Chapter 79: NEAR THE GREEN

CHAPTER

79

NEAR THE GREEN

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Meiyao rushed to the front—then shoved Jieyuan aside, forcing him behind her with a strength that surprised him.

Jieyuan almost lost control of the cloudcraft. On instinct, his hand darted out to drag her back—

“NO!” she shouted. “LET ME!”

He froze. Her eyes were shut, her face locked with tension—brows furrowed deep in excruciating concentration, the kind of focus you only saw in someone with their life on the line.

And then the flock of flying beasts—the swarm—was upon them.

The sky vanished, consumed in a blizzard of glowing feathers and shrieking noise.

Birds of prey—massive, talon-clawed, green-lit beasts that looked big enough to swallow a man whole—swept around them in a frenzy. Wings beat like thunder. The air was pure motion—no up, no down, only streaks of green light slashing past in every direction.

One of them surged toward them—beak open, talons forward, a streak of light and intent.

Jieyuan would’ve swerved the cloudcraft, but there was nowhere to go. More of the beasts poured past in every direction, thick as hail. His soulsense screamed at him—tenth-sign Redsoul—and he braced for impact, throwing up both Shifting Feathers—

But it never came. The bird abruptly cut off its screech, banked hard, and veered away to the side, flying past them.

Jieyuan didn’t get any time to think as another bird came sweeping in—then twisted away at the last moment like the one before it. Then another. And another. Every single one veered off just before impact, like they’d hit an invisible wall—a sphere around the cloudcraft they instinctively refused to breach.

He glanced at Meiyao.

She stood frozen in place, hands clenched tight at her sides, her whole body taut with strain. Her face was locked in concentration, as if holding together something fragile and enormous. She was doing something—holding the birds back, somehow. But whatever it was, it didn’t look like she could keep it up for long. Like she was one breath from collapse—enduring only by will, living second to second.

He angled the cloudcraft even lower, driving them downward, carving a line through the relentless current of beasts.

Below, the glowing woods of the outer forest came into view—closer now, clearer, like a sprawling, luminous latticework in every shade of green.

They broke through the last of the stream of beasts. But it was like replacing one storm for another as they crashed into the forest canopy.

Glowing, barbed branches and razor-like leaves tore at them as they plunged into the treetops.

These weren’t mundane trees but chromal. Fifth-sign Redsoul, his soulsense supplied—but his body had already gotten the message loud and clear in the form of cuts and tears. The cloudcraft bore the worst of the impact, shielding them from the brunt—but not all. Branches snapped and slashed, scoring his arms, shredding fabric and skin alike.

Then Jieyuan felt something inside him gutter out—felt the connection to the cloudcraft—and suddenly, there was nothing beneath them.

They fell.

Branches snapped beneath them in a blur. Jieyuan curled in midair, arms up to shield his face, the Shifting Feathers gripped tight, letting the forest break itself against him before he broke against it.

His soulsense cleared just before the ground surged up. He let go of the Shifting Feathers, twisted, clenched his teeth, braced—

Then the ground met him and he rolled with the landing.

Pain exploded through his ribs. His head rang like struck metal, blood roaring in his ears louder than thought..

But he pulled himself up—ignoring the protests of his body, pain and exhaustion both—and took in the situation in a snap-second. Daojue was already back up, having landed nearby.

But Meiyao—he didn’t see her.

His soulsense picked up something twenty feet above, off to the side and falling fast. A fourth-sign Redsoul.

Meiyao.

Meiyao, who was already hurt something fierce.

Jieyuan lunged.

He caught her just before she hit the ground, his arms taking the brunt of impact as he fell back with her. The collision knocked the air from his lungs. They tumbled to the ground.

They rolled back some, then ground to a stop. Jieyuan took gasping breaths, chest and spine on fire. He only barely managed to force the words out, “You alright?”

Meiyao let out a groan, then shifted in his hold, pulling away. He let go.

The fall could’ve very well killed them. Falling wasn’t something cultivators normally had to worry about. The ground and flooring were usually mundane, and so could do them no damage. But the earth underfoot was chromal. Fifth-sign Redsoul, like the trees.

They got to their feet slowly. She leaned on him at first for balance, then took a shaky step back, righting herself despite the pain etched across her face. “Thanks,” she muttered.

Jieyuan waved it off, studying her for a moment in the soft, green glow of the forest. Meiyao’s eyes were glassy, her breath uneven.

She was running on fumes and fury, and not much else.

There was nothing left of her orange outer robe anymore—even her inner robes hung in tatters. Well over half her body was exposed—and not a single inch of visible skin was intact. Before they’d taken flight, she’d had dozens of cuts—now there were hundreds, crisscrossing every surface he could see, blood soaking through like ink.

Judging from the multitude of stings Jieyuan felt all over himself, fighting for his attention against the aching and throbbing and exhaustion, he wasn’t much better off.

The ruined side of her hip looked stable, at least. Still bleeding, still torn, but not as bad as it should’ve been. The pill she’d taken earlier was holding, though only barely.

He took a shuddering breath, then took a more careful look around. He blinked sweat and blood from his eyes, trying to put his thoughts back in order.

The forest crowded in around them. Massive, ancient trees humming with faint light, their presence almost sentient. It wasn’t just the trees that glowed, either. From the mossy earth to the swaying canopies, everything luminous, shimmering in hues of green and brown.

The shadows twisted around them, moving like something alive. The air was thick with a bittersweet tang—earthy but rotten, like roots soaked in blood. Life and death, warped together.

The eeriness didn’t stop at his five sense. There was also something off with his soulsense. Nothing immediately apparent—just a faint but persistent feeling of wrongness, tugging at the edge of his awareness.

It took him a moment to place it.

At fourth-sign Redsoul, his soulsense extended exactly twenty-four feet in every direction. But he could feel nothing past twenty feet behind him. Four feet were missing.

He turned—and saw it.

A solid, glowing stretch of green, rising from the ground A wall of it, extending beyond sight, disappearing past the tree tops far above.

The Viridian Dome. Looming, vast and pale-green. Twenty feet away. So close, it looked flat, endless—its curvature lost to perspective.

It was supposedly made out of mist—impenetrable mist. But it could’ve been hard marble for how solid and even it looked.

And completely blank to his soulsense. Not just that—whatever it contained was also blanked. Like a void. And there were things there. There was a tree right at the boundary, cut in half by the dome—he could sense the part outside it, a clear fifth-sign Redsoul spirit-shadow, but beyond the Dome, nothing. Blank.

It wasn’t like a gear-shroud. A gear-shroud blocked whatever it covered through its very presence—you sensed the gear-shroud, not the chromal gear it was wrapped around, hiding it from soulsense just like it hid from sight. But the viridian mist was a void that swallowed everything inside it.

Jieyuan’s focus was broken as Meiyao bent down—slowly, grimacing—and picked up her saber from the ground.

Jieyuan blinked. Right. He focused on his soulsense, searched around some, and—there. The cloudcraft bracelet. He focused on it, trying to call it to his hand with his soulforce. But it didn’t stick, his soulforce slipping off it like trying to grasp at water. He just couldn’t concentrate properly, what with—well, everything.

Groaning, he walked over, bent down, picked it up, and tossed it into his glyph-stretch pouch, then went and picked up the Shifting Feathers, which had also landed nearby.

Meiyao was staring at the Viridian Dome. So was Daojue—who, best as Jieyuan could tell, hadn’t moved at all since getting up, Gleaming End already in hand. No—not already, but still in hand. Unlike Jieyuan and Meiyao, Daojue had managed to stick the landing without letting go of his weapon.

Jieyuan walked over, eyes back on the Viridian Dome. What they’d come all this way for. But now that it was there, just a couple steps away, glowing eerily in the green-lit gloom, he just couldn’t make himself moved toward it.

Nobody’s ever come out. Not even yellowsouls.

He swallowed thickly. He wasn’t one for hesitation, Firesoul that he was. He’d even planned on flying straight into it. But standing there now, in front of it—it hit harder than ever before that this was the Viridian Dome.

The most mysterious—and deadly—area in the entirety of the island. A mystery not even the island’s ruling Yellowsoul cabal—the Incandescent Serenity Sect—had managed to unravel. The place where, if the parents of Radiant Gold City were any authority on the subject, bad children were sent.

A chuckle escaped him at the thought—at the memory. Of his father, threatening to give him over to the Viridian Death Cultists when he was being particularly nasty in that mocking tone adults used but that seemed like the Heavens’ own truth to a child.

But the sound had barely left his mouth before it died, all traces of warmth slipping away. Like levity couldn’t find purchase, not in the face of the Dome.

It wasn’t just the Dome’s reputation that made him hesitate. There was more to it than reason and thought. Just looking at the viridian mist set off something inside. Something deep—deeper than bone, deeper than blood. Something primal.

Instinct, plain and pure, that had him balking at the mere sight of the Dome. And paling at the idea of—Heavens forbid—stepping inside it.

Already his mind started coming up with alternatives. Slow at first, sluggish. Then faster. Then frantically.

Maybe they didn’t need to go inside—they should’ve lost their pursuers, who didn’t have Meiyao to guide them through that swarm of flying beasts. Maybe they could find their way to another city from here. Maybe they could head to the Viridian Death Cult. It shouldn’t be too far off, and they’d help, what with how they worshiped the very ground Meiyao walked on.

Maybe—maybe—maybe—

A series of cracks rang from above, and Jieyuan snapped out of it, whirling around just as two red blurs broke through the tree top and streaked straight down.

The pair of cloudcrafts halted mid-air, hovering just inches above the forest floor—not even twenty feet away.

Tenth-sign Redsouls, Jieyuan’s soulsense told him—but his eyes were working just fine, even if he’d rather not believe them right now.

He should’ve jumped backwards the moment he took in the streaks, before the tenth-signs had even landed, thrown himself into the Viridian Dome.

And he would’ve. But his legs didn’t comply, didn’t move, not with the sight of the Dome—and the dread invoked by reason and instinct both—still so fresh.

To his sides, Meiyao flinched backwards, but didn’t move toward the Dome, instead stepping closer to him. Daojue stayed put—just shifted his weight, Gleaming End already angled in a half-guard.

On the cloudcraft on the left was a woman. On the right, a man. Like everyone who’d fought outside the palace, the two of them were in rough shape. Battered and bruised, like they’d gone through a grinder—which, given all the gleamstone blades flying around the street earlier, wasn’t that far off.

The black scraps hanging over the woman’s gray inner robes told him she was from the Xiyunfeng Clan—though her specific rank was uncertain. The man’s outer robes were in a better state. Blue. Another protector of the Gleaming Stone Sect turned traitor.

More importantly, though, none of their wounds looked particularly debilitating. They were roughed up something fierce, sure—but no deep gashes, no destroyed limbs, no ruined eyes. They were banged up—but not broken. Not enough to matter.

Jieyuan gripped the Shifting Feathers tighter even as his stomach dropped. Meiyao could barely stand. He wasn’t much better. And as for Daojue—even with Gleaming End, even at his best—Jieyuan didn’t like his odds against a single tenth-sign in a straight fight, let alone two.

But then he noticed the Gleaming Stone Sect traitor’s outstretched arm—and the strip of white paper he held in his grasp, shown openly. A talisman.

Jieyuan recognized the talisman—recognized its spirit-song. It had left quite the impression on him, after he’d used one to kill a protector of the sect a month ago. Radiant Light Blast. One such talisman had even been used earlier today, during their escape.

The man was holding the talisman directly toward him. Meiyao was close enough that a good deal of her body would also get caught in the blast. Daojue, on his other side, wouldn’t be getting out unscathed, either.

“Try anything,” the man said, voice cold, precise, merciless, “and I’m using the talisman.”