CHAPTER 222: ASHES OF AUTHORITY

Cheng no longer thought of himself as an elder of the Silent Moon Sect.

He never had, really.

The robes had fit like borrowed skin; worn only for shelter, never for belonging. Now they were gone, burnt to ash in a ditch two valleys back, and all that remained were his own tattered silks, stained dark at the cuffs with dried blood. Some his. Some not.

His boots dragged through the loam of a forgotten trail, long since abandoned by even the most desperate hunters. Moss crept up the bark of thin-trunked trees, and roots clawed out of the earth like crooked fingers. The only sound was the distant call of crows and the wheeze of his own breathing, made harsher by the cold bite of blood at the back of his throat.

He coughed, sharp and wet. A red mist painted the leaves beside him.

He stopped at the edge of a clearing, one hand gripping the gnarled trunk of a tree for balance. His other trembled, knuckles pale as bone, the fingers still twitching from overuse. The Veiled-Mandate Seal took more than he’d expected. More than it ever had before.

He looked up at the grey morning sky, lips cracked and dry.

“…Damned cultists.”

He didn’t speak the words with anger. There wasn’t energy for that anymore. Just the kind of numb resolve born of too many narrow escapes and too few answers.

He and Wei fled after the breach; after leaving Fang to his death. Cowardly? Perhaps. But it gave them time to flee. To put between space them and the cultists.

Every time they ran, the cultists followed. With precision. They didn’t chase like rabid dogs. They moved like hunters with a map. Always knowing the routes. Always finding them, no matter how far they traveled or how cleanly they masked their tracks. Cheng had watched entire villages razed just to flush them out; villagers butchered in patterns, their bodies placed like sacrificial runes.

Crescent Bay had become a Go board, and each step closer to civilization made their scent stronger.

At first, Cheng believed it was their spiritual signatures. But no technique explained this accuracy. This persistence.

No, they weren’t hunting him.

They were hunting it.

The Phoenix Tears.

“They knew. From the start.”

It hadn’t mattered how many of them they killed. Wei alone had slain a dozen, possibly more. Cheng had watched his own traps reduce three cloaked fanatics to ash. But they never slowed. Never thinned. The ones they defeated felt like puppets... decoys meant to exhaust them.

And then came the Envoys.

They’d underestimated the horrors lurking in Tranquil Breeze Province. Thought the scarcity of qi here made it impossible for anything stronger than Essence Awakening to thrive.

They were wrong about that, too.

Something had changed in the last year. The Heavenly Interface had descended; first as a curiosity, then as a threat. What had once been a backwater province full of forgotten sects and rotting scrolls had become a crucible.

Cheng spat into the moss and bitterly wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

He had never received a quest. Not one.

It was almost comical. A Spirit Ascension realm cultivator, veteran of two sects, and yet the damn thing barely acknowledged him. But it showered blessings on the peasants, gave martial quests to nobodies who had never even stepped into a sect’s outer courtyard. He watched prodigies rise over his station within years, when it otherwise would've took decades.

He scowled, jaw tight.

“It favors the unshaped. The unfinished.”

The ones with room to grow. To be guided.

'But what use was a divine path to someone already walking the only one available?'

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He had forged his cultivation through fire and blood. There was no other way forward now but the Phoenix Tears.

Cheng’s hand brushed the talisman pouch at his side, feeling the brittle edges of paper soaked in his own heart-blood. The last one was still warm. Barely.

The Veiled-Mandate Seal wasn’t a technique meant for long-term use. He’d created the talismans from scratch; three total. Each drawn in blood directly siphoned from the heart. When activated, it fractured his qi flow, scattering threads of his presence in conflicting directions with every exhale. It obscured not just his position, but everything on him. Even a higher-tier cultivator’s divine sense would pass over him like fog.

But the cost was steep. His meridians ached. His cultivation base frayed with each breath, unraveling like rope worn too thin. A lesser man would've collapsed from the burden of maintaining it for so long.

And he couldn’t stop now.

Going to Crescent Bay would be suicide. Wei might have gone that way. Cheng didn’t know. Their last exchange had been a scream and a flash of light as they were separated by the cultists’ latest ambush.

But Wei was always the gambler. The strategist.

Cheng was the survivor.

He chose obscurity. A calculated bet.

'No sects patrolled this far out north. No beasts of real threat. Just groves twisted with time and trails that only ghosts remembered. This was a place forgotten by even the mountain winds.'

A perfect graveyard, if he failed.

Cheng stumbled forward another dozen paces until a moss-covered shack emerged from the tangled brush at the base of a rocky slope. The structure was little more than a skeleton, half-rotted planks leaning against each other like exhausted soldiers, its sagging roof blanketed in lichen. Inside, the space was tight, damp, and smelled of mold. A sodden mattress rested near a crude stone stove, long abandoned.

He exhaled slowly, relief flickering briefly through his chest.

'This would do.

'

But as he stepped over the threshold, boots squelching against the half-rotted floor, another feeling rose unbidden.

Shame.

Just several weeks ago, Cheng had reclined on silken bedding lined with fox-fur, fanned by disciples and given treatment equal to the Emperor.

A room like this, soaked through with rot and mildew, would’ve been beneath the lowliest servants.

Now?

He was grateful for a roof that didn’t collapse when he leaned on it.

He let out a long breath, shaky at the edges. There was no one left to impress. No robes to starch. No titles worth whispering.

A cultivator in the Spirit Ascension realm required little; less food, less sleep, less warmth than ordinary mortals. But less was not nothing. After weeks of running, hiding, sleeping in tree hollows and coughing blood onto snow, this ruined shack might as well have been a palace.

He lowered himself to the edge of the mattress with all the grace of a man twice his age, the damp fabric sighing beneath him. The ache in his joints made him wince. Not just spiritual exhaustion. Not just backlash from the Seal.

Just… mortal weariness.

He hated how much of it he felt. Beneath the frustration, the bruised ego, the raw edges of a shattered life; there was also a thread of something simpler.

Relief.

No footsteps behind him. No chanted whispers chasing him in the dark. No Wei arguing at his side, gambling their fates on another bold maneuver.

Just silence. And the smell of mold.

He let it sit with him a while longer than necessary.

Carefully, with practiced motions despite trembling fingers, Cheng pulled small paper talismans from within his sleeves. Each was etched with precise brushstrokes of blood, dried and brittle. He placed them around the entrance and beneath the creaking floorboards, whispering low incantations as he moved.

If anyone entered without performing the exact sequence of steps required, steps only Cheng himself knew, the perimeter around the entire shack would ignite, incinerating everything inside that wasn't him.

It was brutal. Crude, even.

But effective.

He knelt slowly onto the damp mattress, the ache in his bones deeper now, the nausea churning at the pit of his stomach. His breathing was ragged, each exhale shredding his lungs a little more. The Veiled-Mandate Seal had already claimed much. He knew it would claim even more.

From the storage ring on his left hand, he withdrew a small crystalline vial that hummed softly in the dimness. His breath caught despite himself. Within, a viscous liquid shimmered brilliantly, distorting the very heat around it; Phoenix Tears, pure yang energy so potent it felt like liquid fire even through the sealed case.

He stared.

His fingers tightened involuntarily.

For one terrible moment, he wanted to smash it. Just hurl the damned thing into the corner of the shack, hear the glass shatter, see the golden liquid boil away into nothing. No more running. No more weight.

His arm even twitched, half-lifting.

Break it. End it.

The urge swelled like nausea, a tidal wave rising in his throat.

But his hand stayed frozen.

Not from restraint.

From need.

He lowered the vial slowly, breath shallow, trembling. His grip tightened instead, knuckles pale.

“You,” he muttered bitterly, voice raw with exhaustion, “have ruined everything.”

He squeezed it tighter, feeling its heat through the seal. The memory of taking it flashed vividly, an impulse, a moment of greed that shattered his place in the Azure Sky Sect and forced him to flee across the sea. Allies lost, sects destroyed, reputation burned... all for the promise held in this tiny vial. And it was clear the cultists coveted it just as much as he did.

But he didn’t loosen his grip. He couldn’t.

At the second rank of Spirit Ascension realm, Cheng knew he’d reached the end of his natural potential decades ago. No matter how much he cultivated, no matter how bitterly he struggled, Earthly Transcendence was forever beyond his reach without divine-grade materials.

Materials like these Phoenix Tears.

If he could pair this raw yang energy with the perfect yin balance, he could shatter that ceiling completely. Not merely ascend within the Spirit Ascension realm but surpass it entirely, stepping directly into Earthly Transcendence.

“Not just some elder in this backwater province,” he whispered hoarsely, the gleam in his eyes almost feverish, “but a sect leader in the mainland.”

Outside, thunder rolled faintly. The wind picked up, shaking branches and scattering leaves like fleeing insects. The air changed subtly, turning colder.

A storm brewed in the distance.

Rain began gently, soft droplets falling with quiet taps against the rotting wooden roof.

Cheng ignored it at first, absorbed by the vial and the fevered visions of his potential future.

The weakness he felt—the tremors in his limbs, the persistent nausea—had to be side-effects of the Veiled-Mandate Seal. He’d been aware it distorted qi perception and muddied spiritual senses. It was expected.

But the rain persisted, growing louder, more insistent. A droplet slipped through a gap in the planks above, landing directly on his shoulder.

Another drop followed, hitting the vial itself with a delicate plink. Cheng grumbled irritably and reinforced the protective barrier surrounding the vial, certain the sensation of wrongness was just another illusion wrought by the Seal.

“It’s nothing,” he muttered irritably, brushing at his shoulder. His fingers came away wet and strangely colored, stained a faint violet hue like bruised orchids. He blinked, confused, wiping harder at the fabric. Another droplet landed on his sleeve, spreading slowly into the silk.

He scowled, feeling a flash of unease twist through his gut. When he licked his lips unconsciously, the taste was metallic, coppery, faintly bitter.

Still, no pain. No sharp alarm. Just a strange discoloration, a trick of perception. He’d faced worse illusions before.

Yet he couldn’t suppress the unease growing inside him, an instinctive warning deep in his gut. Something was off. Something beyond mere illusion or fatigue.

The violet rain continued to fall, gentle and relentless, staining the earth outside in unnatural hues.

He shifted on the damp mattress, holding the Phoenix Tears tight. Tomorrow he’d move again, he decided. Find safer shelter.

Once he found the yin ingredient to temper the Phoenix Tears... then none of this would matter. Cultists, illusions, betrayal... he’d leave it all behind.

Outside, the violet rain fell steadily, soaking the shack, staining the earth.