Chương 37: Chapter 36

She was still deciding when she heard a sudden ruckus outside. Buoyed by the Night, Wu Zetian's thought process ran as fast as lightning.

In the time it would have taken an average cultivator to start formulating one thought, she went through, in rapid succession: irritation for the interruption; dismay for being so distracted as not to see it coming; battle readiness as she took in her sorroundings in case of ambush; grim determination as she swept through her surveillance network and took in the whole palace, starting from anyone and everyone who could be held responsible for the disturbance.

Only then, while the hearts of the twelve – not thirteen – secretaries had just started to spike with anxiety at the thought of her reaction to the interruption, her perceptions swept out of the doors like a tidal wave. Another kind of dismay took hold of her then. The secretaries were going through the motion of surprise, all of them moving as if caught underwater, as she flitted between them. She flung the throneroom doors open, stepping through.

A crowd of panicking maids and servants surrounded a fury of dark lightning that could only be Wu Lin. Two guards in the Hand uniforms were doing their best to restrain her, yowling and cursing every time they got stung. A third one had taken hold of another kid Wu Zetian had never seen before. She held him down, the child kicking and yelling. What did you say to that? If Immortals had answers, she wasn't one of them.

Wu Zetian let her quickened awareness blunt the mix of emotions surging in her chest, before she announced herself with a burst of Qi. Like throwing a bucket of water over a rowdy party. Expressions ranging from the horrified to the stunned snapped on her, followed by a general scramble to kowtow, the weight of her Qi generously helping. The guards jumped to attention so fast their bodies briefly forgot to be smushed to the ground by her aura, which they remembered quickly.

Not bothering to hide her irritation, Wu Zetian let her gaze roam over the crowd of almost prone bodies.

"Explain yourself." One did.

"Grandmaaaaa!" Wu Lin zipped forward in her shadow-sphere form, straight for her and as receptive to etiquette as a squirrel. Wu Zetian's first impulse was to push her away with a wave of Qi. Her second impulse was to panic and cancel it before a little girl could get squashed by mistake. Outside of her quickened perceptions, what was seen was the Ancestor receiving the crying child's tackle with the grace of a marble column.

"Grandma!" Wu Lin cried, not seeming to mind. The little girl buried her face in Wu Zetian's lap.

"They're bullying me!" A series of croaks may have gone up from the assembled crowd. Wu Zetian wasn't sure she noticed. She passed through disbelief, realization and outrage too fast for anything else to register. And then she had grown ten feet, looking down at a bunch of soon-to-be-dead meat who looked up in terror.

"We're not! We're not!" managed a handsome young man who must have been quite the catch when not begging for his life.

"The Young Lady wanted to disturb the Founder! We only wanted to restrain her until the Ancestor was informed!" Wu Zetian's ears didn't seem to work well at the moment. Good thing her Night let her read lips easily. She turned to Wu Lin, a question in her gaze. The little girl played dirty. She made puppy eyes. Puppy eyes. Motherflipping puppy eyes. With sparkles and all. Wu Zetian never felt holding her frown as difficult as in that moment.

Surely any Immortal who managed the titanic enterprise deserved to receive direct praise from Tien itself.

"Little rascal, explain yourself." Lin pouted, looked away, and did just that. As it turned out, she had almost maimed a bunch of servants just doing their job. Sighing, back to her normal height, Wu Zetian waved maids and soldiers away, which they did with frankly understandable haste. Feeling vaguely cheated, she frowned at the rascal who seemed to have decided that making her life more complicated than it should be was funny.

Wu Lin grinned right back, as self-satisfied as a cat who had just pushed a glass off the table and just as repentant.

"Grandma!" She cheered, hugging her leg. The sneaky little traitor.

"Grandma is back!" Wu Zetian tried to remain angry. She really did. But Lin looked so happy. Was someone ever so honestly happy to see me? Without any idea of payment or advantages to be had. Just… happy. Getting a resounding no regarding her previous life was the matter of a quick memory scan. Moving through the tens of millennia of vicious, hard-bitten life of her previous self took longer and gave the exact same result. Wu Zetian let out a soft sigh, giving up the fight.

Certain battles couldn't be won, and that was one of them. Yet again, others needed to be fought.

"Little Lin," she chided, trying to be reasonable.

"You know that I am very busy. It's not good for you to barge in during these moments. If you want my… company, you have to wait." Kings would abase before her in terror and supplication. You'd think that a little girl wouldn't have the gall to stomp her foot and puff her cheeks.

"When?!" Wu Lin asked, and it very much sounded like something she had been itching to say for a long time. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. Wu Zetian was taken aback. She… she didn't take breaks from work. There could be interruptions, forced or wanted, because she needed to rest. But moments meant for entirely different things… When? Well… Lin stomped her foot again.

"It has been a whole moon, Grandma!" She protested, and there was real hurt there.

"Since you've woken up, you've been in there! Wu Zetian watched her. It was good that her poker face was ingrained in her bones, because she wasn't sure her composure would have held otherwise. One whole moon? That was a month. That… can't be right. Except that her perception of time was infallible. It had been a month. One month since her awakening, and one full month she had passed in her throneroom, managing affairs, giving orders and receiving reports. That she hadn't felt mortal needs didn't touch her.

Thirst and hunger were things of the past. Even fatigue could touch her only marginally: her Immortal Soul pulled Night Qi nonstop, constantly refining itself. Anything less than a battle-level strain could do little to exhaust her. Not that it dismayed her how deeply she had got into it. Hyperfocus had always been the name of the game for her. Even in her previous life, she had to learn to play around it, assigning people and tools to keep herself from fixating.

Even to a logical level, she knew that a month had passed. She grasped it to a level far deeper than the child looking up at her with wounded eyes. Likely, she did so more deeply than a Sect Elder could. Above her Night, she felt the constellations move, and the Gods shift and change their place. No. What stunned her was that even knowing all that, it still didn't feel like much. A month of constant, unflinching effort felt like half a day of moderate pressure.

And she had to force her more emotional side not to think of it as such. Of course. An Immortal counts their existence in millennia. A month is nothing. For a moment, a wave of unreasonable fear washed over her. Did she live in a different type of time perception than the rest of the world? She picked at her awareness. Accelerating and decelerating the speed of the world around her was trivial: it was only a question of how deeply she tapped into the sensorial powers of her aura.

The Path of Sight, pushed to its extreme limits, let her speed up her thought process to impossible levels. This… it was only a distraction, nothing more. The distraction of an Immortal, who was so untethered by worldly concerns that she may give herself to a passion for the time that would see a mortal die of exhaustion and feel nothing. Simply put, she had allowed her work to engulf her. Her instinctively different grasp of time did the rest. … disturbing. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

She clamped down on her awareness of time, forcing it under tight control. It wasn't easy: her mind worked on different orders of magnitude, even from those of Nascent Soul. Yet, it would have to be done. It must be. She couldn't allow time to escape her so easily. Far too close to how I wasted my previous life. She let out a slow breath, forcing her scattered thoughts back in order. Wu Lin was still pouting. For once, being able to think in hyperspeed was helpful. The little girl hadn't noticed her turmoil.

Wu Zetian kneeled, her Immortal body turning the simple act into poetry in motion.

"You're right…" she admitted, and it said volumes about her personality that even admitting that much felt like a strain. She only managed because there was nobody else to listen, and because Wu Lin seemed to have a preternatural ability at breaking down her barriers.

"I guess I…" Wu Zetian smiled.

"… got distracted." Never admit your mistakes. Always appear like you're always in control. From beyond the grave, her father's voice felt like a whip cracking on her back. Suddenly, she was back in her grandfather's study. Old furniture, spotless and grim, loomed over her on all sides. Father sat beyond the great desk, a little man drowning in a chair too big for him. His eyes bore feverishly into her, and all his anxiety, his eagerness, his fear of failure were hers. Wu Zetian dug fingernails in her palm.

Far beneath, a Heart Demon emerged mewling from the sand. Wu Lin looked thoughtful. For a moment. Then, a big grin broke on her face.

"Alright then!" She cheered, and reached out, grabbing her hand with her small ones.

"So, can we be together for a while now?" She asked, desperate hope making her eyes gleam. Wu Zetian watched her, ignoring how her little fingers felt like a charge of electricity. It was all over her Qi, like a bad smell that refused to leave. Solitude. Tears. One month. One month left alone while Grandma and Brother ran the Sect. And she had never complained, not even when it had become unbearable.

Only now, after so long, she had come, and all it took was a little touch for all sorrow to be wiped off, like a ray of light after a long rain. I don't deserve this… I really don't… Wu Zetian reached out, squashing the Heart Demon with the tip of her forefinger. Lingering goosebumps ran across her skin at the thought of stopping the work. It was never pleasant to stop the work. It was when the rush ceased and everything came crashing on her shoulders.

But one look at that timid hope and every consideration for herself felt horrible.

"But of course," she smiled. That sealed it. Wu Lin beamed, grin shining like the sun.

"Yay!" There was always silence after work. Deep and smothering. There was silence too while she gave instructions to her secretaries – twelve, there were twelve of them -, which, incidentally, she had frozen in darkness out of instinct. They were rattled, but rallied quickly, accepting all her words, and then scattering for their assignment. Wu Zetian watched them go, a mix of unpleasant feelings twisting in her chest. Her perception of time wasn't the only thing work had skewed.

While she kept an iron grip on all things to a macro-level, faces and names had been sliding off. Her Immortal perceptions were sharpened like a blade. Too sharp. Everything that wasn't needed for the purpose of lifting the Sect was promptly discarded. That was why, while she could follow dozens of processes encompassing all of the Domain at once, and name all details on a whim, she could mistake her twelve secretaries for thirteen… or don't remember their names. It wasn't needed. Simple as that.

And that brought its own stark realization. She had been closing herself off. Again. With her perceptions allowing her to run everything from her seat, she had instinctively returned to considering her domain as a set of numbers and faceless drones. She had moved, managed, ordered, all with unflinching efficiency, and forgot entirely about the fact that it was people she was regulating, lives she was ordering, families she was dealing with.

It had all become, once more, a concept she was chasing, the wealth of a sect instead of a multi-billion-dollar business. Even the idea of people benefiting from her work had long turned abstract. It was an ideal, a vague image, not something real she truly understood. Wu Zetian stifled a frustrated gesture. And after all the promises I made and the attempts at seeing people as people. A good new beginning for sure. The moment she immersed herself in work, everything had flown out of the window.

One month, and she was already distancing herself again. It would have been easy to think that it was the lingering influence of her previous self, but she wasn't so naive. The old Wu Zetian resembled her far too much. They were peas in a pond, the two of them, nasty old women who preferred to drown in their self-interested games rather than face their inability to connect, or that their struggle had long lost its meaning. Wu Zetian banished that train of thought, refusing to chase it further.

Wu Lin was waiting for her, beaming like the moon. She was little, alone and pure, and at that moment, she felt like the only real thing the great Immortal could cling to.

"Shall we?" She said, beckoning. Wu Lin didn't need to be told twice. She hopped to her, clinging to her leg. Wu Zetian's priceless robes bent a little under her granddaughter's little fingers.

"Come on!" She said, because she needed the last word, the little scamp. She grabbed her hand, pulling excitedly.

"You've been working so hard, Grandma! Come take a look at how much it did!" That… it shouldn't have felt as intimidating as it did. Voices from the past, both of them, hissed in her ears, threatening her from this path. Ghost of the dead, curses laid a long time past, against the smile of that little girl who was far too perceptive for her own good. Wu Zetian was very grateful for her poker face. She allowed herself to be led into the Palace, setting her long stride to Wu Lin's excited hopping.