Su Yaping went still. He turned and fixed his gaze on the main gate.
He had commissioned it himself. The doors were forged from red sunken wood salvaged from the deep seabed, banded in alloyed iron, and weighed upwards of four thousand six hundred jin. An ordinary man could not budge them. Opening them required cranking a set of internal chanisms—a job that took two or three n working together just to haul the doors apart.
Beyond that, every exterior wall of the manor had been built from the densest deep-sea copper stone. Even if he threw his full strength against them barehanded, it would take dozens of blows to force a breach.
On top of all this, he had personally laid down a dedicated Relic protection array inside.
With a defense this formidable, even he would be shut out for so ti if he ever lost his keys.
And yet—
Su Yaping watched as the heavy doors were slowly pulled open. Against the pale gray of early dawn, two silhouettes stepped through and into the courtyard.
"Not bad. This will do as a place to lay low for a while," the white silhouette in front murmured. Her voice was crisp and composed.
"You're right, but why not rest at the Moon Tower directly? The Inner City's Moon Tower must have sensed our arrival by now," said the man behind her, deferential and low.
"The Moon Tower is tedious," the woman said lightly. "Those three are not easy to manage—and unless I have pressing business, I'd rather not deal with them. They're busy fighting the Mist Gods right now and won't want extra complications. If I don't make the first move, they'll simply look the other way. That suits
fine."
"I see," the man replied.
"Now then—you're Su Yaping, aren't you?" Her gaze settled on Su Yaping, who stood rigid in front of his bedroom door. "Co here, little one. Tell —where is your master right now?"
As she drew closer, the strange distortion rippling around her gradually dissolved, and her true face erged.
The mont he saw it, Su Yaping's pupils shrank. He stepped back without aning to.
Her face was pitch-black. A single multicolored eye sat in the center of her brow, pulsing with a sharp, iridescent halo.
The next instant, the world around him changed completely.
The courtyard bled dark red. A layer of dark flesh spread silently across every surface—blood weeping from the ground, the walls bristling with intestine-like villi, the stone pillars sheathed in pulsating fleshy mbranes. A thick, fetid stench saturated the air.
My mind-spirit—completely overwheld. What are they? Terror seized Su Yaping in its grip.
He had been pulled into her mind-spirit domain.
At his current level of mind-spirit strength, not even a Blood Ancestor could have done this so effortlessly—and certainly not on first contact, before he had drawn a single breath to resist.
There was only one type of being capable of this.
A Mistborn.
The realization struck him like cold water. He forced himself still, completely motionless. He understood that resistance was useless now; she could brainwash him, restructure his cognition, and leave him a babbling wreck.
"This junior was unaware of Your Excellency's arrival. If there is anything Su Yaping can do, you need only give the order." He knelt.
"Tell
your master's whereabouts," the woman said again.
"My master..." Conflict tore through him. He wanted to answer—but in that instant, the image of the Clear Wind Temple's Law Seal blazed in his mind.
If he betrayed his master, the Law Seal would abandon him. And the power the Clear Wind Temple offered was the key to every breakthrough that remained ahead of him.
But if he said nothing now—
"You're hesitating?" The woman saw through him imdiately. A trace of genuine surprise entered her expression.
A Luminous Extre—daring to hesitate, even for a mont, in front of her?
Even if he ultimately chose betrayal, the fact that he had wavered at all was remarkable. Martial arts and The Call, even pressed to their absolute limits, were little more than parlor tricks asured against a Mistborn's scale. Practitioners of both paths were powerless in any confrontation with a being like her.
This was why the Mistborn—she herself among them—treated the mortal world with a certain detached amusent, reserving real seriousness only for their own kind. But Su Yaping's hesitation, and the will behind it, made her already-keen curiosity about Lin Hui sharpen further.
A bright smile spread across Tuyue's face. "It has been a long ti since anything was this interesting."
"Your Excellency." Su Yaping trembled, bowing low. "If I reveal my master's whereabouts, I will pay a trendous price. But I also know that refusing to answer truthfully ans you will make
suffer far worse. That is why I find myself caught—and why I hesitate."
"A trendous price." Tuyue's smile didn't waver. "You think the price he can extract from you is comparable to the price I can extract?"
"In this junior's heart, yes," Su Yaping said quietly, without flinching.
If he could no longer pursue a higher peak—if the path forward was closed to him—he would rather die.
"Interesting. Too interesting!" Tuyue broke into open, ringing laughter.
Her laughter shook the ground. The houses humd around them, every wall and beam vibrating as though the world itself was bracing against the sound.
Su Yaping and Ning Qianzhi pressed their heads down and did not move, saying nothing, waiting for the laughter to run its course.
After several long minutes, it finally ceased.
"I'll ask one more question."
"Please," Su Yaping said, exhaling quietly.
"Just how strong is your master? Strong enough to make you submit so completely—and stay so dead-set on following him." A faint smile touched her lips. "Half a year ago, you were still Vice Palace Master of the Rain Palace in Xingdao, weren't you?"
"This junior... does not know." Su Yaping paused, then chose honesty. Simply admitting ignorance couldn't count as a betrayal.
"You don't know?" Both Tuyue and Ning Qianzhi were taken aback.
For a Luminous Extre Grandmaster of Su Yaping's caliber to have no read on his own master's strength—that only happened when the gap between two people was truly unfathomable.
And Lin Hui—how many years had he been cultivating? To already stand at such a height?
Could it be—
A wild guess flashed through Ning Qianzhi's mind, and he glanced quickly at his mother.
Tuyue gave a slight shake of her head. "He's not of our kind. We can sense each other within a certain range."
That he was not one of their kind made it all the more absurd.
What lay beyond Luminous Extre? Blood Ancestor.
Yet even a Blood Ancestor needed centuries—sotis millennia—to reach the level Ning Qianzhi had attained. In his estimation, only soone at his own tier could render an expert like Su Yaping so utterly unable to gauge the disparity. And after seeing him today, it was plain that Su Yaping stood a cut above the Luminous Extres in his mory.
"One last question," Tuyue said, her smile full and bright. "In your eyes—who is stronger: , or your master?"
"..."
This question.
Su Yaping said nothing. More sweat beaded on his brow; his back was already soaked.
"Don't be afraid. Tell the truth," Tuyue said.
"Yes..." He deliberated for a mont, then chose to lay it all bare. He drew a slow breath. "In this junior's eyes, Your Excellency is like an ocean—vast, boundless, with no end in sight. And my master is like an abyss—pitch-black, bottomless, and without asure."
Didn't that amount to saying nothing at all?
"Understood." Tuyue knew she would get nothing more from him. Every ripple in his mind-spirit lay open to her—she could see clearly that he had spoken the only truth he knew. "Let's find him ourselves. I'm growing impatient."
…
Early morning. Inside the Taisu Martial Academy.
Lin Hui walked into the teaching pavilion at an unhurried pace, a cloth bag of books slung over one shoulder. Though the pulsation of life he was absorbing remained sparse, it continued to strengthen his body in ways that went beyond what straightforward cultivation could achieve.
The gains were minute—yet the changes they wrought felt more profound than a full rank of advancent through his Typhoon Body Tempering. His body had been honed to what felt like its absolute limit, and the pulsation of life had begun turning that strength inward, slowly contracting and compressing it.
More than that—with every step he took on solid ground, he could faintly sense his feet brushing against sothing vast pulsing deep beneath the earth.
The Star Breath Sword Canon... the breath of the stars.
He was beginning to understand why the Canon had earned that na. He still couldn't say precisely how strong it was, or how much power it could ultimately draw upon—only that it far surpassed the Typhoon Sword Technique in both scale and danger.
As he did every morning, he exchanged a few words with Song Xinyan, the class teacher, then settled into his usual work—observing, correcting, assisting. Indistinguishable, to any eye, from an ordinary teacher in an auxiliary post.
…
anwhile, several thousand ters away, outside the martial academy, Tuyue and Ning Qianzhi hung motionless in the air, gazing toward Lin Hui's position.
"It's him." Tuyue's voice carried through the void. "Interesting. His whereabouts would have been trivial to extract—yet Su Yaping refused to speak even under those conditions."
"We'll know what we're dealing with soon enough, once we bring him in," Ning Qianzhi said.
"True enough. Bring him over—and try not to cause a scene."
"Yes." He inclined his head and vanished, reappearing an instant later at the martial academy's main gates, several kiloters away.
A Relic grand array—linked directly to the Moon Tower? Even a branch campus is guarded this tightly.
He could destroy it and force his way in. But that would trip the Moon Tower's monitoring array without question. Recklessly dismantling another Mistborn's property was a provocation of the first order.
Sensing his hesitation, a flicker of impatience crossed Tuyue's face in the distant sky. She raised one hand, extended a single finger, and aid it straight at Lin Hui through the walls of the academy.
"Tuyue. This is not your Tuyue City!"
A black silhouette dropped into her path without warning.
"Sister Xinlian?" Tuyue lowered her hand, a serene smile settling over her face. "Listen to yourself. I rely spotted an interesting diversion that happened to wander into your territory. I only wanted to bring him back."
"In Black Cloud City, the mont soone crosses my borders, they beco my citizens—and all prior accounts are wiped clean." The silhouette was blurred and indistinct, its form and features impossible to read, but the voice was unmistakably female—and utterly unyielding. "If Mistborn can simply walk in and seize whoever they please, how is Black Cloud City supposed to function?"
"...Sister Xinlian, why must you always be this inflexible? Na your terms." Tuyue kept smiling.
"Stop calling
that. You're barely a dozen years younger than ." Mistborn Xinlian's tone turned glacial. "Rules are rules. If you want soone taken back, find another way. If you break mine, don't expect
to hold back."
Her silhouette dispersed.
Leaving Tuyue alone in the void, a dark look settled over her face.
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