Chương 136: Two Armies

Leo Chen and his three companions flew west toward certain death. At least, that was how any sensible cultivator would have described it. The spiritual signature detector the Shen family had loaned them had stopped providing useful readings an hour ago. The last estimate before the needle buried itself in the red and snapped off: two hundred and twenty Nascent Soul Lords, eight thousand Gold Core cultivators, and hundreds of thousands of Foundation Establishment soldiers.

That being said, Leo was having a great time. He was going to try something absurd. They were going to check out a sealed profundity that hadn't been opened in centuries, all while under the watchful eye of two armies that were not going to be very happy to see him. Hopefully the Nascent Soul Lords would be too busy glaring at each other to notice them. He'd spent six months stuck on Earth. Now he had a new sword, an impossible mission, and the growing certainty that something very entertaining was about to happen.

"That can't be right," Kevin said, peering over Leo's shoulder at the detector.

"Is it broken?"

"I think so." Leo turned down the sensitivity. The indicator still just glowed bright angry red.

"I bet Lord Shen loaned us the cheapest one he could find. He probably figured we weren't going to return it anyways." They flew closer. Leo saw the warships. Dark shapes hung against the gray sky, arranged in formations so vast they looked like wooden clouds. Each vessel flew banners so large he could read them from miles away, as if the two sides spent their days trying to intimidate each other. Crimson and gold flew on the western crescent.

The eastern side displayed a wide array of colors, dozens of sects and temples competing for prominence. Below the airborne fleets, camps sprawled across the valley floor. Tens of thousands of tents stretched toward the mountains in both directions. Supply wagons sat in long rows. Soldiers drilled in formation, their loud chants filling the air. Trenches and fortifications scarred the landscape between the camps. Earthworks had been raised and reinforced with formation stones.

Spiritual barriers shimmered at regular intervals, layered defenses that looked like they could break apart any ground assault. The no man's land told the history of the battle. Craters pocked the frozen earth where formation cannons had traded fire. Broken warboats lay half-buried in the mud. A few bodies still lay where they had fallen, unretrieved. And in the center of that scarred ground, a gate. Two Nascent Soul Lords stood guard above it.

They unfurled their domains, and Leo could feel them glaring at him from the distance. Below them sat the entrance to the profundity. Dark energy leaked from its edges. Leo checked it with his ortho-k vision and confirmed that it was indeed Slaughter Qi. The first jade slip arrived thirty seconds later. A message talisman shot toward them from the eastern crescent, trailing golden light. Leo let it bounce off his shoulder and tumble away into the void. Three more followed. Then seven.

Then a small cloud, streaming from both armies simultaneously. Kevin caught one reflexively, then dropped it like it was a hot potato.

"Should we respond to these messages?"

"Why?" Leo kept his eyes on the profundity gate.

"They're either demands for identification or threats. It would be a waste of time to respond."

"What's our story going to be? If someone asks who we are?"

"I don't think there is any point in responding. Let's just go straight into the profundity instead. Besides, I think I recognize one of the Lords guarding the gate." Leo pointed at the mountain domain.

"That's definitely our good old friend Lord Ironhorn," Leo said.

"The other one looks like it must be an Army Breaker domain. Must be Lord Shattervow." The last time Leo had seen Lord Shattervow, he had been locked in a deadly conflict with Lord Ironhorn over Crimson Lotus City. If it really was Shattervow, the two Lords must have reconciled and started to work together. More jade slips arrived. Leo ignored them. A few warships began moving to intercept them, but the response looked slow. He bet neither army wanted to be the one that made the first move.

The four Americans aimed for the gap between the armies and accelerated. From far away, Leo figured they must have looked like insects flying into a furnace. Warships tracked their movement with formation cannons. Patrol squads scrambled to intercept. Jade slips flew in clouds, demanding identification, threatening consequences, promising death. They ignored all of it. And somehow, impossibly, it worked. Leo grinned. It was exactly what he'd predicted. Nobody stopped them.

Likely every soldier assumed someone else would handle it. Every patrol squad probably waited for the squad ahead to make the first move. Over two hundred Nascent Soul Lords watched four Foundation Establishment juniors fly past, and each one must have figured someone else would deal with it. By the time any Lord decided to react, they had already reached the open ground before the profundity gate. Leo waved. Ironhorn wore the same annoyed expression that Leo knew so well.

He was trying not to make eye contact with Leo, as if ignoring him would make him go away. Shattervow hovered about a hundred feet away from Ironhorn. He pulled out his spear and held it ready, pointed at Leo. Ironhorn spoke first.

"Go away, Leo." Leo grinned.

"Nice to see you too, Lord Ironhorn."

"What manner of rabble has Lord Ironhorn been associating with?" Shattervow's gaze swept across the four Americans.

"This Seat observes four Foundation Establishment juniors who fly in like children on an outing. They bear no banner. They display no sect insignia. And yet they address two Lords of the Nascent Soul realm as though speaking to peers at a teahouse." Shattervow glared at Leo.

"This Seat wonders if they are ignorant of propriety, or simply tired of living." Leo raised an eyebrow at Ironhorn.

"Since when have you been associated with this empty-headed fool?" Shattervow's domain spiked. The air pressure tripled. Lightning crackled along his spear, and he readied himself to swat Leo out of the sky.

"Junior, you dare..." Ironhorn raised a hand to calm Shattervow.

"The commanders needed two Lords to watch this gate. Lords who could tolerate each other's presence without violence, but who would never trust each other enough to collude." He paused.

"Lord Shattervow and I have been glaring at each other across this stretch of dirt for seven days." Another wave of jade slips arrived, a whole cloud of them. Ironhorn plucked one out of the air and scanned its contents. His expression soured.

"People are already accusing us of colluding with you." He crushed the jade slip.

"Please leave."

"I'll leave in a moment," Leo said. Ironhorn looked relieved.

"Unfortunately," Leo smiled, "we left Arthur's dentures somewhere behind the gate. We just need to pop in, grab them, and we'll be on our way." He pointed at Arthur. Arthur had no idea what Leo was saying, since the conversation was happening in Common. He just smiled broadly at the two Nascent Soul Lords. Full set of teeth. Every single one was present and accounted for. Ironhorn stared at Arthur's very complete, very visible teeth. Then he stared at Leo. He said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Shattervow apparently didn't share that restraint. A flush crept up his neck and spread across his face. His domain crackled. Lightning ran along his spear.

"Junior. This Seat has shown patience beyond measure. This Seat has tolerated disrespect that would have earned lesser cultivators immediate annihilation." He leveled the spear. Lightning gathered at its tip.

"But this Seat's patience has limits. What derangement has convinced you that such audacity will go unpunished?" Leo laughed.

"We can do this the easy way," he said.

"Or the hard way." He reached into his storage ring and pulled out a green hat. Stolen novel; please report. Ironhorn sighed again. Leo felt a little bit sorry for the man. Shattervow's domain destabilized. Lightning shot wildly from his spear, scorching the air around him in chaotic bursts. His composure shattered. He sputtered.

"You... this Seat... the audacity... how dare..."

"I personally am a fan of the hard way." Leo tossed the hat lightly from hand to hand.

"Just lifebonded with a new sword. Been dying to try it out. If you want to dance, I'm game." Shattervow's face turned purple. His eyes bulged. Spittle flew from his lips as he tried and failed to form coherent words. Ironhorn gave him a look. The lightning on Shattervow's spear subsided. His jaw clenched so hard the muscles in his neck stood out. But he controlled himself. Barely. Ironhorn turned to Leo. His voice was strained with patience.

"Leo. Please. Do not do this."

"Do what?"

"Lord Shattervow is especially..." Ironhorn chose his next word carefully.

"... sensitive... to green hats." Shattervow's face twitched. A prominent vein on his forehead pulsed visibly.

"I ask for your understanding in this matter," Ironhorn continued.

"Whatever you want, we can discuss it like reasonable cultivators. There is no need for..." He gestured at the hat.

"That." Leo considered this.

"Tame your mad dog a little better," he said.

"Then we can talk." Shattervow's face flushed so dark it approached the color of a ripe eggplant. The lightning around his spear went haywire, arcing in every direction. Ironhorn raised a hand. A silent exchange passed between the two Lords.

"Also," Leo added, "we upgraded the hat since the last time we met." Ironhorn went very still. A bad memory crossed his face.

"We've added a new feature. Now, when it makes contact, it automatically takes pictures." Shattervow's left eye began to twitch. Steam seemed to pour from his ears. His hands gripped his spear so violently it looked like it was going to break.

"And transmits them." Leo mimed a camera shutter with his hands. On cue, Mike, Kevin, and Arthur each pulled out prepared jade communication slips and held them up. The purple drained from Shattervow's face, replaced by a bloodless white. His trembling stopped. His domain went still. The lightning on his spear flickered and died. All he could do was stare helplessly at the jade communication slips. Leo smirked. There were fates worse than death. Shattervow turned to Ironhorn and spoke quietly.

He had lost all his bluster.

"Can the kid actually do it? Can he actually place the hat on this Seat's head?"

"The Army Breaker domain is certainly formidable," Ironhorn said.

"And the kid probably cannot crack your Tier 4. 5 armor." Ironhorn scratched his chin.

"But if all the kid wants is to place a green hat on your head... you probably would not be able to stop him." Leo grinned.

"So." He held up the hat.

"The easy way? Or the hard way?" Another wave of jade slips flew over from both armies. This time, neither Lord bothered to look at them.

"Why did you guys follow me in?" Leo glanced at the two Lords walking behind him.

"Aren't you supposed to be guarding the entrance? What if they accuse you two of colluding with us?" They were inside the profundity now, walking down a corridor of pale gray stone. The walls were covered in tiled patterns, rectangles and triangles carved into every surface. Leo had never seen architecture like this. Mike, Kevin, and Arthur had already rushed ahead. They weren't comfortable walking beside Lord Shattervow, who radiated killing intent with every step. Lord Ironhorn shrugged.

"The moment you four entered, both armies had already formed their opinions. Why suffer the accusation without reaping the benefit?"

"This Seat might as well observe what you are planning," Shattervow added. He still sounded pretty cross. Leo shrugged.

"So what is this place anyway? Why is everyone here?" The two Lords stopped walking. They stared at Leo.

"What do you mean you don't know what this place is?" Ironhorn asked.

"We found out about this location yesterday. Shen Tianyi didn't have time to fill us in on the details. He was busy paying respects to his ancestors or something like that." Leo gestured at the corridor around them.

"I'm wondering if you can help me figure out what we are looking for." Lord Shattervow's eye twitched.

"Leo Chen. You are telling this Seat that of all the locations in the Azure Profound Continent where you could have inserted yourself, you chose here? In the midst of the assembled armies of the Central Powers and the Western Seat?" Leo shrugged.

"I figured if everyone was outside stopping each other from getting in, there must be something good." Ironhorn was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded slowly.

"Fair point."

"Okay." Leo clapped his hands together.

"So tell me what you know. You've got to know more than me." Ironhorn shrugged.

"We were selected as guards precisely because we know nothing. This old man was minding his own affairs, attempting to rebuild what remains of Crimson Lotus City, when the order arrived." He gestured at Shattervow.

"Lord Shattervow's situation is worse. He spent the last three months pursuing his former wife across three provinces. His commanders had to drag him back from Fog City." Leo stared at them.

"You're telling me neither of you knows anything?"

"You likely possess better intelligence than either of us," Ironhorn said. Shattervow tried very hard not to meet Leo's eyes. Lord Ironhorn tilted his head.

"Leo. What do you hope to find here? Why did you come?"

"I want to find something to help end the war. Millions of cultivators are suffering. I felt like I should try to at least do something. This place seemed like a pretty good place to start looking for answers." Ironhorn shook his head. He studied Leo for a long moment, then pressed further.

"But why do you care? Shen Tianyi has already disclosed your origins. You are an otherworldly cultivator who enters our continent as though it were a game." The words hung in the air.

"Why do you care about these people?" Ironhorn continued.

"Are you here because you wish to save them, or merely to amuse yourself with an interesting diversion?" Leo's mouth opened, but nothing came out. The question cut deeper than he expected. Conceptually, he understood the people in the game were real people. His Heart of Flesh could connect him to them if he really tried. He had felt the burning desire for life in the field of wheat. But it was hard to attach the same emotional stakes here that he had felt in the Grey Cult.

Back at Ashviel, everything was real, he could die. He had to watch his words, make sure nothing he said could be considered heresy. Here, he could do whatever he wanted. If he pissed off someone he shouldn't have, he could just self-detonate and respawn. Was he here because he was trying to help end the war? Or was he here because it seemed like an interesting quest line? He looked at Lord Ironhorn. Would he feel sad if Ironhorn died? If Shen Tianyi died? He didn't really know if he could honestly say yes.

"HEY! GET OVER HERE!" Kevin's voice echoed down the corridor, high and excited. They raced toward the sound, flying down the passageway. The corridor opened into a massive cavern. The ceiling rose so high their spirit lanterns couldn't reach it. The walls were covered in the same pale gray stone, and the tiles stretched from floor to ceiling. In front of them stood a broken gate. The gate clearly didn't fit in with the rest of the pale gray aesthetic.

It looked like some sort of thing he would have seen back in the Western Seat. It followed similar construction principles, it was full of wooden beams reinforced with spirit metal. And in the center of the gate, there was a massive hole. Someone had broken it apart. Leo looked through the hole in the gate, past it was the familiar stone walls that they spent the last twenty minutes walking through. Blue light flickered from some spiritual lanterns inside.

"What's going on?" Leo asked. Kevin was bouncing on his heels, holding a spiritual magnification scope to his eye.

"Look at the formations! Look!" He pointed at the hole in the gate. Leo activated his ortho-k vision and looked at the broken gate first. The qi density in the formation work was extreme. The only thing he could compare it to was the formations on his Sunshifter. Probably Tier 5. He frowned. The gate was clearly broken, the formations torn apart. So why was there still residual qi? Damaged formations lost their charge fast. Whoever broke through must have done it only a few weeks ago.

"We aren't the first ones here," Leo said. He glanced at Ironhorn. Ironhorn studied the broken gate. His gaze traced the torn formation lines, the shattered spirit metal. His jaw tightened.

"This was a Tier Five formation seal." Ironhorn said quietly.

"Whoever broke through possessed considerable power."

"We were told to make sure no one entered," Shattervow said. His voice had gone flat. Leo walked closer to the broken seal.

"No!" Kevin ran up to Leo and physically turned him toward the gap.

"Look inside! The formation work is crazy! The array runes are hexagons!" Mike and Arthur rushed through the gap. They stood in the chamber beyond, craning their necks upward, mouths hanging open. Leo peered through the gap. Inside the chamber, a formation lantern hung from the ceiling, casting a dim blue glow. Somehow, after hundreds of years sealed underground, it was still working. He activated his ortho-k vision and looked closer. Kevin was right. The array runes were hexagons.

He had never seen anything like this before. The formation didn't match anything from his training. The qi flow paths followed rules he had never encountered before. The formations seemed to breathe. The hexagonal patterns shifted slightly as he watched, reorganizing themselves in response to his presence. He turned to the two Lords. Both of them had gone still.

"Does Lord Shattervow recognize this?" Ironhorn asked. Shattervow withdrew his divine sense from the chamber. The silence stretched long enough that Leo began to wonder if he would answer at all.

"This is the signature sixty-four hexagram formation system of the Everlasting Empire." Leo was shocked. Everlasting Empire. He was not expecting to hear the name of a civilization that had been dead for thousands of years. He knew that name. There was an entry for it in the Common-to-English dictionary they had taken from Wei Tuo to learn the language. The dictionary was thousands of years old, full of entries for places that no longer existed.

The Everlasting Empire was one of them: Everlasting Empire - Imperial state governing the nine provinces. Renowned for advanced studies in puppetry, jiangshi (AN: cultivator zombies), and their signature hexagram formation system. He had asked Shen Tianyi about the Empire once. Tianyi didn't know much about it, he just mentioned that the Empire fell into ruin and disappeared thousands of years ago. Leo turned to Shattervow.

"What happened to the Empire? Is this profundity related to it?"

"This is no profundity." Shattervow kept his eyes on the broken seal.

"The ruins of the Empire are saturated with Slaughter Qi. Later generations frequently mistake their former installations for profundities." Leo stared at him.

"The Imperial Court mandated T5 Seals like these to be constructed to contain whatever lies below. To break such a seal is to defy the will of the Dragon Throne itself." Leo looked deeper into the hallway with his ortho-k vision, trying to see what the seal was meant to contain. Far below, past layers of stone and formation script, a thin strand of Slaughter Qi drifted upward from the darkness. Someone was down there.

Someone had taken the time to break through a Deity Transformation level seal in the middle of a war. Leo turned and thought back to the valley he had traveled through. The camps. The warships. The spiritual barriers layered in concentric rings. He had assumed they were pointed at each other. Now he saw them differently. They no longer looked like two armies preparing to fight. They looked like two armies preparing to contain whatever might emerge from below.

Leo looked back at the two Lords, hoping that they would have answers. Instead they just looked furious.

"Our assignment was never to prevent entry." Shattervow spoke each word like he was biting through it.

"Our assignment was to prevent interruption."

"We were placed above the entrance like dogs chained to a post, keeping the yard quiet while the master works."