Chapter 107: TRUTH AND DEALS (Patreon)

“There!” the woman snapped, stepping toward him, sky-blue eyes narrowed and fixed onto his.

Her gaze was hypnotic; he was no stranger to special eyes, given Daojue and Meiyao, but the blue of the woman’s eyes was especially unnatural. Perfect swirls of smooth azure—too bright, too vibrant, too unreal—around the pitch-black depths of the pupils.

“There?” Jieyuan repeated, confused, frowning; he was still reeling from the revelation of Lushan’s—Chunying’s—true identity. Her eyes weren’t helping, either.

Lu—Chunying jabbed a long, slender finger at his chest.

“There. Just now. When I said my name, you recognized my family. Wutianxuan.” Her voice, Jieyuan noticed now, had also changed. It was richer and smoother now, velvety; there was also an almost musical lilt to it. It was a voice made for singing, the kind that could effortlessly set your ears tingling. “You know of my clan; don’t bother trying to hide it. And the Vessel knows there’s no way someone with your purported background would’ve ever heard of it before.”

Well, rot. The woman in front of him might look different now—awfully different, completely different—but clearly the mind behind those now-azure eyes hadn’t changed. It was still Lushan he was dealing with, no matter what she looked like or what she was really called. And Lushan was as sharp as a finely honed blade. As sharp as it got, really. Sloppy, Jieyuan.

Something else also stood out to him. The expression she’d just used. The Vessel knows. That was new. Not one he’d ever heard before, not from Lushan or anybody else. When dealing with someone like Lushan—or rather, Chunying, apparently—you had to pay attention to every little thing. Something about Vessel struck a chord of memory, too. But he set that little observation aside for the moment.

“I’ve heard of the Wutianxuan, yes,” Jieyuan admitted. “But I really am a mundane-born from Radiant Gold City. It’s just that not too long ago I came into contact with some… higher-realm matters.”

He stood his ground as he held L—Chunying’s azure gaze. Now that they were close he realized she was even taller than he’d originally assumed; she might actually be an inch taller than him, even. And though Jieyuan was no Daojue, he was far from short.

“Hmmm.” Chunying pursed her lips. She stepped back, cocking her head, eyes narrowed in consideration, arms crossed over her chest.

Jieyuan took note of all those little reactions, all those subtle gestures. And he found that though Chunying looked nothing like Lushan, she had the same mannerisms. The same confident, bold disposition. But as he took in the motions and movements of Lushan’s body, his attention was drawn to the body itself—and that, in turn, had him thinking back to the way she’d transformed.

How exactly does her transformation work? The face was one thing; if that was the only thing that had changed, he could’ve easily accepted it. But Lushan’s entire body had changed.

Everything else aside, she’d grown taller by over a foot, from average height to taller than any woman he knew. That couldn’t be the work of an illusory power, of something like the mirages her star-artifact produced. He had sparred with Lushan. Dueled her, fought with her. Crossed blades with her. He’d have noticed something off if she’d been using a mere illusion to alter her appearance.

Shape-shifting? A biological transformation? No. That couldn’t be it, either, Jieyuan realized, because of her robes. They had also grown accordingly to fit Chunying’s much taller frame. Some form of material transformation, then? That would fit. But it’d also be an awfully broad ability or power. What were its limits? How exactly did it work?

Then there was the azure mist from before, even more unreal and unnatural than her eyes. That was clearly involved in Chunying’s transformation. Likely the means through which it was achieved. An artifact? A bondskill? A bloodgift?

He glanced at Chunying’s left hand, where the azure mist had disappeared. Chunying wasn’t wearing armor at the moment, her hand bare, but he couldn’t spot anything particularly off about her hand. Over her fingers was a series of artifact rings, but all of them were Orangesoul and none seemed out of the ordinary.

“Higher-realm matters…” Chunying said, scowling, like she’d tasted the words and found them bitter. “What higher-realm matters, exactly?”

“It’s a long story,” Jieyuan said. “I’ll tell you later. But I really am a mundane-born. I really am from Radiant Gold City. And prior to joining the Ardent Light Sect, I really was a member of the Gleaming Stone Sect.”

He wasn’t even lying; depending on how their conversation went, he might even be willing to tell her about the Absolute Sword Trials. But first, he needed to understand just who Chunying really was. Just what sort of business someone from the third most powerful organization in the Human Plane had infiltrating a lowly—at least in comparison—Yellowsoul sect.

“All right. I’ll take your word for that,” Chunying said, though her expression made it clear she wasn’t in the least convinced. “What about the Tianzijun and Linzushen, then? What’s their deal? I know the true significance of those names. I know of the Tianzijun and Linzushen Clans.”

Jieyuan sighed. That, he reckoned, was a very good question. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a very good answer for it.

“Daojue and Meiyao are from Redsoul independent divisions completely unrelated to their main clans,” Jieyuan said. At Chunying’s unimpressed, disbelieving look, he shrugged helplessly. “I know how absurd it sounds, but it is what it is.”

“Absurd is putting it lightly,” Chunying said. She looked away from him, frowning thoughtfully. “Liecheng gave me reports on the three of you. Information the New Nobles had collected. They mentioned a Redsoul Tianzijun Clan on Incandescent Serenity Island, as well as a local Linzushen Clan connected to a cult… the Viridian Death Cult, I believe? But… I thought… I don’t know, I thought it might be some sort of cover. It didn’t make much sense, but all my other theories sounded even sillier.”

Chunying sighed, her azure gaze focusing on him again. “Let me see if I understood it correctly, then. You’re telling me that a Tianzijun and a Linzushen just happened to break away from their clans, find their way to the same Yellowsoul island in the middle of nowhere and start new families, offshoot clans? And that these new local clans, even after a thousand years, never rose beyond Redsoul?”

“I’m honestly not sure how the offshoots on Incandescent Serenity Island began,” Jieyuan said. “But that seems to be the case, best as I can tell. How well-known are the main Tianzijun and Linzushen Clans, anyway? You seem rather familiar with them.”

He’d known the Tianzijun were famous, or rather infamous; his conversations with Anren, that suspiciously helpful Violetsoul from the Absolute Sword Trials, had made that clear. Of the main Linzushen Clan, on the other hand, he knew very little, besides that they were a Violetsoul clan and connected to the Primordial residing in the Viridian Death Dome, Muyeshen.

“The Linzushen and the Tianzijun?” Chunying snorted. “I doubt there’s anyone from a Violetsoul sect who hasn’t heard of them. The Linzushen Clan is among the most powerful clans in the Chromajie in the current era; they’re a major power in the Heavenly Continent. And as for the Tianzijun… They might be a mere Bluesoul clan nowadays, forced into seclusion here in the East, but I don’t think they’ll ever be forgotten. It’s impossible, I think, to forget the clan that ruled the Human Plane twice.”

The Human Plane. As opposed to the Empyrean Plane, the two making up the Chromajie, Jieyuan recalled. It was a term that Anren had used a few times in their conversation, but it’d never come up outside of his conversations with the suspiciously helpful Violetsoul from the Absolute Sword Trials. But ruling over the plane?

He knew of Tianzijun Juechen’s rampage and how the man had almost destroyed the Chromajie, and that at a later point the Tianzijun Clan had been driven out of the Central Continent, but this was his first time hearing about this ruling the plane business. What did it even mean to say they ruled the Human Plane? And not just that, the Tianzijun had done it twice?

“What exactly do you mean,” Jieyuan asked, “when you say the Tianzijun ruled over the Human Plane?”

Impossible blue eyes blinked at him. “You don’t know? I thought you knew about the Tianzijun Clan?”

“I know of the main Tianzijun Clan, yes, but very little,” Jieyuan said. “My knowledge of Violetsoul matters as a whole is spotty at best.”

“And Daojue and Meiyao, you couldn’t have asked them?”

“I wasn’t kidding when I said the Tianzijun and Linzushen Clans they’re from, the ones on Incandescent Serenity Island, are independent from the main ones. Daojue and Meiyao don’t know much more than I do.”

Or at least that was the case for Meiyao; Daojue seemed to know of quite a lot of higher-realm matters. But he was keeping that to himself for the time being.

“You really… You’re really serious, aren’t you?” Chunying’s blue eyes met his, searching, questioning. Burning.

Jieyuan tensed; something had just changed in Chunying’s posture, in her gaze. There was a weight to the air between them that hadn’t been there before.

“Serious?” he asked, uncertain where she was going with this, unsure what had changed.

“About who you are, about Meiyao and Daojue…” she continued. “You three really are from Incandescent Serenity Island? You three really aren’t connected to Violetsoul sects?”

So that’s what’s happening, Jieyuan realized. We’re circling back to that, then.

Chunying sounded halfway between disbelieving and hopeful, like she wanted to believe him but couldn’t quite bring herself to. Or maybe it was the other way around, and she didn’t want to believe him but couldn’t bring herself to dismiss his words as lies. Jieyuan wasn’t sure which it was. He wasn’t sure Chunying knew which it was.

It seemed like he wouldn’t be getting the history lesson on the Tianzijun Clan he’d been hoping for, but that was fine. This was more important.

“Yes,” Jieyuan said simply. “Not directly, at any rate. Not as far as I know. Meiyao and I were both born in the Radiant Gold District, and Daojue in another Redsoul district. We became cultivators when we joined the Gleaming Stone Sect. That’s the Heavens’ own truth.”

“What about what you said, about your heavenly affinity? Is it really tenth-order? Meiyao’s and Daojue’s too? Was that also the truth?”

“Yes.”

Chunying took a deep breath, then slowly expelled it. Though she wasn’t standing so close anymore he still felt her breath, made warm by the sweltering heat of their fiery landscape, brush against his face.

“I see,” she said. “Well, I don’t see, actually, but… Heavens. I knew there was something up with you three, but I thought— Honestly, I never really decided what you three were.”

She looked away from him. She began pacing in front of him, boots light against the rocky red ground.

“I thought that maybe Meiyao and Daojue had been sent by the main Tianzijun and Linzushen Clans. They certainly had the bloodlines, that much was unmistakable. But that never made too much sense to me, because I just couldn’t see those two clans ever working together. It also didn’t make sense why neither Meiyao nor Daojue had bothered to hide their identities, and there were also the local clans on Incandescent Serenity Island, which also didn’t fit anywhere in the puzzle…”

Another deep breath. Another deep exhale. Jieyuan just stood back, silently watching as Chunying paced. He wasn’t quite sure what was going on right now. She seemed to be speaking as much to him as to herself. Raving, almost. Or maybe she was venting? Either way, she wasn’t acting normal. Her expression was one of disgruntled, exasperated confusion.

“And then there was you…” Chunying rounded on him suddenly. Glared at him. “You. You drove me insane, you know, Jieyuan? Because as little sense as Daojue and Meiyao made, you made even less. Unlike the two, your clan was unknown to me. Unlike the two, you clearly didn’t have a bloodline. And yet Meiyao and Daojue respected you as an equal.”

She looked away and started pacing again.

“If anything, you were clearly the leader of your little trio. And that… That should’ve been impossible; a Linzushen and a Tianzijun—a Tianzijun, known for their legendary pride—deferring to a no-name mundane-born? There’s also your martial prowess, more than a match for any Violetsoul-raised cultivator. And then there’s your amphis, a weapon that’s rare even among Violetsouls, a weapon almost exclusively wielded by a very specific clan of moonsworn empyreans…”

Again Chunying stopped in place; again she fixed him with her gaze.

“It did not make sense. Any of it. I couldn’t think of a single theory that would explain you three. Explain who you were, what you were up to, how you were connected. And I did my best to figure you three out. I threw out hints. Baited you. Revealed some of my hand, so you’d reveal yours. And it worked, to an extent. But the more I found, the less I understood. The more confused I became. I thought… Honestly, I was glad when you distanced yourself, because I really might have gone insane, otherwise.”

Jieyuan just stared at Chunying, not sure what to say. He was stunned, really. Because Chunying’s words rang awfully, painfully familiar. Resonated with him. What she was describing—it was how she’d made him feel. That gnawing frustration, that obfuscating confusion, he knew them all too well. Those were the emotions the mystery of her had provoked in him. If anything, from the sound of it, Chunying might have actually had it worse.

Worse. He could hardly believe it. He’d wondered many times now just what it was that went on in Lushan’s head whenever they butted heads, whenever they fenced with their words. But frenzied, desperate confusion wasn’t at all what he’d imagined to lie behind that confident, smug, mysterious facade.

He’d never really thought about just how he, Meiyao, and Daojue would come across to someone aware of Violetsoul matters, of the main Tianzijun and Linzushen Clans. When Chunying put it that way… He could see it. Could see just how absurd the three of them were. Just how impossible it’d be to make sense of them, to puzzle them out, to guess at their real circumstances.

He laughed. It just bubbled up his throat, rising from his chest. A bark of laughter, loud and clear. He couldn’t help it, couldn’t hold it down.

Rotting Heavens, what a mess. What a glorious, golden mess.

Chunying blinked, taken aback. “You’re laughing?” she accused, disbelieving. She glowered at him.

It only made him laugh harder. He felt months of worry, of tension, drain out of him.

Even as she glared at him, blue eyes burning, Chunying’s lips twitched. Curled upwards. Then she snickered—and then she couldn’t hold it in anymore and started laughing too.

“It’s— It’s not— It’s not funny,” she bit out between peals of laughter.

“Sure… it… isn’t…” Jieyuan responded, still laughing.

Finally, he felt he’d let it all out of his system, and he straightened back up, shaking his head. “Heavens, I think I needed that. I… Look, it seems like we still have a great deal to discuss, so let’s get a move on again. Walk and talk. Also, you should probably transform back into Lushan’s guise, in case someone else appears.”

“Right, yes,” Chunying said. “Good idea.”

Jieyuan paid very close attention as blue mist—an unreal, unnatural blue blur—began spiraling out of Chunying’s left hand. It happened too fast, though, and he barely got a glimpse of Chunying’s left hand, where a circular azure mark had briefly appeared, before it was obscured by the unsettling blue mist.

The mist spread quickly, wrapping around Chunying’s body until it completely hid her from sight, leaving him looking at a human-shaped azure blob, like a slice of horizon. It was pure color, but not in the way of materialized chroma. Chroma still had a texture to it, even if a smooth one. It looked like color made solid, sure, but it looked real in a way that Chunying’s azure mist didn’t.

Jieyuan couldn’t quite explain it; the only thing that was clear to him was that the mist somehow unnerved him even more than the viridian mist did. It disturbed him on a deeper, instinctual, animal level, if not even deeper than that. It looked wrong. Felt wrong. Like something that shouldn’t exist. Taboo in a fundamental, existential sort of way.

The azure mist, now fully coating Chunying, rippled suddenly, warping—and then it vanished abruptly, leaving Lushan in its place. Mundane-looking, dark-eyed, average-height Lushan. If the transformation from Lushan to Chunying was jarring, the other way around was even more so. Maybe it was the fact that now he knew that Lushan’s mundane guise was a farce; knew what Chunying really looked like.

Jieyuan began walking, toward the firestorm. Chunying joined him at his side.

“So,” he said, affecting a conversational tone, “how exactly does this whole transformation business work? What’s with the blue mist?”

Chunying glanced at him, then looked away. “I would rather not say, at least right now. I imagine there are some things you’d also rather keep to yourself, for the time being.”

Her voice, he noticed, had changed again; it’d lost its smooth, velvety quality, its musical lilt. Had turned mundane. He didn’t think Chunying was going out of her way to speak differently right now, so he reckoned the transformation was indeed biological. Or at least partly so.

“That’s… fair,” Jieyuan allowed. He really wanted to know more about Chunying’s transformation powers, and especially about the blue mist that unsettled him so much, but he knew the friendly air that had settled between them was fragile at best. He didn’t want to press too much.

He decided to change the subject: “You know, everything you described? I went through something similar. Very similar. You were quite the frustrating mystery yourself, you know? And the way you acted, your prodding and your teasing, it only added to said frustration. Did you have to be so heavy-handed about it? There were times I actually had to stop Meiyao from attacking you. I enjoyed our games for the most part, but sometimes you really were too much.”

“I… I’m aware of that. I admit I can be rather… abrasive. It’s not just me, either. We Wutianxuan, you could say we are… chaotic, by nature. It’s complicated, and some of us have it harder than others, but… Ultimately, we can’t help but seek conflict. It’s just who we are. We’re… born chaotic, and we can’t help but spread that chaos.”

Jieyuan frowned. Chaotic by nature? Born chaotic? That sounded like a bloodline thing. Like the Liangshibai obsession with gemstones, or the Linzushen attachment to nature, or the Tianzijun sky-high pride. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be such a reason for the way Chunying had behaved as Lushan. Something didn’t quite add up, though.

“You’ve been far more pleasant ever since we struck our truce here in the trialworld, though,” he pointed out pointedly. He also wanted to ask about her bloodline, but the list of questions he had for Chunying was growing longer by the second, and he had to prioritize.

“Yes,” Chunying said. “That’s true. That’s because I started keeping myself in check so that we could work together, whereas back in the Ardent Light Sect… I didn’t. That was on purpose; in my experience, people let slip things more easily when they’re riled up. I did want to get under your skin. But… I guess I might have gone too far, at times. I guess I was also venting my frustration on you three. Like I said, I wasn’t having an easy time.”

“Right,” Jieyuan said. “I guess I can see it. But since we’re on the subject… Before we get back to the matters of heavenly affinities, and violet skillseeds… What’s your side of things? What’s a Wutianxuan doing here, in the East, pretending to be a mundane-born, joining the Ardent Light Sect?”

Chunying’s circumstances clearly weren’t like Meiyao’s and Daojue’s. She wasn’t from a local Redsoul offshoot of a Highsoul clan. For one, he didn’t know of any Wutianxuan Clans in any of the Islands. Besides, Chunying had a lot of higher-realm knowledge. Then again, her situation might be more like Daojue’s, who also had higher-realm knowledge. In Daojue’s case, it was because of his master, whom Jieyuan still knew little about.

“I’m from the main Wutianxuan Clan, from the Central Continent, the Heavenly Continent,” she said, with surprising readiness. “My parents were Violetsouls. They were betrayed by our family, driven out of the clan. Hunted down. Forced to escape, to run away. They took me with them. They burned their souls in their escape… Many times over. Too many times, too soon.”

Jieyuan’s interest grew with every word Chunying said. Burning their souls was clearly soulburning, but many times over? And too many times, too soon? He wasn’t sure what that was about. It seemed like there were aspects of soulburning he wasn’t aware of. But he didn’t interrupt Chunying; he could ask those questions later.

“In the end,” she said, “they managed to flee into the East, into the Absolute Sword Region, where the Wutianxuan had no power. They went as far as they could before their power ran out; that was how we ended up in the Ardent Light Sect.”

She closed her eyes and steadied her breathing, clearly trying to steady herself.

“Soulburning like that… It ruined their minds. They managed to recover much of their sanity in the following months, but that was it; they lost their connection to their concepts, to their bloodlines, to their souls. Permanently. They were reduced to mundanes. They still had a Violetsoul’s lifespan, but everything else, even their Law… mundane. I was ten years old when it happened. We settled in a small village, where they raised me for the next eight years.”

She opened her eyes again, looking steadily, firmly ahead, toward the firestorm in the distance. “We planned, the entire time, what I’d do next. I assume you know Lushan’s background, her history; she really did exist. I was traveling through the chromal forest when I came across her. She was dying. At the time I was already a cultivator, using a chromalization hymn from my parents. I changed my plans when I saw her, deciding to take her identity instead. It’d be better than what I originally had in mind.”

That seemed… rather coincidental, Jieyuan reckoned. But coincidences, in his experience, were par for the course where he, Meiyao, and Daojue were concerned. If Chunying really was like them—and everything else aside, her tenth-order heavenly affinity was indicative enough of that—then it looked like the pattern held.

“I actually looked into Lushan before assuming her identity. Visited her village in secret, studied her background. Then I returned to the forest under Lushan’s guise and happened to be found by a patrolling cultivator from the local Redsoul sect. The rest, you already know, I think,” Chunying said. “I faked my heavenly affinity and alignment, joined the nearest Redsoul sect… and ultimately ended up in the Ardent Light Sect.”

“Wait,” Jieyuan cut in. He’d been refraining from interrupting, but he had to make an exception for this one. “You faked your heavenly affinity? You knew from the start you had tenth-order heavenly affinity?”

She glanced at him, frowning in clear confusion. “Yes? Actually, that is one thing I meant to ask you. If you were really a mundane, how did you know to fake yours? Unless you didn’t, and whoever initiated you helped you hide it?”

“No,” he said. He stopped walking, focusing fully on Chunying. “My heavenly affinity—Meiyao’s and Daojue’s, too—was originally fourth-order. Our heavenly affinities were… sealed, I think. Yours wasn’t?”

“Sealed?” Chunying’s frown deepened. She also came to a stop. “I didn’t even know that was possible.”

Jieyuan felt stumped. This was the first major point of divergence between Chunying’s circumstances and Meiyao’s and Daojue’s. He wasn’t sure what to make of that. He needed to know more.

“How did you go about faking your heavenly affinity and alignment?” he pressed. “Actually, how did you even fake being a mundane, for that matter?”

It was one thing to pretend to be a lower-step cultivator; you just mask your soul with lower-realm chroma. But pretending to be a mundane? The only way to do it would be if you were at a higher realm, normally. Unless…

“Wait, were you already an Orangesoul back then?” If her heavenly affinity had been tenth-order from the start, she’d have been able to reach Orangesoul in less than a year’s time, easily. If she was close to the real Lushan in age, that’d add up just right.

“No, I had just become a Redsoul,” Chunying said. “I’m actually over two years younger than the real Lushan. Just two weeks older than you, in fact.”

And now a major point of convergence. One thing about Lushan that had stood out was that he, Meiyao, and Daojue were all nineteen, whereas Lushan was supposedly two years older than them, at twenty-one. But now it turned out Chunying was of an age with them after all. That was a point in favor of them being connected somehow.

“Then how did you pull off the Lushan disguise? Being a mundane, the heavenly affinity, the alignment…” The alignment and heavenly affinity parts, at least, he had an idea of how she could’ve done it. There was Qingshi’s approach. Pursuing another Concept—in her case Water, to fourth-order—and pretending it was her alignment. But he still had no idea how she’d faked being a mundane. “What even is your real alignment, for that matter?”

“It has to do with how I can change my appearance,” Chunying said, after a moment’s hesitation. “My appearance isn’t the only thing I can transform with my… blue mist.”

“I… see,” Jieyuan said, carefully. He’d thought that material transformation was already an awfully broad power, but now it seemed like he’d been thinking too small. Because, apparently, Chunying could transform her soul. He’d have to check once she was out of her disguise, whether her soul’s song changed, too. It hadn’t occurred to him to check earlier. “What about your alignment?”

He resumed walking, having already gotten over most of his shock; Chunying followed suit. Though he faced forward, he kept observing Lushan out of the corner of his vision. He saw her visibly hesitate.

“I’ll tell you my alignment later,” she finally said. “You’ll definitely have questions, and I think we’ve already gotten sidetracked enough.”

I’ll have questions? That sure fanned the flames of his interest. But she was right; they were deviating from the real matter at hand. Understanding just who Chunying was, and then finally addressing the matter of absurd heavenly affinities and innate violet skillseeds.

“Just, one last thing. Your parents. What happened…” he trailed off as Chunying looked away, her expression growing tightly neutral, controlled.

“They killed themselves, when I turned eighteen,” she said. “I was out of the house, when it happened. They didn’t want to burden me. Didn’t want to be dead weight.” Her tone was clipped, her voice even, unemotional.

Clearly this wasn’t a subject she wanted to linger on.

“Right,” Jieyuan said. “Before, you said you’d made plans. I assume you have some sort of goal. Revenge, on those who betrayed your parents?”

“Yes,” Chunying said without hesitation. Her voice and expression weren’t artificially neutral anymore, but rather hard, resolute. “That’s the idea, in the long term. Reach Violetsoul, return to the Heavenly Continent, to my clan, and kill every single person who conspired against my parents. And in the short term… I’m looking into the Immaculate Blood Cult.”

Jieyuan latched onto that. “I did notice you seemed unusually interested in them. In their bloodline.”

“It’s not their bloodline, actually,” Chunying corrected him. “Or at least not the bloodline itself. What I want to know is how easily they can grant it to others. Even among Violetsoul sects—even among the most powerful of them—granting someone a bloodline is no easy feat. And yet a mere Yellowsoul sect apparently does it without trouble, regularly. Clearly they have something special. Something that, somehow, even the strongest Violetsoul sects in the Chromajie lack, as absurd as that sounds.”

Though she didn’t stop walking, she turned to fully face him. “If I want to avenge my parents, I might very well end up taking on my entire clan, one of the most powerful sects in existence. I’ll need every scrap of power I can get my hands on. The Immaculate Blood Cult’s secret, everything else aside… Just being able to easily grant others a chromal bloodline could allow me to create a power base. I must have it.”

He could see in Chunying’s gaze that there was something she wanted to ask him. He had an idea of what it was. She was looking for power. Wanted to take on a Violetsoul sect, wanted to start a power base. She wanted allies.

But his, Meiyao’s, and Daojue’s ledgers were already awfully full. Before committing to anything—especially to conflict with the third most powerful human sect in existence—he needed to get a better grasp on the situation.

“That makes sense,” he said, before Chunying could ask the question. “What about the matter of our heavenly affinity, and the violet skillseeds? What do you make of that? You must have your theories.”

His deflection was obvious, and Chunying frowned slightly. But she didn’t call him out on it, instead taking on a thoughtful expression. “Well, the innate violet skillseeds are one thing, but tenth-order heavenly affinity, do you have any idea how rare—”

“Hold on,” Jieyuan said. “What do you mean, the innate violet skillseeds are one thing? You know what that’s about?”

She shot him a surprised look. “You don’t?”

“Spotty knowledge, I said,” he said. He did his best to contain his excitement. He’d known Chunying would have theories, probably better ones than his given her knowledge of Violetsoul matters, but he hadn’t imagined she’d have the answers to at least part of the mystery outright.

She nodded. “All right. So… Bondskills, they represent a cultivator's bond with a Concept. When it comes to Violetsouls, any fully developed Conceptual bonds they have—that is, Violetsoul bondskills—don't drop when they die but rather remain bound to their souls. That's only if their affinity with the bondskill's core Concept is at least sixth-order, but that's almost always the case with Violetsouls.”

He already had an idea of where she was going with this.

“Now, when you die, your soul is captured by the Silver Stream and wiped clean so that you can reincarnate. That much you know, right?” she asked, and he nodded. “But here’s the thing. A Violetsoul bondskill—a Violetsoul Conceptual bond—is so strong that it can resist the Silver Stream; instead of being erased, it becomes a violet skillseed.”

“You mean, then,” Jieyuan said, slowly, even as his thoughts raced ahead, “that those born with innate violet skillseeds are reincarnated Violetsouls?”

“Exactly,” she said. “All innate skillseeds are violet skillseeds, for that matter. And those born with innate skillseeds normally have six of them, because most Violetsouls die with a full set of Violetsoul bondskills.”

Reincarnation. He was Amyas’s reincarnation, as far as he could tell. And now it seemed like Meiyao and Daojue were the reincarnations of Violetsouls? Chunying too.

The circumstances of their reincarnations couldn’t have been any more different, though. Rather than a Violetsoul, Amyas had been a mundane from another reality, and neither Meiyao nor Daojue—or Chunying, he was fairly sure—remembered their previous lives. But that’d explain why he was the odd one out among them. Why he alone wasn’t born with the six violet skillseeds.

Meiyao and Daojue will want to know about this. Meiyao in particular, he knew, had long wondered whether her innate skillseeds might somehow be related to her bloodline. It was, in fact, something she and her mother had been very concerned about; he could clearly remember her telling him about it back in the Viridian Dome. Finally, finally, they had some answers.

Granted, that answer had also raised a slew of questions. And foremost among them: “These reincarnated Violetsouls, is there any way for them to regain their memories of their previous life?” It wasn’t exactly his case, but maybe it might shed some light on how he’d gotten Amyas’s memories.

“No,” Chunying said. “Or, rather, not immediately. In some cases you can access those memories, but only when you reach Violetsoul. And your previous incarnation must’ve done some preparations for that to work. But I’ll tell you about that later.”

“Right,” Jieyuan said. Heavens, so many rotting questions. Though it didn’t seem like it had to do with him getting Amyas’s memories, if it involved some sort of preparation on the previous incarnation’s part. “So, reincarnated Violetsouls, they aren’t too rare?”

“Yes and no. There were two reincarnated Violetsoul Wutianxuan I knew personally; I also knew of several other reincarnated Violetsouls,” Chunying said. “It’s still very rare, of course, but it happens.”

“And tenth-order heavenly affinity?”

Chunying laughed. “Heavens, those two things are not even remotely close. My parents, they were Violetsouls, powerful Violetsouls, who knew all sorts of things. And according to them, before they had me, they had thought it was theoretical. There were rumors, they said, of there being cultivators with tenth-order heavenly affinity in the past, but before me, that’s all there were. Rumors. Rumors that my parents never believed until they realized it was possible, when they measured mine.”

She held his gaze firmly. “In the entire history of the Wutianxuan Clan, the highest heavenly affinity ever recorded was ninth-order, and there’s only been one. Those with eighth-order are already so rare you could count their numbers since our founding on one hand. Seventh-orders, less than two dozen. And our clan has been around since the Violet Epoch, for millions of years. That is how rare tenth-order heavenly affinity is.”

Jieyuan took a moment to process all of that. Tenth-order heavenly affinity was turning out to be a much, much bigger deal than he’d originally assumed. That raised a question, though. If it was already so rare… “What about above tenth-order heavenly affinity?”

“Above?” Chunying gave him an odd look. “Tenth-order’s the limit. The theoretical limit, even. There’s nothing beyond it.”

Jieyuan pursed his lips. Interesting. He knew there were affinity orders above tenth-order. Anren had told him as much in the Absolute Sword Trials. How they could be reached by surpassing perfection in some way, or achieving a great enough feat with a Concept. The echo left behind by Tianzijun Juechen had confirmed that, even revealed that it was possible to surpass perfection many times over, to climb past eleventh-order heavenly affinity to twelfth, thirteenth, if not even higher.

He’d thought it was common knowledge among Violetsouls, but apparently not. That, or Chunying’s parents just hadn’t told her about it. Clearly all her knowledge on these higher-realm matters had come from her mother and father.

“Jieyuan?” Chunying pressed.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “I’ll tell you later. Just… What is even so special about tenth-order heavenly affinity? It’s rare, sure, and it means you cultivate faster, but… You’re still limited to Violetsoul, aren’t you? And sixth-order is enough for that. At seventh-order, you can soulburn safely, but is there anything—”

“World-weaving,” Chunying cut in. “You don’t know about it?”

“World… weaving?” That sounded very interesting.

“Spotty knowledge, indeed,” Chunying said, sighing. “Something else I’ll have to tell you about later.”

“Right,” Jieyuan said. “I’ll hold you to that.”

He took a moment to consider everything he’d just learned. Assuming Chunying was being honest about everything—and he had a feeling she was, for the most part—then he now had a good idea of who she was, what she was after. He was also certain that she was connected to him, Meiyao, and Daojue in some way.

Tenth-order heavenly affinity might very well be the rarest thing in existence, and for the four of them to have it, and to have been born so close to each other in both time and place? Something was clearly up. Big time.

The question, then, was what to do with all this information.

He recalled the way Chunying had looked at him, earlier, when she’d been talking about her family. The question she’d almost asked. He had kept her from asking it because he was still making sense of everything.

He was someone that took commitments seriously. If he made a promise, he was keeping it. Far more precious than a merchant’s gold, his old man used to say, is their reputation. But it wasn’t just his father’s teachings. Even as Amyas, he hadn’t been one to take promises lightly.

Jieyuan halted his steps. Chunying stopped in front of him.

“It’s clear that we’re connected, in some way. You, me, Daojue, and Meiyao,” he began. “If for no reason other than our heavenly affinity. We’re part of something greater.”

“Yes,” Chunying agreed. She looked like she wanted to say more, but stopped herself, just looked at him expectantly.

“That doesn’t mean we have to stick together, of course,” Jieyuan said. “But… Your revenge, your family, you’re looking for allies to help you with that. Well, I’ve got some matters of my own I could use some help with. Nothing as grand as taking on one of the most powerful sects in existence on my end, but… Who knows, that might change.”

Chunying’s lips quirked upwards.

“Anyway,” he said, “it seems, to me, like we could both benefit from making our truce a proper partnership, and extending it beyond the Divine Star Trials. Far beyond them, even.”

He extended his gauntleted hand toward her.

“So, keeping it nice and simple,” he went on. “I’ll help you with your business, and you help me with mine. Sounds good?”

Chunying grinned at him, grasped his hand. Metal on metal.

“Sounds heavenly,” she said.

And that was that.