Chapter 141: DO OR DO

CHAPTER

141

DO OR DO

Jieyuan

—∞—

Jieyuan sighed as the Heavenly Hall reappeared around him, along with all the cultivators there.

The sphere he had chosen now sat within his body; he could just barely feel its presence here in the Heavenly Hall, but it was unmistakably there, inside him. Merged with him, maybe.

This constant awareness of the Concept he’d been forced to pick was many things. A comfort was not one of them. Most of all, what it did was remind him of what he’d—what he’d have to face—next.

He wasn’t looking forward to it. Not at all.

“That’s quite the face you’ve got.”

Jieyuan glanced to the side.

Anren had walked up to him and was staring at his face. She was frowning. “What happened?”

Glancing in the other direction, Jieyuan saw that Daojue was also looking over.

“I ran out of luck, I guess,” Jieyuan said. He did his best to ignore the cold weight in his gut. “Didn’t get any good options.”

Anren’s frown deepened, her expression turning fully concerned now. “What Concept did you—”

“Fate.” The word came out clipped, dark—like the death sentence it might very well be.

“Fate?” Anren sounded like she wasn’t expecting that. Her frown didn’t ease up, but her overall expression went from concern to confusion. “That’s odd.”

Jieyuan was confused by her confusion. “Odd?”

“Fate is— Well, it’s a weak Concept,” Anren said. “Powerless, even.”

Just for a moment, Jieyuan forgot about the fact that he might have just signed his death sentence. “What do you mean?”

Anren shot him that confused look, the one she gave him whenever he asked about something anyone from a Violetsoul sect should have known. Even with his excuse of having come from a Redsoul sect, it seemed like his lack of knowledge could still catch her by surprise.

“Well, fate only really exists as an idea,” she said. “It doesn’t actually exist. There’s no higher force guiding our actions. We all have free will.”

Normally, Jieyuan would have loved the sound of that. The idea that you make your own destiny—that what you get is what you strive for. He was all for free will.

Problem was, that didn’t quite fit with his own assumptions about the world, particularly when it came to Meiyao and Daojue. There was also the whole business with Huaxin and its powers. Not to mention how the creator of the Fatebloom Heart, Yikongwei Beidao, a violetsoul, had very much seemed to believe in fate.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” Anren said. “It’s something cultivators proved a long time ago. Fate is strictly conceptual. See, practically all the other Concepts govern some aspect of reality. The Concept of Fire governs flames, the Death Law governs death, and so on. But Fate governs nothing. It exists just as an idea. There’s the Concept of Fate, but there’s no such thing as fate in practice.”

Jieyuan pursed his lips. Anren was from a Violetsoul sect; she probably knew what she was talking about. But his own experiences didn’t quite add up with her claims.

He knew for a fact that he, Daojue, and Meiyao were part of something bigger. Even putting all they’d been through aside (a lot of which he refused to believe were mere coincidences), he had his memories of a previous life, while Meiyao and Daojue had their bloodrights and backgrounds. Not to mention Meiyao had been born with six violet skill seeds (and, Jieyuan suspected, so had Daojue, though he wasn’t all that sure about that one).

There was definitely something up with all of that, no two ways about it.

Jieyuan could accept that fate wasn’t necessarily a part of it, though. It might be some other higher power meddling in their matters.

But there was still the question of the Fatebloom Heart.

“Hold on, what about divination?” He didn’t have much experience with divination the way other cultivators normally used it, but he’d used it plenty through the Fatebloom Heart. “I’m pretty sure it’s a thing.”

“Well, yes.” Anren shot him that confused, shouldn’t-you-know-this look again. “But that only really proves my point, doesn’t it? Divination’s only accurate for divining the present and the past; for the future, it’s terribly imprecise. Any predictions you get are, in fact, probabilities based on present events. Guesses, not facts. There’s no way to actually tell the future, because nothing’s predetermined.”

Jieyuan frowned, recalling the times he’d used Fatebloom Intuition. Both the warnings Huaxin gave him from time to time, as well as the full-blown sequences. He’d never really tried to think about how, exactly, they worked; he’d never really wondered about what the mechanics behind them were.

But assuming Anren was right, and what Huaxin did was come up with possibilities based on the present situation, and narrow it down to the likeliest one? Jieyuan gave it some thought. He quickly realized it worked.

Not just that, it’d explain why Huaxin sometimes got things wrong. A lot of other things suddenly make sense, too. Like why the sequences Huaxin sent were so short; anything more than a handful of seconds into the future should be impossible to calculate with the degree of precision the sequences required.

“Why did you pick Fate, anyway?” Anren asked, pulling him from his thoughts. “Did no other Concepts select you?”

“Not exactly,” Jieyuan said. “I got one other option. Refining.”

“Refining?” Anren cocked her head. “I didn’t know you were a refiner.”

Jieyuan gave a bitter little laugh. “That’s the thing; I’m not. I’ve dabbled in it, sure, but the first time I managed to refine a pill was just weeks before the Absolute Sword Trial. Not even two months ago.”

“That’s— Forget about dabbling; you’re a complete beginner. Why would Refining even pick you?”

“Beats me,” Jieyuan said. “But that doesn’t matter. The important thing is that whatever Refining’s pursuit and challenge are, I doubt I’ll be able to manage them. With Fate, I have no idea what I’m in for—but the unknown’s better than the all but guaranteed death I’ll get if I had picked Refining.”

For once, Anren looked like she wasn’t quite sure what to say. “Well… I mean, even if you get killed, you won’t actually die; you’ll just be thrown out of the trialworld. And you’ve already gotten a soulskill out of the trial. No matter what, you’re still leaving with more than you had when you arrived.”

“Right,” Jieyuan said. A touch of dryness crept into his voice despite his best efforts to hold back; he just couldn’t help it. “There’s that.”

Anren’s words would have been a comfort if they were true.

But as it was, if he were killed, he would, in fact, die. Either he pulled through or he died.

His talk with Anren had helped him take his mind off the immediate future, though. And now that he returned his attention to it, he found he had a new perspective on the situation.

He took a deep breath and centered himself.

Either I do it, or I die. That’s it. Do or die.

There was nothing he could do except give it his best shot. If he was killed—well, that was that. The end of the line. Of course, the idea of never realizing his dreams, of never tasting greatness, was maddening; and the thought of never seeing Meiyao again was just as—

No. Don’t think about it. Jieyuan steeled himself, fanned his fire. Do or die.

“Enough about that. Jieyuan banished all traces of gloom and doom from his voice. From his mind, too. No point in feeling bad for himself. “What about you? What Concept did you pick?”

Anren gave him an unsure look, like she wasn’t sure what to make of this sudden change that had come over him. But she didn’t comment on it.  

“I chose Edge,” she said.

“Edge? That’s interesting. I don’t think I ever really thought of it as a Concept. What about you, Daojue? What did you go for?”

“Metal,” Daojue said.

Metal. Daojue’s alignment. Oh, what Jieyuan would’ve given to have gotten Fire as an option.

But I didn’t, and what-ifs never did anyone any good.

His lot was Fate, and that was that.

“Not much of a mystery, that one,” Jieyuan said. Looking around the Heavenly Hall, he found that he, Daojue, and Anren were the only ones left. “Well, then. It’s time we get going.”

He turned around to face the doors. Daojue and Anren did the same.

Anren shot him one last look. Half-searching, half-worried. “Good luck, Jieyuan. You too, Daojue.”

She then walked over to her door, opened it, and disappeared into the void beyond.

“Well, that’s that.” Jieyuan nodded to Daojue, before stepping toward his door.

A hand on his shoulder stopped him.

Turning back, he saw that Daojue was staring intently at him.

“Do not die,” Daojue said.

Without another word, Daojue let go and walked off. He didn’t look Jieyuan’s way again as he opened his door and then crossed the threshold. The door soundlessly closed behind him.

Jieyuan’s gaze lingered on Daojue’s closed door for a few moments longer before he dragged his focus back to his own door. He took another deep breath, then walked over and grabbed the handle. Opening the door, he stared into the seemingly infinite, pure-black void beyond.

Do or die— No.

Jieyuan stopped himself mid-step.

Do. Just do.

There was no or, he decided.

Dying wasn’t an option.

Not now. Not ever.

He walked inside. The void swallowed him whole.

—∞—

Jieyuan stared at the three doors in front of him.

They weren’t the steel doors from the Heavenly Hall. These were white (marble, unless he was off his mark) and set in a large black stone wall.

It’d been a few minutes since he’d stepped inside the Heavenly Room so that he could start pursuing the Concept of Fate. And what he’d found on the other side was this empty square chamber he was currently in. And the three white doors lined in front of him, indistinguishable from each other.

Torches hung from the walls, providing just enough light to see. Actual torches; Jieyuan had checked. It’d been ages since he’d last seen one of those.

He was pretty sure this was supposed to be some kind of maze, except with doors instead of simple openings on the walls.

Unlike with the Amphis pursuit phase, he hadn’t had to reach for the sphere inside him to start things off; the moment he’d appeared inside this chamber, he’d known instinctively he was already in the first difficulty of the Fate pursuit phase.

What he was supposed to do was also clear enough. Pick a door. Except he’d spent a good while studying the doors and the chamber as a whole, and he’d found absolutely nothing that set them apart. The one thing he hadn’t actually done was try to open them; he was saving that for last.

Jieyuan glared at the three doors.

He’d also already tried checking in with Huaxin, in hopes his connection to it would somehow be stronger here, but he’d had little luck there, either.

“Well, here goes nothing,” Jieyuan murmured. He approached the middle door and laid his hand on the handle. Just as he was about to open it, though, he felt… something. A flash, a prodding at his awareness. Barely perceptible. If he hadn’t had experience with Huaxin, he wouldn’t have even noticed it.

Huaxin? Was that you? He focused on his connection with Huaxin again—but not. It was still too faint. But if not that, then what…

He narrowed his eyes at the door. Then he took a deep breath, cleared his mind, and shut his eyes. He then focused on the door in front of him. Nothing came to him, but he wasn’t discouraged; he kept focusing on it, envisioning the door in his head, imagining himself opening it—

And it came. Something took over his mind’s eye, for a split-second—a vision of himself going inside, and—

He didn’t catch the rest of it. But Jieyuan grinned. He was pretty sure he’d figured out the trick, and that was what mattered.

More importantly, that flash of perception hadn’t come from Huaxin; it had come from somewhere else. He wasn’t quite sure yet what was going on, but he had some ideas. And a few of them were rather promising.

Focusing on it some more, he caught that flash again—faster, this time. And this time, he saw the full event: saw himself go inside the middle door, only to have his body cleaved in half by an invisible blade.

He jerked away from the door.

“Not that one. Got it.”

He walked over to the door on the left. Grabbed the handle, but didn’t open it. Concentrated again. It came even faster this time. A flash. A vision of him opening the door, seeing a chamber just like the one he was in on the other side, and crossing inside. Nothing else happened, and the vision ended.

That was definitely more promising.

Just in case, though, he walked over to the third door, the one on the right, and did the same for it. The vision he got from it was just like the last one: a replicated chamber on the other side, himself stepping in—only for the floor to disappear, and himself to fall into what looked like an endless void.

Jieyuan stepped away from the rightmost door and considered all three doors again. It looked like the choice here was obvious enough.

Still, he went back and checked each one one by one again, left to right. The visions didn’t change, but only after he’d gone through all of them twice over did he finally feel satisfied.

Stopping in front of the left door for the last time, Jieyuan took a deep breath, drew one of the Shifting Feathers, and opened it. Just like in his vision, he saw a chamber identical to the one he was in on the other side: square, lit by torches, with three white doors on the wall facing him.

He stepped inside, bracing himself. Nothing happened. He stayed put for a few moments longer, waiting, ready for anything. But even after a while, nothing came, and he finally let himself relax. He didn’t sheath the Shifting Feather, though.

Eying the three doors in front of him, Jieyuan went through them one by one. His visions came faster and faster. It took him just a couple of minutes to find the one door that wouldn’t lead to his death. The middle one, this time. He opened it and walked inside.

Three more doors awaited him.

After that, it was rinse and repeat. Jieyuan went through a total of ten rooms (and saw himself dying in all sorts of ways, some subtle, some gruesome, and some outright bizarre) before he decided he’d had enough of the first difficulty.

Standing in the eleventh room, he sent his focus inward, searched for the feeling of the Fate sphere, and then conveyed to it: Second difficulty.

Nothing happened. Nothing changed. The room he was in stayed just the same.

Frowning, Jieyuan approached the doors and started checking them. The first one he checked (the middle one) showed him a vision where he crossed safely into the other side. The next chamber, as seen in the vision, was different, though. It was larger, and there weren’t three doors in it, but six.  

Checking the other doors, he found that nothing had changed there; they still led to his death.

Jieyuan didn’t waste any more time; a Shifting Feather still drawn, he opened the middle door and entered the next room.

Six doors sat across him.

Jieyuan was a bit more careful this time, approaching the doors slowly, but nothing came at him. And when he checked the doors, he got five visions leading to his death, and one that didn’t.

Feeling like it couldn’t be this easy, Jieyuan chose the supposedly safe door and entered the next room.

There were six more doors inside.

Jieyuan went through three more rooms before he had no choice but to accept that, yes, it was that easy. The only thing that really changed was that the visions were coming to him more and more easily; he didn’t even need to grab the handle anymore; just being near the door was enough to set them off.

Third difficulty, he told the Fate sphere.

Jieyuan was unsurprised when nothing happened. Going over the six doors in front of him, he quickly found the safe one, and he was also unsurprised when he saw a vision of himself walking into an even larger room with nine doors.

He walked inside. He eyed the nine doors on the opposite wall.

He made quick work of the room; the safe door was the fifth one from the right. In the next room, he saw nine more doors.

He was starting to think he might have actually lucked out with the Fate sphere. He was even starting to feel a bit silly about how worried he’d been before. But he’d have to reserve his judgment until he saw what the fourth difficulty had in store for him; that was supposed to be when a new mechanic came into play.

Jieyuan crossed one more room in the third difficulty before he focused on the Fate sphere.

Fourth difficulty.

Just like the last two times, nothing seemed to change—at first. But then Jieyuan felt something. A brief flash of perception. Just like the ones he had gotten when he had been just starting out, back in the first difficulty. Except he was standing in the middle of the room, away from the doors.

“What in the…” Jieyuan frowned, focused on the area around him like he’d been focusing on the doors earlier… And a vision came to him: the white doors disappearing, and a dark, viscous liquid seeping into the room, almost like the walls were sweating. And as it touched the Jieyuan in the vision, his clothes sizzled and burned.

Barely an instant later, the floor was completely submerged in that dark, corrosive liquid. And with nowhere left to go, the Jieyuan in the vision was burned, consumed by the liquid—

Jieyuan pulled himself away, breaking the vision. He’d gotten the idea already; no need to watch it to the end.

He stared at the nine doors, his heart beating faster now. What the vision just now had shown was simple: he was on a time limit. He wasn’t sure how much time he had. But if he took his time, then it was out with the doors and in with the flesh-melting wall-sweat.

Jieyuan immediately went for the first door; a glimpse of his future told him that this wasn’t the one. He moved to the second one. Not it, either. The third one, another death. The fourth, death again. The fifth—

The doors disappeared. Just faded into blank, dark stone.

The walls started sweating.

Jieyuan didn’t hesitate.

OUT!

A blink later, and he was back in the Heavenly Hall. Staring at doors—except these ones were made from steel.

He looked around the Heavenly Hall; there was only a handful of cultivators there. Jieyuan gave himself just one moment to collect himself before he went back inside the Heavenly Room.

He reappeared inside the stone chamber. Three pearly white doors in front of him, cast in torchlight.

Jieyuan didn’t get started on the doors immediately. Rather, he just stood there and thought things through.

The fourth difficulty had him on a very tight time limit. He needed to get faster. And in the fifth and sixth difficulties, he’d get more doors to choose from or an even smaller window—or, Heavens forbid, both.

He needed to get way faster.

Third difficulty.

It took him just seconds to pick the right door; crossing into the next room, he found nine doors waiting for him.

He took a deep breath, then made for the leftmost door, intending to rush through all of them as fast as he could. But then he got a better idea.

Stopping in the middle of the room, he considered the doors from a distance. Then he focused on the first one from the left. Nothing stuck out to him immediately—but then he caught it. A very faint flash. He kept concentrating on it until he could see it clearly in his mind’s eye: spikes surging off the ground and walls just as he stepped into the next room, turning him into a pincushion.

“There we go.”

By this point, Jieyuan had already grown quite used to seeing himself die; all he felt was pleased his idea had worked.

Staying put, he focused on the second door. It took him a while to get a proper feel for it, but then he had it: another vision of death.

The fifth door turned out to be the safe one. He didn’t go for it yet, though, and instead focused on the sixth door. The point of this was practice, after all.

Once he was done with all nine doors, he went through the fifth one. On the other side, he repeated the process; he divined the nine doors from a distance, then went through the safe one.

He went through twenty more rooms; the visions came to him faster and faster.

In the twenty-first room, he decided he was ready.

Fourth difficulty.

Immediately, he got a sense of impending doom, but he didn’t focus on it. It didn’t matter how he’d die. Instead, he focused on the nine doors in front of him. The first, death. Same for the second. And for the third, the fourth, and the fifth. But on the sixth: safe.

But Jieyuan didn’t go for it yet—just in case the time limit wasn’t the only new thing introduced by the fourth difficulty—and checked the other three doors.

Seeing himself die three more times, Jieyuan didn’t hesitate anymore and rushed for the sixth door.

But he’d barely taken a step toward it when the nine doors vanished.

Jieyuan didn’t wait around to find out how he’d die.

OUT!

He was back in the Heavenly Hall.

Breath in. Breath out.

Jieyuan went right back inside the Heavenly Room, stepping into the void.

And then he was in the stone chamber again.

Fourth difficulty.

There was a shimmer in the air, and then the room stretched, expanded, and the three doors in front of him turned into nine. He checked them again. The first one was a bust. So was the second. The third—he saw himself entering the next room, unharmed.

There.

Jieyuan didn’t bother with the other doors; he rushed toward the third one, wrenched it open, and went into the next room.

Nine more doors. Another premonition of death.

Without a moment to waste, Jieyuan got to work.

—∞—

Jieyuan stared at the three white doors in front of him. He’d just entered the Heavenly Room again. It was a sight he’d gotten to know like the weight of gold over the past day.

He’d long since lost count of the number of times he’d been forced to retreat to the Heavenly Hall. Normally, he’d just get right back to it, but now he was bracing himself. He’d just attempted the seventh difficulty for the third time—and, like the last two attempts, he hadn’t managed to get past a single room.

He was good up to the sixth difficulty; as it turned out, the fifth and sixth difficulties only increased the number of doors. The seventh, though… He wasn’t sure what to make of it.

It was nearly the end of the first day, though, and if he wanted to reach third-order affinity with Fate in time, then he needed to get to the tenth difficulty as soon as he could.

Seventh difficulty.

The air shimmered—and then the chamber didn’t just expand, but went from square to circular. Fifteen white doors lined the black wall.

Jieyuan immediately focused on one of the doors. He saw a vision of himself walking over to it, stepping through to the other side. The vision kept going, but nothing happened in it; he just stood in another circular chamber with fifteen doors. But Jieyuan didn’t go for it. Nor did he check any of the doors. Instead, he kept his attention on the vision.

In the vision, Jieyuan saw himself quickly checking the fifteen doors in the room. All fifteen of them. And the vision-Jieyuan saw his death in all of them. It ended with the vision-Jieyuan stuck in the next room as the time ran out, and the doors disappeared, and the entire chamber turned into the fleshy, rotting mouth of some massive creature that then swallowed the vision-him whole.

Jieyuan pulled away.

The last two times he’d tried the seventh difficulty, he’d found the right door from the get-go and gone straight for it—only to find that all the other doors on the other side led to his death.

He wasn’t sure what to feel right now. Part of him was satisfied; he’d just confirmed his suspicions. On the other hand, his suspicions had been the kind he’d rather have been wrong about.

He focused on another door; again, he saw himself go safely inside the next room, and then check the doors there. Vision-him was halfway through the doors, though, when the doors in front of the real Jieyuan disappeared.

Out.

Jieyuan reappeared inside the Heavenly Hall; a beat later, and he was opening the steel door of the Heavenly Room and stepping inside. And then he was back inside the black stone chamber with the three white doors.

Jieyuan closed his eyes and thought it over. He was pretty sure he knew now how the seventh difficulty worked; all doors would appear safe at first, but they would all lead him to a room with no safe doors—except for one, he was assuming.

Which meant it wasn’t enough that he picked a safe door for the room he was currently in; he also needed to pick the next room’s safe door in advance.

Problem was, he was on a time limit, and what was holding him back now wasn’t how quickly visions came but how long they lasted. He needed to find a way to speed them up.

He was reminded of Huaxin’s sequences. They showed him the next couple of seconds, but he absorbed all of them in an instant.

“All right,” Jieyuan said. “Let’s do this.”

Third difficulty.

The room expanded. Three doors turned into nine.

Jieyuan focused on the first one; he saw a vision of himself walking over, open it—

Faster.

Vision-him died. But after he’d gone inside, his death had happened so quickly that Jieyuan wasn’t sure the vision had actually sped up. He turned to the next door, and just as he started seeing the future in his mind’s eye, he concentrated on it further. Faster!

He wasn’t sure he saw a difference this time, either. But he kept at it. The third door, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, willing the visions to go by faster. He didn’t feel any different even after he’d gone through all the doors, but he wasn’t discouraged. He just picked the safe door and went into the next room. Then he tried it again.

It was three rooms down that he decided he needed to change his approach. Just willing the visions to go by faster wasn’t having an effect. He knew it had to be possible; there was no other way to pass the seventh stage otherwise, so he had to be going about it the wrong way.

Standing in front of the nine white doors, Jieyuan thought it over some more. He had an example to work from: Huaxin’s sequences. That was what he needed to reproduce, here. To somehow compress several seconds into an instant—

Compress?

“Compress…” Jieyuan turned the word over in his head.

He was onto something; he could feel it. Speeding things up wasn’t the way. So, instead, what if he tried to change not the vision itself, but how he received it? Could he somehow reproduce the feeling of Huaxin’s sequences? Compress them?

He wasn’t sure, but it was worth trying.

—∞—

Jieyuan stood in front of his door in the Heavenly Hall, considering his options.

It was the sixth day. As best as he could tell, there was less than an hour left before the Sword Tower’s ego would appear to announce the start of the challenge phase.

A few other cultivators were in the hall; some stood like him, while others sat and waited. Anren and Daojue weren’t there, but he wasn’t surprised. He reckoned they’d be at it until the very last minute.

He was tempted to do the same, to keep pushing, but the rational part of him told him there wasn’t much point.

He’d reached the tenth difficulty by the second day, and he’d spent most of his time since then in it. His idea to compress the visions had been just the breakthrough he needed. The eighth through tenth difficulties had only increased the number of doors, so they hadn’t posed much trouble after he’d figured out the compression trick.

His hand brushed the Shifting Feathers at his waist. Twin Serpent Cognition had already started paying dividends, too; he’d found he could use it together with his ability to glimpse the future, and reading two doors at the same time meant halving his time spent per room.

He turned inward to the presence inside him: the Fate sphere. Fainter here in the hall, but still there.

Fourth-order affinity.

He’d reached it barely two hours ago. That was a good thing, to be sure. He only needed second-order affinity, after all. But it was also the issue at hand: with less than an hour left until the challenge phase, he had no chance of reaching fifth-order affinity. Even if he went for the eleventh difficulty, he’d still need fifteen hours per affinity order.

Not that the eleventh difficulty was an option anyway. The few times Jieyuan had tried his hand at it, he hadn’t managed to get past a single room. He wasn’t even sure how it was supposed to work: at first every door seemed safe, but each led to a room with no safe doors.

There was a trick to it, he was sure, but he hadn’t been able to figure it out. Not even exploiting Twin Serpent Cognition had been enough.

Sighing, Jieyuan sat down in front of his door, legs crossed.

Part of him still itched to go back into the room and keep at it. But he was better off using the little time left to prepare for the challenge phase. Clearing his mind, centering himself. More importantly, he needed to come up with ideas for what Fate’s challenge might be—and solutions for each possibility.

More cultivators began appearing in the Heavenly Hall; some went straight back into their rooms, while a few stayed. About an hour later, it happened: the entire hall seemed to shimmer as more than a hundred cultivators appeared at once before the doors.

Anren and Daojue among them.

Jieyuan rolled his shoulders, then stood up.

“Hey.” He nodded to Anren, then to Daojue. He hadn’t seen either of them since the start of the third stage.

“Jieyuan!” Anren beamed at him. “You were waiting outside, weren’t you? Does that mean—”

Jieyuan smiled back. “Fourth order.”

“Yes! I knew you could do it! Also—you have to tell me what Fate’s pursuit phase was like.”

“Sure,” Jieyuan said. “What about you? How did it go with Edge? No, wait. Let me guess: secret?”

Mischief sparked in Anren’s eyes. “Correct.”

Jieyuan hummed, then looked over at Daojue. “And you, seventh order?”

“Yes,” Daojue said.

“Of course.” Jieyuan shook his head with a rueful smile. He was about to say more, but then he caught movement at the center of the hall.

The Tower ego was back, hovering in the air over the Absolute Sword Sect disciples, steel-gray hair fanning behind robes of the same shade.

“You have one hour before the challenge,” the Tower ego said, voice cool. “Prepare yourselves.”

The exact same words he’d said before the first stage’s challenge phase. Then it vanished. Unlike in the first phase, it didn’t linger to kill anyone; this time, it was properly gone.

With everyone gathered in the hall, Jieyuan took a quick headcount. He found that the number of cultivators in the Heavenly Hall now was just a little over a hundred; it looked like quite a lot had gotten themselves killed these last six days.

He wondered how many would make it to the seventh stage.

Of course, he didn’t wonder if he would make it that far.

He didn’t have a choice in the matter.

Do or do. That was the name of the game.

—∞—

Jieyuan stepped inside the Heavenly Room, Shifting Feathers in hand. He wasn’t much surprised when the void gave way to a torchlight stone chamber. A circular one, like the ones in the later difficulties. There were two differences, though.

One, there weren’t any doors on the wall. Second, a woman was standing in the middle of the room.

“There you are!” the woman said. Her voice was rich, resounding. “I’ve been waiting for you, young man!”

The woman was strikingly beautiful, though older-looking than most cultivators he’d met so far; she seemed to be in her late forties, if not in her fifties, faint wrinkles lining her features. Her hair was black, mundane, with a sprinkling of gray. Her eyes, though—they were golden. A vivid, rich yellow. Her robes were elaborate: mostly golden, trimmed with purple and embroidered with red.

If she was a Violetsoul (and he was pretty sure she was), then given how old she looked, she must’ve been several thousand years old when she left behind her echo in the Sword Tower.

She was probably the oldest being he’d ever met—not counting the Muyeshen and the Plunderer, whose ages he couldn’t even fathom.

“Hello,” Jieyuan said, inclining his head in polite greeting. He didn’t sheathe the Shifting Feathers, though.

The woman strode over to him, a smile on her face.

“You’re quite the young one, aren’t you?” she said. “When the ego informed me I’d be holding the challenge for Fate, I knew I was in for an interesting time—but I hadn’t thought you’d be quite so… unusual. Fascinating.”

She stopped in front of him. Jieyuan tensed, getting himself ready for a fight, but he tried not to make it too obvious.

“I’ll be honest with you, this is my first time administering a challenge for Fate,” she said. “Heavens, I don’t even have much of an affinity with Fate! But I don’t believe any of the other echoes do, either—and my domain’s Divination, which is as close to Fate as it gets. So I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for me.”

“Right,” Jieyuan said, uncertain. He was about as off-balance as he’d been when facing the empyrean back in the first stage’s challenge. Were all the echoes so eccentric?

The woman clapped her hands. “Anyway, I’ll be giving you the challenge I normally give to those who choose Divination. Since it’s only the second stage, I can keep it simple. And you can sheathe your weapons; you won’t need them for this.”

Jieyuan focused on the woman, trying to see if he could get a vision to appear. But nothing happened. He couldn’t feel anything.

When he’d told Anren about his pursuit phase, she hadn’t been sure whether his future sight had been a soulskill or a temporary property of the trial. She’d leaned toward the latter, though; Fate, after all, was powerless. It shouldn’t be able to grant soulskills.

Feeling just a little reluctant, Jieyuan sheathed the Shifting Feathers.

“Now!” the woman said. “Here’s how this will work. I’ll think of a number between one and a thousand. All you have to do is guess it. Guess it right, and you’ve passed. Guess it wrong, and…”

She shrugged, gave him a wry smile. “Well, I’m afraid I’ll have to kill you. You won’t actually die, of course, but you get the idea.”

Oh, he got the idea all right.

“I just have to guess the number you’re thinking?” Jieyuan asked, just to be sure. “That’s the challenge?”

“Precisely! You’re supposed to divine it, of course,” the woman said. “Use whatever method you want. I’m not sure what your pursuit phase was like, but it must have involved divination, so you shouldn’t have much trouble. I want you to pass, young man. I know some of the echoes like to make it difficult for the challenger, but I take no pleasure in killing you younglings.”

“All right,” Jieyuan said.

Using divination to find out what number the woman was thinking of. That did seem easy enough. Thing was, though, he didn’t know the first thing about divination. At least not the way cultivators normally did it, with rituals and whatnot.

He checked with Huaxin again, but the connection was still too faint. So he had one option here: use that same future-sight he’d used in the pursuit phase. He’d already tried it and it hadn’t worked, but he’d just have to try again. And again. And again. Until it worked.

Because he didn’t have any other options.

Jieyuan focused on the woman. She looked back at him, nodding encouragingly. He searched for that feeling of foresight, for that flash of the future. He drew blanks. But he kept searching, kept focusing on the woman.

He tried to imagine himself asking her the question, tried to imagine her speaking it, tried all sorts of different scenarios in the hopes that one of them could be the spark that set off his ability to see the future again.

The woman’s expectant look gradually turned into a frown, but she kept quiet. Jieyuan didn’t pay it much mind; he kept concentrating, hands clenched, brows furrowed, reaching— reaching—reaching—

And then he felt. A nudge in his perception, the faintest hint of a flash. Heart soaring, Jieyuan latched onto it.

Yes!

It faded, but he kept concentrating—and then it came to him again. A vision flashed by, but it was too brief, too indistinct.

The woman suddenly froze, her golden eyes widening.

Jieyuan took note of it, but he was too busy chasing the visions; after a few more attempts, he saw it clearly in his mind’s eye: himself, saying a number at random; in the vision, the woman gave him a sad look, said he’d gotten it wrong; vision-Jieyuan then asked what was the number, then, and she said, “Nineteen.”

But then the vision changed, warped—and Jieyuan saw himself asking the woman, again, what her number was. And she answered, “Fifty-eight.”

What?

Another abrupt, jarring shimmer: the vision rewound, vision-Jieyuan asked the woman the right number, and she said, “Five hundred and seven.”

What— What’s happening?

And then the vision changed again—

“That’s enough,” the woman said. Not the one in the vision—the real one.

Jieyuan blinked, a little disoriented. His head throbbed; not strongly, more like the beginnings of a headache.

The woman was staring at him, her eyes wide.

“Path Glimpse Divination,” she said. “You have it. You actually have it. But how…”

She frowned, falling silent. Her gaze didn’t leave him.

Path Glimpse Divination. That must be his ability to see the future. Meaning it was a soulskill, after all. Normally, he’d have been pretty excited about that—but he was still reeling over what had happened there, at the end, with the woman changing her answers in the vision.

“Ah!” The woman’s expression suddenly lit up. “I believe I understand!”

Jieyuan kept quiet, waiting for her to elaborate. She didn’t disappoint.

“Path Glimpse Divination, in case you’re unaware—and I suspect you are—is a soulskill that can be granted by the Divination Laws,” she said. “Not by Fate, note, but by Divination.”

He had, in fact, noted that distinction. “Then how…?”

“The Fate Laws might be impotent, young man, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. They must’ve convinced the Divination Laws to grant you the soulskill. I don’t believe such a thing has ever happened before, but Fate and Divination have a close enough relationship. And if there’s one thing Fate wouldn’t pass up on, it’s an opportunity to leave its mark. It is its very nature to meddle, after all. How it must chafe under its constraints, the poor thing.”

It looked like he owed the Fate Laws some thanks. He was also surprised by the level of sentience the woman was implying the Concepts had; he’d known they were aware to some extent, but what she was saying made them almost seem like people.

“Now! With that ability of yours, this challenge should be easy enough. You saw me say a few different numbers in your visions, didn’t you? Just repeat them for me.”

“Actually,” Jieyuan said, “what was that about? Why did the vision keep changing?”

“Counter-divination,” the woman said. “I realized what you were doing and changed my number accordingly. Normally, I wouldn’t go that far in the second stage’s challenge, but I suspected you had Path Glimpse Divination, and I wanted to make sure. Now, the numbers, if you will.”

“Nineteen, fifty-eight, five hundred and seven.”

“Splendid!” The woman beamed. “You’ve passed the challenge. Now, let me leave you with a word of warning: be careful about using Path Glimpse Divination outside the trialworld; you’ll find it’s not nearly as easy out there.”

“All right,” Jieyuan said. “But how exactly is it harder?”

“Oh, you’ll see, fret not.” She gave him a smile much like the ones Anren gave him every now and then, mysterious and teasing. “Now, we still have quite a bit of time left over, and I find myself rather curious about your relationship with Fate. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just take a little peek…”

She fixed him with a stare; her golden eyes started to glow, and vague red patterns appeared in her irises. “Let’s see, now.…”

A beat passed. The woman froze. A tremor ran through her, and her eyes opened wide. She took a shaky, unsteady step backward.

Jieyuan frowned, took a step forward. “Are you—”

She didn’t seem to hear. Her eyes were still on him, but they were unfocused, like she was seeing something else where he was.

“What— What is that thing?” she said, her voice coming in a croak. “A vessel…? But what— No, no, no! No!”

One moment, she was standing there, a few feet away. The next, she was right in front of Jieyuan, hands grabbing onto his shoulder, her face inches from him.

Her expression was wild, frantic, alarmed.

Jieyuan tried to draw back, but her hands on his shoulders held him firmly in place. “What are you—”

“Child, listen to me.” Her voice was deadly serious, tinged with hysteria. “You must—”

The woman didn’t get any further; she and the chamber vanished, and Jieyuan suddenly found himself back in the Heavenly Hall.