Chương 128: Book 2 Chapter 42: Nine Lives

Prince Xiang Chengxuan sat in a small, unused room on the twenty second floor and plotted. The room was barely deserving of the name. It was closer to a broom cupboard than a chamber, with barely enough space for him to sit comfortably; if he stretched out his legs, they would strike the opposite wall. The ceiling hung so low that standing and lifting an arm would be enough to touch it, and the entire space was illuminated by a single globe of qi burning at the exact center overhead.

The light it cast was harsh and dim at the same time, a sharp glare that carved across one side of his face while leaving the rest of the room submerged in shadow. If there had been any chance of someone seeing him like this, Chengxuan would have at least have adjusted the lighting so he did not resemble the villain of some absurd jade slip drama. But since no one would ever see him here, he allowed the light to paint him as it liked.

Besides, with the way things were unfolding, a little villainy was exactly what the situation required. He had not slept in his own bed since the incident with the Lion Army. Every day, he found a new place to spend the night: some forgotten corner of the palace, an unused guest chamber, or one of the many rooms belonging to his subordinates.

It was not that he genuinely feared dying in his sleep, but a lack of caution was precisely what had allowed him to bring down so many enemies over the years, and he refused to fall victim to the same mistake. He had instructed his entire faction, or at least those he considered worth saving, to do the same. It had helped. The mysterious deaths had slowed down to a trickle. That, too, was a data point.

Twenty jade slips hovered silently throughout the cramped room, arranged without any particular aesthetic intention. Together they contained every scrap of information his agents, spies, servants, and unwitting helpers had managed to collect: everything he could reasonably, and in several cases unreasonably, obtain. These were the other data points. Above his head floated a single wheel. It was a simple thing: a plain metal circle the size of a dinner plate, divided by nine spokes.

Only faint crystalline traceries disturbed its surface, like snowflakes frozen beneath steel. Even then, it appeared utterly unremarkable. It was the Wheel of Nine Lives. It had been a long time since Chengxuan had brought it out for such extensive use. His natal artifact was unlike most in that it demanded a heavy price for each use, one he preferred to pay sparingly. The last time had been- A memory surfaced before he could stop it.

He was a young boy again, clutching his mother's arm as she guided him through the corridors of the Inner Court. She pointed out every marvel they passed, exclaiming over each wonder with infectious enthusiasm. Even now, he could remember staring wide-eyed at the beauty and grandeur around him. Then a door opened. Brilliant light spilled into the corridor, and a man stood framed within it. He had Wild hair and smoldering golden eyes, like embers trapped beneath glass – the eyes of the imperial family.

Unlike Chengxuan's own plain yellow ones. His mother had drawn him close and whispered reverently: "… the Crown Prince, Xiang Mingyuan." Embarrassingly, Chengxuan remembered calling out, "Uncle." His mother had sucked in a sharp breath. The man had turned and then he had smiled. He had laughed softly, ruffled Chengxuan's hair, and greeted his mother with easy warmth. She had bowed and made him bow as well, but all Chengxuan remembered was the feeling of awe.

The dizzy certainty that perhaps, one day- He exhaled slowly and forced the memory away. This was why he hated using his natal artifact unless absolutely necessary. For all its usefulness, it dragged his mind through old memories like a river carrying a fallen branch, pulling him this way and that without warning or control. Still, his complaints could wait. It was time to begin. Tonight, he was giving Muxue his full attention. He would find a way to kill her, no matter what it cost. Nothing else could be allowed.

He swept his spiritual sense into the jade slips and began to read. Four hours, seventeen minutes, and thirty seven seconds later, he leaned back, nursing a slight headache. Information still coursed through his mind, settling in slow layers. Names, places, events, once-unconnected coincidences that now fit together into recognizable shapes. He let them drift past without seizing any single thread too tightly. Wu Shang of the Thousand Shattered Islands and his endless rantings.

Xu Chuanli, gate guard of Dragon Gate Number Two Hundred and Thirty-Eight, delivering his reports in that characteristically oily manner. Official records concerning the duel between Mo Jian, supervisor of the Kanchi Spirit Jade Mine in District Forty Eight, Division Nine Hundred and Twelve, Tiger Province, Third Quadrant, and Wei Shentong, magistrate of District Forty Eight.

Attendance records from the Flower Valley Sect of Tiger Province, one among more than a thousand sects bearing that name throughout the capital, showing the enrollment of two new students. Shen Jinglan's report on operations at the Kanchi Mine, submitted to the Ministry of Works. Reports from Meng Zizan of the Second Floor, detailing his failure to infiltrate the dreams of the two newcomers.

Li Wei's – the guard on duty outside the Simha hall on the day before the Lion General's death – account of the day Muxue arrived seeking Shi Wanjun, only to turn around and leave moments later. The confession of Zeduan, the portrait assigned to watch Tang Huwei. Dispatches from his spies within the Tiger Army. Court records documenting Muxue's recent appointments with various ministries. The final death message of the assassin he had sent after Yao Yue. All that and more.

An endless stream of facts, reports, confessions, records, and observations flowed through his thoughts, each carrying a fragment of a larger picture. He neither chased nor resisted them, allowing the torrent to settle into place on its own. Some things became clear almost immediately. Mo Jian and Bai Ning. The gui of the divine treasure, the South Pointing Chariot. Shi Wanjun's death – yes, death, not disappearance.

Muxue's counterattack, bolstered, or rather, made possible by her possession of a method to kill anyone within the palace without detection. How was she doing it? That remained unclear, but Chengxuan felt he could make a reasonable guess: the gui. Those carriers, Mo Jian and Bai Ning, had found a way, and Muxue had found them in turn. Other pieces remained missing. Holes, gaps, and frayed edges in the information he possessed that prevented him from seeing the full tapestry now emerging before him.

He did not rush to fill them. Facts came first. Speculation, and the work of bridging those gaps, could wait until he had something solid to build from. Holding all of it in his mind, Chengxuan finally activated the Wheel of Nine Lives. That, after all, was the reason he had secluded himself here in the first place. Using the Wheel left him vulnerable, and the best defense against vulnerability was to be impossible to find. His surroundings blurred.

Walls, floor, and ceiling stretched into wisps of steam, ribbons of color, drifting lights, and distant sounds. As always, the sensation was powerful enough to make it feel as though the world itself were dissolving, even though he knew better. The Wheel affected only his mind and nothing else. Yet he had made a mistake. It had been too long since he last used it. His thoughts were not as sharp or disciplined as they should have been.

Instead of carrying him into the illusory realm he intended, the artifact seized upon a stray thought – its power, its origin – and dragged his consciousness backward. Back to the moment he had first claimed it. The world dissolved completely. Chengxuan looked up and saw- The sun was shining brightly. The room should have been flooded with light. Instead, everything seemed washed through with watercolors. Edges bled into one another. Pillars stretched into pale vertical smears.

Robes became drifting patches of color. Faces dissolved whenever he tried to focus on them. Yet some things remained perfectly clear. The hall was long and broad. Several members of the Imperial Family stood within, all at the peak of Foundation Establishment, brushing against the threshold of Core Formation. Around them clustered parents, patrons, servants, and well-wishers. Chengxuan was not alone either. His mother sat on a cushion near the rear of the hall.

He could not remember her face, but he remembered her pride. An old man presided over the gathering. His body was bent and stooped, his features little more than streaks of diluted ink. Before him stood a table draped in yellow cloth, in a shade that was extremely familiar. The objects upon it were not blurred at all: a bell, a wheel, a ruler, a cauldron, a banner, a sword, and a folding fan. Each stood in perfect focus, impossibly solid amidst the dissolving dream.

Their shapes possessed a weight that memory could not erode. Treasures of the Imperial Family. Some had once been natal artifacts belonging to mighty cultivators now long dead. Others had been forged from materials so rare that no second example existed beneath the heavens. If one chose him… if he could claim even one- The doors opened and the Crown Prince entered. Like the treasures, he was strangely clear.

His hair was as disheveled as ever, but is eyes shone gold, brighter than the sunlight pouring through the windows. The room rose as one. Greetings were offered and respect was shown. Chengxuan felt, he felt –"My daughter," the Prince said. The words remained even as everything else dissolved. A little girl stepped forward. She was too young. Even now, that thought survived the years intact. Too young and too early in Foundation Establishment. Too far from the requirements of the trial. Yet she was here.

She pointed and the Prince laughed. The bell rose from the table and settled into her waiting hands. It rang once. The sound cut through the dream with impossible clarity, pure and true. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. Chengxuan felt, he felt – The memory hesitated there. It had always hesitated here. Not because he had forgotten, but because he remembered too well. Bitterness. And beneath it, something older, colder.

A slow poison he had swallowed willingly and carried every day since. His turn came and he stepped forward. The treasures waited. Each possessed a powerful spiritual nature. If one accepted him as its bearer- Nothing happened. He reached again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. The room grew quieter. Or perhaps that was only how he remembered it. Failure settled around his throat like a tightening cord. He reached for the wheel. This time, not because he wanted it, but because he wanted to throw it away.

Hurl it into the sea and watch it sink. Never see it again. But eyes were upon him, the elder was frowning, and his mother was watching. The entire hall was watching. So Chengxuan pushed. Qi poured into the wheel, along with his desperation, then his stubbornness, and finally, something deeper. A willingness to pay whatever price was demanded. Life and death. A crack sounded and the wheel responded. The sensation remained vivid even now. It was not acceptance, but recognition.

The difference mattered, yet triumph flooded him anyway. The elder rejected it immediately: the treasure was unsuitable, it would never truly belong to him, it would demand too much, it would function imperfectly, it would burden his cultivation, it would make every step of his path more difficult. The elder kept speaking. Chengxuan heard none of it. He looked down at the wheel. The wheel looked back. Or perhaps that was only another thing memory had sharpened over the years.

'Hate me all you like,' he thought.

'I hate you too. But from this day onward, you are mine.' He looked up. The sun was shining brightly- Chengxuan exhaled and the memory shattered. The world dissolved once more, and he found himself back in the cramped room. His heart hammered against his ribs. Qi surged through his meridians like a galloping horse. The Wheel of Nine Lives spun silently above his head and within his soul. And somewhere in the transition, two years of his lifespan had vanished.

Immediately, a familiar temptation seized him, to take one of the Stolen Life Pills. He possessed one containing a century of life and three lesser pills holding two decades each. They had been refined from the life essence of the most depraved criminals in the Empire – those who had sought to harm the Imperial Family itself – and by law could be consumed only by the Emperor and the Crown Heir. Obtaining access to them had been one of the earliest and most enduring motivations behind his rise.

Ever since stepping into Core Formation, the Wheel had cursed him with a steadily diminishing lifespan. Every promotion, every alliance, every calculated risk had been taken with that burden in mind. The pills were a solution; an ugly one, but a solution nonetheless. Unavoidably demonic, inevitably secret, and regrettably necessary. Their existence was unknown beyond a tiny handful of people.

That the Imperial Family possessed methods of extending life was hardly a secret; several emperors had lived far longer than nature should have allowed. Emperor Qianlong alone had lived for eighteen centuries, ascending the throne at one thousand six hundred years of age and remaining upon it two centuries longer, older than any emperor in Xiang history save for the First Emperor, though matters concerning his grandfather were different in ways that exceeded mortal understanding.

That thought lingered at the edge of his awareness along with the temptation. Two years, gone in an instant. An insignificant price, and yet not one he could ignore. A single pill would erase it tenfold. Chengxuan forced the thought down. Not yet. It was better to save them. He could have consumed them long ago and built a reserve of lifespan against future losses, but he had chosen not to. The reason was simple: the less life he had left, the more responsive the Wheel became.

That trade had proven useful more than once. This loss, then, was not only acceptable; it might even be advantageous. Without lingering further, he activated the Wheel again. This time, there was no mistake. The room blurred and stretched, colors thinning into streaks of light, and then reality folded- He was seated within the Throne Room, at his customary position: the tenth step below the Emperor. The court was assembled in full attendance. Here, the distortion was even more severe.

Most of the gathered ministers and nobles were reduced to unstable silhouettes, their forms wavering like ink dropped into water. The great hall itself shimmered, as though seen through heat rising off desert stone. And yet some figures remained sharply defined. Muxue stood at the foot of the stairs. Behind her and one step to the left stood the Tiger General. The others upon the steps were also clear: ministers, allies, adversaries, and the old herald who had never concealed his dislike for him.

Chengxuan did not even glance toward the place where his uncle sat. He knew too well what that presence would look like within this distorted recollection, and looking at it served no purpose. Below, Muxue was speaking. Her voice reached him as though carried through deep water, each word broken into softened fragments by distance and time.

"…corruption within…"

"…to my great horror…"

"…no choice but to…"

"…lay the evidence before…"

"…Ministry of War…"

"…Yuan agitation…" He narrowed his focus and listened more carefully, pushing past the distortion, gathering what meaning he could from the fractured speech.

'One life first,' he thought.

'And then the next, and the one after that, until there were no more to take.' Tonight, he would spend his lifespan as though it were water poured into an endless sea, careless of what was lost, indifferent to the cost. One life after another, he would step through every possible variation of this moment, watching, listening, and extracting certainty from possibility until nothing of Muxue's design remained hidden. Only then would he act.

Prince Xiang Chengxuan was preparing the killing stroke for the daughter in exactly the same way he had once prepared it for the father fifty years ago. There would be no escape. ………………………………………………..

"Wrong," came the gleeful voice of Tang Huwei, sounding entirely too pleased with himself. A second later, a bejeweled scepter hurtled through the air and struck his "student" squarely on the skull. Mo Jian's eyes snapped open, a glare already forming. The scepter bounced off and clattered to the ground as though it had struck a stone wall.

"I am doing the exact same thing you taught me," Mo Jian said through gritted teeth.

"How is it wrong?"

"You should be asking how it isn't wrong," came the immediate, scathing reply. Tang Huwei regarded him with the same expression one might reserve for a particularly slow child struggling to learn numbers.

"The flow of qi was wrong, the meditation was wrong, and your grasp of self was wrong. I told you not to focus on things like xian. Those are concepts beyond this stage. Focus instead on the turning points of your life. The story of who you are is etched into your nascent soul – no, it created your nascent soul." He jabbed a finger toward Mo Jian for emphasis.

"Now, what part of your story made you grow and change? What made you mature from an infant into a child? That is what you should be meditating on." From behind came the sound of muffled giggling. Mo Jian did not need to turn around to know who it was. Bai Ning was enjoying herself immensely, watching her former teacher suffer through the indignity of becoming a student under an utterly insufferable man. Under normal circumstances, Mo Jian would have assigned her an absurdly difficult trial by now.

Unfortunately, he was quite certain that any punishment he devised would somehow find its way back to him through Tang Huwei.

"Do it again," his "teacher" commanded. With extreme reluctance and a completely undisguised glare, Mo Jian closed his eyes once more. The irritating truth, that he admitted only in the privacy of his own mind, was that the Tiger General's teachings were genuinely helpful. To advance through the Nascent Soul stage, one had to nourish the soul. There were two methods to accomplish this, and the proper approach was to employ both simultaneously. The first was accumulating qi.

Much like in the earlier realms, the nascent soul could be strengthened through a vast infusion of qi, though ordinary cultivation was nowhere near sufficient for this. One needed either an environment saturated with an absurd concentration of qi or powerful pills and elixirs capable of bridging the gap. However, relying on this alone led to what Tang Huwei called a "shoddy soul." The true method of advancement was to meditate upon the growth of the nascent soul itself and use qi to trigger that growth.

In this way, the soul became "robust and mature," capable of progressing to the next stage. And what was one supposed to meditate upon? As his "teacher" had explained, it was the moments in life when one had genuinely grown and changed. It had nothing to do with becoming a better person. A cultivator did not need to be kind, or wise, or just. They simply needed to become more completely themselves, merely growing along the path one pursued. Mo Jian understood the importance of this principle.

He had taught it to Bai Ning himself. He simply had not expected that one day it would need to be taught back to him. In a way, he was grudgingly grateful. If only Tang Huwei's attitude were better... Another scepter – seriously, where did this man keep getting them from? – bonked against his forehead before falling harmlessly to the ground. Mo Jian's eyes snapped open.

"What now?" he demanded.

"I was meditating."

"No, you weren't," the Tiger General replied flatly.

"You were entertaining uncharitable thoughts. I can tell." For a moment, Mo Jian was tempted to point out that Tang Huwei's teaching record must have been truly abysmal if he had become so accustomed to his students harboring ill thoughts toward him that he could now detect them instinctively. However, as a mature and responsible adult, he refrained from doing so. Instead, he uncrossed his legs and leaned back.

"I understand the principles. I'll work through it later on my own." He glanced toward the door.

"Besides, the princess should return any time now, and she'll probably have another name for me." It was an excuse to end the session, and not a particularly convincing one. Everyone present recognized it for exactly what it was. Still, Tang Huwei did not protest. He merely rolled his eyes and began muttering under his breath about "... laziness," and how "... in my day, we meditated under waterfalls." Mo Jian let him.

For all the jokes about being his teacher, Tang Huwei had been careful not to cross the line beyond offering instruction and sharing a few treasures. He kept the arrangement firmly informal. A true master-disciple relationship was something entirely different. Even among cultivators, or perhaps especially among cultivators, it was considered special, and not something entered into lightly or treated frivolously.

So, despite the fact that Tang Huwei was teaching him, he was not Mo Jian's master, just as Mo Jian was not his disciple. Both of them preferred it that way.

"Aw, it's already over?" Bai Ning pouted as she skipped up beside him, looking entirely too pleased with herself.

"I was hoping for an hour long recording I could store in a jade slip. Do you have any idea how much money I could make selling that back home?" She trailed off, eyes sparkling with mischievous delight. Mo Jian suddenly found himself with both a target and a convenient outlet for his lingering frustration. He smiled and Bai Ning immediately stopped smiling.

"I seem to recall," he said pleasantly, "that you missed your own session on perfecting the crimson lotus yesterday. How about I help by supervising while you complete it?" His smile was saccharine sweet. His eyes promised absolutely no avenue of escape. Bai Ning paled. Her expression cycled rapidly through several stages – shock, wounded betrayal, desperate calculation – before settling on a forced and unconvincing laugh.

"Ha ha. No need, Master. I managed to finish it during the night. I'm perfectly-" Her desperate attempt at escape was cut off by the door sliding open. A bell tolled – the sound clear and crystalline, reverberating through the room with unmistakable authority. Xiang Muxue stepped inside, one eyebrow already raised as she glanced around the room. Floating beside her shoulder was the Truth Tolling Bell, gently ringing once more.

"Who's lying," she asked, "and why?" Bai Ning slumped instantly, all hope draining from her face, while Mo Jian's smile widened. Tang Huwei, who had apparently grown bored of muttering and had been enjoying the spectacle from the sidelines, pointed at Bai Ning without a moment's hesitation.

"She is."

"I was not." The bell tolled again. Mo Jian leaned back and waited, savoring one of his rare victories over his headache of a (former) student.

"I can explain," Bai Ning finally said. The bell rang again Yes, there was indeed not going to be an escape.