Chương 123: Bait

Leo walked the grey stone corridors alone. The tearoom door had closed behind him with a quiet click. Formation lights in this section of the guest wing had dimmed to their nighttime setting, casting long amber pools across the floor at irregular intervals. The only sound was his footsteps echoing off the vaulted ceiling. The vial hung against his chest on its silver chain, warm through the fabric of his shirt. He could feel it pulsing in a slow, steady rhythm that beat out of time with his own heartbeat.

It was Seraphindë's heart essence blood. Leo kept walking. The corridor stretched ahead, featureless grey stone in every direction. He understood why she had given it to him. His merit stamp let him bypass the Deity Transformation inspection. He was the only competitor whose belongings went unchecked at the door. Which meant Seraphindë had just asked him to hide something from the most powerful cultivator assigned to protect them. That thought settled in his stomach like a rock. The Monarch was their security.

Their last line of defense against the demon. And Seraphindë didn't trust him. If the conspiracy that they were facing included the Monarch that was supposed to be protecting them, then the Grand Pavilion was not a competition venue. It was a cage that locked from the outside. Leo briefly considered whether he could trust Seraphindë. Whether he might be aiding the demon by smuggling contraband past inspection. He dismissed the thought quickly. Leo had a feeling that he could trust her.

That her love for Mateo's father was real. He took another look at the vial. Heart essence blood was the most valuable gift a cultivator could give. Seraphindë had compressed a decade of her own lifespan into this vial. Whatever power she had poured into it was gone from her forever. From this day forward every technique she cast would be weaker. Every fight she entered, she would enter diminished.

She was a Gold Core cultivator who had carved a permanent piece out of her own foundation and handed it to an eighteen-year-old she barely knew. He pressed his divine sense into the metal. He started with the clasp. He probed every joint, every solder point, every single bit of silver. Then he moved link by link down the chain, turning it between his fingers as his divine sense mapped the surface and interior of each piece. Nothing. No formation lines. No trace of anything beyond ordinary metalwork.

He shifted to the vial itself. The glass was smooth, unremarkable. The stopper was sealed with a thin layer of wax that carried a faint imprint of Seraphindë's qi, a tamper seal rather than a formation. The heart essence blood inside was dense with compressed spiritual energy, but it was raw material. Leo turned the vial over one more time, then lowered it. This wasn't the first time a powerful cultivator had handed him a special tool so he could do something with it.

In Berlin, the CIA had given him the ortho-k lenses to observe the Russian progress on nuclear fission. People kept giving him solutions and trusting him to figure out the problem. Seraphindë's expectation was clear enough. Save Mateo's life. But Leo had no idea how to use heart essence blood. Which meant it must be able to activate on its own. Two possibilities.

Either a formation existed somewhere in this object that was beyond his ability to perceive, layered so deep into the materials that his divine sense simply could not reach it. Or there was no formation at all, and something about Seraphindë's heart essence blood was significant in a way he did not yet understand. The vial pulsed against his palm with that same steady warmth, unhurried, as if it had all the time in the world. Leo tucked the chain back beneath his shirt and continued toward their room.

Leo reached the door to their quarters and stopped with his hand on the latch. He wasn't sure how much to share with his team. Some of what Seraphindë had told him was intelligence. Some of it was personal. The honeypot theory was intelligence. He needed to warn his team that the Cults were using this Summit to draw a demon toward his generation's brightest young cultivators. That every competitor was bait on a hook, dangled by powers who viewed Qi Refiners as acceptable losses. The vial was different.

Seraphindë had trusted him with her heart essence blood, and Leo didn't want to betray her confidence. Their room could be monitored. Perdue's loyalties were unclear. And the rest of it, the Grey Eternal engineering his own daughters as brides for their half brother, that was Mateo's family history to learn on his own terms. Leo made his decision. He pressed the chain flat against his chest and opened the door. The common room was fully lit.

The whole team sat around the long table with Lord Perdue at the head, and from the look of them, nobody had slept. Every head turned when Leo walked in.

"Well?" Thad said. Leo closed the door behind him and sat down.

"Seraphindë told me what's going on." He laid it out. The cults were using the Summit as bait to draw the demon into the open, and the Deity Transformation Monarchs were there to destroy it after it showed itself.

"The demon needs a host," Leo said.

"To survive, to grow, to cultivate. It needs a young soul with exceptional potential. The stronger the talent, the better the vessel." He looked at each of them in turn.

"We are the bait." Silence held for three seconds. Then it shattered.

"They're using us?" Danyl pushed back from the table. The color had drained from his face.

"We're the trap?"

"All twenty-four competitors. Every delegation. To the deities above, we're just some expendable Qi Refiners."

"And if the Monarchs are too slow?" Ella's voice was quiet.

"If the demon corrupts someone before they can act?"

"They're already preparing our replacements. They don't care if we live or die." Thad leaned forward. His usual easy grin was gone.

"And we're supposed to walk back into that building tomorrow and sit at a table and draw formations while a demon shops for a body."

"Yes." The word sat in the air. Liyang's voice broke the silence.

"Can we forfeit? Can we just go home?" Every pair of eyes at the table shifted to him, then away. The question they had all been thinking and nobody else had been willing to say. Perdue sighed.

"You already know the answer to that. The replacements don't take your seat unless you vacate it. And 'vacate' in this context means one thing." Nobody moved. The formation lights hummed. Somewhere outside, a distant alarm chime sounded and went quiet. Liyang sat rigid in his chair. His hands clutched the dark wood. The color hadn't returned to his face. Then he reached across the table to where Shen Tianyi's notes lay scattered among their empty teacups.

He gathered the pages toward him, squared the edges, and set them in a neat stack in front of his seat.

"I've never lost a competition in my life." Liyang opened the first page.

"If I die tomorrow, I'd rather die in first place."

The final round of the Grand Formation Summit began in tense silence. The Grand Pavilion was quieter than ever, each competitor sitting at their table with brushes laid out and notes meticulously organized. Every face wore the same grim, focused expression, the look of those who understood the danger that lay ahead but refused to let it deter them from the task at hand. The scoreboard painted a stark picture. The Weaver Cult led with four points, while Grey Cult, Hollow Cult, and America trailed with two each.

Any team hoping to claim victory would need to correctly answer both of the day's problems. And with Weaver Cult presenting, Sariya Moirath was sure to make the challenges brutally difficult. Leo glanced back at his teammates, giving a barely perceptible nod. They were ready. As the Moderator stepped onto the center platform and raised a hand to commence the round, a collective breath was held. The truth behind the Summit, the real reason they had all been gathered here, was about to be revealed.

By the day's end, the secrets that had loomed over the competition would finally be dragged into the light.

"The fourth round begins." The Moderator's voice cut through the terse silence.

"The Weaver Cult will present." Sariya walked to the center platform alone. Her footsteps made no sound against the grey stone. She carried a single brush and a small pot of prepared ink.

"I will demonstrate the intermediate problem," Sariya said.

"Observers, please take your positions." Leo moved forward from America's table. Thad fell into step beside him. They joined four other observers around the platform, two from the Grey Cult and two from the Hollow Cult, all positioned to catch every detail of the formation's construction. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. As they settled into position, the observers unleashed their perceptive techniques. Leo slipped into Omnidirectional Awareness.

Beside him, Thad entered Third Person Perspective. Six different methods of enhanced perception locked onto Sariya simultaneously. She didn't flinch. Sariya dipped her brush into the ink and began to draw. Her movements were precise and deliberate, each stroke laid down with unwavering focus. White qi flowed from her fingertips in measured streams, settling into the patterns she created on the formation plate.

When the final stroke fell into place, the formation plate flashed and sent copies of Sariya's work to each team's table. She set her brush down and rolled her shoulders. Two minutes passed in silence. Sariya looked toward the Moderator's dais and gave a single nod.

"The Weaver Cult's captain will now present the forbidden formation." Leo activated his ortho-k vision. Beside him, Thad inserted his contacts, the lenses flickering once as they powered on. One by one, the other observers activated their own perception methods, layering divine sense and enhanced sight over Sariya from every angle. She began to draw. Three strokes in, Leo's ortho-k vision shut off. One moment he was perceiving the formation through enhanced sight, seeing the layered construction of qi and intent.

The next, his eyes had reverted to normal without his permission. Leo stood there blinking. What was he doing? He needed to observe the formation. That was his purpose here, his responsibility to the team. He looked at Sariya, ready to activate the technique again. Something stopped him. His body was telling him not to look. Why was his vision reacting like this? There shouldn't be any Slaughter Qi. Sariya had passed the Deity Transformation inspection.

Every competitor had been examined before entering the pavilion. She was cleared. Then his mind caught on something else. The medallion. When they had met privately a few nights prior, Sariya had held one up for him to examine. In that moment, he had been tempted to activate his ortho-k vision, to study it. But something had stopped him. At the time, he had convinced himself it would be impolite to examine the medallion too closely.

Now, as he watched her draw, surrounded by his fellow competitors, that same reflex gnawed at him once more. His instincts had tried to warn him that night, but he had rationalized it away. His throat tightened. Something was very wrong with Sariya Moirath. Leo found himself at a loss, unsure of what to do. He didn't know if a competitor could interrupt another team's presentation. He wondered if he should wait for her to finish. But the unease only grew.

"Slaughter Qi!" The word cracked through the silence like thunder. The sound of his own voice rang in his ears, too loud, irreversible. Half the room moved on trained instinct. Danyl hit the floor and rolled under America's table, tucking into a protective curl. Liyang followed a heartbeat later. Mateo was on his feet. His greatspear materialized in his hand from his Dantian. His divine blood began roaring. Vivian grabbed Ella's head with both hands and tried to turn her face away from the platform.

Ella didn't respond. Her violet eyes stayed locked on Sariya. Her body refused to move. Vivian pulled harder, straining, and Ella's head turned an inch before snapping back. Leo lunged for Thad. He grabbed Thad's shoulder and shoved him sideways, trying to break his line of sight to Sariya. Thad stumbled, caught himself on the platform's edge, and his head turned right back toward the center. His eyes were wide open, pupils dilated.

The special contacts he wore glowed at the edges, pulsing in time with something Leo couldn't perceive. Leo reached into his dantian and pulled Moonrider into his hand. If he couldn't break Thad free, he could break the formation. He took one look at Sariya. A root erupted from the grey stone floor and wrapped around his ankle. The Moderator made his move. His mask cracked first. A single fissure ran from forehead to chin, splitting the ceramic in a clean vertical line.

The two halves fell away and revealed a face that looked ancient and young at the same time. Skin the color of sun-bleached wood stretched over features that might have belonged to any age, any era. Deep, patient green eyes regarded them all with indifference. His white robes split at the seams. The fabric tore and fell away as the Moderator's true form emerged. Bark covered his body. It grew from his skin in spiraling ridges.

It wrapped around his arms in layered plates, climbed his torso in rough textured sheets and crept up his neck toward his jaw. His fingers lengthened. The joints multiplied, each knuckle giving way to another and another, the digits branching into thinner and thinner extensions. By the time Leo's eye reached the ends, the Moderator's hands had become roots. Spreading, seeking, alive with purpose. His hair became a canopy.

The strands thickened and flattened into pale leaves that rustled without wind, spreading outward from his scalp in a crown of living foliage. He was a divine child. And when his divine domain unleashed, the Grand Pavilion disappeared. In an instant, the grey stone ceiling disappeared, replaced by a thick canopy of interwoven branches that stretched out overhead. The branches were ancient and gnarled, their dense foliage blocking out any glimpse of everything above.

The vaulted walls became a ring of massive trunks. Each one rose from the ground like a pillar of rough, deeply furrowed bark, their immense size dwarfing the competitors below. The trees pressed tightly together to form an impenetrable barrier of living wood that enclosed the space entirely. Leo looked down. The root around his ankle was as thick as his wrist, pale and segmented like a grub grown to monstrous size. It coiled around his lower leg with deliberate slowness, climbing from ankle to calf to thigh.

He pulled against it. The root didn't give. He raised Moonrider to cut himself free. But more roots emerged. They climbed his sword arm in a swift spiral, threading between his fingers, pressing the blade flat against his side. They wrapped his other arm and wound around his torso. In seconds, Leo was pinned. Then the roots began to project. A divine domain poured out of the pale wood and into Leo's body. It pressed down on his shoulders, his spine, his knees.

Every fiber of his being screamed at him to kneel, to prostrate himself before something far greater than he could comprehend. Around the clearing, bodies dropped. Competitors from every delegation collapsed against their bindings, forced to their knees by the domain's weight. The Grey Cult captain fell forward, his forehead nearly touching the ground. Two Hollow Cult observers crumpled like puppets with cut strings. Leo fought to raise his head.

The domain pushed back, grinding against his will, demanding submission. He had felt a divine domain before. Mateo had one. This was ten times stronger, it was closer to Monarch Scatterstraw's. The Moderator was a divine child, he carried the blood of a Void Refining Eternal. Or maybe the blood of a Great Ascension Immortal. Leo managed to raise his head enough to look at the chaperones. The three cult chaperones had collapsed entirely, their voluminous robes pooled around them on the ground.

Only Mateo was offering some semblance of resistance. His bloodline power flared in desperate pulses, grey light flickering against the wood. His jaw was clenched, every muscle straining against the compulsion to bow lower. Leo strained. He reached for his Heart of Flesh, but it barely responded. In the wheat field, it had connected him to millions of lives. In the Flying Aces' stadium, hundreds of thousands of fans had cheered him on.

The fire had come easy there, overwhelming in its abundance, an ocean of life he could drown in. Here there was nothing. Here they were alone. The city was gone. The Deity Transformation signature outside had disappeared. No alarms sounded. No Lords or Monarchs came to their rescue. The domain wasn't just suppressing them. It was hiding them. Whatever happened in the Moderator's domain would stay in his domain. At the center of the clearing, Sariya continued drawing.

Her brush moved across the formation plate with the same fluid grace it had shown from the beginning. She worked as if the chaos around her didn't exist, as if the transformed Pavilion and the ensnared observers were simply irrelevant to her purpose. Something was falling from the canopy. Golden pollen, fine as dust, sifted down through the branches in a slow, silent rain. It drifted through the clearing and caught on something invisible. Faint lines of light appeared where the pollen gathered.

The threads had always been there. The pollen was just making them visible. The lines stretched from the formation plate toward the frozen observers. Thin as spiderweb, barely visible, the color of morning light. Leo blinked. The nearest line pulsed once and steadied. Another line appeared. Then another. They radiated outward from the formation like threads from a spindle, reaching in every direction. Leo recognized them. Karma threads. He had seen a synthetic one on Shen Tianyi's identity token.

He had discussed them with Sariya herself over tea. The threads that connected them to people, to places, to events. The threads that accumulated over a lifetime, recording every action, every relationship, every consequence. The threads that the Weaver Cult called fate. At first they were barely visible. But with each stroke of Sariya's brush, they brightened. They thickened. What started as spider silk became golden cord. The threads filled the clearing with their pale glow.

They connected every person to the formation at the center, a vast web of lines radiating outward from Sariya's brush. Some threads were thin and delicate. Others had grown thick enough that Leo could trace their shapes against the ambient light. Sariya completed another stroke. Leo watched her from his bound position, trying to find a solution. His mind raced. The Moderator could have killed them. His divine domain had already frozen them.

He could have easily crushed every Qi Refiner in this clearing without effort. But the roots held them in place instead of tearing them apart. Why? Leo twisted against his bindings, fighting to turn his head to examine the other competitors. The roots gave just enough for him to see. All five of Sariya's teammates were convulsing. They tore at their own skin through the gaps in the roots, scratching and clawing at their arms and their faces.

The movements were involuntary, primal, as if their bodies were trying to reject something that had already taken hold inside them. There was no visible attack, no formation light, no spell art. Just five young cultivators who suddenly decided to tear themselves apart. But the Moderator was holding them in place. Holding them still. Forcing them to their knees while whatever Sariya was doing to them did its work. Corrupted. Leo realized the Weaver Cult competitors were being corrupted. The demon had taken its bait.

That was why he couldn't see any attack. Slaughter Qi was invisible. Unless he activated his ortho-k vision he wouldn't be able to see what was truly happening. Leo looked at Thad, who hadn't moved since the roots took him. His body stood pinned with arms bound to his sides and head locked forward, but his eyes were alive. The special contacts glowed at their edges in a steady pulse, and behind them Thad's pupils tracked something invisible to the naked eye. Ella was the same.

Her violet eyes were wide and unblinking, locked on the formation plate, her lips barely moving as she tried to speak. They could see the demon consuming Sariya's team. Leo could not. The certainty of his own death settled over him with each passing second. No one was coming to rescue them. Whatever Sariya was weaving, whatever invisible demon that was consuming her teammates from the inside, it was still growing. Still spreading.

The karma threads brightened with every stroke of her brush, connecting every person in the clearing to whatever she was building. Leo decided that if he was going to die, he was going to die with his eyes open. He would see what killed him. His ortho-k vision sat behind his eyes, waiting. All he had to do was push. He knew what would happen if he did. He had barely survived his last encounter with Slaughter Qi.

He had needed millions of wheat stalks and a Dao revelation to pull himself back from the edge, and here he had neither. There was no army of wheat, no ocean of shared life to anchor him. Just a handful of muted embers behind the roots and a vial of blood against his chest. Was this what Seraphindë foresaw? This moment? What did she want him to do? The vial pulsed against his chest, warm and steady, waiting for something he didn't understand.

If he opened his eyes now, there would be no coming back from what he saw. No technique to shield him, no buffer between his awareness and whatever darkness Sariya was channeling. Every instinct he had, the same instincts that had shut his vision down and stopped him at the tea table and pulled him back from the edge in the wheat field, every single one was telling him the same thing. Do not look.

Leo looked at the bodies across the clearing, five young cultivators reduced to twitching shells, still breathing but already lost. He looked at Thad, frozen and watching and unable to do anything with what he saw. He looked at his own hands, bound by roots, holding a sword he couldn't swing. If he activated his ortho-k vision now, the Slaughter Qi would detect his presence. The instant he laid eyes on the force corrupting Sariya's team, it would sense his gaze.

And once it recognized a soul radiant enough to be a worthy prize, it would turn its attention to him, drawn like a predator to its prey. Leo closed his eyes and took one breath. He was about to start a sequence of events that would end with him victorious or dead. He would either break whatever Sariya was building or become part of it. He had no plan. The last time he faced Slaughter Qi, he had self-detonated and ran. That was the full extent of his experience fighting demons. He opened his eyes.

Across the clearing, Sariya was looking directly at him. Her brush had stopped. For the first time since the formation began, her hands were still. She stood at the center of the clearing with her head tilted slightly, watching him. She knew what he was about to do. Leo held her gaze and activated his ortho-k vision.