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Chapter 119 - A Bad Day for Others

Added 2024-04-19 18:19:06 +0000 UTC

An Ping of the Dark Star mercenaries looked up at the sky in wonder.

Just a minute ago, a Heavenly Tribulation had descended down to Earth, burning an envoy of the Westmoon Kingdom, two disciples of the Twilight Blood Palace, and one from the Selenosilver Valley into an inch of their lives.

The sky was bright with the rainbows and auroras. They danced, lighting up the firmament with their mischievous dance as if to point at the foolish renyao below, wondering which mortal to punish next.

“Do you know what this is?” She asked her husband lying on the wooden cot. His whole body was nailed and bandaged, his face covered in the repaired bone mask.

She could see his eyes. They looked exasperated.

“Enclave,” An Xing said. “Changes nothing.”

An Ping shifted on the stool, it was made of unpolished wood. Looking out the window, she could see the people from the three smited factions rouse up.

There was chaos to come.

“Rest well,” An Ping said, walking out of their pavilion.

She had a duty to oversee the newly named Graceful Wind Fort.

Leady’s team were already at the ready. An Ping nodded at them, instructions sent through the communicator instantly.

“Roger that,” Leady said.

The four scattered to carry out there duty. Or they were about to, but before they could, there was a strange shift in the air.

And the four collapsed on the ground mid-movement as if gravity had increased a hundredfold.

“What. In. The—”

It wasn’t just them. An Ping stomped her feet hard, a surge of Spirit qi barely allowing her to hold her head up high, the ground beneath her cracking in spiderwebs.

All around, anyone below the 3rd Realm had collapsed. The 2nd realmers were trying to prop themselves up. Those in the 1st realm could not even move a limb, but they were conscious.

As for the mortals, none were standing. Bleeding from all orifices, long passed out.

A wave rippled out from the cave entrance leading to the Lost Plane.

Reality itself seemed to blur. The space cracked like a mirror, as if suddenly hit by a hammer.

Then the cracks mended.

A battered envoy from the Azure Deep Island burst through the cave entrance, covered in gore and blood, cursing the deep sea with language too foul to repeat.

One step, two steps.

There was a scream.

The envoy fell down as if hit from behind with a ram. He rolled forward, passing out.

The cracks continued mending.

And the ripples smoothed out.

But just before reality could fully heal, the ripples fought back. An otherworldly scream penetrated the brains of every being present there.

“RáÚÆ â€š???? ▀Â£舐©!”

It was a strange language. As if communicated by writing on her very soul with a fermenting fishbone. An Ping’s vision grew dim. Before she too passed out, she saw a gust of Azure Wind swirling into existence, gently breaking her fall.

There she stood, the blonde fox maid. The vixen sighed, tired. In her hand was a shimmering talisman that glowed brighter than the sun.

The cave entrance turned into an impossible stone gate. The ripples disappeared.

And all faded to black.

***

Yung made his way out of the branch family graveyard. The entrance to the Dim Gold Orchard that connected to the Citadel was, unexpectedly, unguarded today.

What the—

He was wrong. It wasn’t unguarded.

Behind the gate, the few Youjin Clan guards were kowtowing repeatedly, muttering their solemn reverence to the grand dao and the heavens.

“Forgive us!”

“Mercy.”

“We shall repent!”

Yung rushed past them. Everywhere he went, he saw both cultivators and commoners bowing down on the spot if not heading for safety inside.

Yung met the Youjin Farming Elder and the Auction House Elder.

They wore solemn looks on their wizened faces. Before Yung could call out, the two rushed towards where the Youjin clan’s treasury was.

Five seconds later, three arcs of lightning struck different parts of the Citadel.

“Ze!” Came a hoarse shout.

“Minglan!” Followed by a mournful cry.

The lightning had struck too close. Yung had instinctively ducked down, covering his ears.

But the world was still spinning, he could not differentiate sounds from images.

“Oh mercy! Mercy for these sinful fools!”

“The heavens have seen our wrongs. The heavens have seen our wrongs.”

“It’s all because of the madlanders! This is what happens when you make friends with the forsaken!”

Yung stood up.

Then ducked down again.

About a dozen more lightning strikes hit the citadel.

The bright pillars of electricity connecting the sky with the ground broke through the flimsy protective formation of the citadel like it was nothing. It pierced the courtyard roofs, hitting precisely who it was meant to.

Sonic roars, thunder flashes.

There was neither fire nor smoke.

Yet it felt like the world was ending. Despite the rainbow clouds, the gorgeous aurora, the pearly starlight falling from the sky.

Children were crying. Mothers were weeping. The mortals ran away hapless in their plight.

But where? From whom? For what?

What the hell is happening? Yung felt nauseous. He should have stayed back in the orchard.

From what he learnt from Miss Maid, all these Heavenly Tribulations made sense. The Youjin Clan were part of the ruling class in a dog eat dog world. They must have had many people with less than stellar ethics.

Even evil.

But what kind of evil were they committing inside the clan compounds? Or does past actions also matter? Yung stopped. A Sanctified Enclave didn’t care for his definition of good and evil. It struck those who broke the law, and the law was dictated by the whims of the planar consciousness.

The question is, then, what are the laws for this Enclave?

Yung made it out of the Dim Gold Citadel, walking into Western Upper Town.

It was no better here. The air was fresh, as though it was being actively purified every time he breathed in or out. But the emotions of those who lived here ran higher.

Every few seconds, there would be lightning strikes.

Towards the South, the frequency was higher.

And there seemed to be a particularly large number in the madlander slums.

Yung debated whether he should head there.

The Sanctified Enclave punished lawbreakers. He didn’t know if he was one too.

“Get out of the way!” A cultivator wearing Youjin robes rushed past the citadel gates in a frenzy. Screens of multicolour light covered his being. His eyes were black, no sclera. Violet and green veins pulsed under his skin.

“A cultist!” Yung was shocked. Of course, there would be more of them. If his grandpa was one, then hidden agents were always a possibility.

Above the cultist’s head, his Celestial Link connected him to the heavens.

The heavens, which flared.

A blue streak of lightning crashed down until it hit the cultist exactly on the head.

“Guaaaaaaa!” The man screamed, ablaze in divine punishment.

Yung could not believe what he had just seen.

The Heavenly Tribulation was forked and branched, zigzagging in a strange curve with multiple points of turns. But miraculously, even with the zigzags, it roughly traced the line of the cultist’s Celestial Link.

If the Celestial Link was a dilapidated pillar, then the Heavenly Tribulation were like the vines growing around it.

The lightning came and went with a flash.

What was left was the charred remains of a thing, a mix between seafood and man left twitching.

Yung carefully went forward, then poked it with a stick.

Miraculously, the guy was still alive. His eyes were left untouched, and on his cracked, ashen body, they were staring wide open at the heavens as if to curse it. Dry, bloodshot, bulging.

More shouts and screams echoed. Two cultivators wearing Youjin robes rushed towards Yung. They barely looked at the boy before they carried the failed tribulate’d cultist clanskin away.

Yung moved on, steps taking him further South. He decided to give up on the Madlander slums.

Too risky. Too alone.

After five minutes and more tribulation flashes, Yung’s communicator pinged.

Yung saw his shadow squirm. They split apart as though they had Medusa hair, then settled back into a Yung-shaped blob.

But a few eyes opened. Su Haochen’s Umbral Foxvines.

<Yung: Your creepy eyes make me feel safe.>

Some more time passed, and the tribulations had died down. As did every other sound. In the distance, the air seemed to simmer up in mirage-like waves from the ground.

An old man walked out of a house wearing nothing but a loincloth around his waist. He walked towards a bunch of teenagers that had climbed up a tree. The kid at the tallest branch held a metal ladle towards the sky.

The old man yelled. The teens replied with the equivalent of 'Okay, bro’. After some more heated yelling, they climbed down the tree and went back inside the house.

The door to the Jade Slip Store was locked shut. Yung could force it open with his token. But he merely glanced at the store before moving on towards the tall shape of the Dim Gold Hotel.

Yung couldn’t see the other party.

By now, the streets were totally empty. The stores in the market square were closed, no paddler in sight. The beasts of burden were left behind, but the poor things cowered on their legs except one group of three cats that were having the time of their twenty-one lives.

From the houses and buildings, tiny faces peeked through the cheap curtains behind the window panes before they were pulled away by angry mothers.

Yung reached the hotel entrance.

He waited. And stopped.

From inside, Xiu Jiujiu spotted him. She brightened up, about to open the door and let Yung in. It had been barred from the inside for some reason.

Yung ran away.

<Yung: That’s not it.>

<Yung: Somebody wants to kill me.>

Yung went into Selective Empathic Isolate, cutting off the whole world other than the thread coming from Su Nanya—which was bright teal—and the ones from Su Yafeng and Su Haochen, both greenish teal too.

But there was one more. Another Thread of Intention.

<Yung: Someone else!>

The tod stopped spamming.

There was someone out there who wanted to harm Yung at this very moment, with malice strong enough for a Scarlet thread to materialise the moment he stepped in front of the hotel.

Yung had cut that thread off, almost on instinct.

The severed scarlet Thread of Intention waved around in the air like a beheaded snake.

But it was still there. Hovering around. Ready to snap back to Yung the moment his Empathic Isolation ended.

So it remains. I am sure the other party cannot perceive me anymore. The last time with the thugs that were beating up the coolie, Yung didn’t see any scarlet Threads of Intention after he had cut off the Empathic Links. But this time, apparently, he could.

There was something in the mechanism of how his Empathic abilities worked that he was still missing.

But he could guess about that later.

Yung followed the red Thread of Intention.

<Yung: I’ve located the other party. Heading in that direction now.>

<Yung: What do you mean?>

<Yung: It doesn’t make sense. Isn’t the effect of the Karmic Backlash the strongest on the day of the Enclave’s sanctification?>

<Yung: … Weren’t you Undaunted?>

<Yung: A unique Dao Aspect? Maybe an artefact?>

Yung found her. The other party.

It was a kimono-clad catgirl hanging upside down from a tree in the outskirts of the market square.

She had two fluffy cat ears and two fluffy cat tails too.

And at her waist, there was a bone-white whip coiled up like a snake, seemingly made from metal-sharpened vertebrae.