Chapter 102: COLORED BEAM

CHAPTER

102

COLORED BEAM

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Jieyuan’s eyes flicked sideways—left, then right—past the length of the bridge, scanning the crystal-clear waters below. White flowers drifted lazily across the surface. Below them, the feathery, eel-like green stalks swayed with the current, their movements slow and harmless.

Nothing. It all looked—

The stalks went ramrod straight.

In the same breath, they shot upward—spear-fast, spine-locked. Their tips punched through the floating flowers, launching them high into the air in spinning, weightless arcs. The flowers scattered skyward like thrown dust, sailing past the bridge, past him, past all three of them.

But the stalks didn’t stop there. They kept rising—dozens of feet—well above the level of the bridge. Then, midway through their ascent, they curved sharply. Like coiling snakes, their long bodies twisted in the air, then dove straight back down—angled, targeted—homing in.

All of it in the span of a second.

Jieyuan’s body jerked sideways just as the first stalk slammed into the bridge where he’d been a half-second before. The impact drilled clean through the wood, sending splinters flying.

No pause.

The next wave came fast. Dozens of stalks, all at once, stretching faster than Jieyuan’s eye could track. Blurring green lines, snapping from every angle.

Maeva moved his own body. Still running, he ducked under one, slipped aside from another, skipped across a third. But evading wasn’t all Maeva had him do—the fourth stalk was met by one of the Shifting Feathers, shearing it clean across.

The fifth and sixth he cut them down at the same time, arms whipping sideways, the Shifting Feathers flaring wide around him, their blades slicing through them mid-lash, wet green fibers spraying apart like burst vines.

The severed ends didn’t just drop dead. Even as Maeva rushed his body forward, Jieyuan saw out of the corner of his eye how they kept coming, stretching and lengthening—more growth driving from below, or maybe just more of their bodies unspooling from under the riverbed.

But it didn’t matter. Maeva already had him past their reach.

She pushed him back up to full speed, driving him straight into another flurry of zipping green lashes. Somehow—impossibly—she’d already gotten the hang of it. Even though it had only been seconds, at best.

Just ahead, Daojue and Meiyao handled themselves with the same kind of ease—spinning, weaving, scything their way through the flurry of whipping stalks.

Jieyuan would’ve liked to think that on stable ground, with Fatebloom Intuition active, he could’ve managed the same. Probably.

Maybe.

But envy had always only served to push him forward rather than bring him low. He threw every ounce of focus he had into his own body’s movements. Immersed himself in them, did his best to absorb the way Maeva had him move, all the intricacies of it. Because through skill alone she was somehow bridging the gap between him and Meiyao and Daojue—the gap between mundane heritage and bloodright.

And it was still his body that Maeva was using—Maeva herself was, in fact, part of him. So whatever she could do through him, so could he.

The three of them kept advancing through the barrage of stalks, and moments later they reached the halfway point of the bridge. And so far, unscathed.

It looks like we’ll make—Jieyuan caught the thought halfway through, cursed himself for even starting it.

Too late. The Heavens had heard.

“THE FLOWERS!” Meiyao shouted. “DON’T LET THEM TOUCH YOU!”

Maeva had him twisting aside, slipping him past one stalk, then hacking clean through another two with the Shifting Feathers. Somewhere in the midst of that, Jieyuan’s eyes—and he wasn’t sure whether it was him or Maeva or both of them that did it—flicked upward.

And there they were.

The white flowers from earlier—the ones launched spinning skyward when the stalks first burst from the river—had come apart midair. Split wide into dozens of broad, flat petals. Which now they drifted down in a slow, thick, falling curtain.

A shower.

One such petal was, in fact, nearly at the ground already, right ahead of them.

Maeva pivoted his body hard as she finished dealing with the latest stalks, and Jieyuan’s gaze locked onto that petal as it touched down.

It landed softly.

And then the bridge hissed.

The wood beneath the petal bubbled, warped, and pitted on contact. The flower didn’t sit on the surface—it sank into it, leaving behind a scorched impression edged with lacquer-like melted wood.

The stench hit him next.

A sharp, bitter, chemical tang—acrid and burning, nothing like the rotting sweetness of the sap still coating his skin. No sweetness at all this time—just the unmistakable stink of acid at work.

Jieyuan’s head snapped back up. The air overhead was full of the petals. Hundreds—thousands, blotting out the view. There were gaps between them, sure, but none wide enough for a person to slip through at this speed. Not with the stalks still lashing from the sides.

Jieyuan thought hard and fast.

Radiant Light Blast? He still had a few talismans left. But the beams were too narrow, too focused. And he could only use one at a time. It might’ve worked if it weren’t for the lashing stalks, but as it was it would be risky.

He glanced down at the river, considered it. That’d be the home ground of the stalks, but maybe—

Movement ahead caught his eye.

Jieyuan’s focus snapped back up just in time to see Daojue whirl mid-run. Gleaming End arced around him in a wide, bright swing as he carved clean through another barrage of stalks. For a breath-long pause, Daojue stood facing back toward him—but looking upward, Gleaming End pointing in the same direction.

And there—right at the tip of the spearhead—a bright white dot began to swell.

A bead of light. Pure, tight, sharp.

It flared.

Then expanded—suddenly and all at once—into a broad, blinding beam of multicolored light that shot straight into the air. The column tore through the falling petals like a lance, cutting a wide, clean path through the shower overhead.

It wasn’t as bright as a Radiant Light Blast, but it still left Jieyuan blinking away dark blotches from his vision.

Maeva didn’t stop his movements for even a moment, didn’t stop fending off the stalks. As far as he could tell, she was tapping into his hearing and soulsense even more than his sight.

About a second later he refocused, and saw that Daojue had already turned back around, charging down the the bridge again, not breaking pace.

Jieyuan’s eyes snapped upward.

Clear sky.

Or what passed for sky in this place. Thin wisps of viridian mist lingered up there, but not a single trace of white remained overhead.

All the deadly petals—gone.

Maeva kept him running. Kept him weaving, dodging, cutting through the next set of stalks. But she seemed to have it well in hand for the moment, so Jieyuan allowed himself a glance at Daojue’s back. And, more importantly, at the brief, glistening glimpses of Gleaming End as it swept out ahead.

Back in Gleamstone Valley, in the long-dead protector’s crystallized tomb of a cave, Jieyuan had wondered what sort of gear-skills Gleaming End might have. He’d kept wondering over the next few days—but as time passed, and Daojue never once used it, the question had dulled and faded. Either it didn’t have any, or Daojue couldn’t use them. It should’ve already been impossible for Daojue to bond with it, being only a Redsoul.

Well. It looked like both his theories had been wrong.

Gleaming End did have gear-skills—at least one. And Daojue could use it.

Why Daojue had waited until now, Jieyuan didn’t know. Going from what he’d seen just now, it was like a Radiant Light Blast, but with a much wider range—and probably even stronger, given it was fired by an Orangesoul weapon. Something like that could’ve turned the tide back during their escape. Might have been enough to turn the tables on the Xiyunfeng clansmen and the traitorous Gleaming Stone Sect elders.

But Daojue was using it now—and might’ve just saved them—so that’d have to do. They’d be having a talk later about it, though.

The bridge and the river didn’t have much else to throw at them—and not long later they stepped out of it, into the bank on the other side.

As with before, they didn’t pause, didn’t take even the smallest of breaks—just kept going. They were about halfway through the current pocket, and they still had another one ahead of them before they were out of the city.

And Jieyuan didn’t reckon any of them intended on stopping until they were well out of it.

Now that they weren’t in any immediate danger—or at least none that he wasn’t equipped to handle himself—Jieyuan thought to take back control of his body. The questing roots underfoot were still there, but at this point, they felt more like an annoying floor texture than a real hazard.

But before he could act, Maeva beat him to it.

Something shifted inside him, senses reconnected, awareness amplified. And he could feel his body again, sharp and whole, except for his legs and feet. Those were still Maeva’s.

And it came as a relief. Irrational relief, because he was clearly better off with Maeva in control. Their time in the bridge just now had more than proved that. And Maeva was him, technically—or at least a part of him. But he couldn’t help it.

Letting her run his legs was one thing, do the running, that was one thing. But giving her full control like that? Even if he could learn something from it, from tracking her actions— it still didn’t sit right with him.

“I don’t like taking over control any more than necessary, either,” Maeva whispered, voice cool against his ear. “This is your body, Amyas.”

Agreed, Jieyuan sent back, not bothering to hide the tension still knotted in him. But on that note—you’ve been holding out on me. Big time. I knew you were good, but not this good. You need to teach me—well, everything.

It was one thing to walk silently, or even to glide over the roots. He could do both of those on his own if he really focused, even if only to the exclusion of everything else. But what Maeva had just pulled off, in the bridge… that was something else entirely.

It was closer to the times he’d him join her in a fight using his soulforce and a Shifting Feather, when she’d move much more fluidly and with much greater skill than he did.

He’d questioned her about that when he’d been preparing for his duel with Daojue, after he’d seen her wield the Shifting Feather during their practice. She’d told him she could draw on all his memories, replicate any move he’d ever seen. But she’d made it sound like it was only possible because she didn’t have a real body.

That explanation didn’t hold up anymore. Not after she’d taken over his body and moved like that.

“I only know what you know,” Maeva said, airy, but with a thin edge of amusement that she didn’t bother to hide.

Then apparently I know a lot more than I thought I did, Jieyuan shot back. Is this a subconscious thing? You’re externalizing—or, I don’t know, surfacing—everything I’ve ever internalized and just… putting it into action?

“Amyas,” Maeva said, her tone turning warm and scolding all at once, “I know you’ve got a better grasp of basic psychology than that.” Then, more softly: “But—yes. Something like that. And once this is all over, I’ll help you train. Of course.”

Much appreciated, Jieyuan answered, letting just enough sincerity bleed through to make the point.

Whatever this was—some buried kinesthetic knowledge, some instinctual reflex Maeva could tap but he couldn’t—Jieyuan wanted it. Badly.

Maeva’s incomprehensible abilities aside, Jieyuan had never been one to pass up an avenue to power. As far as he was concerned, as long as Maeva could pass her skill onto him, the more skilled she was, the better. And until he’d gotten the hang of it, he had to admit it was good to know he could call on her to handle matters—he might not like the idea of it much, but he could keep on disliking it while he was alive.

The city flashed past them, restless and aggressive. The buildings on this side pressed closer to the streets than they had on the far bank, their forms tight and looming, leaning at strange angles like they were craning forward for a better look—or a better reach.

Walls sloped forward, frames bent at impossible joints, the wood pulsing faintly at the edges of his senses, as more and more colossal roots wormed out of the ground and advanced in on them.

But it was all too far away to pose any threat, at least for now.

That didn’t mean, though, they were safe. They wouldn’t be, not while inside Viridian Death City. But it wasn’t just that, not just the general danger of the city itself crowding around them.

Besides the bridge and the Sacred Garden, there was one other part of the city that had been dangerous even before the whole place turned into a living deathtrap. So dangerous that Meiyao had flatly refused to let them get anywhere near it.

The tree tunnel.

And it was coming up just ahead.