Chapter 98: CULT OF DEATH

CHAPTER

98

A DEATH FAITH

JIEYUAN

—∞—

It was a long way down. Thousands of steps, each one thick with tangled roots, to the point you could hardly see the original, darkened wood underneath. Their footsteps echoed faintly in the hush of the Cradle—hollow beats that barely stirred the still air.

The roots made for some awkward footing. But after the bridge, Jieyuan figured he might as well be gliding along. After the first couple of steps, he found his balance and settled into the rhythm. Before long, he barely had to think about his feet at all.

He started off with his focus locked on the massive, towering viridian oakwillow below. He watched it warily, carefully, eyes narrowed for any hint of movement—any small sign that something might be off. He didn’t like the thing, and he wasn’t about to take his eyes off it.

But after a while, he noticed how Meiyao’s gaze never wavered from the great tree. Daojue, too, stared dead ahead, unflinching and silent. Between the two of them, the path forward was more than covered.

So Jieyuan shifted his attention outward. The deeper they went, the more he felt the air grow denser—almost oily, heavy with the scent of resin and ancient earth. The mist was thickening, too. Not by much, but enough that he noticed.

He let his eyes flick from side to side, scanning the thousands of trees that ringed the galleries. Each one, for all effects and purposes, a living coffin. Huaxin had said the danger was the tree. But Fatebloom Intuition wasn’t perfect—and the mist had already shown it could mess with it—so Jieyuan wasn’t about to leave things to chance.

It was the ones nearby he paid the most attention to, the ones right by the steps. The three of them were already nearing the fourth level, and he eyed the trees they’d soon be passing by, just ahead. Again he looked for signs of motion, of something that didn’t belong. But he caught nothing, and as they walked past the trees, nothing happened, either.

And then the fourth level was behind them, and they were closing on the third. This time, Jieyuan did notice something different. One of the trees—not right beside the stairway, but a little off to the side—was smaller than the rest, by almost half.

As they got closer, he turned his head to get a better look at it.

What he saw was the face of a child. Probably not even into the double digits. Eyes closed, like everyone else, that Linzushen beauty still only half-formed. So young he couldn’t even tell if it was been a boy or a girl. If it had been a boy or a girl, rather—because right now it was nothing but a twisted, half-plant corpse.

He felt a sudden tightness in his chest. It’d been one thing with the adults. He could accept that—not agree, but accept. They’d made their choice to stay behind, to surrender themselves to the Dome. But the children… They’d have only been following their parents. Their clearly insane, lunatic parents.

Jieyuan looked around—cast his gaze out further. And now that he was looking for it, he saw them. Several smaller trees, scattered here and there, especially down in the lower galleries. He hadn’t noticed them before—hadn’t thought to look. Now he did, and he didn’t much like what he was seeing.

It’d never really occurred to him to wonder what it must’ve been like, growing up in the Viridian Death Cult. But now that he did, his thoughts took some bad turns—and he suspected the real thing had probably been worse still. Even the Linzushen wouldn’t have been spared. They might’ve been worshiped like living saints, but they’d been just as much a slave to their faith as everyone else. Maybe even more so.

He felt a sudden, sharp surge of gratitude for Meiyao’s mother, Lanhua—for getting away from it all, and for keeping her daughter safe from the worst of it, too.

“It’s called the Viridian Death Cult for a reason.”

Meiyao’s voice cut through the quiet, pulling Jieyuan out of his own thoughts.

He blinked—and only then realized he’d stopped moving at some point, just standing there staring. Meiyao and Daojue had stopped, too. Daojue was still looking ahead, as steady as ever, but Meiyao’s eyes were on Jieyuan. She looked at him, then at the dead child, then back again.

“Life and death, to the Faith, aren’t separate,” she said. “Life in stillness, death in motion. The cycle of growth and decay, feeding into each other. The wax and wane of rot and bloom. The Faith has all sorts of ways to describe the concept.”

She pursed her lips, frowning a little, thinking it through. “But it all prunes down to the fact that the cult believed the Viridian superseded the Heavens when it came to life and death. They lived to worship the Viridian, and in death the Viridian would claim them—make them part of itself. That’s the whole idea of growing plants over our dead, of having funeral gardens. It’s all to ease the transition into the Viridian’s grasp.”

Jieyuan watched her. Her eyes were bright, catching the glow of the mist.

“Of course, ask a cultist just what the Viridian is, and matters get far more complicated.” Her tone was light, almost casual, but her face didn’t match it. “But you can think of it as nature itself. Or, more precisely, a part of nature that commands the rest of it. The Primeval Grace, it’s sometimes called. Supposedly the Dome is a manifestation of it—the Viridian’s attempt to assert its dominion over the living world.”

She smiled a dark, bitter smile as she nodded at the kid’s corpse. “Those are the words everyone who grows up in the Cult is raised to. The Linzushen most of all. So as far as everyone here was concerned—as far as everyone here was concerned—the Viridian had come for them. So what else was there to do, except welcome it with open arms? If nothing else, they’d have died content, strong in their faith. And there’s a certain peace in that.”

A small mercy, that. Maybe. Jieyuan didn’t quite agree. But it was a done thing, and he didn’t feel like arguing the point. No use in talking about the dead—there was enough to deal with in the living.

He let the matter slip from his mind. Meiyao was in a talking mood, and he figured he’d use that while it lasted. Better to focus on what mattered, on what he could do something about. Which, right now, was figuring out just what this place was and what the huge, haunting tree could be up to.

“You said this place was a temple. But what exactly is it? And…”—he nodded toward the massive viridian oakwillow—“what exactly is that?”

“The Viridian Cradle was the cult’s greatest temple.” Meiyao turned and looked back down at the pit, eyes thoughtful. “Every day, the Linzushen would come—young and old, cultivator and mundane alike—and meditate here. It’s where they’d cultivate, too. As for why this place was special, it’s all because of that tree. The Sacred Source.”

She started down the steps again, slow and deliberate, but didn’t stop speaking. “It’s a viridian oakwillow, as I think you can tell. And like the ones outside, it was planted over a dead Linzushen. A dead Sacred One. Not just any Sacred One—the very first one. The First Linzushen, the Primeval Daughter, the Viridian Progenitor.”

She looked back at him. “She was born in Radiant Gold City, about five thousand years ago. She’d been a cultivator—the scriptures aren’t clear on the details, but most sources point to the Radiant Gold Sect—who’d been drawn to the Dome and spent an indeterminate amount of time inside. And then she came back, changed by the Viridian.”

Meiyao’s voice was quiet, but it carried in the empty space in a way their footsteps couldn’t. It was steady, and Jieyuan could tell she’d thought about these words a lot before.

“She founded Viridian Death City. Grew it from a sapling, here in this valley, close to the Dome. She went back to Radiant Gold City, preached her faith, and found herself believers. She taught them to study the Dome and the Viridian, to unravel its secrets, so they could understand it. And in understanding, worship it better—prove their faith, so that the Viridian might recognize them as its own.”

Meiyao gestured vaguely with her arms, as if to take in the whole of the Cradle around them, even as they kept climbing down the steps.

“She was the one who created the Viridian Cradle. Grew it herself, supposedly in a single day. And over two centuries later, when she felt her time had come, she lay down at the center of it, placed the acorn of a viridian oakwillow upon her breast, and breathed her last. Overnight, it grew into that tree. The Sacred Source.”

They were nearing the second level now, and Jieyuan felt the weight of the place pressing in around them, the sheer age of it.

“This was all a very long time ago, of course. And most of the original records were lost when the Dome took over the city.” Meiyao fell quiet for a moment. “They should still be here, though—somewhere. Something we can take a look at later. But that’s not the point.”

She shook her head, refocusing. “What matters is that here, in the presence of the Source, the Linzushen felt the closest to the Viridian. Viridian oakwillows are also called the living corpses of the Sacred Ones. And the founder’s living corpse served as a window of sorts to the Viridian.”

Jieyuan squinted at the massive tree. He didn’t know about much else, but if he had to guess, he’d have said it was these smaller oaks—grown right over the dead Linzushen—that better fit that living corpse label. The big one was too vast, too alien, to feel like it had ever been human at all. And, of course, it didn’t seem to have an actual corpse sticking out of it—unlike the others.

“I don’t believe in the Faith, or in the idea of a Viridian as some kind of personification of nature,” Meiyao said suddenly. Her voice was matter-of-fact, with that calm certainty she always seemed to wear when talking about the cult. “But we do have a bloodright, so there must’ve been something special about the First Linzushen. And it does seem to be connected to the Dome. And I’ll admit I’m rather fascinated by all of it. Death cult or not, this is my clan. My family, my history. And…”

She trailed off, silent for several more steps.

“There is something special about the Sacred Source,” she finally said. “I could feel it even from outside the city. You’ve noticed how the mist here is thicker, right? It’s because of it. It’s drawing the viridian mist in, somehow. And it’s doing other things as well—but I’m not quite sure yet what.”

They walked past the second level. Now only the first gallery stood between them and the bottom. This close, Jieyuan realized just how badly he’d misjudged the scale of the place. The viridian oakwillow was far bigger than he’d thought from above. Forget a hundred feet—it was closer to a hundred yards, maybe more, pushing four hundred easy. It loomed above them, massive and silent, and Jieyuan couldn’t shake the feeling that this was just the surface of whatever was really going on here.

Meiyao didn’t say anything else. Jieyuan didn’t know if it was because she’d run out of things to say, or because the sight of the tree from this close had shut her up. He couldn’t judge her either way. He felt it too—the weight of the thing, the way it seemed to press in on them from every angle. And whatever he was feeling, her bloodright would have her feeling it even more intensely. He didn’t envy her that.

Of course, what Meiyao had said about how the tree was doing other things didn’t help any. But it wasn’t news to him that the tree was dangerous, and at least her words proved she was aware of it. Better to have her watching for that than pretending it was harmless.

Still, he wasn’t sure how much good that’d do. The viridian oakwillows outside had been Orangesoul plants, according to Meiyao. He doubted this one was any different. Just bigger, older, and probably a whole lot meaner.

They left the first gallery behind them, the final stretch ahead. No more barriers, no more levels—just the bottom of the Cradle.

And then they were taking that last step, out of the root-covered stairway and onto the root-covered ground of the pit.