Chapter [B5] 30 — Transcendence of Chi

Chapter [B5] 30 — Transcendence of Chi

Yin stood on the ridge where her crews had lined cannon rails for weeks. She had already stripped off her gloves; the webbing still carried a dusting of ash that would not wipe clean on the first pass. Her goggles hung at her throat.

She did not call an order or reach for a failing safety. There was nothing left to time or adjust. She gripped the railing and kept her eyes on the crown of the Tree as if monitoring a fuse. When the light swelled, her mouth tightened and then softened again. She lowered her head a fraction and set her shoulders so none of her crew would see them shake.

Lu Jie had done it, after all. He’d saved them all, at the cost of his own life.

***

Yan Yun planted the butt of her spear in the cracked earth and held it there with both hands. The shaft bore nicks from the last charge; her palms rested in the familiar places between them.

She watched the brightness without blinking, then clenched her jaw once, hard enough to send a small tremor across the muscle at her cheek. What was happening felt almost ceremonial, she realized, and that thought sent a pang through her heart.

Leiyu perched around her shoulders gently, wrapping her with his wings. She had never liked ceremonies. She did not need one to understand what was happening.

***

Liuxiang’s bandage at her side had bled through twice already. The clean wrap a medic offered stayed tucked under her arm because she would not look away from the sky long enough to lift her arms. She stood close to Matriarch Shie, keeping the older woman in the edge of her vision the way she did in the courtyard on long afternoons.

Liuxiang could feel a sting creeping to the base of her own throat.

***

Ash and Sheldon stood just past the shattered courtyard wall. Ash’s fur was singed in irregular patches from the last push; Sheldon’s shell held a thin, new hairline crack that even the fiercest enemies had never managed to make before now. They did not jostle. They did not speak.

Sheldon tucked his head slightly as if listening to a tone only he could hear; Ash’s ears flattened and then pressed closer to his skull.

When the light intensified, Ash’s tail thumped twice and went still. The two had learned to measure rooms and people together, to share a glance and know which of them should move first; they needed no signal to stand and watch as one.

***

The old man had posted near the steps of the ruined hall, hands clean for once, shoulders square from habit rather than rest. He did not take his eyes off the light while the medics and juniors packed tinctures and folded cloth around him.

He had once taught his newest disciple to watch patterns until the truth of them settled. He watched now, counting in breath-long increments the steadiness of the glow and the gaps between pulses.

He bowed his head once, not deeply, and steadied Granny Lang when she swayed. He did not speak. He was thinking of what came next for those still here, as he always did.

Granny Lang, who rarely allowed herself to show weakness in front of juniors, dabbed at her cheek with the heel of her palm and pretended to adjust a sleeve. When her shoulders shook for a heartbeat, she stilled them through stubbornness, drew one slow breath, and stood straighter beside the old man.

***

Su Lin could not keep still. He stepped forward, then back, then forward again, stopping himself each time at the edge of the ward line.

He ran a thumb across the crooked strip at his jaw, a nervous habit that came from too many nights on the road and too little sleep in safe beds.

He had told Lu Jie in that courtyard that he did not regret the path that had led him here, that he was glad he had met him; he had meant it then, and he meant it now, even as he wiped at his face with the back of his hand and pretended it was only sweat.

His shoulders shook. He ignored it and kept his eyes up.

**

Cao Chen stood with a straight back that no longer belonged to the uneasy boy he had been. He did not say goodbye aloud. He mouthed the word and set his jaw. Then, deliberately, he moved to make space for a medic squeezing past with a litter, because small useful movements had always been his way to keep balance when emotions ran strong.

**

Zhou Fang’s gaze stayed on the light as if he could memorize it. At one point his eyes watered from the brightness and the grit, but he did not blink until the sting forced him to. ᚱ𝘈𝐍O͍ВĚṨ

As much as he’d joked that of course Lu Jie was the first one to sacrifice himself like Zhou Fang’s father had, of course he’d be the first one to match up to Lord Zhou’s legacy, Lu Jie was just that excellent of a talent, after all…

At that moment, Zhou Fang couldn’t help but wish Lu Jie had been just the slightest bit less excellent. He wondered if the boy would have had a more peaceful life, that way.

**

Yin’s crews, usually loud with clipped commands and the scrape of loading gear, fell quiet except for the low murmur of someone counting softly out of habit.

A drummer lowered a stick onto the drumhead and left it there rather than mark the moment with sound. The healers near the Tree kept to their tasks, because abandoning a patient for ceremony felt wrong to them, but even they turned their faces toward the brightness each time they lifted a cup or set a stitch.

Each a different mixture—relief, grief, exhaustion, a hard fragile pride—but every face held stillness.

***

Beyond the lines, citizens filled alleys and rooftops. Some cheered in ragged bursts; some folded to their knees and pressed their foreheads to the ground without knowing the names of the powers at work.

Children reached upward and then looked to their parents for whether to laugh or keep still.

A vendor propped a broken wheel on stones to square his cart while he stared; an old woman pulled a scarf tighter over her hair and whispered a prayer to a household god who no longer had a shrine.

They did not understand what it meant that Lu Jie burned so brightly, or how a life could be spent as cleanly as a breath; they only knew the air tasted normal again. The curse had lifted. The sky was no longer wrong.

***

Qiao Ying stayed where he was because moving would have broken the thin control he had left. His shoulders shook and he made no effort to hide it. His master was doing this for the greater good; he knew about the lives his actions would save.

His heart did not hurt any less, with that knowledge. He bowed once to the Tree and stayed bowed while he wiped his face on his sleeve.

***

No one called Lu Jie’s name. Each of them stood in their way: Yin with her hands firm on iron, Yan Yun with her spear planted, Liuxiang with a wrap pressed to her side, the old man upright, Granny Lang bearing up, Su Lin rocking on his feet and refusing to step away, Cao Chen taking careful breaths, Zhou Fang grounding the last tremors, Ash and Sheldon still as sentries. They did not bow because bowing felt wrong for a goodbye that had not yet finished happening.

They did not look away.

It was only Labby that cried. Openly, loudly, heart-wrenchingly enough that people flinched at her voice. But what could they do? No one could or dared to try and console a girl who’d lost her brother—no, her father.

Not when his loss was so fresh for them all, not when they were all drowning in grief.

***

I felt myself slowly dissolve back into the Tree of Unity. I hovered on the verge of ascending beyond reincarnation, becoming a fundamental part of this world like the heavens themselves.

The pull was even and persistent. Each heartbeat smoothed into the tree’s slower rhythm.

Each thought, even the restless ones that had kept watch during the longest nights, aligned and fell quiet. I understood I could let go of my name and not lose anything important.

My sense of where I ended and the bark began blurred; bark, leaf, and root registered as positions of myself rather than objects near me. Sap answered intent the way Chi answered breath.

Above, the canopy pushed against the sky and held, exactly as it had done from the first day it covered the palace grounds and kept the Demon God from breaking the world at once.

Ironic, that I would become like the heavens after doing my best to tear them down. But I hoped I would be a kinder ruler than them, one that did not confuse control with care or balance with indifference. I did not want choices removed because they were untidy or people molded to satisfy a plan.

If becoming a law meant I would cease to be a person, then all I could hope for was that my responses bent toward protection rather than punishment.

But then, before I could fully dissolve into the tree, something stopped me, slowing the last step at the threshold. Something was missing, something unfinished.

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The tree’s channels still reached for me, welcoming and waiting, but the flow around me slowed to a stop. My perception withdrew briefly from its endless expansion to hover in a familiar nothingness. This time, though, the nothing had brightened and the stillness was full.

I opened my eyes, and gasped. Standing before me were the four Divine Beasts.

I saw them in human form first—faces I’d seen so familiarly in Ki’s visions, their eyes clear, bearing the familiar lines of their strengths without the burden of the miasma. Their presence arrived without pressure, without the radiant heat of the Vermilion Bird’s wings or the cutting edges of the White Tiger’s claws.

Only when I focused did the other aspects slide forward: the Vermilion Bird’s bright gaze with its steady, precise heat; the Azure Dragon’s patient coil of power that preferred curves to lines; the White Tiger’s plain readiness that took what was in front of it and did the next necessary thing; and Xuanwu’s weight that made ground solid and kept walls from falling when fear would have loosened them.

Behind them was an endless array of the spirits of all those who had passed. The space widened without distance. Figures arranged themselves in ring after ring, each ring a breath farther away, yet each face close enough to see. The Emperor, Lord Zhou, countless soldiers and countless civilians.

Shen Yuan stood in one of the rings next to a woman—who I guessed must be his deceased partner—and waved warmly at me. I waved back at him, truly glad he could reunite with his partner and find some semblance of peace, as I continued looking through the figures.

I recognized armor from every unit that had held the lines, aprons from kitchens that had fed us, robes from towns that had emptied to carry stretchers. I saw the guarded pride on an old smith’s mouth, the soft relief on a child drummer’s brow, the tired joy that let an exhausted mother straighten her spine as if a weight had finally been set down.

I smiled at all of them, glad I could save their souls, when my eyes froze.

Froze upon two very ordinary figures.

My parents of this life looked at me with smiles. My mother mouthed, “Thank you.” My father said, “I’m proud of you.” The words were soundless, and yet they filled my heart with something steady. My stomach lurched. I had not expected to see them here; I had not allowed myself to imagine it.

My hands lifted without thought and then lowered again, because reach would have turned into grasp, and grasp had no place in this moment. The line between the living and the dead was clear, held the way the Tree held, because that was what the world asked it to do.

Xuanwu was the one to step forward. “You have done enough,” the Black Tortoise said, smiling. The corners of his mouth were turned up as he set his palm up, asking for mine.

When I placed my hand on his, I felt the trace of the shell that wasn’t visible now, the firm, woven reinforcement that had protected others long before it protected him.

“We shall help you.” His voice was certain and carried no doubt.

The Divine Beasts held each other's hands, forming a circle. They extended a hand towards me, inviting me in, and I joined, allowing the circle to close easily. The spirits of the dead surrounded us, giving more of their energy. Their presence rose and made room, the way a thousand hands lifting at once under a sagging beam can take the weight without crushing anyone who stands beneath.

The Fifth Law of Cultivation—Transcendence of Chi—something that would have needed all of me… stopped halfway. The pull eased from my chest and throat, then held at a point that did not take the next step.

The channels that had been drawing me deeper into the trunk slowed until they matched an ordinary cultivator’s intake. The bright edge of dissolution softened into a boundary I could step back from, leaving it behind. The whirling coalescence of all the power I’d been given, all I’d taken, my blue and the tree’s gold, Shen Yuan’s blue and Shi Qing’s red, all fusing into something prismatic and translucent that stretched across the sky. Yet even all that combined was not enough, not without a will to hold it in place, to heal the breach.

It took me a moment to see the threads, whisper-thin echoes, binding the four corners of the patchwork unity to…

I blinked. The Divine Beasts? Each of them had sacrificed a portion of their immortality to sustain the patch on reality, providing just enough of a will to free me. All of them would be diminished forever to allow the world to heal without taking me with it.

The knowledge came to me in that form as a simple fact. The four of them had released reserves they had guarded for longer than any human life, and the spirits—people who had already given up everything and died—offered a little more of the warmth that still clung to their edges.

“Why?” I asked, quiet, as if to speak normally would break something delicate.

The Black Tortoise smiled warmly, just like the other Divine Beasts.

“You deserve it,” the Vermillion Bird said. “You have carried what none of us could have, and done what needed to be done. None of this would be possible without you.”

“You’ve given enough,” the White Tiger said. “We would ask no more of you. It is enough for us to sustain this for a few millennia.”

“When you are ready to return, your Law will still be here,” the Azure Dragon said, sealing the deal. “But it is not right to demand that you take it up until you are truly satisfied with your life.”

“Your friends are waiting for you.” Xuanwu spoke in a gentle manner. “Go now.”

The Vermilion Bird dipped her head once.

The Azure Dragon’s mouth moved in the suggestion of a laugh without sound, the kind he allowed only when no one would misunderstand sentiment for weakness.

The White Tiger squeezed my hand once and released.

Xuanwu let go last.

When I woke, it was in the midst of the army—muddy and bloody, my robes half-torn. The air felt different near the ground: dust, sweat, the tang of old alchemical smoke that had settled into cloth and blood drying on armor.

The sky above was pale in a way that meant the sun had moved far beyond the center of the day. My back ached where plates had pressed, and my palms itched where the Demon God’s flesh had eaten into the skin.

I blinked. I hadn’t realized how bad a state I was in after all the fighting. Every joint had a record of some strain. My shoulders held the memory of holding back a weight larger than any building. My calves carried the ache of jumps made beyond ordinary reach. My ribs noticed breath again and made complaints about neglect.

I was so filthy that the soldiers, engulfed in the bliss of freedom, didn’t recognize me. Which was completely fair. Streaks of black ran from my hairline to my jaw and ash had pasted itself to sweat until it made a new layer that cracked when I moved. A rend along my sleeve had turned into a long tear that showed skin the color of old bruises.

No one spared me a second look, an experience that was quite refreshing. The flow of the field moved around me, the way it moved around any exhausted survivor who was not an immediate task. Voices rose and fell. A stretcher team carried a man with a bandaged head, and one of them said, “Mind the stone,” and they listened, and the stretcher did not jolt. That small expression of care soothed my soul and anchored me to reality in a way I couldn’t explain.

I looked for my friends and found them gathered in a circle, watching the last sparks of my almost-transcendence fade, all of them mourning my absence. They had chosen a patch of ground with good footing and enough space that no one would bump them by mistake. Their faces were gray with grief in a way that did not fit on them.

Yan Yun’s hands were clenched so hard the knuckles were white. Zhang stared at the center of the circle as if he could order the air to open and return what it had taken. Liuxiang held a vial cap that had snapped off in her fingers without her noticing.

Granny Lang’s cloak had gone still; not even the frayed edge moved. My master stood with his back straight and his mouth set in a line that tried to be steady and failed in small tremors.

Su Lin and Cao Chen stood shoulder to shoulder, both of them looking like their souls had left their bodies.

I approached, creeping behind them, hearing them sob. They were not loud. Exhaustion had taken even the sound from grief. Sniffling came in little bursts. Breath hitched and then lowered into the chest again.

One of the junior soldiers who had joined the circle without permission held his helmet against his stomach like an offering, eyes fixed on the ground so as not to intrude on the elders’ grief and yet unable to leave.

Labby had curled in on herself in a way that made her look smaller than she was, not to hide, but because every muscle had pulled tight to hold in a sob that had run out of voice. She rocked once and then stopped, as if she had noticed the movement and decided she was not allowed to make even that much demand of the people around her. Ash and Sheldon sat around her, clearly unsure how to help.

I appeared in front of Labby and gently placed a hand on her shoulder. She flinched and looked up. The rest of my friends looked at me, eyes widening, realizing just who the sudden intruder into their sacred semi circle was. They all looked at me with abject surprise. It moved through them like a wind hitting tents; you could see the canvas ripple, the lines go taut, then settle. Zhang’s mouth opened and closed. Yan Yun’s hands flew to her face and then lowered as if she had to check that this was not just a hallucination. Liuxiang’s eyes filled too fast for her to blink away the shine.

I squeezed Labby’s shoulder once. She focused, blinked twice, and searched my face with the same concentration she used to judge if a snack was going to be tasty or not. Recognition struck cleanly.

I grinned. “Missed me?” That broke the silence.

“T—This!” Granny Lang exclaimed.

“Y—You’re alive, but I thought, the sacrifice—” The word twisted on Zhang’s tongue as if it hurt to say it now. Granny Lang slapped his shoulder lightly without looking at him, the kind of quick correction that said he did not need to finish that sentence anymore.

“Master!” Labby yelled and leapt into my arms, sobbing as she hugged me. Her weight hit my ribs and made them protest, and I tightened my grip anyway. I looked at the others and beckoned my free arm, inviting them into the hug too.

For a second, I thought they’d refuse.

But then Zhang’s arm wrapped around my shoulders from one side, careful not to squeeze the bruises he could feel through the cloth. Yan Yun’s cheek pressed against my back for a moment, a short contact that said more than any words she could have crafted. Liuxiang reached over two others and hooked a hand through my sleeve, as if to anchor herself, and then remembered herself and let go only to take my wrist with a better grip. Granny Lang patted my spine twice in the same place. My master’s hand came last, a light touch at the back of my neck that steadied every shaking piece.

It was minutes later that we pulled away, and I noticed my master’s expression—one of melancholy and bittersweetness. The line that had held his mouth hard had softened, but the eyes had not cleared.

There is a worry that does not leave with good news; it sits and waits because it concerns a person, not a battle. He wore that worry now. He had carried it since the first time Shen Yuan’s path began to twist out of sight. He had carried it every hour we fought under a sky the Tree held apart for us. He had carried it as he explained duty to men who did not want to hear it from him. He had carried it as he learned to say I was wrong without collapsing under the weight of that sentence, and he had carried it into this circle because there was still one answer he did not have.

I already knew what he was worried about.

Leaning in, I said, “Shen Yuan has entered the Tree of Life and the cycle of reincarnation, too.” The words were simple, but their effect was profound.

My master’s eyes widened, as he stared at me blankly. He had braced for something final, and I had given him a different kind of finality. His lips parted with a small sound that did not form a word. He shut his eyes. The muscles in his jaw shivered once, twice, and stopped. And then, for the first true time, he broke out sobbing.

He did not hide it. He did not turn away from his disciple to weep behind a sleeve. He bent at the waist and covered his face with one hand and let the sound out from the chest like a man who had been holding his breath since before the first drum sounded.

Labby stepped close and set a steadying palm on his shoulder. Granny Lang, who had seen too many men try to swallow grief until it soured, nodded to me once, satisfied.

Around us, life continued in the practical way it does when a field has to be cleaned and bandages changed and the fallen counted. Our weapons and formations hummed as they were dismantled. Medics called for water. A squad leader recited names, and voices answered or did not.

The Tree of Life’s branches moved just enough to let sunlight through the nets where it would do the most good. The sky above looked like a sky again, with clouds of water rather than corruption.

There would be councils and plans and long, hard work to turn campaign tents into homes and supply lines into trade. There would be rituals to honor the dead and platforms to dismantle and a hundred small decisions about where to plant beans and where to set stones.

But for now, my friends stood close enough that the warmth of their bodies made the air around us slightly less cold. For now, my master’s sobs slowed, and his breathing evened, and the cloth Liuxiang had given him was damp.

For now, everything was alright and we’d won. We deserved to savor that taste of victory, for just a bit longer.

“Master,” Labby said between small hiccups. “Master is back.”

“I am.” And in the steady weight of that fact, with the Tree of Unity’s pulse still running in distant parallel to my own, I allowed myself to stand still for a long breath and feel the simple, heavy relief of being here, with them, alive.

I now had a future with them, a future I could choose to do anything with.

“Let’s go home,” I said, and all of my family’s expression brightened at those words.