Chapter 82: WARPED SENSE

CHAPTER

82

WARPED SENSE

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Jieyuan and Meiyao broke through the curtain of green mist and crashed into the ground.

And then they were rolling through the undergrowth, loose branches and brambles crushed underneath

Swirling mist, glowing grass, and moist dirt became the sum of Jieyuan’s world. Meiyao’s hold on him was tight, keeping him pressed against her, and it only made the situation worse. Instinct made Jieyuan let go of the Shifting Feathers before an accident finished what the tenth-signs had started.

Then the whole front of his body met something hard and brown and glowing, the impact ringing in his teeth. Meiyao’s arms around him went slack, and he felt the warmth of her body fade as she rolled away.

Jieyuan pushed off against the tree he’d crashed into, the taste of moss and bark making merry in his mouth with the dirt and grass.

He remained lying, now at the base of the green. He stared up at the green, thick mist that swirled above. Higher up, he could pick out the vaguest hint of glowing leaves and branches. He blinked, stared, stumped.

Entering the Viridian Dome probably wouldn’t be a pleasant experience even in the best of conditions. Jieyuan would have to think hard to come up with conditions worse than his. And he wasn’t in a thinking mood at the moment.

He was in the Viridian Dome. The most dangerous place he knew of. It was anyone’s guess what was inside. He should’ve been on his feet, scanning the area, looking for danger. But he’d pushed himself from the brink of exhaustion way too many times already. All those concerns registered as clearly and loudly in his mind as muffled murmurs.

So he just lay there, staring up at the luminous brown shapes of the gently swinging branches above and the green, glowing leaves that dotted them, little more than brown and green glows through the screen of the mist.

The mist wasn’t the solid, impenetrable mass it’d been outside the dome. It was the exact same color—the same deep, blueish green—and it glowed just the same way. But he could see through it. Not perfectly or clearly, but leagues better than it’d been from the outside.

Thoughts came to him, but they were like coins thrown at the street, falling on their edge and rolling away into gaps, out of sight.

Then a face appeared above, taking up the view. A cold, handsome face. A face that would’ve been perfectly at home on a statue. And set on it were dark violet eyes, just as inhuman and impossible as the face they belonged to.

The face went out of focus as a hand appeared between them, outstretched.

Jieyuan blinked. Breathed in, breathed out. Then something managed to land right on the slippery streets of his mind. Not quite a thought, but rather a vague sense of urgency, of heightened awareness.

He breathed out, sharply.

Ugh.

It was the taste that struck first—muddy, earthy, thick—and he turned his head to the side, spitting out a glowing glob of grass and dirt. Then he focused back on the hand, forced himself to lift up an arm, and took it.

The next thing he knew he was being pulled back to his feet in a way that gave him very little choice in the matter.

He swayed uneasily. The hand on his pulled away, and another grabbed onto his shoulder, holding him upright. Jieyuan leaned into it for a second, two, three. Feeling he’d recovered enough of his balance, he drew back, and made an attempt to stand on his own.

It worked, and he he focused on Daojue, who stared back at him, expressionless, silent. Gleaming End in hand.

“Thanks,” Jieyuan said—or mumbled, at any rate. He looked around. His mind wasn’t as steady as his body yet, but he put it to work all the same.

He took a quick scan of the area. There was no immediate danger, best as he could tell. Nothing caught his attention, and Daojue wouldn’t have just been standing there if they were in trouble.

Then he looked down—and saw Meiyao.

She was lying on the ground, face down. The green glow was gone. She was unmoving.

Whatever strength he’d managed to recover, he spent in rushing over to her, stumbling into a kneel as he reached her side. He grabbed onto shoulders, and rolled her onto her back.

She was coated in grass, dirt, soil, and blood. He could only just barely make out her face, but enough so to tell her eyes were closed. He focused on his soulsense, and confirmed that he could feel her soul. Something struck him as odd—something was missing from his soulsense—but he put it aside for now, all his attention on Meiyao right now.

He placed a finger just under her nose.

Cultivators didn’t need to breathe, but they spent at least the first eighteen years of their life doing it at every moment to survive. Old habits died hard—and those your survival once hinged on might as well be immortal.

He felt her breath, brushing against his finger. It was light, faint. Uneven. But the fact she was breathing was already good news.

Jieyuan slumped back, overcome by a surge of relief as powerful as anything he’d ever felt. Then he steadied himself, and considered the situation.

He wasn’t sure what pill she’d taken, but all the healing pills he knew worked for at least the better part of a day. He’d feed her another one in a while if she didn’t wake up, but besides that there wasn’t much more he could do for her. There wasn’t even a point in binding her wounds, when they were already clotting over.

And yet… Meiyao’s state—filthy, battered, thrashed—curdled something in his chest.

Cultivators didn’t really need to worry about cleaning their wounds. Germs, disease, and whatnot were mundane, and couldn’t harm them. But something in him recoiled at the idea of leaving Meiyao like this.

He checked his soul again, just to be sure, but his soulprism was really gone. He still had some unattuned chroma, lying on the bottom of his soul, but it’d need attuning before he could use it.

He glanced up at Daojue, who didn’t seem to have moved at all, and said, “Do you mind cleansing her?”

Daojue didn’t answer—but just as Jieyuan was about to insist, he stepped forward, leaned down, and tapped Meiyao on the shoulder. The air around her shimmered—and suddenly, she was clean.

Jieyuan’s breath caught.

If he’d been unsettled before, now he felt something colder coil in his gut. He clenched his fists, nails digging into his palms.

Without the grime to obscure it, every wound on Meiyao’s body lay bare beneath the mist’s faint glow.

He’d already known it was bad. He’d seen the wounds. But seeing them like this really drove it home.

Cuts crisscrossed her—raw, angry, and deep—over skin already bruised blue and purple. He couldn’t find a single inch untouched—not on her face, not on her body, most of it exposed through the tatters of her robes.

But the cuts weren’t the problem. Most had stopped bleeding, and some were already fading, pale and half-healed. They might not even scar.

The problem was the gashes.

One slashed across her collarbone. Another tore into her upper arm. And then there was the worst of them—the ragged stretch of ruined flesh along her waist, just above the hip, so deep he could see bone.

These wounds weren’t anywhere near close to healed. Blood had begun to clot, thick and dark, sealing the gashes in a crude layer—but that was the best he could say for them.

They wouldn’t kill her. But they’d take time to heal, even with a fourth-sign’s regeneration and healing pills. And they’d leave their mark. Scar tissue, yes—but more than that. Damage. The kind that lingered. The kind that left you slower, stiffer, never quite right again.

Jieyuan’s focus broke as a faint shimmer passed through him. He looked up sharply.

Daojue was drawing his arm back, straightening to his full height.

Jieyuan glanced down at himself. He was clean. The dirt, the grass, the blood—all gone.

Oh.

He scanned the wounds visible through the torn fabric of his robes. He was better off than Meiyao, but not by much—at least when it came to cuts. And that’s all they were. Cuts. Plenty of them, yes, but nothing deep. Nothing that mattered.

He’d be fine.

He gave Daojue a nod of thanks, then turned back to Meiyao.

Part of him raged at the sight of Meiyao like this—demanding he act, do something, punish whoever had brought her to this.

Jieyuan took that fury—all the helpless anger, the powerless need to do take action—and forced it into focus. Into holding off the exhaustion, into clearing his head. Just like he’d done with the pain earlier. It didn’t work nearly as well, but you couldn’t repeat a trick and expect the same results. It’d have to do.

He made to look around—properly, this time—but something caught his attention first.

Or rather, the absence of something.

He couldn’t feel the viridian mist.

It swirled around him, twisting and rolling, but that was all. There was no weight to it. No pressure, no presence. He might as well have been surrounded by empty air.

He waved his arm—and the mist followed, curling in soft, glowing tendrils. It broke against his skin, coiled around it. But he didn’t feel a thing. Not even the ghost of a sensation.

Odd. But there was nothing to be done about it, either.

Jieyuan set the thought aside and took a proper look at his surroundings.

To his left stood the tree he’d slammed into. It wasn’t much different from the ones just outside the Dome, but now that he wasn’t in a rush, he took the time to really see it.

Every part of it glowed—the trunk and branches a soft, luminous brown, the leaves a vivid green. And it was massive. The trees in the Fatebloom Woods had seemed enormous, but these put them to shame. Even if a dozen of him linked hands, they couldn’t have circled the trunk.

Size and glow aside, it still looked like a normal tree. An oak, maybe. Or elm? He wasn’t sure. His experience with trees mostly came down to identifying what wood furniture was so he could put a price on it.

This wood? Worth its weight in gold, even if it hadn’t been chromal. Maybe it was the glow, but every color popped—even the brown. And brown wasn’t a color you usually called vibrant.

That was all to his left—the tree dominated that entire side.

He looked right. Daojue stood there, Gleaming End in hand. Not much else in that direction, either.

Then he turned his gaze forward. Meiyao lay just ahead, surrounded by glowing grass, low shrubs, fallen leaves and branches, the scattered undergrowth. Nearby, the Shifting Feathers lay where he’d dropped them—and near them, Meiyao’s saber.

First order of business. Jieyuan picked up the Shifting Feathers and slid them back into their sheaths. Then he took Meiyao’s saber—but didn’t put away, just held onto it for now. All the while, his eyes stayed on the surroundings.

Which led him to another oddity: he couldn’t see much farther ahead. Barely two feet past where Meiyao lay, the mist thickened until he could only just make out the vague shapes of trees in the distance.

He frowned, then looked up. The mist was too thick to be sure, but the branches seemed to start at least a couple dozen feet above. He couldn’t see them clearly—just shapes—but that was more than he could say for anything around him at ground level.

He looked back down and around. It didn’t matter which direction he turned—his vision was severely limited.

It wasn’t that the mist was any thicker near the ground, either. If anything, it looked almost uniform—the same deep green everywhere, blanketing the air and drifting gently with the breeze.

He took a few steps back, but the mist didn’t respond—his vision trapped at the same shallow depth.

Were they inside some kind of bubble, where the mist was thinner? That would explain part of it—but not everything.

Then he remembered—something about his soulsense had felt off earlier. He reached for it again.

The difference hit immediately.

It wasn’t just his sight that was limited.

His soulsense still couldn’t register the mist, just like outside the Dome—but now it was worse. Wherever his vision ended, so did his sense. His usual sixteen-foot range had collapsed to just a few feet in every direction.

Every direction except behind him—where it cut off even closer.

He’d been in this exact situation only minutes ago.

Jieyuan turned.

And sure enough, an impenetrable wall of Viridian Mist loomed just an arm’s length away.

He stared at it. Considered. They couldn’t have rolled far from the Dome’s edge. Two strides, maybe three, and he should be outside.

Which was just the problem.

The rumors were clear. No one who’d entered the Dome had ever returned. And the Dome had been around for thousands of years. Jieyuan couldn’t believe that in all that time, no one had thought to step in, then step right back out.

He glared at the wall of mist—the surface of the Dome.

Then took a cautious step forward.

His nose was nearly touching it now. Pure, unbroken green filled his vision.

He took another step forward—

A hand caught his shoulder and pulled him back.

Jieyuan blinked, turned—and saw Daojue standing behind him.

And behind Daojue… the wall of the Dome.

He turned back to where he’d been headed. In front of him was only mist—thick and hazy, but not nearly as dense or solid as the Dome’s surface.

He looked back again, trying to make sense of what his eyes were telling him—even as a cold weight settled in his gut.

Daojue stood behind him. Meiyao lay beyond Daojue, near the tree. And further still, opposite where Jieyuan now faced, loomed the boundary of the Viridian Dome.

He wasn’t near the edge.

He was as far from it as he could be within this pocket of thinner viridian mist.

He’d meant to walk out of the Dome. What he’d actually done was walk deeper in.

If Daojue hadn’t stopped him…

The cold crept up higher, chilling him whole. Jieyuan swallowed.

He didn’t know how he’d ended up there.

But he might’ve figured out why nobody had ever returned from the Dome.

“Daojue?” Jieyuan asked quietly. “I know you’re not much for words, but I really need you to tell me what I just did.”

Daojue didn’t let go of his shoulder. He just stared—and while his face was mostly unreadable, Jieyuan thought he saw something there. A flicker of unease.

“You turned around and walked into the mist,” Daojue said, in the same cold, detached tone he always used.

But just like that flicker in his expression, Jieyuan thought he caught something in his voice too—tension, maybe.

Or maybe he was just projecting.

Because right now, Jieyuan had enough tension and unease in him for the both of them.