Chương 19: Chapter 18: IN THE HEART

First an inner disciple, now a core disciple. In a way, it was like he was moving up in the world. Maybe too fast, though. At this rate, he'd be dealing with a sect protector next, and he wasn't even halfway through Redrealm yet. Jieyuan didn't stand on ceremony. He first dragged the woman's corpse into the inscribed field—just to be safe—and with a pulse of his cleanser ring erased all signs of blood from the ground.

If anyone from the Fusongshi Clan went looking for her, they should draw blanks. They might even put their efforts into tracking her down, meaning less attention spent on him. That done, he crouched down and went about collecting the woman's belongings. With the inner elder Weiming, and the inner disciple Sunqiu, he'd at last had a measure of respect for them, as fellow cultivators who'd faced and endured the Pains.

But while he did, in a way, appreciate the core disciple's industriousness in tracking him down, her threats of torture hadn't exactly endeared her to him. He was quick about it. The woman didn't look like she'd been lying about following him in secret, but he didn't want to take any chances. Most of it was fairly standard fare. Armor, weapons, none of which any better or preferable to those he already had, courtesy of Weiming, so into the woman's holder pouch they went.

Her tenth -step holder pouch; that was good stuff, but it was a pity Jieyuan couldn't use it openly without others wondering where he got it from. He found a skillseed on her chest under her robes, and in one of her inner pockets a pair of tenth-step talismans just like the ones Meiyao had given him. The skillseed went into his holder pouch, but the talismans he tucked into his robes for easy access.

The woman also had a tenth-step Redrealm ring on her with a spiritual song he didn't recognize, but he couldn't really spare the time to puzzle it out, so he put it away. Inside the woman's pouch were a couple of jadebooks, but after a brief skim he found nothing worthy of note. Most important of all was the cloudcraft he found wrapped around her wrist in bracelet form, which he immediately bonded and donned.

Standing back up, Jieyuan tossed the woman's holder pouch inside his, turned around, and continued on his way. If he hadn't been in a hurry before, he was now. He'd be getting his business here done as fast as he could, and then he was heading straight back to the sect. The woman had been a core disciple, so she'd have definitely been important in the Fusongshi Clan—and from how she'd talked of Sunqiu, she was likely of the core bloodline. If somehow the Fusongshi found out about him, then they'd be out for blood.

They'd been trying to off him even before he'd killed Sunqiu. Killing an inner disciple of theirs should've only made matters worse, and now that he'd murdered a core disciple, they would be particularly committed to seeing him dead if they somehow got wind of it. Really, if it weren't for Meiyao and Daojue, he wouldn't even be returning to the sect. Revolution, the woman had said. Gleaming Nobles' Revolution. Whatever that was—and Jieyuan could make a guess or two—he wanted no part of that.

The Gleaming Stone Sect should've been a stepping stone. A brief stopover on his way up the sect ladder. He already got into plenty of trouble on his own, thank you very much. He'd chosen to follow Daojue and Meiyao around because he reckoned they were part of something greater. A conspiracy in a Redrealm sect wasn't quite what he'd had in mind.

Whatever he stood to gain from getting involved in this wouldn't matter much, because soon he wouldn't be a Redsoul anymore, and just about everything he had in his holder pouch now would be rendered worthless. Still, he was in for the long haul, and if this was what he had to deal with, then he'd just have to pull through. The stretch of forest ahead didn't look any different from the rest of the Fatebloom Woods.

Had it not been for the woman's reaction, he wouldn't have even known he was now past the boundary of the distracter field. Although supposedly this area should be safe, he still kept his wits about him. The Yikongwei had been awfully vague about what exactly lay at the Heartseat. He walked for about a minute before he arrived at a clearing, the trees around him opening up in an almost perfect circle. Jieyuan didn't take a single step forward, seized by dazed incomprehension. This was the Fatebloom Woods.

The Gleamstone Valley was many, many miles away. So, pray tell, what in the Heavens was a gleamstone statue doing here? In the center of the clearing, next to what looked like a small, half-grown stump of a trunk of a fatebloom tree, stood the crystalline form of a man facing up, holding a sword in his right hand, pointing at the skies. The statue was directly across him, its front facing him, and Jieyuan could see the man's expression.

The gleamstone was warped in a visage of rage, and the man had his mouth open, like he was mid-speech. Jieyuan could almost hear him. A challenge, or maybe a vow. Whatever it was the man spoke—had been speaking—was of defiance. It was like a moment frozen in time. A final stand stretched forever.

"Well, then." Jieyuan stepped into the clearing, slowly, eyeing the crystallized man warily, confused. It seemed like though he was done with the Gleamstone Valley, the Gleamstone Valley wasn't quite done with him yet.

"This is curious." Further behind the man, closer to the trees, was a small log cabin. Golden, made from fatebloom wood, but Jieyuan only gave it a passing glance before returning his attention to the man. As the gleamstone caught the morning sunlight, it gleamed in a thousand different hues, and as Jieyuan approached the colors seemed to shift and blend and mix in a fairly close approximation to what he reckoned a rainbow turned solid would look like.

It was clearly gleamstone Jieyuan was looking at it, but it was unlike any form of it he'd come across before. All the others tended to have a predominant tone—three, at the most. In Protector Yuanzhi's case, that color had been violet. The crystallized man, though, seemed to gleam with all colors (and that was all colors) equally. The gleamstone was also clearer, more translucent. Jieyuan heard a dim, faint thumping sound. It got stronger and clearer as he approached, but he couldn't tell where it came from.

It was when he was only a couple feet away, still studying the crystallized man, that he happened to see, out of the corner of his eye, the top of the stump beside the man. Or rather, what was on it. In it. The half-grown fatebloom tree was about of height with the man's waist, and its top was caved in, concave, bowl-like. And lying on top of it was a heart. A beating heart. It was gold in color, streaked with green veins. At the top was a crown of crimson, thick, tubular blood vessels.

Under the sunlight, it seemed to glow as much as the gleamstone statue right beside it. For the second time in about as many minutes, Jieyuan found himself shocked into stillness. The Heartland. That was what the Yikongwei called the Fatebloom Woods. The Heartseat. That was what they called the center of the woods, where he was currently at. Heart. He'd assumed that they'd used Heart in the metaphorical sense. As in, something important to them. Something dear to them.

"A literal heart," Jieyuan murmured. It was about the right shape and size for a human heart. A little smaller than two fists held together, looking like a fleshy, slightly oval clump of flesh. Except it came in the color palette of the fatebloom woods—gold, red, and green—and seemed to be doing a fairly good job beating on its own, outside a body. The faint thumping he heard was its beating. Evenly, rhythmically, steadily. One, two. One, two.

As far as he knew, though, hearts beat to pump blood, and there didn't seem to be any of that going on around. Though he could detect the tangy, metallic scent of blood wafting up from the Heart. Faintly, but it was there. This close, he should've been able to sense both the heart and the statue with his soulsenses, but neither registered to it. Since both the statue and the heart had to be chromal, that could only mean they were above Redrealm.

He shifted his gaze from the heart to the statue, then back to the heart. His soulsenses was of no help here, and further staring didn't seem likely to unravel their mysteries. The crystallized man was probably the Yikongwei Founder. How he'd ended up this way was a mystery, but it might be that he took an ill-fated trip to the Gleamstone Depths like Protector Yuanzhi did. The problem with that theory was that he'd been working under the assumption that the Yikongwei Founder was at Violetrealm.

And if he'd still ended up that way, then the Gleamstone Depths were far more terrifying than he'd previously thought. Studying the man more closely, he found that the supposed Yikongwei Founder looked young. It was hard to tell for certain, what with how he was made from gleamstone now, but looking at the crystal lines of the man's face and trying to imagine them on living flesh, he would've put him in his early twenties, if not younger still.

Handsome, too, in a sharp, intense way, though he wasn't sure how much of it was the man's defiant expression as he stared up at the skies. They were also about the same height, with similar builds. As for the heart… Jieyuan circled the trunk, looking at it from different angles. It was clearly something important to the Yikongwei Clan. But what was it? Humans didn't have spiritual bodies. When cultivators died, in the absence of their soul and mantle, their bodies became mundane again.

And this was definitely a human heart, or at least it used to be. The question, then, was whose heart it was and what it was supposed to be now. Finding nothing else—everything the man had on him had been converted into gleamstone and fused into his body—Jieyuan made his way over to the golden cabin. It was a small, simple cottage. As he drew closer, though, he found that it wasn't a standard log cabin like he'd thought it was—or at least as standard as a log cabin could be, when it was made from chromal wood.

Because while it was made of wood, it wasn't made of logs. Rather, the cabin was made entirely out of one, unbroken piece of wood. And it wasn't as if it'd been carved out of a gigantic fatebloom tree, either. There were no signs of it being cut. No sharp edges, no signs of cutting or trimming. It was smooth, like it'd simply grown that way out of the ground. Standing in front of it, looking at its base, where it met the ground, that impression was reinforced.

Barely visible, stretching out from underneath the cabin and burrowing into the ground, were emerald-green roots, like the roots of fatebloom trees. Its spirit was at fifth-step Redrealm, too, exactly like a fatebloom tree.

"Sure," Jieyuan said. After the gleamstone statue and the heart, a tree grown like a cabin was, at best, quaint. The cabin didn't have a door, just two small steps in front of the open doorway. He climbed them, pausing at the entrance. In the middle of the cabin, there was a small, raised block of wood, growing directly out of the floor and half-lit by the sunlight coming from the doorway. Lying next to it was a small pile of jadebooks.

Detecting nothing dangerous and hoping that was indeed the case (because if there were protections or traps inside, he probably wouldn't have been able to sense them with his soulsenses, being at Redrealm) he walked inside, to the stack of jadebooks and picked one up. Like all jadebooks, it was just at first-step Redrealm—just about the first thing, besides fatebloom wood, that was perceptible to his soulsenses in the Heartseat. He connected his chroma to it, and text appeared in his mind's eye.

He gave it a quick scan. Jieyuan's furrowed his brow as he was met with lines of warped, barely discernible text. It wasn't like Yuanzhi's jade slip. Those hadn't been intelligible, but that was because they were in the Liangshibai code. He had still been able to easily visualize them. This was different. He couldn't even tell if this was in code or not because he couldn't make out the words. It was like it'd been corrupted, somehow. Jieyuan had never heard of that happening to a jadebook before.

As he was quickly going through its contents, though, he came across a word that he could read, somehow clear and readable despite all the blurry, indistinct text around it. That word was Liangshibai. He kept on skimming the jadebook, and two more readable words popped up, together. Gleamstone and Serpent. Gleamstone Serpent. And then, a couple of words down, Corruption. It wasn't a fairly extensive text—just a few pages' worth of content—and all three terms appeared a few times throughout. Jieyuan opened his eyes.

"Corruption…" He recalled Protector Yuanzhi, crystallized. Then the man who was likely the Yikongwei Founder, also crystallized. Corruption could refer to how the jadebooks themselves had been corrupted, but he wasn't sure if that was the appropriate term for that, if there even was a term for whatever it was that had happened to the jadebooks. No, it seemed rather clear to him that corruption, here, had more to do with the Liangshibai. And the Gleamstone Serpent, which should be some gleam beast.

Pocketing the jadebook, Jieyuan picked another one up. This one was similarly short, but unreadable from beginning to end. Into the pocket it went. The third one he picked up turned out to have a readable word, at the start of the second line. Linzushen. Linzushen. Linzushen. Meiyao's family name, inherited from her mother. Jieyuan gripped the jadebook tighter, but not so tight as to crush it.

So far he hadn't managed to find out anything about Meiyao's origins, and he hadn't gotten around to asking Meiyao herself, either. She was prickly, to say the least, on any topic that involved her family, and he had an inkling that her mother might be a particularly sore subject. A little further in that same text, he came across another readable word. Primordial. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Primordial." The word didn't really ring any bells, and there was no context whatsoever to even begin guessing at what it referred to.

"Linzushen. Primordial. Linzushen. Primordial…" All names were made up of glyphs, each with a distinct meaning. He hadn't really paid much attention to it before, because the glyphs of a name usually didn't mean much, but the ones in Linzushen meant forest, ancestor, and deity." Ancestor, deity, primordial." Put that way, the words did seem closely related. It turned out he did have some context, after all. Nothing else on the jadebook was readable, and he stored it away with the rest.

Seeing there were still more than a handful of them left in the pile, he sat down on the raised wooden platform and picked up the fourth jadebook. This one provided him with six readable words: Tianzijun. Miwanxue. And Immaculate Blood Pearl, all together. Tianzijun. Daojue's family name. Daojue, who was similarly of mysterious, unknown origins. Miwanxue appeared to be another family name, and he'd bet on this Immaculate Blood Pearl being some sort of artifact.

Once again, though, the lack of context meant he couldn't get anywhere. But when he tried breaking down the names, he got something like last time. While the glyphs making up Tianzijun didn't seem to have to do with anything, Miwanxue was "to seek, complete, blood." He'd bet that the Immaculate Blood Pearl had to do with them. Cutting off the flow of chroma, Jieyuan regarded the jadebook in his hand thoughtfully. It was curious, to say the least, that the family names of both his teammates had come up.

It looked like the Yikongwei Clan was somehow connected to both the Tianzijun and Linzushen Clans. That's way too many coincidences for my liking. The next jadebook came with four more terms, none of which he recognized. Qianxing. Jiandaozhi. Absolute Sword Sect. Heavens-Piercing Hall. A given name, a family name, the name of a sect, and what seemed to be the division of a sect, though a very oddly named one.

The Jian in Jiandaozhi meant sword, so that was a connection with the Absolute Sword Sect, but that was all that stood out to him. The sixth jade was the one with the most visible terms, though no less clear for it. Heavenly Vessel, Heavenly Way Sect, Divinity, Sucheng, and Duowen. Normally, when Jieyuan took the time to read something, it was to clear up his doubts on a given subject. That wasn't what was happening here. With these jadebooks, the more he read, the more confused he got.

Confused and suspicious —suspicious of how these terms, specifically, had remained clear while everything else was mysteriously obfuscated. It was like he was being given a few clues, but not enough to come to any sort of conclusion. Like a breadcrumb trail leading nowhere. Like it was intentional. Only three more jadebooks were left, and as he reached for them, he realized that one of them, unlike the others, wasn't perceptible to his soulsenses.

It was clearly in front of him, a little jade cube, impossible to tell apart from the other two beside it, but his soulsenses told him that there was nothing where it sat. He considered it, but then picked the two that he could sense. The first one turned out to be entirely unreadable, but when he started on the second one, he found that the very first word was visible, and it was Fate. After some lines of unclear text came Authority, followed shortly thereafter by Irregular.

All three terms were repeated many times throughout. Further down, two new terms started popping up, Fatebloom Heart and Huaxin, and always very close to each other. Both of them always appeared over a dozen times, and always very close to each other. The Fatebloom Heart was definitely the heart he'd found outside. As for Huaxin …" Hua, flower. Xin, heart. Huaxin. Flower heart? Bloom heart?" The name had to be connected to the Fatebloom Heart, though he couldn't tell in what way.

Jieyuan then reached for the last jadebook—the one he couldn't sense—and after a moment's hesitation, connected his chroma to it. And then he wasn't sitting in the cabin anymore, but outside, in the middle of the clearing. And it wasn't morning, but nighttime, and he was staring up at the starry sky as he sat cross-legged on the ground. And while he was still Jieyuan, he had another identity now. He was also Yikongwei Beidao, tenth-step Violetsoul and founder of the Yikongwei Clan.

It took Jieyuan a couple of seconds to remember himself and get a sense of what had just happened—what was still happening. His thoughts were faint, unfocused—and mingled, he distantly realized, with those of Yikongwei Beidao, which droned on faintly and indistinct. Dazed, he—Jieyuan himself, as well as Beidao, both of them—stared up at the night sky. And it wasn't just Jieyuan's thoughts that had merged with the man's, but his very sense of identity.

Sitting there, on the grass, he felt like he was Beidao, that he'd always been Beidao. So he knew, now, all sorts of things about the man, all of it on an unconscious level, the same way you remembered all the things that made you yourself. It just so happened that Jieyuan already had experience with suddenly sprouting a second identity. As well as with dealing the hefty helping of overwhelming confusion that followed.

Even in the dissociated, jumbled haze he was in, Jieyuan managed to retain enough presence of mind to ground himself. The first thing he did was to try to reach for his original sense of identity while doing his best to ignore Beidao's literally intrusive thoughts. But then he found that for all that he'd suddenly, instantaneously, learned about Yikongwei Beidao, many more things were left distorted, unclear.

Where Beidao was from, his original family name (confusingly, Jieyuan knew that Yikongwei was a family name Beidao had come up with for himself, but not what he'd originally been called) and the specifics of his current circumstances. And by focusing on those muddy blotches, Jieyuan found, reversely, his own clarity returning. Throughout it all, Jieyuan could hear Beidao's thoughts, a voice in his head (or was it Beidao's head?) deeper than his own, colder and sharper.

And much like the contents of the jadebooks in the cabin, most of what Beidao was thinking was hazy and unclear, like someone had tried to wipe it all away and only the vague outline of them remained. Some words did stand out bright and clear, though, from amid the foggy confusion. The same select few Jieyuan had found to be readable in the jadebooks. Jieyuan could distantly feel his body now, his real body, sitting in the cabin, holding the above-Redrealm jadebook, a line of chroma still connecting his soul to it.

And he was fairly sure that as long as he concentrated, he could snap out of this… vision, memory, or whatever this was, and return to reality. He almost went for it, without really thinking. But as he started pulling away, feeling his connection to his body grow stronger and that to Beidao grow fainter, he stopped himself. Because he was in control now. He could snap back to reality whenever he wished.

And now that he was no longer desperately fumbling about to remember who he was, he could concentrate and figure out what in the Heavens was going on. Anchoring himself in his awareness of his body (Jieyuan focused on the feel of his real body, as if he wanted to return to it, but didn't go further than that), he began exploring, investigating. Beidao was still staring up at the night sky, still thinking thoughts that were mostly obscured.

Jieyuan could feel virtually everything the man felt, and whatever had obfuscated Beidao's thoughts hadn't had the same effect on the man's emotions. Jieyuan could sense a dark undercurrent lurking beneath the unintelligible thoughts, and as time passed that feeling only grew, like a brewing storm. Jieyuan tried to move Beidao's body, but all that happened was his real arm twitching a little. So he was in some kind of half-disembodied state, in some kind of immersed spectator state.

Beidao stood up, and as he did so, Jieyuan finally got a good look at the man's surroundings. They were on a circular clearing, like the Heartseat, except there was no cabin in it, or any fatebloom trees. Rather, the trees around looked like mundane cherry trees, full of white blossoms. Beidao returned his attention to the sky, and in his thoughts, the word fate appeared multiple times, in quick succession, loud and clear. Too loud, in fact. FATE.

Each instance of the word carried a weight with it, an intensity, a significance in Beidao's thoughts that they momentarily rendered Jieyuan deaf to his own thoughts. And each time Beidao thought of fate, the dark, manic-like currents roiling within him grew stronger, more violent, rising like a crescendo. Looking down, Beidao brought his right arm in front of him, coating it with a layer of materialized chroma. Violet chroma.

Beidao's dark storm of feelings peaked, so strong Jieyuan felt his sense of self slipping, consumed by Beidao's presence, and he almost pulled back into his body by instinct. Then Beidao thrust his chroma-coated arm inside his own rib cage, and the shock kept Jieyuan there, rendered the spiritual, mental version of frozen still. The chroma-coated arm tore through skin and bone and flesh unimpeded, and Jieyuan numbly felt it all.

The pain wasn't actually that great—at least not from a cultivator's perspective—but the discomfort that came with having an arm inside you, between your viscera, was decidedly unpleasant, only made accentuated by how he could feel the wet, bloody organs through that very arm.

Over a quarter of his arm sunk into his rib cage, Beidao felt around his viscera, pushing his hand and wrist between his lungs, before gripping his heart, reaching his arm deeper inside his chest so that he could get a good hold on it, before spreading the coat of chroma around the still-beating organ. Some of the shock had faded, and it was a morbid sort of curiosity that Jieyuan felt now, even more given Beidao's own feelings at the moment. Heavy, grim determination, laced with barely contained anticipation.

Then, in one hard, unhesitating pull, Beidao tore his chroma-coated heart right out of his body. Beidao barely seemed to notice the gaping hole in his chest as he stared at his own bloody, still-beating heart, now lying in his hand. And even as Beidao stared down at his heart, Jieyuan could feel, through Beidao's senses, as the hole in Beidao's chest closed up all on its own, and a new heart started growing inside him.

Barely a couple of seconds passed, and Beidao's new heart was almost halfway grown and the hole in his chest mostly closed. FATE, Beidao thought, madly, victoriously. And then Beidao was gone, together with everything else, and Jieyuan was floating around, properly disembodied now, in a black, featureless void. Before Jieyuan could think to return himself to his body, another scene took form around him just as abruptly as the previous one had disappeared. He was in Beidao's head again, but everything had changed.

Beidao was still in a clearing, but now what surrounded him weren't mundane cherry trees, but fatebloom trees, with trunks like pillars of gold and crowns like clouds of blood and emerald. And while Beidao was still holding a heart, it wasn't his own, bloody, mundane heart freshly plucked out of his chest, but rather the Fatebloom Heart, golden-bodied, emerald-veined, crimson-crowned. Beidao wasn't the same man as before, either.

Before Beidao had seemed half-mad, like he had one foot dangling over the edge of insanity. Now there was no more half about it. Beidao had taken the leap. The man's feelings were now a convoluted, tangled mess, and Jieyuan got the impression that even if most of Beidao's thoughts hadn't somehow been hidden from him, he'd have still found them impossible to understand.

The mania Jieyuan sensed in Beidao before, dark and brewing, seemed to have completely taken over him, and it was now suffused by bone-deep desperation, rage, wonder, and obsession, all of it churning and twisting violently inside the man. FATE rang over and over again in Beidao's mind. FATE and HEAVENS. Beidao focused on the Fatebloom Heart, and his thoughts changed. Huaxin featured prominently now, and to a lesser extent, Linzushen and Miwanxue.

After staring at the Heart for over a minute, Beidao looked off into the distance, eastward, and now at the forefront of his thoughts were Liangshibai, Gleamstone Serpent, and Corruption. The memory—because by now Jieyuan was fairly certain that's what it was—cut off then, and this time, there was no brief interlude of darkness, and Jieyuan was returned straight back to his body. Beidao's thoughts and feelings lingered like an echo as Jieyuan sat in the cabin, eyes closed, breathing heavily.

At the end there, he'd felt Beidao's madness sure as if it were his own, and even now, uncertain, uneasy thoughts of FATE thundered in his head. But cultivators were nothing if not mentally resilient (you had to be, to handle the Pains), and Jieyuan had struggled with his inflamed emotions his entire life. Focusing on his breath to the exclusion of everything else, Jieyuan cleared his mind, bringing himself halfway into Heavenly Communion. It did the trick.

Beidao's remnant grip on him slackened, then faded, and Jieyuan's own thoughts and feelings soon settled in the absence of Beidao's lingering madness. Jieyuan opened his eyes and raised the jadebook he was still holding—the one he couldn't detect with his soulsenses—and turned it over between his fingers. What he'd just felt were Beidao's memories, from Beidao's perspective. Jadebooks did store memories. But at least as far as Jieyuan knew, only in the form of text and images.

What he'd just experienced was different; the two scenes had been more along the lines of a full memory, even more vivid than what Jieyuan had felt when going through Amyas's memories. But it wasn't the jadebook that was important here and what it did, but its contents and what Jieyuan had seen. Or rather, what he'd lived. Standing up, Jieyuan put the jadebook away with the others, and strode out of the cabin. Back outside, he made straight for the center of the clearing, stopping in front of the gleamstone statue.

He studied its face again, cast in glowing, kaleidoscopic crystal. Sure enough, it was familiar to him—familiar to him like his own face. It was indeed Beidao. Jieyuan hadn't actually seen what Beidao looked like in the man's memories, as they were from Beidao's perspective, but they'd also come with Beidao's sense of identity, and so Jieyuan knew that was what Beidao looked like. Right now he could recognize Beidao much like he'd have been able to recognize his own face.

And beside Beidao's crystallized form was the Fatebloom Heart, still beating, cradled in the half-grown golden trunk of a fatebloom tree. Beidao's heart, Jieyuan was sure, somehow transformed into… whatever it was now. He recalled Beidao's very last thoughts, of the Liangshibai and gleamstone. And how, at the very end, it was in the direction of the Gleamstone Valley that Beidao had been staring off.

"You bit off more than you could chew, didn't you?" Jieyuan murmured. Beidao had been planning something involving the Gleamstone Valley. Clearly, that hadn't gone well for him—and from the looks of it, in his final moments, Beidao had known who to hold responsible for that. Stepping back, Jieyuan fully took in the sight of the statue Beidao had been transformed to—crystallized as he'd been in his very last moments, pointing a sword at the Heavens.

Now that he'd gotten a peek at Beidao's head, the impression Jieyuan got when he'd first looked at the statue was reinforced. It was in challenge—and accusation—that Beidao pointed his sword up at the skies. A final stand against the Heavens, against Fate. Jieyuan stared at the statue for over a minute, trying to imagine what exactly had happened to Beidao at the very end, and why he seemed to blame the Heavens for it.

"Fate…" Jieyuan murmured, softly. Beidao was mad. He'd been half-mad in the first memory, fully mad in the second, and Jieyuan imagined the man hadn't been much better during his very last moments. But Beidao had still been a Violetsoul (a tenth -step Violetsoul, Jieyuan knew, from the memories) and you didn't ignore the words of a man who'd reached the very peak of the world, the very peak of existence. Jieyuan turned to regard the Fatebloom Heart.

Beidao was a crystallized corpse, and all that had been in the cabin were jadebooks that raised all sorts of questions and answered almost none. Any artifacts Beidao might have had on him would've been converted into gleamstone with the rest of his body. The Fatebloom Heart was all that was left. Jieyuan had come here searching for a Violetsoul's inheritance, and as far as he could tell, he was looking at it now. The problem was, he wasn't sure what to do with it.

He moved closer to the trunk, peering down at the Fatebloom Heart. He couldn't tell its step, couldn't sense its spiritual song. He had no idea what it did. The only impression he'd gotten from Beidao's memories was that the Heart had been very important to him. The culmination of his life's work, even, judging by the way Beidao had felt while looking at it. It was Beidao's legacy. A tenth-step Violetsoul's legacy. Daojue had bonded Gleaming End, even though that should've been impossible.

Gleaming End was at Orangerealm, and the bonding ritual only worked on entities at the same step as you or lower. Assuming the Fatebloom Heart worked like an artifact—that it was an artifact, even, though a very unconventional one—could he do the same? Should he try to do the same? Jieyuan frowned down at the golden heart. Odds were that it was dangerous. It could consume him, take him over, or do any number of things.

And even if he did bond it, he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with it, or how he was even supposed to use it. Was he supposed to carry it around with him? But he'd come here despite the risks for a tenth-step Violetsoul's inheritance, and making away with just the corrupted jadebooks while leaving what was clearly the true treasure behind didn't sit well with him. And just standing there, hesitating, wasn't really a choice here, because the sooner he returned to the relative safety of the sect, the better.

So he needed to decide, and he needed to do it now. Maeva would be against it. He didn't need to call on her to know that, just like he'd known she'd be against his expedition to the Fatebloom Woods in the first place. And he'd be calling on her later, to review everything he'd gotten from the jadebooks, but not now. Jieyuan stepped closer to the trunk. This was an opportunity, and as with all the opportunities that really mattered, it came with significant risks.

As far as he could tell, as long as he stuck around Meiyao and Daojue, other opportunities would come—but there was no guarantee they'd be any less dubious than this one. Or that, if he didn't take this one, he'd even be able to keep up with the two. He seemed to be doing well so far, but Meiyao and Daojue still had a whole deck of cards up their sleeves.

Meiyao had shown hints of it here and there, what with her mysterious ability to glow green and that red haze of hers, not to mention her aptitude for nurturing and probably refining. And Daojue had just straight-up done the impossible by bonding Gleaming End. Go big, or go bigger still. Jieyuan reached forward and laid his right hand on top of the Heart. Its surface was sleek, smooth, warm. He could feel it contracting and then expanding under his touch as it beat. In his chest, his own heart beat much faster.

So far, so good. There was only one thing left to do. Jieyuan entered Heavenly Communion. His next word would lead to one of three outcomes. It could very likely be the last word he uttered. Just as likely, it could give him just what he needed to catch up to Daojue and Meiyao, if not surpass them. And it could also result in nothing at all. Jieyuan connected a line of chroma from his soul to the Fatebloom Heart.

And then, feeling like Beidao had felt as he ripped his heart off his chest—feeling that same heavy, grim determination and barely contained anticipation—Jieyuan chanted,"Ablaze."