Chương 190: Chapter 191: The Truth

"You know what it means to stand at the edge of the fog and make a choice." Grayscroll's voice reached every ear in Stonehaven.

"You have stood where this Lord stands. You have taken what lies within." Leo's heart leapt into his throat. Whispers spread across the rooftops. On the plaza, brothers of the Guano Gang exchanged glances. Leo stood frozen in the atrium. The trap was closing. Every word Grayscroll spoke drew the crowd's attention toward a question Leo couldn't answer. Why didn't Boss Leo go into the fog himself? Why did thousands have to die when one cultivator could have saved them all? He had seen this coming.

He had identified the scheme before stepping into it. He had prepared for this. He knew exactly what to do. He was going to pull an Arthur and blame someone else. Leo turned and walked back through the shattered gates. The plaza opened up in front of him, torchlit, packed to the walls, silent. He picked a spot at the center where the whole avenue could see him and took one long, slow breath, gathering his thoughts. He amplified his voice with spiritual qi.

"He's right." The silence deepened. Nobody had expected that.

"Years ago, before there was a Heavenstone Sect, before the first brick of Stonehaven was laid, I stood right about where I'm standing now. I looked at that fog. And I remember exactly how it felt." He paused. Let them wait.

"It felt like there was one road. One step in front of me, and no other choice." Leo kept his face solemn and turned slowly as he spoke, taking in the rooftops, the crowd, the refugees pressed into every doorway.

"The Heavenstone Sect knew that feeling. They ran the selections because it was the only choice they had." He looked out at the crowd.

"And you all know that feeling too. Every one of you. You left your homes because staying meant death. You came to Stonehaven because there was nowhere else to go. That wasn't a choice either." Nobody answered. Nobody needed to.

"So I want to ask a question. Not to Lord Grayscroll. To you. All of you. And I want you to actually think about it, because it's been sitting in front of us this whole time and nobody's asked it out loud. Why does every road in the Lanternmarches end in the same place?" Silence.

"Millions of people were driven out of their homes by Cloudpiercer's war. And every one of them funneled here. Into these refuges. Along the Embertears river." Leo raised a hand and started counting.

"West is the war. That's what you're running from. You try to go east, the Central Provinces turn you around at the border and send you back. North and south? Beast territory. So you came here. Same as everyone else. Millions of people, and every single one of them ended up in the same place." Behind him, footsteps sounded in the corridor. Grayscroll, Tianyi, and probably Sparrow. Leo didn't turn around. He raised his voice instead.

"The moment Cloudpiercer launched his war, everyone could see where we'd all end up. So why wasn't there anything waiting for us? No relief. No work. No road to the Central Provinces. Just the fog, and the selections, and the beast territories on every side." His voice rose.

"Why does it feel like we've all been gathered together so the beasts can feed on us?" He paused. Let them wait.

"Millions of us, herded into one pen, fattened on hope. And when the flock was big enough, the beasts came to feed." The crowd stared at him.

"A conspiracy at the highest level. Between Monarch Cloudpiercer and the Imperial Secret Police. And behind both of them, one man. A cultivator who calls himself the Enlightened." The crowd erupted. Shouts, curses, screaming. Leo stood in the middle of it and did not move. Tianyi stepped forward. He had been listening from behind Lord Grayscroll and decided Leo had done a good enough job. Now it was his turn. One man shouting conspiracy was a lunatic. Two men explaining it was an exposé.

"This one is Shen Tianyi, of the Shen family." He did not amplify his voice much. He made them listen instead.

"This one asks you to consider, for a moment, the process of pill creation." Confused glances crossed the rooftops.

"Every cultivator here has consumed an alchemical pill. Every cultivator here knows that a spiritual pill requires four things. A cauldron, to contain the work. Spiritual ingredients, to be transformed. Alchemical fire, to refine them." He paused.

"And the pill itself."

"The valleys of the Embertears River are the cauldron. Sealed on every side. Nothing leaves that is not permitted to leave. Lord Hollowfang confirmed that before the first refugee crossed into these mountains, someone went to the Beast Kings and negotiated your right to settle in these valleys. Someone purchased this valley the way an alchemist selects a vessel before the work begins." The mountains stood black against the night sky in every direction, ridge stacked behind ridge.

For the first time, the people of Stonehaven noticed how much the valley walls looked like the sides of a vessel.

"We are all the ingredients. Within the Embroidered Uniform Guards stands a high-ranking cultivator known as the Enlightened. He has betrayed the Emperor. He conspired with Cloudpiercer to start the war in the west which drove you all into these valleys. Into the vessel prepared to receive you." Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. No one needed to look far. The Savage Mountains, an empty wilderness two years ago, now sat packed denser than the imperial capital itself.

"The beast tide is the fire." His voice went quieter still.

"That was lit by someone in the Embroidered Uniform Guard. Fire renders the ingredients down, and the tide was set upon you for the same purpose. To burn away your bodies and leave only what the alchemist wants." Beyond the outer wall, the burned forests still glowed. Lines of embers traced the foothills where the outlying refugee camps had been.

"Slaughter Qi. To be consumed by the one who arranged all of it." He stood very still.

"The Enlightened." No one spoke. Tianyi continued.

"The Enlightened does not draw from spirit veins or refine the qi of heaven and earth. He feeds on Slaughter Qi. The energy that rises from massacre. Every death in this valley is a grain of medicine to him, and two million grains were refined in a single night."

"This one does not ask for belief. This one asks only that you consult your own senses. Extend your perception. Every cultivator past Foundation Establishment can feel it pressing on their sea of consciousness at this very moment." The Slaughter Qi hung over the mountains. It pooled in the valleys. It clung to the fires. It had been there all night, a wrongness everyone had felt and no one had named.

"When beasts kill men, the Heavenly Dao considers it the way of the world. No Slaughter Qi forms. And yet it is everywhere. The Dao itself is telling you a human was responsible for the beast tide. That someone lit this fire, and threw you into the pill furnace." He turned his face to the western peaks and said nothing more. Hundreds of thousands of cultivators turned with him, staring into the dark, trying to figure out who was staring back.

Envoy Sparrow had heard enough. These cultivators were weaving lies. Constructing a conspiracy from smoke and speculation. Lord Deng would want to know. Lord Deng would want Sparrow to report everything, to identify the speakers, to catalog their accusations for future action. Sparrow opened his mouth.

"This one serves the Emp..."

Lord Grayscroll focused his spiritual pressure on Envoy Sparrow and pressed until the man collapsed.

"The envoy will have his chance to answer. Before a proper tribunal." Grayscroll had walked out here to turn the crowd against Leo Chen. To remind them they only started to harvest soil because the boy had done so first. Instead, he had walked into something completely unexpected. He wasn't so sure if he could trust the words of these juniors. But if the Imperial Secret Police were servants of a demon... If Lord Deng's demands were part of a conspiracy to harvest cultivators for Slaughter Qi...

Then Grayscroll was not a collaborator. He was a victim. A man who had been deceived. A man who could throw off his chains and claim he had never known. Leo Chen and Shen Tianyi were handing him a lifeline. A narrative that absolved him of everything. A way out of the exorbitant tribute. All he had to do was take it. Grayscroll stepped forward.

"This Lord thanks Leo Chen." Of everything the crowd heard tonight, this was the most unexpected.

"This Lord's eyes have been clouded." Grayscroll's voice carried across the plaza.

"For years, this Lord believed he was navigating treacherous waters. Making hard choices for the good of the Sect. Now this Lord sees that he was manipulated from the beginning." Leo watched Grayscroll speak and felt two things at once. Relief, because his plan had worked. And guilt, because the man who had fed ten thousand disciples into the fog was about to walk away clean.

"For two years, this Lord told himself that the choices he made was for the good of the Sect. Tonight this Lord learns that the roads were few because they were built to be few. That the hand narrowing them belonged to another. This Lord looks back on two years of choices and no longer knows which of them were his own."

"This Lord's eyes were clouded. This Lord was deceived by the very authority to which he answered." He turned, robes sweeping, and leveled one hand at the unconscious Envoy Sparrow.

"By this man. An agent of the Embroidered Uniform Guards. A servant of the demon, who came to this Lord's hall bearing the Emperor's seal and the demon's instructions, and who spoke to this Lord of tribute while his master fed on the dead." The crowd's roar broke against the walls. On the rooftops, cultivators who had spent two years fearing the Guards' name screamed it now like a curse.

"This Lord committed a wrong against Shen Tianyi, and before all of Stonehaven, this Lord acknowledges it. This Lord's selections saved tens of thousands. But the hand that forced those selections belonged to another. The Heavenstone Sect surrenders the one called Envoy Sparrow to the Guano Gang. Let him answer for his master." Zhang Wei moved forward, grabbed the unconscious envoy, and lifted him away from Grayscroll's side. Grayscroll turned to Leo.

"This Lord has much to discuss with the elders of the Heavenstone Sect. We must determine a new path forward." His expression was unreadable.

"In light of what has been revealed tonight." Leo nodded. He brought his hands together in a formal Daoist salute.

"This one thanks Lord Grayscroll for his understanding." He turned and walked away. Tianyi walked to his right. Zhang Wei walked at his left, hoisting Envoy Sparrow over his shoulders. The brothers of the Guano Gang fell in behind him. They marched down the great avenue, away from the fog, away from the city, away from the hundreds of thousands of cultivators who suddenly realized they had a lot of questions.

The people of Stonehaven had expected a simple resolution. Good and evil. Right and wrong. The monster exposed, the hero victorious, the injustice corrected in a single night. Instead, they learned they were ingredients in a cauldron. The beast tide that had burned their homes and killed their families was not random violence. It was a conspiracy. The Guano Gang marched through the streets with their chests thrust forward. The brothers held their heads high.

They had faced down a Nascent Soul sect and walked away with a prisoner and an apology. It looked like victory. But to be honest, almost nothing Leo and Tianyi had said was entirely true. Leo hadn't walked into the fog to save anyone. He'd been treasure hunting. And the rest of it was wild speculation. The Enlightened existed, yes.

But whether he had orchestrated the beast tide, negotiated with the Beast Kings, or was lurking in the Savage Mountains at this very moment feeding on Slaughter Qi, none of them actually knew. None of them fully believed what had been said tonight. Not even Lord Grayscroll. But it was good enough. Grayscroll had his exit from the Imperial Secret Police's demands. Leo had his distraction from questions about what he did in the fog.

And the crowd had their villain, their explanation, their reason to believe that the world still had hope for them. In the end, what more could anyone ask for? After all, isn't the truth what we make of the world?

At the city gates, Leo handed off everything he could. Zhang Wei would hold Envoy Sparrow somewhere quiet. Not for interrogation. They didn't need his answers. They'd already supplied them. The brothers of the Guano Gang would disperse the crowd, and make sure no one did anything stupid before morning. Leo and Shen Tianyi flew alone together, east towards Skyhome. After a few minutes, when the fires were just a glow on the horizon, Leo slowed his sword. Tianyi pulled alongside him.

"Tianyi." Leo's voice was quiet.

"Was letting Grayscroll go unpunished the right thing to do?"