorus while her quiver held only mundane arrows and her meridians ran dry as winter riverbeds.
The Bow of Severed Threads trembled in her grip, the fracture spreading with each draw. Three mundane arrows left. Against two constructs that wore the faces of her dead disciples and fought with the precision she herself had drilled into them over countless training sessions.
Xiu-Lan’s left arm screamed as she nocked another shaft. The burn scars pulling tight, the reduced mobility making her draw awkward, imprecise. The arrow flew true anyway, muscle memory overriding damaged flesh, but mundane wood simply shattered against the construct’s chest. No karmic threads to sever. No binding to unravel. Just animated corpses held together by stolen soul-essence and bureaucratic authority she no longer possessed.
The constructs split, circling. Crane-and-Serpent. One high, one low. She’d invented that formation herself, had written it into the temple’s training scrolls with such pride. Now it would kill her.
Her meridians felt like cracked pottery, the spiritual channels refusing to hold qi no matter how desperately she drew from her depleted reserves. The Seventh Ordination should have made her untouchable against such crude constructs. But Heaven’s Gate had broken something fundamental in her cultivation base, left her spiritually crippled, forever stuck at a threshold she could neither cross nor retreat from.
The high construct struck. She rolled, her exhausted body protesting, and came up with the bow reversed: using it as a staff to deflect the low construct’s sweeping kick. The impact sent fresh cracks spidering through the jade. The weapon wouldn’t survive another exchange.
Two arrows. Two constructs. And the child’s trail growing colder with every wasted second.
She tasted copper. Blood from a bitten cheek, or perhaps from the internal injuries she’d been ignoring for the past three days of pursuit. Her vision swam. The constructs pressed closer, their stolen faces wearing expressions of disappointed judgment.
Just like her disciples had looked, right before they burned.
The Seventh Ordination reserves that should have sustained her through hours of combat guttered like a dying candle behind cracked glass. Each attempt to draw qi through her meridians met the same resistance: spiritual channels still twisted and scarred from Heaven’s Gate, refusing to channel more than a trickle of power. The catastrophe had done more than kill her disciples; it had shattered something fundamental in her cultivation base, left fractures that no amount of meditation could heal.
She felt the qi pooling uselessly in her lower dantian, unable to circulate properly, unable to reach the limbs that needed it. Like trying to pour water through a shattered vessel. The constructs sensed her weakness, their movements growing bolder, more aggressive. They had no such limitations. No exhaustion. No damaged meridians. Just stolen soul-essence burning with mechanical efficiency, animated by bureaucratic authority that cared nothing for the natural limits of flesh and spirit.
Her left arm trembled, the burn scars pulling tight as she raised the fractured bow one final time. Two arrows. Two constructs. And her cultivation base offering nothing but the hollow echo of what she’d once been.
The Bow of Severed Threads cracked along its limb with a sound like breaking bone, overdrawn, pushed beyond its capacity to sever karmic threads. She felt the weapon’s spirit cry out in protest, a keening wail that resonated through her damaged meridians, before going ominously silent. The fracture spread like lightning across the jade-white wood, splitting the intricate inscriptions that had bound the bow’s essence for three centuries.
Her fingers went numb as the weapon’s death-throes sent feedback through her grip. She’d inherited this bow from her master, who’d received it from hers. A lineage of careful stewardship now ending in desperate overuse. The string went slack, its tension failing, and she knew with sick certainty that even if she survived this moment, she’d lost another irreplaceable piece of her sect’s legacy.
The last talisman crumbled between her trembling fingers, its protective script dissolving into ash that tasted of wasted years and squandered hope. The two remaining constructs advanced with tireless synchronization, their movements perfectly coordinated. They wore her disciples’ faces (young Lin’s determined scowl, Master Qiao’s serene expression) stolen visages that transformed death into accusation, making every defensive stance feel like betrayal.
The construct’s strike connected with surgical precision: not the wild blow of a beast but the calculated targeting of something that understood anatomy. Her left arm, already compromised by seven years of scar tissue and nerve damage, absorbed the impact like rotted wood accepting an axe. She felt the deep structural failure: tendons separating from bone with audible pops, muscle fibers shearing apart in layers, the remaining functional tissue simply giving up its desperate attempt at cohesion.
The arm hung against her ribs like a stranger’s limb tied to her body, all weight and no connection, the sudden absence of sensation more horrifying than pain. Blood bloomed through the rust-brown fabric in spreading darkness, warm and insistent, following the paths of least resistance where old burn scars had turned skin to something between leather and parchment. Those ancient wounds, seven years sealed over with will and desperation, split now along their silvered seams. The tissue paper-thin, compromised, never truly healed despite her pretense otherwise.
Through the torn fabric she glimpsed her own interior geography: white adipose tissue like tallow, red muscle fiber glistening wet, the deeper purple of something she couldn’t name and didn’t want to. Clear lymphatic fluid wept from the reopened burns, mixing with arterial blood into pink rivulets that traced down her wrist, dripping from nerveless fingers that no longer answered her commands.
She’d carried this arm for seven years like a burden she refused to acknowledge. Pushed it through sword forms and bow draws, forced it to hold ritual implements and climb the World Tree’s treacherous bark. Ignored the morning stiffness, the afternoon ache, the night-time burning that woke her from already-fractured sleep. Told herself it was functional enough, strong enough, that she could hunt Feng and restore her sect’s honor before her body’s accumulated damage came due.
The arithmetic had finally resolved against her.
Distantly, she registered wetness on her left side: not just blood but the deeper saturation of internal fluids finding external routes, her body’s architecture collapsing in ways that couldn’t be walked off or meditated through. The arm swung slightly as she swayed, a pendulum marking time she didn’t have, dead tissue still technically attached but functionally severed, a preview of the separation her whole body might soon perform from the spirit that drove it forward.
Her knees buckled and she caught herself against a prayer column with her good hand, fingers scrabbling for purchase on stone worn smooth by centuries of supplication. Vision tunneled to a gray pinpoint, the shrine’s amber sap-light collapsing inward as shock tried to drag her under like floodwater, cold and insistent and patient as bureaucratic process.
The constructs’ footsteps echoed closer. Patient. Methodical. The sound of celestial enforcement that never tired, never doubted, never bled.
She thought absurdly of her disciples’ final moments. Whether they too had felt this cold certainty of ending, this bitter arithmetic of flesh failing before will. Had Mei-Lin’s knees buckled like this? Had young Tao-Ren tasted copper and understood, finally, that determination wasn’t enough? The Heaven’s Gate flames had taken them so quickly. Perhaps they’d been spared this particular humiliation, this slow-motion betrayal of sinew and bone, the body’s final refusal to honor debts the spirit kept writing.
The column’s carved prayers pressed into her palm. Petitions for longevity, for health, for protection from calamity.
Someone had once believed those words held power.
She’d been that naive once, too.
The Bow of Severed Threads slipped from nerveless fingers, and she watched with strange detachment as it fell. That arc of descent containing seven years of singular purpose, seven years of tracking and hunting and surviving. It struck stone with a sound like breaking bone, the sacred wood splitting along its length where the grain had always been weak, where she’d never bothered to repair it because there was always another lead, another trail, another reason to postpone maintenance for pursuit.
The crack spread like lightning through amber, bifurcating the weapon that had severed so many karmic threads.
Now it couldn’t even hold itself together.
She’d carried that weight across twelve branches. Slept with it. Killed with it.
And her fingers hadn’t even tightened to stop the fall.
The meridians felt like frost-cracked porcelain inside her chest. She reached inward with desperate precision, trying to coax even a thread of qi through the damaged pathways, but her cultivation base had finally shattered completely. Seven years of neglect, of choosing vengeance over maintenance, over healing. The spiritual energy she’d hoarded so carefully simply dissolved, leaving only the hollow echo of what Seventh Ordination had once meant.
Her fingers tightened around the Bow of Severed Threads even as consciousness frayed. The weapon pulsed once. Recognizing her intent, her final choice. Not vengeance. Not today. She could loose one arrow, sever one connection: her own thread binding her to this hunt, or the karmic link between those footprints and Feng’s corruption. Choose. The constructs’ hands reached for her throat.
The constructs descended with the patient inevitability of celestial judgment, their movements precise as calligraphy strokes, and Xiu-Lan felt her consciousness fragmenting like torn silk: yet even as darkness crept through her vision, those footprints burned in her awareness with terrible significance.
Small. Unsteady. The gait of someone whose left leg dragged slightly.
A child who had witnessed Feng’s ritual. Who had been close enough to absorb curse residue that still smoldered with fresh corruption. Who had fled alone into the World Tree’s labyrinth carrying evidence in their very flesh.
Her disciples’ faces loomed closer, animated by stolen essence, their mouths forming words of comfort they’d once offered her during meditation. The mockery of it should have kindled rage, but Xiu-Lan found only a strange, crystalline calm settling over her failing body.
Seven years. Seven years hunting Feng while he continued his work, marking new victims, spreading corruption through the celestial bureaucracy like rot through sacred wood. She had been so focused on vengeance, on restoring honor to the dead, that she’d never considered the living still suffering under his influence.
The bow’s pulse synchronized with her heartbeat, slowing, weakening, but still present. Still offering choice.
Sever her own thread, and she might escape. Might survive to continue the hunt, though her cultivation base would shatter completely, leaving her powerless. A ghost of a ghost, unable to face Feng even if she found him.
Or sever the connection between those footprints and Feng’s corruption. Cut the karmic link that would inevitably draw the child back into the corrupted official’s web. Give them a chance to escape the fate her disciples had suffered.
The constructs’ hands closed around her throat, cold as bureaucratic decree.
Xiu-Lan’s fingers found the bowstring, drew it back with the last ember of her strength, and aimed not at her enemies but at the curse residue pooled around those small, desperate footprints.
The curse residue burned against her palm, viscous, wrong, carrying the same twisted signature she’d memorized from a hundred ritual sites. But this time the corruption was fresh, still malleable, still connected to its source through invisible threads of karmic debt.
Her cultivation base screamed as she forced qi through damaged meridians, converting spiritual essence into the raw material of the Tracking Seal. The technique was forbidden for good reason: it required the caster to forge a permanent bond with the target, tethering their fates together across any distance, through any barrier.
She’d never use it on Feng: he’d sense the connection immediately, turn it against her.
But a child? A child who didn’t know they carried evidence, who couldn’t defend against celestial techniques, who would inevitably circle back to Feng’s influence like a moth to flame?
Xiu-Lan pressed her scarred palm into the curse mark, feeling her remaining spiritual foundation crack and splinter as the seal took form. Not to track the child for Feng’s benefit.
To find them first.
To warn them.
To save one life, even if she couldn’t avenge the dead.
The broken bow lay beside her but the Tracking Seal required no weapon, only will, only sacrifice, only the terrible choice to burn what remained of her cultivation base as fuel for one final act that might matter more than seven years of vengeful hunting.
She pressed her palm flat against the curse residue and opened the damaged channels of her qi despite her body’s screaming protest, feeling her Seventh Ordination foundation crack and splinter as she forced it beyond all safe limits, pouring her spiritual essence into the ancient tracking technique her master had warned her never to use lightly.
The seal formed slowly, agonizingly, each character etched in her own life force. Not revenge. Protection.
One child, saved from Feng’s web.
Perhaps that would be enough.
The curse residue burned like frozen fire against her palm as she channeled her fragmenting qi through circuits never meant to bear such strain. Her Seventh Ordination foundation didn’t merely crack: it shattered, each meridian rupturing in sequence like breaking strings, spiritual essence hemorrhaging into the tracking seal’s hungry formation. The technique her master had forbidden except in direst necessity consumed her cultivation base with methodical brutality, transforming seven years of painstaking recovery into raw fuel for a single desperate purpose.
The constructs’ shadows fell across her broken form. She channeled everything: grief transmuted to tracking resonance, rage compressed into seeking threads, desperation refined to pure intent. The last fragments of her cultivation base dissolved like ash in water, spiritual essence pouring through the forbidden seal. Seven years of recovery, her hope of advancement, her petition rights before the Upper Registry: all surrendered to trace that child’s trail through the curse signature’s labyrinth.
The curse residue writhed beneath her palm like living scripture, each character of corruption a pathway into the child’s essence trail. Xiu-Lan forced her damaged meridians wider, feeling the spiritual channels that had taken seven years to partially heal splinter like frozen jade under hammer blows. The constructs’ brass knuckles gleamed in the amber sap-light, descending with bureaucratic inevitability.
She poured her qi into the forbidden pattern. The Tracking Seal that her master had taught her in whispered lessons, warning that it consumed the very foundation of cultivation itself. The technique demanded everything: not borrowed power, not channeled essence, but the cultivator’s own spiritual root structure as fuel. Each thread she wove into the seeking pattern stripped away another fragment of her Seventh Ordination attainment.
The curse residue responded, unfurling like a scroll written in pain. She tasted the child’s terror in the qi signature, fresh, recent, perhaps only hours old. Beneath it, deeper, she sensed something else: a deliberate architecture to the curse mark, a purpose beyond mere punishment. This was containment. This was a seal disguised as affliction.
Her left arm convulsed as spiritual backlash cascaded through damaged channels. The constructs’ fists were three feet away, two feet, close enough she could smell the ritual oils on their joints. She committed another layer of her foundation to the technique, feeling her cultivation base collapse inward like a dying star. The petition rights she’d been slowly rebuilding: gone. The possibility of ascending to challenge the Upper Registry. Ash. Her chance to advocate for her disciples’ reincarnations. Dissolved into tracking threads that spiraled outward through the World Tree’s essence currents.
But the trail blazed clear now, a golden thread only she could perceive, leading down through the branch levels toward the Root Hollows. The child had fled downward. The child bore Feng’s curse-work. The child was somehow central to everything.
The constructs’ fists struck empty air as she rolled, the Tracking Seal burning in her mind like a compass pointing toward answers.
The Tracking Seal caught, and the price came due all at once.
Her Seventh Ordination foundation cracked like porcelain, spiritual channels that had taken decades to forge collapsing into themselves. She felt each meridian snap. The Ascending Dragon pathway that had allowed her to commune with ancestral spirits, the Threefold Gate that had let her perceive karmic threads, the Silver Court channel that had marked her as a Registry official. All of it feeding into the seeking pattern, transforming cultivation attainment into pure directional certainty.
The curse signature blazed into focus. A thread of corrupted divine essence leading downward through the branches, searing itself into her consciousness with such intensity that blood vessels burst in her left eye. But through the crimson haze she saw it: the child’s trail, impossibly clear, winding down through forty-seven branch levels toward the Root Hollows. And woven through it, unmistakable now, Feng’s signature. Not just his curse-work, but his personal essence, as if he’d bound part of himself into the child’s very being.
The constructs’ brass fists whistled past her ear as she threw herself sideways, the golden thread burning in her mind like a brand.
The curse signature blazed into focus. A thread of corrupted divine essence leading downward through the branches, searing itself into her consciousness with such intensity that blood vessels burst in her left eye. The pain was transcendent, absolute. She tasted copper and incense as the thread burned deeper, carving its path through her mind like a celestial calligrapher’s brush dipped in molten brass. The child’s trail materialized with impossible clarity: forty-seven branch levels down, winding through forgotten hollows and abandoned petition chambers, each turn etched into her awareness as permanently as the bureaucratic records inscribed in the World Tree’s bark. And woven through every step of that trail.
The porcelain-crack sensation spread through her meridians like frost across glass. Each spiritual channel she’d spent decades refining shattered in sequence, Eighth Gate, Seventh Gate, cascading downward through her cultivation base. The agony transcended physical pain: she felt her very potential burning away, forty years of meditation and advancement reduced to ash and desperation. But the thread held. The child’s location seared permanent into her soul.
Her body moved on pure instinct. The constructs’ jade fists obliterating the altar where she’d knelt a heartbeat before. Porcelain shards erupted like shrapnel as she rolled through the debris, her ruined left arm screaming protest. The tracking thread pulsed in her consciousness, an unbreakable tether now woven into her very soul-fabric, demanding she follow despite the spiritual devastation still cascading through her meridians.
The seal’s activation sent white-hot awareness cascading through her damaged cultivation base, and for one crystalline instant she perceived the curse trail with absolute clarity. Not merely a signature but a living thread of corrupted essence, blazing like a comet’s tail through the dimensional fabric. It led downward, plunging through branch after branch in a trajectory that made her breath catch: toward the Root Hollows, those forbidden depths where even her seven-year hunt had never ventured, where outcasts and worse things dwelled in the World Tree’s darkest recesses.
The thread pulsed with a rhythm she recognized. The same cadence as Feng’s ritual work, that distinctive pattern of stolen soul-essence she’d memorized from a hundred cold crime scenes. But underneath ran something else, something younger and more desperate, like a child’s heartbeat trapped within a monster’s chest.
Her Seventh Ordination senses, damaged as they were, caught the thread’s terminus: not hours away but days, deep in the tangled root systems where the tree’s bark no longer recorded transactions, where celestial authority held no weight. The child had fled to the one place she couldn’t follow through official channels.
Another construct’s fist cratered the floor where she’d been, jade fingers closing on empty air. The temple’s defensive wards were fully roused now, and she felt the tree itself beginning to take notice, its vast consciousness turning toward this unauthorized spiritual working like a magistrate’s cold eye. Her rank insignia burned against her chest. The nearest sap channel pulsed ten paces away, its amber glow inviting and treacherous. Unauthorized entry would mark her as a fugitive, strip whatever remained of her celestial standing, possibly kill her outright if the tree’s defenses decided she was a threat rather than merely desperate.
The curse thread tugged at her soul-fabric, insistent, fading with each passing moment.
She rolled through jade shrapnel as the constructs’ second strike pulverized the altar’s remains, their eyeless faces tracking her movement with bureaucratic precision. Seven years of careful investigation, of maintaining just enough standing to access temple records, of presenting herself as damaged but still legitimate: all of it balanced on this single choice.
The curse thread pulsed again, fainter now, and she thought of her disciples burning.
She made her decision in the space between heartbeats.
Her legs drove her toward the sap channel in a desperate sprint, tattered crimson robes streaming behind her like a wound. The constructs pivoted with mechanical grace, but she was already airborne, diving toward that amber glow. Her burned left arm extended first, numb fingers breaking the channel’s surface tension, and then the flow had her, seizing, consuming, dragging her into its burning current.
The World Tree recognized an intruder of insufficient rank immediately. Its defenses activated with the cold precision of celestial law, and she felt ancient wards tear through her qi pathways like clawed fingers seeking her damaged core, stripping away what little remained of her cultivation base as payment for this transgression.
The sap seared through her like molten judgment, each molecule carrying the World Tree’s bureaucratic fury. Her vision fractured into amber fragments as the current accelerated, dragging her through channels meant only for official decrees and sanctioned petitions. The curse thread remained visible somehow. A black filament cutting through the golden chaos, leading downward, always downward.
Her damaged cultivation base splintered further under the assault. She felt the Seventh Ordination’s carefully maintained structure crack, spiritual meridians collapsing like burned paper. The tree demanded payment for her transgression, and she gave it willingly: rank, standing, the last vestiges of celestial legitimacy. Everything she’d hoarded and protected.
Everything except the hunt itself.
The thread pulsed stronger now, closer, and through the burning she felt something else. A child’s terror, recent and raw, embedded in the curse residue like a scream frozen in amber.
The sap channels convulsed around her, rejecting her insufficient rank. Through the amber torrent she glimpsed her reflection in the jade walls: crimson robes bleaching to ash-gray, the Registry marks on her collar dissolving like ink in water. Seven years of anonymous survival, the false credentials that let her hunt through temple districts, the carefully forged permissions: all stripped away in seconds, leaving her naked before celestial law.
The curse trail pulled her consciousness forward like a fishhook through her sternum, dragging her deeper through the sap channel’s convulsing descent. Each twist burned away another layer of pretense: false names, forged seals, the careful lies that had sustained her hunt. The Root Hollows yawned below, reeking of exile and forgotten oaths. She surrendered completely, trading survival for truth, letting the curse’s resonance guide her toward whatever waited in the darkness.
The boy lay where the curse trail terminated, crumpled against a root thick as temple pillars, his breathing shallow and rapid. Xiu-Lan approached with the caution she’d learned tracking corrupted spirits. But there was nothing. Just a child, alone, dying.
She knelt beside him, her damaged arm protesting the movement. Up close, the curse mark was unmistakable. The fractured porcelain pattern spreading across his pale skin, the void-dark flicker behind his eyelids, the precise geometric arrangement of the binding sigils. All of it bore Feng’s signature as clearly as a stamped seal. Seven years she’d hunted through celestial records and interrogated minor officials and followed cold trails through abandoned temples, and here was the proof she needed, written in a child’s flesh.
The boy’s eyes snapped open, flickering between brown and black. His gaze fixed on her with unnatural clarity despite the fever burning through him.
“You’re the ghost hunter.” His voice was barely a whisper, but the formal cadence was unmistakable: courtly diction, proper tonal inflection. Someone had trained him well. “They say you sever threads. Can you…” He gasped as a seizure rippled through him. “Can you cut this?”
Xiu-Lan studied the curse mark, tracing its structure with her spiritual sense. Complex. Layered. Not just a binding but a seal, containing something. Memories, perhaps. Evidence. The kind of thing Feng would hide inside an expendable vessel: a child no one would believe, marked so thoroughly that no celestial court would grant him audience.
“I don’t know,” she said, and honesty felt strange on her tongue after years of evasion and half-truths. “But I can try.”
Above them, echoing down through the hollow’s throat, came the sound of temple guards calling out search patterns in bureaucratic cadence.
The curse trail burned through her spiritual senses like heated wire, leading her deeper into passages carved by ancient roots that had drunk from the Primordial Springs for millennia. Outcasts huddled in alcoves pressed themselves into shadows as she passed, their eyes tracking the crimson tatters of her Registry robes with instinctive fear. Even here, in the tree’s lowest depths where celestial authority held no official jurisdiction, the old hierarchies persisted in the body’s memory of submission.
She ignored them, following the trail’s searing guidance through turns that defied spatial logic, through hollows where exiled spirits whispered warnings she couldn’t spare attention to hear. Her damaged arm throbbed with each pulse of the curse signature ahead. Seven years of cold trails and dead ends, and now this: a thread of active corruption leading her through the dark like a rope of burning silk.
The passage opened into a chamber where bioluminescent fungus painted everything in sickly green light, and there, collapsed against roots thick as temple pillars, lay the source.
A child. Convulsing. His left hand blackened with fracture patterns spreading like cracked porcelain across pale skin.
Her scarred fingers hovered above the spreading fracture patterns, reading them as she’d once read celestial mandate scrolls. The curse wasn’t killing him: not quickly. It was preserving him, sealing something within his flesh with the meticulous care of an archivist binding forbidden records. Evidence. The word crystallized in her mind with terrible clarity.
The boy’s eyes snapped open, flickering between human brown and void-black. His lips moved, forming words in the formal cadence of celestial bureaucratic language. A petition, she realized with shock. A child reciting protocol even while dying.
“Registry Officer,” he whispered, recognizing her robes through delirium. “I submit… formal appeal…”
Then the seizure took him again, and she saw the truth written in corrupted qi: this child was her proof incarnate.
Her damaged cultivation base flared as she traced the curse’s architecture with spiritual sense: each layer revealed meticulous craftsmanship, the work of months or years. This wasn’t punishment. This was containment. The boy’s flesh had been transformed into a living ledger, his very existence a testimony that someone had invested tremendous power to either hide or preserve. What truth burned beneath his skin that required such elaborate imprisonment?
The revelation struck with the force of a failed breakthrough: seven years pursuing ashes and echoes, believing herself the hunter, when she’d been following breadcrumbs deliberately scattered. Feng hadn’t merely committed atrocity at Heaven’s Gate; he’d been constructing something far more intricate. This child was simultaneously weapon and testimony, his cursed flesh a ledger of crimes too dangerous to record in jade or paper, suffering made into evidence that could topple celestial courts.
Her hands moved through the diagnostic mudras with practiced precision despite the tremor in her damaged left arm. Each gesture pulled at scar tissue, sent phantom flames licking up to her shoulder, but she’d learned long ago to work through pain that would have broken lesser cultivators.
Spiritual sight peeled back the material world’s veil, revealing what lay beneath the boy’s pallid skin. The curse’s architecture spread before her inner vision like a master calligrapher’s nightmare. Threads of corrupted qi wrapped around his meridians in patterns that should have been impossible, each strand pulsing with sickly luminescence. They coiled through his spiritual channels like parasitic vines, choking the natural flow of his life force, feeding on his essence while simultaneously preserving him. A contradiction that spoke of deliberate design.
But it was the script that made her breath catch in recognition.
Celestial bureaucratic notation. Not the simplified forms used in common temple records, but the archaic high court variant reserved for classified mandates and sealed testimonies. Each twisted thread bore fragments of official language, characters that writhed and reformed as she observed them, resisting her comprehension even as their meaning burned at the edges of her awareness.
Feng’s signature permeated every stroke. She’d studied his ritual work long enough to recognize his particular flourishes, the way he bent divine law into weapons. This was his craftsmanship, unmistakable as a painter’s brushwork.
Her stabilizing technique flowed through her fingertips, golden qi meeting the curse’s corruption at the boundary of Chen-Yu’s central meridian. The contact sent a jolt through her damaged cultivation base, and suddenly she wasn’t just observing the curse’s structure.
She was reading it.
The revelation struck her with physical force. This wasn’t execution: it was preservation through torture. The curse functioned as a living ledger, each thread a testimony written in agony. Chen-Yu’s flesh had been transformed into evidence that couldn’t be destroyed without triggering celestial investigation protocols. Brilliant. Monstrous.
Her stabilizing qi touched deeper, and the archive opened.
Fragments cascaded through the connection. Her disciples’ final moments, their spiritual signatures unraveling as Heaven’s Gate burned. Feng’s voice reciting authorization codes that should never have existed. The forbidden ritual’s true purpose. Not ascension, but erasure, wiping entire lineages from the celestial records while harvesting their cultivation essence. And this boy, cursed as an infant, had somehow absorbed it all.
The psychic weight nearly broke her concentration. She tasted ash and heard screams she’d tried for years to forget. Her left arm convulsed, scars splitting open, fresh blood mixing with old burns.
But now she understood. Chen-Yu wasn’t just evidence.
He was the only remaining proof that her temple had ever existed at all.
The curse recognized her cultivation signature, Seventh Ordination, Heaven’s Gate lineage, and turned predatory. Black threads erupted from Chen-Yu’s hand, seeking her damaged meridians like roots finding cracks in stone. She had heartbeats to decide.
Force the stabilization and she’d cripple him permanently, collapsing meridians too young to withstand such pressure. Withdraw and the curse would claim his left lung, perhaps his heart. The temple guards’ qi signatures pulsed closer through the hollow’s walls: three breaths, maybe four before they breached her concealment wards.
Her masters’ voices echoed through memory: When heaven and earth both demand sacrifice, walk the blade’s edge between.
Xiu-Lan shifted her technique mid-flow, abandoning stabilization for containment. She wove her qi in defensive spirals around his core meridians, not healing but fortifying, creating spiritual levees that would hold for hours, perhaps a day.
The black threads recoiled as her qi-spirals locked into place, creating channels that redirected curse energy away from vital organs without challenging its fundamental nature. Her scarred arm trembled with the effort. Each defensive layer she wove cost more than her damaged cultivation could afford. The boy’s core meridians flared amber beneath her spiritual sight, accepting her protection even as the curse writhed against containment, testing boundaries like a caged thing learning its prison’s dimensions.
The boy’s chest rose with steadier rhythm, eyes settling to mortal brown though awareness remained submerged in fever-dreams. Beneath her palm, the curse mark pulsed. Recognition flowed both ways: the corruption knew her temple’s techniques, had perhaps been designed to. In that resonance of twisted qi, Xiu-Lan understood the terrible arithmetic. This child was evidence. Evidence was leverage. Leverage demanded protection. She had just inherited someone else’s war.
Her damaged cultivation base screamed protest as she drew on reserves she could barely afford. The Bow of Severed Threads materialized from her soul-space, its frame constructed from petrified World Tree wood bound with threads harvested from executed karmic debts. Seven years hunting had taught her efficiency: not the overwhelming force of her temple’s prime techniques, but the surgical precision of someone who couldn’t afford waste.
The guards emerged from the sap channel in standard formation: lead tracker, two enforcers flanking. Their robes bore the Vermillion Seal of the Middle Registry’s Purification Office: bureaucratic predators authorized to cleanse “corrupted elements” without trial or appeal. The lead tracker raised a detection compass, its needle swinging toward Chen-Yu’s hiding place.
Xiu-Lan’s first arrow severed the compass’s spiritual thread to the celestial record-keepers. The device shattered, its connection to higher authority cut clean. Her second and third arrows flew before the guards registered the attack, slicing through the communication talismans at their belts. The enchanted jade cracked, spilling inert qi like blood.
“Registry Hunter Xiu-Lan.” The lead tracker’s voice carried formal accusation. “Interfering with sanctioned purification constitutes,”
Her fourth arrow cut the tracking thread binding him to the cursed child, the karmic connection unraveling with an audible snap. The guard staggered, suddenly blind to his quarry’s location.
“The boy is under my custody pending investigation,” she said, voice carrying the clipped authority of her former rank. A lie, but one spoken with such conviction the curse mark on Chen-Yu’s hand didn’t pulse. “Withdraw, or I sever the threads connecting you to your ordination registers.”
An empty threat: that technique required power she no longer possessed. But they didn’t know her limitations. They saw only the ghost hunter, the temple survivor, the woman who’d eluded capture for seven years.
The guards exchanged glances, recalculating odds.
The seven years crystallized into pure instinct: her body remembered what her damaged cultivation could barely sustain. She positioned Chen-Yu’s fever-wracked form behind the calcified sap deposit in one fluid motion, her fingers already finding the first arrow’s phantom weight before the Bow fully materialized.
Every Root Hollow warren had taught her angles of concealment. Every abandoned shrine had mapped the geometry of surprise. The guards would expect desperation, the cornered fugitive’s wild assault. Instead she gave them precision: the calculated economy of someone who’d learned to survive on spiritual scraps.
Her stance shifted to compensate for her left arm’s reduced mobility, weight distributed to favor her stronger side. The bow sang its readiness, hungry for karmic threads. She counted heartbeats, measuring the guards’ emergence rate against her draw speed.
Three opponents. Four arrows prepared. One chance to sever their coordination before they could coordinate a proper response.
The sap channel’s amber glow silhouetted them perfectly as they stepped through, and her first arrow was already in flight, aimed not at flesh but at the invisible threads binding hunter to prey.
The formation collapsed before they understood what had struck them. Her first arrow found the lead guard’s command talisman thread, that gossamer connection between authority and artifact, and severed it with surgical precision. The talisman went dark in his hand, its binding characters fading to ash.
The second guard’s recording crystal shattered as her arrow cut through his observer’s link, the spiritual resonance that fed evidence back to the temple archives. Seven years of being hunted had taught her which threads mattered most.
Her third shot intercepted the binder mid-gesture, slicing through his activation sequence before the net of golden light could fully form. The incomplete working collapsed inward, tangling his own hands in dissipating qi.
Each shot precisely calculated: disable without killing, scatter without martyrdom.
The guards stumbled backward, their formation fracturing. She tracked their confusion through essence-sight: the sudden blindness of severed connections, the panic of officers stripped of their authority’s scaffolding. They still had weapons, still had cultivation, but without their threads they were merely individuals facing something that moved like wind through dead branches.
She couldn’t afford corpses. Dead guards would summon inquisitors with their celestial seals and truth-compelling authorities, resources that would track her through dimensional boundaries and ancestral connections alike. But humiliated officers reporting faulty talismans and a desperate fugitive’s improbable escape? That bought hours, perhaps a full day before anyone questioned their convenient incompetence. Time enough to vanish into the deepest hollows where even official writs held no power.
The passage constricted until jade root pressed against her ribs and Chen-Yu’s shallow breathing echoed off stone inches from her face. She had to turn sideways, damaged arm screaming as root-bark scraped her burn scars, the boy’s curse-mark radiating heat that made her own spiritual essence recoil in recognition of Feng’s signature woven through every thread of the forbidden working.
Her left arm had gone numb below the elbow but she couldn’t shift Chen-Yu’s weight without risking a fall into the lightless chasm she sensed yawning somewhere to her right. The boy’s fever had worsened. His skin burned against her neck where his head lolled, and the curse-mark’s heat pulsed in rhythm with something deeper in the World Tree’s root system, as though responding to a distant heartbeat.
She pressed forward another step. Then another. The jade root’s surface bore inscriptions too ancient for her to read, characters that predated the current celestial bureaucracy, perhaps predated the Registry itself. They glowed faintly as her damaged cultivation base brushed against them, responding to even her diminished spiritual pressure with reluctant luminescence.
Chen-Yu whimpered: a child’s sound that cut through his careful courtly dignity. His void-black eyes flickered open, unseeing, and he whispered something in a language she didn’t recognize. The curse-mark flared brighter, and for one terrible moment she saw through his eyes: a memory not his own, of Feng performing the ritual, of celestial officials watching with approval, of a small boy screaming as porcelain-crack patterns spread across his hand.
Evidence. The boy was living evidence, and Feng had tried to hide him in the hollows like discarded paperwork, assuming the curse would consume him before anyone noticed.
Her grip tightened. The passage narrowed further, forcing her to exhale completely just to squeeze through, Chen-Yu’s weight crushing the air from her lungs.
The first near-fatal wedging came when Chen-Yu’s fever peaked and his body went rigid, back arching in seizure. His elbow cracked against a root protrusion with enough force to split skin. Blood made everything slick. She had to press her forehead against cold stone and breathe through the panic as his convulsions threatened to jam them both irretrievably between jade and primordial rock. Her damaged arm couldn’t grip properly. She felt them slipping, felt the geometry of the passage becoming a tomb.
But then she saw it again: her disciples’ faces as Heaven’s Gate burned. Feng’s dismissive wave in the celestial court, as though twenty-three lives were merely clerical errors.
She adjusted her grip with her good arm, ignored the hot blood soaking through her robes, and dragged them forward six inches. Then six more.
The second time, her legs simply gave out. Exhaustion dropped her against the passage wall like a puppet with cut strings. Chen-Yu’s weight became impossible. Her vision grayed at the edges. The boy’s curse-mark pulsed against her collarbone, each beat a reminder of how far she’d fallen, how little strength remained.
She thought of Feng’s face.
She moved.
The guards’ voices filtered through jade and stone, muffled, distorted, but clear enough. “The passage narrows to nothing twenty feet in. She’ll wedge herself.” A pause, then the captain’s measured response: “Post Third and Seventh Cohorts at the entrance. Standard containment protocol. If she emerges, detain for questioning. If not…” The unspoken conclusion hung in the air. Temple guards operated by efficiency metrics, not heroic sacrifice. They wouldn’t risk three men in an unmapped crack pursuing a disgraced cultivator with a damaged cultivation base and a dying cursed child.
Xiu-Lan’s lips pulled back from her teeth in something that wasn’t quite a smile. She’d counted on exactly this bureaucratic calculation. The risk-assessment that valued living guards over dead fugitives.
She kept crawling forward into the narrowing dark.
The curse-mark erupted: void-black radiance splitting porcelain cracks across Chen-Yu’s left hand. Xiu-Lan’s breath caught, certain she’d feel the boy’s final heartbeat shudder against her damaged arm. But the light wasn’t consuming him. It was illuminating. Revealing.
The passage opened ahead like a throat swallowing darkness. Ancient stone surrendered to hollow space where the World Tree’s deepest roots had carved chambers that no celestial auditor had ever recorded.
Her damaged arm trembled as she steadied herself against jade root. The censored characters weren’t merely scratched out. They had been systematically erased from existence, leaving ghost-impressions where bureaucratic truth had once been recorded. Someone with authority over the World Tree itself had unmade these records. The same authority that had unmade her temple. Her disciples. Everything she’d sworn to protect.
The boy’s skin burned against her palm, fever-heat radiating through damaged meridians that twisted in patterns she recognized from forbidden texts: the kind stored in the Upper Registry’s sealed archives, accessible only to Mandate Holders and their appointed investigators.
She withdrew her hand, staring at the curse mark’s spreading fractures. Each line corresponded to a sealed memory. Each fragment of porcelain-pattern held compressed testimony that Chen-Yu himself couldn’t access consciously, locked behind pain and fever-dreams that surfaced only when his body could no longer contain them.
” (witness signatures falsified under coercion, Registry Seal applied posthumously) ” The boy’s voice cracked, his back arching as another seizure rippled through him.
Xiu-Lan caught his shoulders, holding him steady against the moss bed while her mind raced through implications she didn’t want to accept. Feng hadn’t just orchestrated the Catastrophe. He’d prepared for investigation. For accountability. This child was insurance. A living record that could be destroyed with a thought if the corruption ever faced exposure, taking all evidence with him into oblivion.
But why hadn’t Feng destroyed him already? Why let Chen-Yu wander the World Tree’s hollows for years, a walking testimony that could unravel everything?
Unless he couldn’t. Unless the seal’s architecture required something specific to unmake it safely. Or unless unless there were other officials involved, ones who needed the evidence preserved as leverage against each other, a balance of mutually assured destruction playing out in celestial courts while this child suffered the weight of their crimes in his flesh.
Chen-Yu’s babbling subsided into whimpers. His void-black eyes cracked open, struggling to focus on her face. For a moment she saw past the curse to the terrified child beneath, alone, in agony, used as a tool by powers that had never considered his humanity worth preserving alongside their precious evidence.
She had made her choice in saving him. Now she had to decide what came next.
With shaking hands she pressed her fingers to his temples in the diagnostic technique her master had taught her decades ago, when Heaven’s Gate still stood unblemished. Careful threads of qi (what little her damaged cultivation could still muster) slipped past skin and bone, tracing the labyrinth of Chen-Yu’s meridians.
The curse structure revealed itself in layers of horrifying complexity.
Not corruption. Architecture. Deliberate, meticulous, brilliant in its cruelty.
Each meridian had been rewoven into a storage matrix, compressed testimony threaded through living tissue like calligraphy inked on flesh instead of silk. The curse mark on his hand was merely the lock. The real archive spread throughout his entire body, memories, recordings, witness statements, all preserved in a format that would combust into spiritual ash if extracted improperly.
A living ledger. A breathing scroll of evidence that could topple courts.
And the extraction trigger was exquisitely sensitive. Any attempt to remove the seal without the proper authorization codes would ignite the testimony, consuming Chen-Yu from within. The boy wasn’t just evidence.
He was a trap waiting to destroy whoever tried to free him.
Xiu-Lan jerked backward, her diagnostic threads snapping as Chen-Yu’s eyes locked onto hers with an awareness that transcended his years. The voice that emerged carried the resonant formality of official testimony, each syllable precisely weighted according to celestial protocol.
“Registry Keeper Feng did knowingly falsify the mandate scrolls, did substitute forbidden materials in the consecration array, did accept bribes from. The words choked off into a wet gurgle as blood welled from his nostrils, painting his lips crimson. The curse mark flared white-hot, punishing the unauthorized disclosure.
The boy was a prisoner in his own flesh, tortured by truth itself.
She pressed the flask to his bloodied lips, cradling his head with her scarred arm while her voice shaped the Seventeen Calming Iterations. Mantras reserved for those whose spirits had been forcibly opened. His thrashing subsided. The void-black receded from his irises like ink diluting in water. His breath found rhythm again.
But the porcelain cracks had consumed his wrist entirely now. The curse was devouring him, destroying its own container.
In the phosphorescent dimness she traced the censored script covering the chamber walls: characters half-erased but still legible to one trained in celestial calligraphy. Her fingers trembled. This was deliberate archive, a place where the World Tree itself had preserved transactions that someone later tried to unmake. If Chen-Yu’s curse matched these deleted records, then the conspiracy reached beyond Feng, high enough that someone could rewrite the tree’s own memory.
The paste hissed against corrupted flesh. Xiu-Lan crushed the last of her fever-breaking herbs between her palms, mountain ginger root and silver-leaf sage, ingredients she’d hoarded for her own injuries, mixing them with water from her canteen until the consistency felt right. Not right enough. Celestial medicine required celestial components. She bit her thumb, let three drops of blood fall into the mixture. Her own qi, damaged as it was, would have to serve as the binding agent.
The paste glowed faintly amber as she worked it between her fingers, feeling her cultivation base strain at the effort. Seventh Ordination was insufficient for true healing, but perhaps enough to slow the corruption. She pressed the mixture against the curse mark on Chen-Yu’s left hand, covering the porcelain cracks that had spread past his wrist during their flight through the hollows.
The boy’s skin burned fever-hot beneath her touch. She held firm, channeling what remained of her spiritual essence into the medicine, watching the cracks’ advance slow from a crawl to a trembling stasis. The curse resisted, Feng’s signature was woven deep, designed to consume rather than merely mark. But her blood carried the authority of the Celestial Registry, however tarnished, and the curse recognized hierarchy even in its hunger.
Chen-Yu’s breathing shifted. The ragged gasps that had torn from his throat for hours gradually steadied into something approaching natural sleep. Not healing (she lacked the skill and resources for that) but stabilization. Buying time.
Xiu-Lan sat back against the chamber wall, exhaustion crashing through her like a physical weight. Her left arm throbbed where the old burns ached in sympathy with fresh spiritual depletion. Three drops of blood. Such a small price. Yet she felt it in her bones, in the hollow space where her cultivation should have been whole.
The boy would live through the night. What came after, she would face when dawn filtered through the root-hollow’s crevices.
The boy’s voice emerged thin and precise through chattering teeth, each word shaped with the careful formality of someone who had survived by mastering protocol. “Petition format… seventeen-stroke opening… invokes Integrity Office jurisdiction without… without direct accusation…”
Xiu-Lan leaned closer, her exhaustion forgotten. She’d spent seven years gathering whispers and circumstantial evidence, fragments that dissolved under official scrutiny.
“The language must… must acknowledge hierarchical propriety while establishing…” Chen-Yu’s eyes flickered void-black, then brown again. “Pattern of administrative irregularities. They can’t refuse investigation without… admitting they already know.”
His fever-slick hand clutched at her sleeve. “My teacher said… said the bureaucracy protects itself but… but it also protects its own legitimacy. Force them to choose.”
The words carried weight beyond their fevered delivery. This child understood what she had missed: that celestial corruption feared exposure more than violence, that the right petition filed through proper channels would spread through the Registry like poison through roots, impossible to contain once acknowledged.
Documentation. Procedure. The weapons she’d abandoned for her bow.
“Tell me the seventeen-stroke opening,” Xiu-Lan said quietly, reaching for her travel-worn brush case.
The realization settled into her bones like winter cold: her bow had been a tool of grief, not justice. Seven years tracking Feng through the branches, each arrow loosed in righteous fury: and what would his death have proven? One corrupted official eliminated while the system that enabled him remained untouched, ready to spawn a dozen more.
But this child, marked and suffering, was a living indictment. The curse-work bore Feng’s signature as clearly as any seal on official parchment. Even the Celestial Registry’s archivists couldn’t erase what had been written into living flesh. Chen-Yu was evidence that would testify even if every witness fell silent, documentation that breathed and remembered.
Her bow had been the wrong weapon all along. She needed what this boy possessed: knowledge of how to make the bureaucracy devour its own corruption.
The boy’s question hung between them like smoke from a dying incense stick. Xiu-Lan’s scarred hand tightened on the bow she could no longer justify using. “I spent seven years learning to kill,” she said finally, each word carefully measured. “I have three days’ practice at keeping someone alive.” She met his flickering gaze. “Teach me the bureaucracy’s throat, and I’ll guard yours.”
Over three days in the hollow’s amber light, Chen-Yu’s trembling fingers guided her brush through the Ninety-Nine Forms of Formal Grievance. He taught her which seals demanded investigation, which phrases bypassed corrupt intermediaries, how to weave evidence into bureaucratic silk that couldn’t be ignored. She learned the architecture of celestial procedure: not to circumvent it, but to weaponize it. The hunter became petitioner. Vengeance became litigation. And the system that had tried to erase them would be forced to answer.
The ascent from the root hollows took two full days of careful navigation through the World Tree’s arterial passages. Chen-Yu rode on her back when his strength faltered, his small frame lighter than seemed natural for a child his age. Another effect of the curse’s metabolic alterations. Xiu-Lan had wrapped his marked hand in silk blessed with minor warding prayers, enough to avoid alarming passing spirits but not so elaborate as to draw attention to what lay beneath.
She chose routes through abandoned maintenance passages rather than the main sap channels, following Chen-Yu’s whispered directions to corridors that had fallen off official registry maps. The passages still functioned, the World Tree maintained its own infrastructure regardless of bureaucratic oversight, but they saw no other travelers. Not yet ready to announce their presence, yet no longer skulking like criminals either. Simply traveling with appropriate caution, as any petitioner might who carried sensitive testimony through uncertain jurisdictions.
The passages themselves told stories of the Tree’s slow decline. Sap channels that should have glowed amber ran dim and sluggish. Inscriptions on the jade bark had begun to blur, as if the Tree struggled to maintain its perfect record-keeping. Twice they passed sealed doorways marked with quarantine talismans, corruption contained but not cleansed.
Chen-Yu’s fever had broken, but he remained quiet, conserving energy. His eyes had stayed human-brown since waking, which Xiu-Lan chose to interpret as a favorable sign. Occasionally he would pause to trace characters on the bark with his good hand, reading fragments of ancient transactions like a scholar browsing library scrolls.
“The Integrity Office had jurisdiction here once,” he murmured at one junction, fingers following characters only partially visible. “Before the reorganization. These passages remember.”
Xiu-Lan filed that information away. The boy’s curse gave him strange sensitivities. Not quite prophecy, but a resonance with truth that even damaged records could not fully obscure.
At the boundary marker where the wild hollows gave way to administered territory, Xiu-Lan paused. The transition was marked by a jade archway inscribed with jurisdictional declarations, its characters glowing faintly with residual authority. Beyond lay orderly pathways, proper lighting, the measured flow of minor functionaries about their eternal duties.
She adjusted Chen-Yu’s robes first, smoothing the mismatched fabric into something approximating respectability. Then her own crimson robes, still tattered but arranged now with deliberate dignity: the bearing of a temple keeper fallen on hardship, not a fugitive fleeing justice.
Chen-Yu produced a jade token from the leather pouch at his waist, one of many treasures scavenged from forgotten shrines. This one bore a minor official’s seal, its owner long absent from their post.
“Not forgery,” he said quietly, anticipating her concern. “Evidence. We present it as part of our grievance. Proof of abandonment, dereliction of duty. It establishes our standing to question what became of its bearer.”
His fingers traced the seal’s characters with practiced care. Even in this, the boy thought like a bureaucrat. Perhaps that training would save them both.
The guard’s jaw tightened, regulations binding him more surely than any chain. He stamped their petition with visible reluctance, the seal’s impact echoing like a judgment.
“The Integrity Office receives petitioners on the third bell,” he said, each word clipped. “Present yourselves at the Vermillion Accountability Hall. Deviation from prescribed routes will void your protections.”
Xiu-Lan accepted the stamped documents, her scarred hand steady despite the tremor in her chest. Seven years she had hunted through shadows, and now she walked openly into the very bureaucracy that had failed her disciples. Chen-Yu’s small fingers found her sleeve. Not clutching, but anchoring. The boy understood what this cost her.
They stepped through the archway together, into administered light.
The transformation felt like wearing ill-fitted armor. At the fourth checkpoint, Xiu-Lan’s hand drifted toward her bow when a clerk questioned Chen-Yu’s lineage. The boy’s sharp intake of breath (lies detected) stopped her. She bowed instead, reciting the formulaic response he’d drilled into her. The clerk stamped their passage. Chen-Yu’s trembling eased. This was progress, she supposed, though every forced courtesy tasted like ash.
The cell contained two sleeping mats, a water basin, and a scroll rack: austere furnishings that nonetheless represented legitimacy she’d abandoned seven years ago. Chen-Yu collapsed onto the nearest mat, exhausted by the day’s pretense of normalcy. Xiu-Lan remained standing, studying the walls inscribed with petition protocols, feeling the weight of transformation settle into her bones like winter cold into damaged joints.
The transformation unsettled her in ways combat never had. When she closed her eyes now, she saw not the burning faces of her disciples but columns of testimony, witness lists, jurisdictional hierarchies. The nightmares had not ceased. They had merely reorganized themselves into bureaucratic format, her grief transcribed into formal complaints filed with courts that existed only in her fevered sleep.
She moved to the water basin, splashing her face with ritual precision. The cold shocked her into present awareness. Seven years she had tracked the corrupted official through the World Tree’s shadows, learning his patterns like a predator studies prey. Seven years of solitary vengeance, her identity reduced to a single purpose: find him, confront him, make him answer for the Heaven’s Gate Catastrophe with his blood.
Now Chen-Yu’s shallow breathing filled the cell, a sound that anchored her to complications she’d never sought. The boy was evidence, yes. But he was also a child who flinched at sudden movements, who recited courtly protocols like protective mantras, who had known nothing but rejection from the very system she now prepared to petition.
Her damaged left arm ached as she dried her face. The reduced mobility that had once frustrated her aim now seemed almost appropriate. A physical manifestation of her compromised position. She could not be both hunter and advocate, both vengeance-seeker and protector. The roles pulled against each other like opposing cultivation techniques, threatening to tear her foundation apart.
Yet watching Chen-Yu sleep, seeing how the curse mark pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat, she recognized a truth her temple masters would have called wisdom: sometimes the path to justice required laying down the bow. Not forever: she was not naive enough to believe words alone would topple corrupt officials. But first, before arrows flew, the testimony must be heard.
She was learning to wield patience as a weapon sharper than any blade.
The Bow of Severed Threads remained strapped across her back, yet she hadn’t drawn it in three days: a span that would have been unthinkable during her years of solitary pursuit. Her fingers still knew its weight, her shoulders still carried its familiar pressure, but when officials passed in the corridors she reached instead for the petition scrolls tucked in her sleeve, weapons of a different kind that required no drawn string to strike their targets.
The bow had been her identity, forged from the last intact beam of Heaven’s Gate Temple. Each arrow she’d crafted could sever karmic threads, cut the connections between corrupt officials and their ill-gotten spiritual authority. She’d imagined that final confrontation a thousand times: the draw, the release, the severing. Justice delivered at arrowpoint, clean and absolute.
But Chen-Yu’s curse had rewritten that fantasy. The boy carried testimony woven into his very essence. Evidence that would die with him if she acted too hastily. The bow could end one official. The scrolls, properly filed, properly witnessed, could expose an entire network of corruption. It was a hunter’s calculation applied to bureaucratic warfare: which weapon would yield the greater kill?
The transformation had happened gradually, like curse marks spreading: unnoticed until the pattern became undeniable. Where she’d once memorized the patrol routes of corrupt officials to plan ambushes, she now studied their jurisdictional boundaries to identify legal vulnerabilities. The vocabulary of vengeance had shifted: no longer “target” but “defendant,” not “hunt” but “prosecution,” replacing “kill” with “impeach.”
Her damaged cultivation base, once a source of shame that prevented her from confronting high-ranking celestials in direct combat, had become irrelevant. The courts didn’t measure spiritual power in ordination levels. They measured it in properly filed documentation, in procedural knowledge, in the ability to navigate bureaucratic labyrinths where her years studying celestial law now mattered more than her capacity to draw a bow.
The child had become her anchor to this new path. Each time her hand drifted toward the Bow of Severed Threads, she remembered his fever-bright eyes watching her choose between execution and testimony. Chen-Yu didn’t need an assassin. He needed someone who understood that the celestial bureaucracy’s greatest weakness wasn’t vulnerable flesh, but its own obsessive devotion to procedure. Rules that could condemn as surely as any arrow, if wielded with sufficient precision.
The hunter’s path had been clean. But advocacy was a labyrinth of petitions and counter-petitions, jurisdictional disputes, procedural challenges that could delay justice for decades. She must learn patience she’d never cultivated, master diplomatic language that tasted like ash after years of righteous fury. Worse, she must trust a system she knew was corrupted, hoping uncorrupted elements still existed within its vast machinery.
The transformation had hollowed her out in ways the Heaven’s Gate Catastrophe never had. Vengeance possessed a terrible purity. A single target, a clear ending, the mathematical simplicity of exchanged suffering. She had spent seven years honing herself into a weapon with one purpose, and weapons did not require complicated futures. They required only the moment of their use.
But Chen-Yu’s labored breathing in the darkness beside her, the curse marks spreading like frost across his small hand, demanded she become something far more difficult than a weapon. She must become a shield, a voice, a navigator through institutional mazes designed to exhaust and confuse. The boy carried testimony in his very flesh: fragments of the forbidden ritual, names spoken in celestial chambers, evidence that could unravel conspiracies reaching into the Upper Registry itself. Dead, he was merely another casualty of corruption. Alive and presented properly before the right tribunal, he was irrefutable proof.
The irony tasted bitter as the medicinal paste she’d applied to his fever-hot skin. She had cultivated detachment from life, prepared herself for a glorious death that would at least carry meaning. Now she must cling to survival with the desperation of those she’d once pitied. The compromisers, the petitioners, the ones who bent and bent again before bureaucratic indifference, hoping their persistence would eventually matter.
Her damaged left arm ached as she adjusted the boy’s makeshift bedding. Seven years of tracking, fighting, surviving on hatred’s sustenance, and she’d been preparing for the wrong ending entirely. The corrupted official she hunted would not fall to her arrows. He would fall, if he fell at all, to properly filed accusations, to jurisdictional reviews, to the very bureaucratic mechanisms he’d corrupted turned against him with patient, methodical precision.
She would have to learn to fight with paper and protocol instead of qi and steel. The weapon must become the advocate, or all her fallen disciples had died for nothing but her pride.
The mathematics of survival had inverted. Where once she calculated how much blood she could lose before her aim faltered, now she measured how many hours Chen-Yu could walk before the fever returned. Her knowledge of the World Tree’s geography, accumulated through seven years of relentless pursuit, became a catalog of hiding places rather than ambush points. That narrow passage behind the Registry of Autumn Winds, previously valued because it offered clear sight lines for her bow, now mattered because its walls bore enough residual blessing to mask curse-taint from passing inspectors.
She caught herself studying the boy’s face for signs of deterioration with the same intensity she’d once reserved for tracking spiritual essence trails. Each spreading tendril of the curse mark represented a deadline more pressing than any vengeance. The corrupted official could wait. He had waited seven years already, comfortable in his high chambers. But Chen-Yu’s small body could not wait, and the testimony locked in his curse would die with him if she miscalculated.
Every decision now carried double weight: her life, and his.
The Bow of Severed Threads, which had drunk the essence of seventeen minor officials and four temple guardians who stood between her and answers, now remained wrapped in silk at the bottom of her pack. She’d drawn it only once in Chen-Yu’s presence, and the way his curse mark had resonated (pulsing in rhythm with the bowstring’s hum) had terrified them both. Some weapons attracted the very attention they sought to avoid.
Instead she carried healing herbs, fever-reducing talismans, the dried rations that wouldn’t upset a child’s compromised digestion. Her pack had transformed from an arsenal into an apothecary. The transformation felt like defeat and necessity intertwined, inseparable as the silver threads in her hair.
The grief remained, would always remain, but it had acquired a companion: responsibility for breath still drawn, for fever that might break, for a future that could still be shaped. Her fallen disciples had become ancestors now, their voices joining the others who whispered through the World Tree’s bark. They no longer screamed for blood. They asked only that she prevent more burning.
The transformation unsettled her more than the years of vengeful certainty had. A hunter knew her territory, her prey, her purpose. But a guardian? That required faith in systems she’d watched fail, hope in courts she’d seen corrupted. Yet when Chen-Yu’s small hand had clutched her scarred arm in his delirium, whispering “please don’t leave,” something fundamental had shifted in her cultivation-damaged core. Not healing, but reorienting toward an unfamiliar constellation.
The World Tree’s lower passages tested every survival skill she’d honed during her years of pursuit. The sling pressed Chen-Yu’s fragile weight against her damaged cultivation base, a constant reminder of how far she’d fallen from the Seventh Ordination’s promised strength. His shallow breathing synchronized with her footfalls as she navigated root systems that twisted through dimensions she could barely perceive anymore.
Other outcasts watched from hollow-shadows: exiled spirits and fallen cultivators who recognized desperation when they saw it. None offered help. In the Root Hollows, survival was individual currency, and a woman carrying a curse-marked child represented only liability. She met their gazes with the flat stare of someone who had already lost everything that mattered, until they looked away first.
The boy’s temperature fluctuated wildly. One hour his skin burned hot enough to scorch her scarred arm; the next, he shivered with cold that no blanket could touch. She learned to read the curse’s rhythm, timing their movement to his lucid moments, however brief. When fever claimed him, he spoke in voices that weren’t his own. Testimonies from previous bearers, bureaucratic proceedings conducted in courts she’d never accessed, names of officials she’d spent years trying to identify.
She began recording everything in the margins of her tattered celestial scrolls, using ash mixed with sap as ink. Each fragment might prove crucial. Each whispered accusation could be the key that unlocked the Heaven’s Gate conspiracy. Her hands cramped from writing while walking, but she couldn’t risk forgetting a single detail.
The checkpoint loomed ahead: a jade platform where the lawless hollows ended and celestial jurisdiction began. Guards would be stationed there, officials who would see only an outcast woman and a cursed child. She adjusted the sling, hiding the worst of the porcelain cracks beneath borrowed cloth, and began rehearsing the lies that might save them both.
The ascent consumed three days that stretched like years beneath the jade-bark canopy, each rest stop a grim arithmetic: the curse’s spread measured against her dwindling reserves of strength. She rationed the last spirit herbs with surgical precision, grinding roots into poultices that steamed against his fevered skin. Her prayers emerged as hollow formalities, words directed toward ancestors who had perhaps abandoned this corrupted realm entirely.
In the amber-lit darkness of a root hollow, she found herself bargaining. Not with gods (she knew better now) but with the implacable bureaucracy of karma itself. One more day, she whispered to the World Tree’s watchful presence. One more lucid hour. Grant me enough time to deliver this testimony upward.
The boy’s pulse fluttered beneath her fingertips like a trapped moth. She counted heartbeats, measured breaths, tracked the curse’s porcelain fractures as they branched another inch toward his elbow. Mathematics of desperation: if the mark reached his shoulder before they cleared the checkpoint, the guards would execute him on sight as contaminated.
She had perhaps thirty hours. Perhaps less.
When Chen-Yu surfaced from fever’s grip, eyes flickering brown instead of void-black, she seized the moment with tactical precision. She positioned him against the hollow’s wall, steadied his trembling shoulders, and began the interrogation that would save them both.
“The Middle Registry checkpoint. What forms do they require?”
His voice emerged cracked but certain: “Form Eighty-Three for vertical transit. Seal of sponsorship from a ranked official, or (” he coughed, “) or documented evidence of celestial emergency requiring immediate adjudication.”
She memorized every word, every loophole his curse-touched mind had preserved. His delirium had been chaos; this lucidity was architecture. Together they constructed their passage upward from the rubble of his fractured education, building arguments from precedents, weaving his suffering into unassailable bureaucratic logic.
She knelt beside Chen-Yu in the hollow’s darkness, brush trembling over stolen parchment. His whispered corrections guided each character: the proper flourish for “emergency jurisdiction,” the exact spacing that signaled legitimate authority. Seventeen precedents became seventeen shields. When she pressed her temple seal into the wax, the impression was faint, scorched, but unmistakable. His curse-knowledge had transformed her vengeance into something the bureaucracy itself could not ignore: procedure perfected.
The boy stood half-behind her, curse mark visible on his raised left hand: deliberate display, not concealment. She had learned this from him: the bureaucracy feared irregularities hidden more than horrors declared. Let them see the evidence breathing, trembling, existing within their ordered world. Let the corruption’s proof stand in their amber light and demand processing.
The arrays beneath her feet responded to her formal stance, their amber glow intensifying as they registered her cultivation signature, damaged though it was, and cross-referenced it against the celestial registry. The light flickered uncertainly at the Seventh Ordination mark, corrupted by the Heaven’s Gate Catastrophe’s residue, neither fully valid nor entirely revoked. The junior clerk’s brush trembled, leaving an ink blot on his report.
“The… the registry shows your temple installation as administratively dissolved.”
“Destroyed,” Xiu-Lan corrected, her voice carrying the austere precision Chen-Yu had taught her. “Subsection Nine of the Catastrophic Event Protocols requires surviving officers to submit testimony within one celestial year. I invoke that requirement now.” She adjusted the scroll’s position by precisely three finger-widths, the gesture deliberate. “My petition includes material evidence requiring Upper Registry examination.”
The clerk’s eyes darted to Chen-Yu, to the curse mark’s porcelain-crack pattern visible even in the amber light. His brush moved again, then stopped. “Material evidence of… what classification?”
“Forbidden ritual implementation. Unauthorized karmic manipulation. Corruption of celestial mandate.” Each phrase dropped like a stone into still water. “All traceable to a named official whose rank requires Upper Registry jurisdiction.”
The amber light pulsed faster now, the arrays attempting to process her claims against their bureaucratic logic. Somewhere in the World Tree’s vast record-keeping consciousness, her words were being inscribed, becoming part of the official documentation. Irreversible. Undeniable.
The junior clerk set down his brush entirely, his face pale. He understood what she had done: transformed a potential arrest into a formal proceeding. The bureaucracy could not simply expel her now without processing her petition. She had weaponized their own protocols against them.
“I will need to summon a senior adjudicator,” he said quietly.
“That is proper procedure,” Xiu-Lan agreed, not moving from her stance. “We will wait.”
When the guards arrived, three of them bearing the silver insignia of Branch Enforcement, Xiu-Lan recited the Petition of Extraordinary Evidence clause, her voice carrying the cadence Chen-Yu had made her practice in the hollow’s darkness until the formal phrases felt natural rather than foreign, until her tongue no longer stumbled over the archaic constructions. She referenced subsection markers from the Catastrophic Event Protocols, invoked precedents from the Cloud Court’s third dynasty reforms, and presented her credentials not as a vengeful hunter but as a surviving officer of a destroyed celestial installation requesting formal investigation under emergency provisions. A distinction that made the lead guard pause mid-reach for his binding talismans.
His hand hovered there, caught between enforcement and procedure. Behind him, the junior clerk’s brush scratched frantically, recording every word. The amber arrays beneath them pulsed with each citation she spoke, verifying her references against the World Tree’s vast memory. She was building a cage of protocol around them all, forcing them to acknowledge her not as criminal but as petitioner.
The lead guard’s jaw tightened with reluctant recognition.
The holding chamber’s walls pulsed with recording glyphs, each word they spoke being etched into the World Tree’s eternal memory. Xiu-Lan recognized the trap within the courtesy: anything she said here would become official testimony, binding and unalterable. She maintained her formal posture on the wooden bench, one hand resting protectively on Chen-Yu’s shoulder as his fever-heat seeped through fabric.
The boy’s breathing had grown shallow, each exhale carrying a faint wheeze that spoke of the curse’s tightening grip. She felt the curse mark’s heat intensifying beneath his sleeve, a brand burning from within. Her damaged cultivation base stirred uselessly, unable to offer healing she once commanded effortlessly.
Outside, footsteps approached with the measured cadence of higher authority arriving. The moment of true judgment drew near.
The petition scrolls lay before her in the sequence Chen-Yu had prescribed: each document a calculated step in bureaucratic logic she barely grasped. Her fingers traced the formal seals, committing their order to memory. When she checked his pulse again, the curse mark had consumed another finger-width of pale flesh. Three days remained before the seizures turned fatal. The review process required thirty.
Through the translucent jade walls, she observed the clerks gliding through luminous sap channels. Their movements precise, their scrolls held at exact angles prescribed by centuries of protocol. This was combat by procedure, warfare through proper form. Her bow remained wrapped and useless. Chen-Yu’s fevered whispers had armed her with different weapons: the Seventeen Addresses, the Hierarchy of Evidence, the Protocol of Righteous Complaint. She must wield bureaucracy itself, and pray his teaching held true.
The holding area’s amber light cast shifting shadows across Chen-Yu’s fever-pale face, and Xiu-Lan found herself mentally rehearsing the phrases he had drilled into her during their ascent. The seventeen forms of respectful address tangled in her mind like prayer beads. Each title a key to a different lock, each honorific a blade that must strike at precisely the right angle.
Her left arm ached where the burn scars pulled tight, phantom heat from the Heaven’s Gate Catastrophe flaring with her anxiety. She had memorized the proper sequence for presenting evidence to different bureaucratic ranks, but the knowledge sat uneasily in her mind, foreign as a borrowed sword. The subtle distinctions between a petition and an accusation haunted her, Chen-Yu had made her recite them until her voice went hoarse. A petition acknowledges the court’s wisdom in advance. An accusation presumes judgment before testimony. One might grant them audience. The other would see them expelled, or worse, detained for improper conduct before authority.
The boy stirred against her shoulder, his curse-marked hand twitching. She steadied him carefully, aware that every gesture here carried meaning. Posture communicated deference or challenge. The angle at which one held scrolls indicated confidence or supplication. Even silence had gradations. Respectful waiting versus insolent refusal to speak.
She had spent years tracking her quarry through dimensional boundaries, reading qi signatures like blood trails. Now she must track through hierarchies and protocols, hunting through layers of bureaucratic procedure. The bow across her back felt like a relic from another life. Her true weapons now were these scrolls Chen-Yu had helped her prepare, each character brushed with painstaking care, each argument structured according to the Ninety-Nine Stratagems he had recited in fevered whispers.
This was a different kind of ordeal. One that required her to become someone she had never been. A supplicant who believed in systems rather than a hunter who trusted only her aim.
A clerk passed close to their bench, robes whispering against stone, and Xiu-Lan’s hunter instincts screamed their familiar litany: threat assessment, movement patterns, vulnerable points along the spine and throat. Her fingers twitched toward the bow. But she forced herself instead to observe as Chen-Yu had taught her: the jade-green of his official sash marking him as Fifth Registry, the phoenix insignia indicating Petition Review jurisdiction, the lacquered scroll case suggesting active cases rather than archived records.
Violence translated slowly, painfully, into information.
The clerk’s gait spoke of routine, not suspicion. His eyes passed over them with the disinterest of one who saw countless supplicants daily. Not an enemy. Not an ally. Simply a mechanism within the vast bureaucratic apparatus they must navigate.
Her jaw ached from clenching. Every instinct she had honed over years of pursuit now had to be suppressed, rechanneled. The predator’s crouch became the supplicant’s posture. The tracking gaze became the deferential glance. She was learning a new language written not in qi signatures but in colored sashes and scroll cases, and the translation felt like betraying everything she had been.
Her hand moved instinctively to brush damp hair from his forehead: a gesture that would have been unthinkable weeks ago, when she touched nothing except her bow and the cold trails of her prey. The fever made his curse mark pulse with sickly light, and each flicker seemed to illuminate the gap between what he was and what he should have been.
Twelve years old. He should be climbing trees for fruit, not parsing jurisdictional boundaries. Should be learning folk songs, not subsections. Should be dreaming of adventure, not drowning in the same bureaucratic labyrinth that had failed her disciples.
Yet that corrupted knowledge, force-fed into a child’s mind, might be the only blade sharp enough to cut through celestial lies.
The scrolls’ texture reminded her of temple silk, but their purpose was sharper than any arrowhead. Chen-Yu had taught her the architecture of accusation. How evidence must nest within precedent, how testimony required three corroborating sources, how even vengeance must bow before procedure. She was learning his language now, this bureaucratic cultivation that transformed rage into irrefutable argument.
The vision settled in her chest like an oath: not the burning vow of vengeance that had sustained her through years of hunting, but something quieter, more dangerous: hope. She would master Chen-Yu’s weapons of procedure and protocol. She would transform her testimony from accusation into irrefutable record. And when they finally ascended together, the courts would have no choice but to acknowledge what their corruption had destroyed.