Chương 170: Queen Victoria

The corridor behind the panel was narrow and quiet. Leo followed the guard through passages he hadn't known existed. The walls were paneled in dark oak, the carpet thick enough to swallow their footsteps. They passed doors that led nowhere he could see and staircases that descended into darkness. His mind raced. Why would the Queen want to speak with him? She was a Monarch, one of the most powerful cultivators on Earth. He was a cavalier. A nobody. Maybe she wanted to yell at him. That would make sense.

Her grandson had just detonated the Season on live television, and Leo had been standing next to him when it happened. But you didn't summon someone through secret passages to yell at them. You summoned them to the throne room. You made it public. You made an example. This was something else. This was Queen Victoria.

The woman who built an empire, buried a husband under circumstances no one dared investigate, and ruled for nearly two centuries without ever removing her mourning clothes Deity Transformation cultivators lived a long time. Centuries. The Queen had been old when Leo's great-grandparents were born, and she would be old when his great-grandchildren died. What did someone like that want with him? The guard stopped before a plain wooden door.

"Through here, sir." The guard did not open it.

"Mind your manners." Leo straightened his sash, ran the etiquette drills through his head one last time, and opened the door. The room was small. A coal fire burned in a grate. Two armchairs, worn at the arms. A low table with a tea service already steaming, doilies under the saucers, and a tin of biscuits with a picture of a corgi on the lid. Knitting sat in a basket beside one of the chairs, needles still crossed through a half-finished sleeve. A woman sat in that chair. She was small.

Round-faced, gray hair pinned in a simple bun, a black dress with a shawl over her shoulders. Reading glasses hung from a chain around her neck. Her hands were folded in her lap, soft and spotted with age, and she looked at Leo the way his grandmother had looked at him years ago. For one disorienting moment, Leo thought the guard had brought him to the wrong room. Then he recognized her. The black dress. The mourning clothes she had worn for centuries. The face from the portraits. He bowed.

Deep, formal, exactly the way the etiquette coach had drilled him.

"Your Majesty."

"Sit down, dear." She gestured at the other armchair.

"You've had a long evening." Leo sat. The door closed behind him. The guard's footsteps receded down the corridor. Then silence, broken only by the crackle of the fire. The Queen reached for the teapot and poured. The tea came out pale gold. The smell reached him before she slid the cup across the table, sandalwood and something green, something that loosened a knot behind his eyes.

"Drink some." He drank. The effect was immediate. His shoulders dropped. His racing thoughts slowed. The knot that had been sitting in his chest since the ballroom disaster began to unwind. Spiritual tea. High grade. He had no idea what tier, and he decided not to guess.

"Better." The Queen settled back with her own cup.

"You're wondering why I called for you."

"Your Majesty. I am your servant." The words came out smoothly. The etiquette lessons had done their work.

"Mm. They did train you." She sounded amused.

"Two and a half years ago, a young Lord came to me with a request. A dao heart technique, he said. For a junior of his. A boy in hospital with broken ribs and a problem too large for him." She sipped her tea.

"I scribbled down some thoughts. Old thoughts. I confess I didn't think much of it afterward. Seeds rarely sprout." She looked at him over the rim of her cup.

"Imagine my surprise when I learned that the junior had made considerable progress. That he had, in fact, cultivated it." Leo looked up. The young Lord was Newmont. The junior was himself. He remembered waking up in the hospital after the Battle of Fort Cambridge. Newmont had walked in and handed him a thin book with no author, no lineage, and no qi circulation pattern. It had read like therapy notes. It had saved his life twice. The Heart of Flesh. He was sitting across a tea table from the origin of his Dao.

His Dao, which had ignited in a wheat field at the edge of annihilation, traced its first spark to a sheet of paper this woman had scribbled without thinking much of it. Something in his chest shook. His cultivation shuddered. His qi stirred, blue and restless, and the room seemed to tilt.

"Drink your tea, dear." He drank. The warmth went down and found the fluctuation and smoothed it flat, and Leo understood why the tea had been waiting on the table before he arrived. She had known exactly what this conversation would do to him. His cup clicked back onto its saucer. The Heart of Flesh was about connection. The desire for life in all living things. Turning stone to flesh and feeling the world's hunger to exist. But how did that come from the Widow of Windsor?

The Queen's ascent to Deity Transformation was no secret. It had been a bloody affair. Wars, purges, family members who opposed her disappearing one by one. Her husband's death under circumstances that had never been fully explained. The Monarch watched him over her teacup, and Leo felt his thoughts lying open on the table between them. She smiled.

"I know my nickname, child." Leo said nothing.

"The Widow of Windsor. That is what they called me, yes? After Albert. After the others." Her voice was calm.

"The Heart of Flesh was not a realisation I came to on my road of cultivation, Mr. Chen. It was something I developed a hundred years after my ascension. Long after my dao was formed. Long after my path was set." You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. She set down her teacup.

"So I scatter the insights as seeds. Here and there, to see if anyone can cultivate what I could not." Her eyes came back to him.

"Most seeds fall on stone. A few sprout and wither at the first stage. You are the youngest ever to step into the intermediate stage." Leo nodded slowly. Monarch Scatterstraw's field. The slaughter qi reaching for his soul. His heart igniting in the final moment before annihilation.

"I do hope you will continue with the technique," the Queen said.

"There is rather more at stake than you know." She leaned forward.

"Tell me, dear. Have you heard what the great problem of Deity Transformation is?" Tianyi had told him, the day after his heart ignited. They had sat on the observation platform above the terraced fields, and Tianyi had explained why every Monarch who survived tribulation emerged damaged.

"Yes, Your Majesty. When a Nascent Soul advances to Deity Transformation, the heavenly tribulation cracks their divine body. The damage can't be repaired, only managed. Faith power from mortal worshippers is the most common solution." The Queen regarded him for a moment.

"Someone has taught you properly."

"Now. Open your enhanced vision." Leo hesitated. She knew about his ortho-k sight. She seemed to know everything. He activated the vision. The room shifted. Colors deepened. Patterns emerged in the wallpaper that weren't visible to normal eyes. Threads of spiritual qi wound through the fire in the hearth. And the Queen. Her physical form remained the same. An old woman in a shawl, sitting in an armchair, holding a teacup. But beneath that form, Leo saw her divine body. It fit inside her.

It shouldn't have been possible. It was vast. A structure of crystallized spiritual power that dwarfed the palace, dwarfed the city, dwarfed anything Leo had ever perceived or imagined. The divine infant that had consumed her gold core and grown for two centuries into something that defied mortal comprehension. And it was cracked. Fissures ran through the divine body like fault lines through a continent. Streams of purple radiance bled out into the air, each one wider than the room they sat in.

Leo's awareness was dragged toward one of the cracks. Pulled in. Consumed. The leaking divinity washed over him, through him, obliterating his sense of scale and self. For a terrifying moment he glimpsed something on the other side, something vast and incomprehensible that his mind could not contain. His sense of where his body sat began to smear at the edges. Somewhere very far away, his teacup rattled against its saucer. The Queen's voice reached him from a thousand miles away.

"Look away, child." Leo snapped back into his skin hard enough that the room lurched. His ortho-k sight was gone.

"Have some more tea." Leo's hands were shaking. He raised the cup and drank. The trembling eased.

"That is merely the beginning," the Queen said.

"The flaws compound as one advances. Void Refining is worse. The Immortals of the Great Ascension who dwell in the deepest reaches of the Catacombs have consulted with me personally. They sought my thoughts because they face the same problem, magnified beyond imagining." The Immortals themselves carried damage they could not repair. Every one of them leaking the power that defined them.

"There is not much time," the Queen continued.

"So I shall be brief. I am here tonight for two reasons." She picked up the teapot and refilled his cup without asking.

"When I established the Queen Charlotte's Ball, it was not to parade young women before potential suitors. It was to give them something far more valuable." She paused.

"The chance to struggle." Leo's blood went cold. Struggle. The character burned into his mind by the Corpse Eternal. The dao of an ancient cultivator branded onto his consciousness. Did she know? Her expression gave nothing away. She picked up her teacup and continued as if she had said something ordinary.

"These girls arrive with their destinies already spoken for. Families have seen to that long before the girls themselves had any say in the matter." She stirred her tea.

"When destiny is settled, what remains to a person? Struggle." Her eyes held his.

"To struggle is to live. To struggle is to be human. It is how we find our dao and ignite our fire of life." She fell silent. Leo realized what the Queen Charlotte's Ball actually was. A protected space for growth. A chance to fight for yourself without dying for it. He thought of Vicky in the ballroom, standing up to Edward, refusing to swallow what she knew for the sake of the match. Struggling.

"That has been the purpose for two hundred and fifty years. But struggle alone is not enough." The Queen was quiet for a long moment. The fire shifted in the grate. A log settled.

"I spent a great deal of my youth struggling." Her voice had changed. Softer. More distant.

"Climbing. Breaking through. Quite certain that if I fought hard enough, long enough, there would be something splendid waiting at the top." She turned the teacup in her hands, watching the liquid swirl.

"I thought struggle was the destination. I thought strength earned alone was the purest kind." But she had just said struggle was the purpose of the ball. That to struggle is to be human.

"I was terribly wrong." She looked up.

"And it took me a terribly long time to see it." She set the teacup aside.

"Struggle is necessary. I do believe that. But struggle on its own, struggle for the sake of oneself, produces something rather hollow." Her voice was quiet. Leo thought of the words from the Heart of Flesh technique. Powerful, isolated corpses severed from the living Dao. The Queen read his face.

"You have entered the intermediate stage of the Heart of Flesh technique. You know what that required." She folded her hands.

"Not greater strength. Not deeper isolation. The opposite. Your heart opened to something beyond yourself, the Heavenly Dao, and only then did the technique advance." The fire crackled. Leo looked at his tea. He had heard the term before. Heavenly Dao. Tianyi used it freely. So did every cultivation manual he'd ever read. But when pressed, no one could explain what it actually meant. They talked around it. Pointed at effects. Named its properties. She continued.

"The Heavenly Dao sustains all living things. What you perceive as karma threads are what that sustenance looks like when you open your eyes. You are kept alive by the same force that keeps alive people you will never meet, and that shared sustenance is the bond. Cultivation does not create it. It merely shows you what was always there." Sustenance? Leo tried to wrap his mind around that word. It felt right, but at the same time he had a hard time fitting it into what he felt in Scatterstraw's field of wheat.

The Queen moved on before he could ask more.

"There are young women in that ballroom who believe they are strangers. Rivals. Tonight, we give them what I was never given. A glimpse of the threads before they spend a century climbing blind." We. The word sat wrong. He was a teenager who had stumbled into the intermediate stage of a technique he barely understood. What part could he possibly play in showing anyone anything? Leo waited for her to explain. She didn't.

"Now." The Queen's tone shifted, though it stayed warm.

"The other matter I must resolve with you." She lifted one soft, spotted finger and pointed at his forehead.

"The Struggle rune in your head." Leo stopped breathing. She knew. She knew everything. The Queen waited. He drank some tea.

"You have contained it well," she said.

"But decade by decade it will seep. It will colour how you see obstacles, then how you see people, then how you see yourself, and one morning you will wake up and your Dao of all living things will have a crack in it shaped exactly like that character." She folded her hands. Leo waited.

"We give it something to argue with." She said it pleasantly.

"One influence alone in a sea of consciousness becomes a tyrant. Two become a parliament. They check each other, balance each other, while you remain yourself above them." She tilted her head.

"And it happens that my original Dao, the one baked into my cultivation long before I knew better, is the natural counterpart to Struggle. Form. Where Struggle breaks and remakes, Form holds and preserves. They are old enemies. They will be too busy with each other to bother with you." Form. Leo turned the word over. He thought of the Queen Charlotte's Ball. The same ceremony since 1780. The same curtsy, the same presentation, the same steps performed by generations of debutantes who never questioned why.

"I am offering you my blessing, Mr. Chen. The real one. The first I have given in a very long time." Her eyes were steady on his.

"Will you accept it?" Leo looked at her. The old woman in the armchair. The author of his cultivation technique. The Deity Transformation Monarch whose divine body leaked light through cracks that would never heal. She was offering him her dao. As a counterweight to the Eternal's brand.

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"Good lad." She set down her teacup.

"Do you know how to open your sea of consciousness?"

"I can learn."

"If you had learnt to, it would be a great deal less painful." She was already rising from the armchair, shawl sliding off her shoulders.

"But it doesn't matter."

"Wait. Wait, what do you mean it doesn't ma..." Divine pressure filled the room. It was nothing like the Moderator's domain, nothing like the slaughter qi that had reached for his soul. This was power so vast and so controlled that resisting it never occurred to him. Something closed around Leo. His body stayed in the chair. The rest of him was lifted out of it, his sea of consciousness drawn upward.

His sea of consciousness, the core of his divine sense, the space where his spiritual power resided, was extracted from his body like a tooth pulled from a jaw. No pain. Not yet. The Queen's divine sense wrapped around his exposed consciousness. He felt her examine it, probe its structure, find the place where the Struggle rune sat coiled like a sleeping serpent. Then she found an empty space beside it. And she wrote. The character burned into him. It seared through his consciousness. It rewrote pathways.

It carved itself into the foundation of his being. Leo screamed. Or tried to. His body was somewhere far away, slumped in an armchair, while his consciousness floated in the Monarch's grip. The last thing he perceived before the darkness took him was the two characters sitting side by side in his mind. Struggle and Form. Fire and structure. Chaos and order. Tearing into each other. Then nothing.