Chương 44: Chapter 43: BEATING HEART

CHAPTER 43 BEATING HEART —∞— Jieyuan stood still as a statue, halfway through a clearing, his eyes fixed on Meiyao. She was just up ahead, standing at the edge of the pocket. In front of her, peeking out of the misty curtain, was the head of some massive beast. Feline, with a triangular head. It had white fur, patterned with glowing streaks of deep green. Its green-tipped snout alone was already bigger than Meiyao's head. The rest of the beast's body was hidden in the denser mist.

At ground level, Jieyuan could see just the tips of two massive paws by either side of Meiyao's feet. The claws were retracted, but he could still see them—pearly green shards as big as his hand, slotted into the flesh and fur. It came as little surprise to Jieyuan that he couldn't sense the creature's spirit. Still, he found he wasn't too worried. He kept a tight grip on the Shifting Sisters, just in case he needed to make some last stand, but that was all.

A few weeks in the Dome could turn any optimist into a fatalist, and Jieyuan had always been the pragmatic type. Either Meiyao would pacify the beast, as she'd done every time since, or she wouldn't, and they'd all die. Not much in between. His lack of say in the matter, over his own survival, had bothered him at first. But it had been ten days or so since their close brush with that vulture-like beast. He'd thought that once they were away from the crest, they'd be safer. And he'd been right in a way.

They were safer, yes, but only from flying beasts. He had to hold back a smile—a rueful one, the kind that crept on your face when the odds were so bad you might as well laugh at yourself—as he observed the chromal tiger towering over Meiyao. Five days ago, the downward slope they'd been on had flattened, giving way to what looked like a valley. A valley teeming with beasts. On the way down, their trek had been as smooth as polished gold.

But they'd barely stepped into the valley when they came across their first one, a surprisingly small wolf that barely came up to Jieyuan's waist but was still of indeterminate realm. Since then, they'd had another seventeen encounters. Some had been with Redrealm beasts, which wasn't so bad; Jieyuan was confident that between the three of them they could take on a Redrealm beast, maybe even a tenth-step one.

Though they never got a chance to put that to the test; Meiyao had prohibited them from starting anything, claiming that a fight could very well draw over more beasts. One Redrealm beast could easily become ten. Or worse, an Orangerealm beast. So far they were averaging three encounters per day. More than half of those encounters had occurred in the last two days, though. Jieyuan saw the trend. Saw how the deeper into the valley, the more beasts they found. And he sure didn't like it any.

This tiger was the eighteenth beast they'd come across overall and the fourth today. That was already above the average, and they weren't even halfway through the day yet. Jieyuan shifted his gaze down to its paw again. This was the first feline beast they'd come across. He might be wrong, but chances were he was looking at the beast that had left those massive prints they'd seen before coming across the Orangerealm vulture. Or at least a beast of the same race.

Then again, there could very well be other races of huge cats roaming the area. According to Meiyao, chromal beasts weren't like mundane ones. That was obvious enough in all sorts of ways, of course. But one thing that really set them apart was that they didn't need to eat; they could get by on chroma alone. Some still hunted and foraged for the pleasure of it, but not out of necessity.

That made coexistence easier; most chromal beasts, especially the predator types, were territorial, but as long as boundaries were respected, they normally didn't mind sharing space with very similar beasts. That was the kind of tidbit Meiyao had taken to sharing with him almost daily now. Jieyuan wasn't too interested in beasts and plants (or in nature as a whole, really), but Meiyao was nothing short of passionate about it all. And when she spoke, it didn't matter he wasn't interested in the subject.

It was Meiyao speaking. That was enough to get him to pay attention. Jieyuan focused back on Meiyao as he caught movement: the tiger had lowered its head, angling it down. Meiyao reached out with her hand and pressed it at the bridge of the beast's snout, just under its eyes. Jieyuan didn't tense up. Rather, he relaxed. This was a good sign. It happened more often than not when it came across a beast, and it signified that Meiyao had won the beast over.

The tiger let out a low, rumbling sound it took Jieyuan a moment to realize was a purr; then it drew back into the mist, disappearing. Meiyao didn't move, and neither did Jieyuan as he waited for her lead. The day after Meiyao had opened up, Jieyuan had taken advantage of her improved mood and got her to explain a few of his doubts about the Dome and also do some experiments so that he could better understand how the mist worked.

One of the things they'd done was try to map out nearby pockets by having Meiyao cross into a new pocket, return, and cross again a few times, and each time she'd ended up somewhere different. The effects of the mist, he'd learned, weren't limited to the mental ones he'd observed in his experiments after they'd entered the Dome; there was also a spatial -warping component to it that came into effect when you crossed the boundary of a pocket.

The positions of the pockets relative to each other weren't a fixed thing; rather, the arrangement of the pockets was in flux, constantly changing, like drifting islets in a churning sea. The only thing that was fixed, supposedly, was that that each pocket they crossed would take them closer to the center. And also that if one of them moved to another pocket, the destination would remain fixed because of the rope connecting them.

Because of her bloodline, Meiyao could read the flow of the mist to a certain extent, and based on that, predict where the viridian mist would take them if they crossed pockets at any given time. That was why sometimes they had to wait a while before they could move; they were waiting for the right moment, for their destination to be a safe enough pocket. But that wasn't only the only issue.

The beasts of the Dome, as far as Meiyao could tell, were not only impervious to the mind-warping properties of the mist but also capable of navigating the mist to a much greater extent than Meiyao, letting them move almost freely between pockets. So whenever they came across a beast, they also had to wait a while to ensure it wouldn't change its mind and return. After a few seconds, she glanced back and nodded at him and Daojue before stepping through the wall of mist in front of her.

Jieyuan followed, and Maeva took back control of his mouth to resume chanting the harvesting hymn for him. After stepping into the next pocket and a quick scan for danger, Jieyuan briefly sent his focus inward, checking on his soulprism. A red, solid, softly spinning prism-shaped mass, already larger than one of his fists. Over three-quarters full. He'd have been even closer to topping out if he hadn't resumed cultivating—imbuing chroma, enduring the Pain—about a week ago.

He'd been at around the halfway mark back then, and he'd decided he had enough chroma to safely resume cultivation while still having a tidy reserve left-over for emergencies. Jieyuan got a spring in his step (and it was testament to how much better he'd gotten at treading on the forest floor when that didn't have him making any more noise) just thinking about his cultivation.

Meiyao and Daojue had broken through to fourth-step Redrealm several days earlier than he'd had, and they'd resumed cultivating more than two weeks ago; unlike him, they hadn't run out of chroma during their escape from Radiant Gold City. But based on what he knew of Meiyao's progress, he was catching up. Meiyao and Daojue still needed to dedicate time to refilling chroma spent during imbuing. Whereas Jieyuan didn't, since he was already doing so all day long through Absolute Will Command.

During their rests, they'd dedicate about an hour to rest and five to cultivation, each. Jieyuan could spend all those five hours imbuing, whereas they'd also need to harvest and attune chroma. He probably wouldn't beat them to fifth-step; they had too much of a lead on him. But sixth -step? It was possible. Seventh-step? All but guaranteed. And on the topic of good news … Jieyuan passed through into another pocket—still no signs of trouble—as this time he focused on his mind.

He could feel Absolute Will Command, active. He could also feel each and every one of the artifacts he'd bonded. And, among them, the Fatebloom Heart. Huaxin. Their connection was there. Strong. Not as strong as it used to be, back when Huaxin was active, but it was getting stronger with each day that passed; in fact, it was nearly back to its original strength. If that wasn't a sign Huaxin was about to awaken, he didn't know what was.

And with Huaxin would come Fatebloom Intuition—which might come really, really handy in the Dome, depending on how it mixed with the viridian mist. Barely five clearings later, though, Meiyao went still again. Already? Jieyuan settled back, resigned to their next chance at a passing acquaintance with death. But no beast came; instead, Meiyao broke into a run. The rope binding them tugged at him, giving Jieyuan no choice but to start running too.

He hadn't been all that concerned up to this point, not even with the tiger nearby—but this? Meiyao had never run since they'd entered the Viridian Dome. Never. And she was making more noise than usual; still barely more than a whisper, sure, but enough that he noticed it. They crossed into the next pocket, then another, then another. Their surroundings turned into glowing green blurs as they carved a path through the mist.

Jieyuan felt the rope extending behind him tug briefly before slackening; Daojue must've started running, too. Meiyao didn't look back, didn't offer any explanation. He didn't know what to think. If she was making this much noise, there shouldn't be danger; but it could also be that it didn't matter how much noise she made, because danger was coming anyway. That didn't seem right, though. Something about the way she ran gave him the impression she wasn't running from something, but toward something.

After she passed into another pocket, the rope suddenly slackened a little. When Jieyuan crossed over, he found Meiyao standing still to the side of the pocket, in front of a tall, sprawling thicket. Nothing else caught his eye, and he focused back on her. She was just standing there, unmoving, staring not at the mists around them, as she usually did when she went still, but into the bright-green shrubs. Jieyuan walked over to Meiyao. Slowly at first, intentionally making more noise than usual.

When Meiyao didn't turn around or warn him off or anything, he continued on at a more normal pace. Behind them, Daojue stepped into the clearing but stopped at the entrance. Meiyao didn't react as he stopped beside her. She was staring fixedly down at the shrub. He followed her gaze down. At first he didn't see anything, just a sprawl of bright, glowing stalks and leaves, about chest-high. All that he really noticed was the lack of thorns, which was always welcome.

But then he stepped to the side, closer to Meiyao, and the angle changed. And he saw it. At the bottom, near the ground, a flash of white. It wasn't the white of plants—the bush was all green—but the warm, smooth white of human skin. He stepped even closer to Meiyao and leaned over to get a better look. It was human skin, all right. On a human body, lying at the bottom of the thicket. A man's body; Jieyuan was staring down straight at his naked chest.

Jieyuan glanced down and confirmed he could see the rest of the man's body through the shrub, also naked. And then up—at the man's face, the eyes closed, the shrub growing around— Not around, Jieyuan realized, but out of him. Stems extended from under the man's closed eyes and brow, through the skin and out. Jieyuan couldn't get a good look—he could only barely see the man's face—but there was none of that sickly pallor all corpses eventually developed as blood stopped flowing. The man's skin was bright, vibrant.

If it weren't for the plants growing out of him, he looked like he could've been asleep. Except, Jieyuan couldn't sense his soul. Normally, that'd mean someone was dead or mundane. Mundane was very much unlikely here in the Dome, and given the circumstances, dead seemed far more likely anyway. But there was a third reason that could explain why he couldn't sense the man's soul. Maeva returned full control over to him, and he said, very softly, very quietly, as he took a step back, "Meiyao?

What am I looking at here?" Meiyao glanced back at him, frowning.

"What are you—""Meiyao, is that man dead?" Jieyuan asked, as plainly and as clearly as he could. Call him jumpy, but he wasn't taking any chances here.

"Of course he is," Meiyao said.

"Why would you— Oh." She turned back to the shrub, stared down at it for a moment. Then she nodded at him.

"I see it now. But no. He's just dead." Her eyes shifted past him, and Jieyuan followed them. Daojue was behind them, looking over. He hadn't moved any closer, though. Quietly, intently, Meiyao added, "He really is dead; I can tell."

"Right," Jieyuan said. He'd trusted Meiyao's instincts (well, more precisely, Divine Nature Intuition) so far to keep them alive, and it'd worked out just fine. If she said the man was dead, and not some higher-realm cultivator with a very odd idea of resting, then he'd take her word for it. He approached again, stepping in just next to Meiyao, and leveled another look down at the dead man. Again, he got the same impression, that he was looking at a sleeping person.

He'd never seen a livelier corpse; aside from, of course, that whole plants-growing-out-of-the-body business.

"This is why you ran off earlier?" he asked, splitting his attention between her and the corpse.

"Ran off…" He looked up, and saw that Meiyao was frowning again. Then she blinked.

"Right. I must— I'm sorry. It's just that—that I felt a presence, and…" She looked back down.

"He was a Linzushen."

"Ah." That'd explain why Meiyao had taken off like that. Jieyuan took a more careful look—but it was hard to tell, with all the plants in the way. But then he looked further up, past the head, at the hair pooling over the head. There. The stems were even thicker over the area, clustered, crowding it, but now that he knew to look for it, he spotted some flashes of brown the same shade as Meiyao's hair.

It was surprisingly clean; Jieyuan glanced over at the body and confirmed that, plants and nakedness aside, the corpse looked rather tidy, not a hint of dirt or grime on it, even though it must've been lying there for Heavens knows how long. How long … Jieyuan realized, then, that something else didn't quite add up.

"I thought your mother was the last Linzushen?" He searched for some family relation that'd fit the man's young age—he couldn't get a clear read, but he didn't see any wrinkles—but he'd been given to understand Meiyao's mother was an only child.

"Is this… a cousin?" It might fit; a cousin of her mother, and Meiyao's once or twice removed. If the Linzushen had been as crazy as the rest of the Viridian Death Cult, he could see one of them deciding to take their chances with the Dome. To seek the Viridian, as they called this particular form of suicide. But that wouldn't really fit the bill, either. Because the man was dead, and a cultivator's youth didn't follow them to their grave.

"No," Meiyao.

"The last male Linzushen was born two centuries ago. This isn't any Linzushen I know of, either. And this bush growing around him, on him…" She focused down—not on the man, but on the foliage—just for a moment, then nodded.

"It's over a thousand years old. If not two thousand."

"That's… That's a two-thousand-year-old corpse, then?" Jieyuan tried to make sense of it. By all rights, the body shouldn't have just rotted, but outright reduced to mush, to little more than fertilizer. A thousand years— two thousand years—was a long time. Well over a dozen generations, to a mundane. Even to a Redsoul it'd be several generations away.

"But I thought—when we die, don't our bodies turn mundane? Is it a bloodline thing, or—" She shook her head.

"Rot doesn't take as easily to the Linzushen, yes, but even then, not to this extent. We do still decompose; it's just that it takes about thrice as long. Left on the ground like this, even a Linzushen's corpse won't last a few months, let alone years—never mind centuries. This is different. This…" Her expression grew distant, vague.

"I think it was the mist. It must've preserved him." The mist. Jieyuan turned his attention to it. It didn't look specially thicker around the corpse, didn't seem to hold it in any special way, but Jieyuan was confident in Meiyao's guess. Pretty much everything odd about the Viridian Dome could be blamed on the mist. The viridian mist was, in a way, the Dome itself. It could mess with the mind, possibly even with space and distance; it wasn't too much of a stretch it could keep a corpse fresh, either.

And that'd go a long way to explain why it looked this way, like it was still alive. As well as the nakedness—his clothes must've rotted away into scraps, picked up by the wind or the ground. There was the question of how the man had died, but it'd been a thousand years and you didn't need much to die in the Viridian Dome. But then another question still came to mind. What about chromal beasts? Jieyuan cast a quick look around.

Meiyao had been way louder than usual on their way here—and so had himself and Daojue, in their rush to keep up with her—but nothing had come out of it, even though it was as if he could throw a coin into the mist and hit a dozen of them. Meiyao didn't seem particularly concerned, either. She'd been distracted before, when she'd rushed over, but she'd already gathered herself. If there was danger around, she'd know. Was the mist keeping the beasts away, then? From the corpse?

Chromal beasts wouldn't go out of their way to hunt for food, but if they found food lying around they wouldn't mind taking a bite, either. And the corpse looked distinctly bite-free. It's probably not quite respectful of me, but… He pursed his lips. What if? What if they picked up the corpse and lugged it around with them? He considered—really considered—whether it'd be worth it, assuming the dead Linzushen served as some kind of beast repellent. He looked over at Meiyao.

This was her family, even if from many generations past. They'd grown a lot closer over the last few days, but he didn't know how she'd take the suggestion. It would be practical, but—well, also callous and possibly macabre. There was disturbing the dead, and then there was picking them up and carrying them around like some lucky charm. So rather than ask outright, he cleared his throat and indicated the corpse with his head.

"Do you want to get him out, or maybe get a closer look, or…"

"No," she said.

"Leave him as he is. The Linzushen don't cremate our dead. We bury them in gardens. It's common for plants to grow from our corpses. This is no garden, but it should suffice." That was that, then. Jieyuan discarded the corpse-carrying idea; it wasn't worth the risk of upsetting Meiyao, not when it was hardly a guaranteed thing, and they were doing well enough with her leading them. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

He found his attention drawn to Meiyao's words. So the Linzushen bury their dead. That came to him as a surprise. It wouldn't have been to Amyas, but Jieyuan had grown up in Radiant Gold City, where there were no graves or tombs. Instead, you had urn houses, large buildings stretching deep underground where funerary urns were kept in niches, almost like books in a library. Richer households would have urn rooms, and in the case of bigger, established families, as had been with the Haoyujin, urn houses of their own.

Jieyuan wouldn't have even known that burying your dead was an option if it hadn't been for Amyas's memories. Up to now it'd never occurred to him to wonder why that was, either. Nothing came to mind, and he set it aside. There were other concerns at hand.

"So what now, then?"

"We go on," Meiyao said. She gave the corpse one last, long look, then nodded her head, stepping away.

"Let's go." They resumed walking. Daojue said nothing as Jieyuan came close, only keeping up pace behind as Meiyao took up the lead again. No questions about what had happened, what they'd been doing near the brush. Three clearings later, Meiyao came to another sudden stop. She shot Jieyuan a meaningful look, before continuing on to the next clearing at a slightly faster pace. Jieyuan had a feeling he knew what this was about. He stepped through into the next clearing after her, already looking for Meiyao.

At first, he didn't see her, but then he followed the rope connecting them to a spot behind a large tree that took up the right side of the clearing. Like the other ones found in the valley, it was entirely green, trunk included, though the shades varied, and it only glowed slightly, so soft you could miss it amid the glow of the mist around it. Jieyuan wasn't too surprised when, as he walked over and turned around to stand beside Meiyao, he saw a corpse. In the tree.

The deep green wound grew around it, and the arms and legs of the corpses were hidden inside it, taken up by the trunk. Only the corpse's upper body—that of a woman, this time—was revealed. The tree kept the dead woman upright, its wood encroaching on her forehead. Not all of her hair was hidden away, though, and the front portion of it parted down at the forehead, leaving a slit through which he could see only the middle third of her face, and falling down over her breasts, stopping just short of the navel.

This time, even with the hair over it, he could see the resemblance to Meiyao. The woman's nose and mouth were bare, between the twin cascades of hair: the nose as delicate as Meiyao's, the rosy lips almost as full, all features finely sculpted. What he could see of the body and its figure also definitely fit the Linzushen mold. Meiyao stepped closer, pressed a hand to the trunk, just beside the corpse's head. She was almost at eye-level with Meiyao. The dead woman's position was a little awkward, half-bent.

If this was anything like the bush and the Linzushen man from earlier, then the tree must've grown around the woman, and carried her up into the air, until she was in her current position. He wasn't sure that was how trees were supposed to work, but they were hardly supposed to glow, either. Chromal plants, much like chromal beasts, took nature's rules under advisement.

"Another thousand-year-old Linzushen?" Jieyuan asked, quietly.

"Two thousand," Meiyao said.

"I can tell more clearly, with trees. And there are others, too."

"Others?" Jieyuan looked around, but there was only the tree in the clearing. The forest floor was thick enough it could keep a corpse—"Not here," Meiyao said.

"Nearby. In other clear areas." She had that distant, faraway look again, somehow both focused and unconfused, though it wasn't as intense this time.

"A lot of them."

"What about beasts?" Meiyao focused on him again, just for a moment, before slipping back into her trance. It took maybe a minute before she broke out of it, and said, "None. Not even a trace. I'd noticed there weren't any close by, but…" Jieyuan nodded. The mist was keeping beasts away from the corpses, then.

"Was there some kind of Linzushen expedition into the Viridian Dome, two thousand years ago?"

"Not that I know of," Meiyao said.

"In fact, two thousand years ago, the Dome was still expanding—" Her eyes widened. She looked between the corpse in the tree and the mist beyond.

"Unless… I think I know what's going on." Jieyuan waited for her to elaborate. But instead, she just turned around and kept on walking. He had little choice but to follow. Again, Daojue, tagged along wordlessly. They went through more than a dozen clearings; every other one, Meiyao would stop briefly to look at another vegetation-enclosed Linzushen corpse. Each time those pauses grew briefer and briefer.

Her pace also picked up, getting faster and faster until she was eating ground just as fast as she'd when she'd rushed off earlier, when she'd sensed that first Linzushen corpse. And then Jieyuan stepped into a new pocket—but it wasn't a pocket, not like the others. As he passed through the curtain of mist, his vision cleared up—and kept on clearing, as his range of sight swelled, expanded.

Expanded to accommodate massive, towering stone walls—several hundred feet tall—coated in vines and roots, on either side of a massive gateway that stood as tall as the walls framing it, and wide open. And past it, the ruins of a city. Jieyuan wasn't sure which one was the bigger surprise. The sight of the city, or the expanded range of sight. But he took it all in, standing at the edge of what wasn't just a pocket of clear mist anymore, but a massive zone—almost like a second dome, except one of clearer mist.

The view didn't go on without end, though. It didn't even encompass all the city. He could see the thicker, deeper curtains of mist close near the edge of his vision, off to the side, and deep within the parts of the city visible through the gateway. Daojue stepped up beside him, but Jieyuan barely took notice. Meiyao was further ahead, though not too far, her back to him. He walked over, his eyes still running through the city's massive walls.

They were as tall as the brightgold walls that enclosed Radiant Gold City, if not taller. The walls were covered in vegetation, glowing vines, brambles, and creepers forming a layer almost as thick as the undergrowth on the ground. Eyeing them, Jieyuan noticed something was off. The hints of stone he could see were oddly dark—brown, even—and up at the top of the walls, there were strange, uneven structures, almost like… growths. He squinted. And then he realized that the walls weren't of stone at all.

Nor was it metal, like Radiant Gold City. It was wood. Deep, dark wood sat underneath all the sprawling vegetation. And not logs, either, or any sort of processed wood; it was bark, straight from a tree. He was reminded of how, back in Radiant Gold City, the Viridian Death Palace had been grown, rather than built—several massive chromal trees, cultivated through some secret means to form a single, massive, dome-shaped building coated in green leaves, supposedly as a way to mimic the Viridian Dome.

The seat of the cult was said to be just the same, except on a bigger scale. The walls must have been grown through similar means.

"Viridian Death City," Meiyao said, breathlessly. He turned to her.

"You know this place?"

"Viridian Death City," she repeated. She wasn't looking at him, or at the walls, but into the city, past the gate, at the ruins lying beyond.

"The original seat of the Viridian Death Cult and the Linzushen Clan." She paused, then looked over to him.

"I told you just now, didn't I? That two thousand years ago, the Viridian Dome was still expanding. The city was founded by the First Linzushen, five thousand years ago. Back then, the Dome used to be only a mile wide." Jieyuan had never really stopped to wonder about how the Viridian Dome had come about. It'd always just been there, a fixture as sure as any mountain or feature of the land (though a great deal more ominous than any work of topography).

It'd never even occurred to him that, once, it hadn't existed; or that it'd grown over the years to its current, humongous size, taking up more and more of Incandescent Serenity Island. He was fairly sure it wasn't growing anymore, at least; he'd have heard of it if it were, and Meiyao's words implied that the Dome had stopped expanding.

"It started off as just the home of the clan, then of the cult, but as it expanded and our mundane numbers increased, it grew into its own city," Meiyao continued. She started off slow, but picked up the pace, like she was trying to remember it all and finding it easier as she went.

"Radiant Gold City already existed back then, but even the mundane population wanted to stay as close to the Dome as possible. And they didn't like the metal of it, either. Viridian Death City was grown —that was important, to them." Jieyuan didn't really see it; didn't really understand why anyone would want to be closer to the Viridian Dome, even more so when it had still been growing back then. But matters of faith, by definition, didn't intersect much with logic or reason.

And he wasn't in any real position to judge, really, when it'd been his idea to go into the Viridian Dome, circumstances notwithstanding.

"What happened, then? The Dome took over?"

"Yes," Meiyao said.

"About two thousand years ago." Ah.

"Roughly how long those corpses have been dead for," Jieyuan said. If that was a coincidence, he might as well trade his gold for copper.

"Exactly. The details of what exactly happened then are sparse, but it was that event that supposedly set off the downfall of the Linzushen Clan. The Dome expanded slowly, so there'd been plenty of time to evacuate, but many of the Linzushen—most, even—chose to remain behind." And to something like that, all Jieyuan could really say was, "Why?" Even as irrational as faith could be, he reckoned that was a tad too far.

He could see a couple of them deciding to stick around (there were always those a few coins short of a full purse, even from birth), but most of them? Meiyao narrowed her eyes, looking off toward the city again.

"Like I said, there's no real way to know. Many of our jadebooks were left behind, and the cultists and Linzushen that survived, the ones that fled the city… From what I understand, they didn't want to talk about it; they felt ashamed, for not staying behind."

"They did know the Viridian Dome as a death zone back then, right?" Jieyuan asked, just to be sure.

"They felt shame for not being reasonable?"

"You don't understand," Meiyao said.

"Back then, the cult was much stronger than it was today. Both in numbers and in belief. And the Linzushen were said to be the most fanatic of them all, the most obsessed with the Viridian Dome—with the Viridian. Those that left, they felt shame because they believed they lacked faith. They envied those that stayed behind, envied their unshakable trust in the Viridian." Out of everything, that was the part Jieyuan found the hardest to believe.

"You're telling me that current cultists—the ones that seem to believe you're some sort of goddess, regularly kill people on grounds of blasphemy, and seem ten steps removed from insane, except in the other direction—are the watered-down version?" Meiyao winced, flushing a little, but she didn't look away.

"I'm afraid so, yes. But that's not the point."

"Agreed," Jieyuan said. Despite himself, he'd started to imagine what a more fanatic Viridian Death cultist would be like, and the kind of images that brought up were far from pleasant.

"So the city got swallowed up by the Dome, and a lot of the cultists decided to stay because their faith was strong, as you put it. Those we caught earlier might have had second thoughts, then."

"Maybe," Meiyao said.

"Probably." She stared off at the city again, falling silent. Jieyuan stared at it too. And he thought about those that had stayed behind. Everyone from back then was most definitely dead, but… cultivators didn't go down that easy. They could even subsist on chroma, depending on their step. And if they had a bunch of Linzushen with them, who might be able to tap into the mist like Meiyao… If they'd managed to survive, have children, descendants…

"Is there…" He wet his lips.

"Is there any chance that anyone's alive in there?"

"I don't think so. Earlier, it wasn't the Linzushen themselves I felt, but their blood in the plants that grew around them, from them. It's the same with the city. There are plants inside, grown in Linzushen blood, but… I can't feel anything else. No living Linzushen. Not beasts, either. There's something, however—far off, so distant I can barely feel it. But still in the city, I think. It feels like a plant, but… bigger. Larger." A vague, big something. That sounded as promising as it was precise.

As if a mysterious, abandoned— hopefully abandoned, at that—city on its own wasn't enough, they now had some big, vague something to look forward to. Jieyuan was fairly sure he already knew the answer, but he asked anyway, just in case.

"Are we going in?" And sure enough, Meiyao didn't even hesitate.

"Yes."" Should we go in?" But even as he said so, he was sighing, shifting his shoulders back, resigned. Meiyao gave him a long, searching look before arching her eyebrows just so, the gesture sharpened by the sly curve of her lips.

"Don't tell me the big, bad Firesoul is scared." Heat flared in Jieyuan's chest, but he held it down. He had at least that much self‑control.

"Being a Firesoul doesn't make me suicidal. Or completely senseless." Meiyao's smile only widened, but just when he thought she would press the point, she let it go. The smile lingered, though.

"Don't worry. I'll keep my senses extended. And who knows? Maybe we'll even find something inside. Artifacts, perhaps." She drew a long, steady breath. The smile faded, her expression softening as her gaze searched his. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter, steadier. The playfulness was gone.

"You understand, right? I can't… I can't just turn away. This is my history. I can feel there's something wrong here, and yes, I know it might be dangerous, but… My mother used to tell me stories of Viridian Death City. Of the Linzushen Clan in its prime. I need—""I get it," Jieyuan said.

"You don't have to explain." Except he didn't get it. He didn't understand. He'd never cared much for history or culture. But he could tell it meant a lot to Meiyao. And that was enough for him. He also did like the sound of artifacts. The corpses they'd come across hadn't had anything on them, but this hadn't been just a city, but the seat of a cult and a clan. It was bound to have something.

"Just one thing—what's up with the mist?" He indicated vaguely with his hands. The range of sight they got in each pocket wasn't set in stone, but it only ever varied by a foot or two.

"Why can we see so far all of a sudden? Is there a reason, or just the mist being the mist?"

"I'm not sure," Meiyao said.

"But I think it's got to do with the city. Or something inside it; maybe even that thing I'm sensing, way off in the distance. I think that's also what's keeping the beasts away. We'll have to go in to find out."

"Well," Jieyuan said, "lead the way, then." But just as he said it, he remembered something. He took a quick glance back at Daojue—who, as always, even now, lingered at the very edge of the pocket. His face was carved from stone, expressionless as ever. Apparently, even the sudden reveal of an entire city wasn't enough to rattle Daojue. Granted, Jieyuan had been talking with Meiyao for a while, and maybe Daojue had been surprised at first but had gotten it under control.

Still, in Daojue's case, surprise might have been nothing more than the slightest widening of the eye.

"We're heading inside," Jieyuan said to him, louder.

"You all right with that?" Daojue didn't answer—just shifted his deep, dark violet eyes over to Jieyuan. That was answer enough. And that was that.

"Let's go," Jieyuan said. Meiyao didn't need him to say it twice. Without another word, she was off, striding ahead. The gates were only a few dozen feet away, and Meiyao crossed the distance in instants. Jieyuan was just behind her, almost by her side, and Daojue a little farther back Together they walked through the gateway, stepping inside the city. Stepping through the gateway, Jieyuan saw for himself what Meiyao had meant when she said the city had been grown.

Starting at the gate was an avenue leading deeper into the city; on either side of it rose rows of buildings, half-hidden by a thick layer of foliage. And beneath that, more plants. All the buildings he could see had been, just like Meiyao had said, grown rather than built; they were all made of living wood (the same deep, dark kind that encircled the city) molded into human structures, twisted into columns and walls, thresholds and eaves, roofs and balconies.

And after two thousand years of neglect, it wasn't just the external plants that had taken over; the buildings themselves had kept on growing, pushing and twisting past any shape they were originally meant to hold. Jieyuan stopped in his tracks at the entrance, giving himself a heartbeat to take it all in, the whole wild mess. Viridian Death City looked nothing like Radiant Gold City. It wasn't even the choice of building material (and you'd be hard-pressed to find two things more opposite than metal and wood).

Radiant Gold City was orderly, geometrical, planned to perfection. Maybe Viridian Death City had looked like that too, once. Two thousands years ago, when it'd been populated. But with its keepers gone for so long, the city had clearly gone wild. Grown wild. Raw, unchecked. To his left, near the wall, monstrous, man-sized roots cracked through the earth, bunching up against a squat little garrison and raising its first floor several feet into the air.

The first two stories of the building were still blocky enough to appear man-made, but above that, it had swelled into something grotesque: spirals and bulges twisted together, no hint of order left. In front of the building, a thin, spindly tree twisted skyward, a bright green bulb swelling in its middle like some swollen, ingrown fruit. Maybe it had once served as the city's own version of a lamppost, like the brightgold posts back in Radiant Gold City.

But its top had since erupted into an inverted crown of fluorescent leaves and branches, warped and snarled into almost whippy tendrils that reached far up and out, swaying faintly with the breeze. Across the street, opposite the garrison, stood a tall wooden tower. Once, it might have been a watchtower, though one meant to watch the city rather than the outside of it, as the outer walls dwarfed it by almost double its length. Now, though, it had become a gnarled spire.

Its upper floors had split apart into jagged peaks like broken fingers clawing at the sky, twisted and reaching for something that wasn't there. Other structures, along with more of those living lampposts, lined both sides of the street, grown and twisted so wildly that you could only loosely call them buildings. Some were tall and thin, others squat and wide, but all were warped and bent in unsettling ways, spaced haphazardly along the avenue.

Farther ahead, the buildings thinned out, and the avenue began to split in several directions. The main street carried on, disappearing into the curtain of mist beyond, but some of the side paths ended in thick, warped tangles of wood that stretched over broad swaths of green. It took Jieyuan a moment to realize those had once been bridges, and that the thick clumps beneath them had once been dips or hollows, maybe even streams or ponds. Jieyuan looked down, letting his eyes roam over the street itself.

There were hints of what it used to be; he could glimpse a few, sparse smooth clear patches. Wooden like the buildings, though of an even deeper color. Solid, under his feet, just like stone. But most of the avenue had been swallowed by sprawls of intertwined roots and vines extending from the nearby buildings, rising and falling in irregular humps, like frozen ripples. He looked back up. His lungs swelled with the scent of the Viridian Dome, rich and heavy, life and decay all tangled together. It was wet, too.

He hadn't seen a drop of rain since he'd arrived, but the air in the Dome was always humid and every inch of ground they'd tread on had held a steady dampness. Here in the city, the moisture was even thicker, weighing down on them. And all of it wrapped up in the viridian mist. A deep green that pooled in hollows and licked at the root-ridden doorways, dulling every color, even as it lit the twisted growths in a sickly, otherworldly glow.

Most of the original city didn't glow; the plants growing over it did, but not the wood itself. But on some of the buildings, there were swollen, tumor-like bulges that pulsed with a faint, emerald gleam, like veins beneath the bark He shot a look at Meiyao. She was staring, wide-eyed with awe—maybe at the place itself, maybe at what it represented, or maybe just at the sheer, wild state of it all. She was a Linzushen, even if she hadn't bought into the whole Viridian Death Faith.

Her chromal bloodline alone would probably have her seeing this wild, overgrown city in a very different light. Beneath the soft rhythm of their breaths, he caught the faintest of sounds: a low, unending creak and crackle. The city itself, he realized. Shifting and settling, still growing. And there was more. A sense of something around them, crowding them. The city wasn't just alive; it was aware, in a way he couldn't quite pin down. Like it was watching them.

Before Jieyuan had felt like the air was weighing down on him; now it was like the air was pressing in on them from all direction, the mist thick and ominous.

"Meiyao?" He kept his voice low. She'd said the area was beast-free earlier, but he'd rather not test his luck. He just couldn't shake off this sense, this impression, of some encompassing awareness, of some vague, looming danger. The city itself felt eerie enough already; the only consolation was that he could at least sense the spirit of the streets—of the city itself, in fact. Tenth-step Redrealm. Not ideal, not when he wasn't even at fifth-step yet, but certainly better than not being able to sense it at all.

Still, the feeling of danger kept coming, echoing in every dark, ominous beat of his heart… Jieyuan went still. That was an awfully specific, suspiciously meaningful way his heart was beating. Meiyao didn't answer; she didn't even seem to hear his question. Her gaze was elsewhere, fixed on things he couldn't see. But he didn't really care. He sent his focus inward, down into his mind, and prodded his bond with the Fatebloom Heart. Huaxin? The reply was immediate. AFFIRMATION.

Now his heart was beating even faster, but for completely different reasons. Through their bond, he could feel Huaxin's presence bright and warm, golden and vibrant. He'd been on such a dry spell of good news that for a moment he forgot how to even react to it. But then the smile came through, wide enough to hurt, the sort that wouldn't have looked out of place on a madman's face. Finally. He didn't care if Meiyao or Daojue noticed.

Meiyao already knew about Huaxin, and explaining it to her would be easy enough; not that he'd even need to, as she was still absorbed with the surroundings. Daojue might catch it, but Jieyuan doubted he'd give one scrap of copper about it. How are you feeling, buddy? The response couldn't be captured in any one word. It came in a brief flash of vague impressions and feelings, half-formed images and sensations. But even after not speaking with Huaxin for so long Jieyuan hadn't forgotten how to process its messages.

In a way, they were even more effective than words. Faster, and more thorough. Huaxin was awake. For good, now. It wasn't back at full strength yet, so he'd have to dial back a bit on Fatebloom Intuition—definitely hold off from using its ramped-up form, Fatebloom Instinct, for a while—but it was eager to be of help again in any way he could. Trust your heart was a common enough piece of advice, but Jieyuan didn't reckon there were many others beside himself that could take it literally.

All right, Jieyuan sent back. You're up to date on the situation? There was a pause. Jieyuan felt Huaxin's presence deepen in his mind, spreading out, searching. It only lasted a couple of seconds. Then, AFFIRMATION. Great. First things first, how well is Fatebloom Intuition working? Is the mist a problem? That vague, pervasive sense of danger he'd sensed earlier must've been Fatebloom Intuition at work, but there were different levels to it.

Huaxin had used it in that broader, more general sense regularly before it'd revealed it could also be narrowed down, focused on the immediate future. And it was this latter application of it that Jieyuan was most interested in, right now. The response was as much AFFIRMATION as it was NEGATION, with a healthy helping of FRUSTRATION. Jieyuan frowned as he parsed it. So it works, but limited? Too limited for sequences? AFFIRMATION. More FRUSTRATION, too. Well, it's better than nothing.

He didn't know how limited Fatebloom Intuition currently was, but any advantage was a leg-up. It wasn't like he'd done much fighting as of late, either, so it wasn't like the precise, step-by-step sequences from Fatebloom Instinct would've been of that much help here anyway. A targeted danger sense would already go a very long way in this kind of place. Huaxin sent him an image, then—of two full golden drops of blood, and another, still-forming. It took Jieyuan a moment to place it. Heartblood? Then he recalled.

It'd been a while since they'd entered the Dome. They were maybe a week or so away from a full month. And the Fatebloom Heart produced one drop of Heartblood every ten days. It could only hold three, and he'd burned the three all at once to use Fatebloom Incarnation. From the looks of it, in just a week or so, the third drop would be complete, and he'd be able to use Fatebloom Incarnation again, the same power that had let him quickly dispatch three tenth-step Redsouls.

Granted, Fatebloom Intuition had played as important a role in those fights, but every advantage was a leg-up, and Fatebloom Incarnation was a major one. It'd have been better to have it at hand right now, to be sure, but he'd take it. Besides, he already had two drops; that was two uses of Fatebloom Renewal, which had been able to regrow his heart in moments.

"Jieyuan?" He focused on Meiyao. She wasn't staring off in a daze anymore—she was looking right at him. And he realized that this time, he might have been the one to drift off, caught up in his conversation with Huaxin He glanced at Daojue, shrugged, then tapped his chest. Meiyao narrowed her eyes, but then he saw recognition flicker across her face. She nodded.

"Let's go," she said, and resumed walking. This time, Jieyuan kept to her side. She wasn't looking around anymore; just staring straight ahead, jaw set, like she was bracing herself for something.

"Any particular place we're going?" he asked. She nodded.

"I think it's better we find out what that thing is that I'm sensing, before anything else."

"The big, vague, plant-ish thing?" He stared off into the thick curtain of mist ahead. It cut off the avenue far ahead, slicing through street and buildings alike, a wall of green that curved way up overhead, forming a dome of its own. Hard to say for sure, but he figured they could see about a quarter of the city at most. The rest lay on the other side, hidden behind that wall of deep, glowing green.

"That's the one," Meiyao said.

"Sounds like a plan." He'd have suggested it himself, in fact. Rather than wander around looking for loot and risk letting the danger sneak up on them, they were better off dealing with it first. Better to be braced for it than to be blindsided; meet it head-on rather than with their backs turned. And if they were charging head-first to their deaths… Well, it wasn't like they'd live to regret it.