The light inside the Crucible pulsed in a steady rhythm—once, twice, then deeper, like a heartbeat dragged across stone. The runes across the floor glowed a relentless gold, shimmering in the haze of immortal pressure. Every breath Kai Feng took grew shallower. Every beat of his heart was one note closer to final silence.
His Qi was unraveling.
His spirit frayed.
The end crept ever nearer.
And still, the Paragon spoke.
She stood at the center of the chamber, hands clasped neatly in front of her robes, her tone composed, almost wistful.
"I first met Jiang Xue on the steps of the Azure Cloud Pavilion," she said softly. "She was newly betrothed as I was newly assigned to her. The air smelled of honeysuckle and incense."
She looked upward, as if seeing it again.
"She stood taller than I imagined. And smiled more than I expected. When she saw the mark on my wrist—the faint trace of a meridian seal—she asked if I practiced."
Kai, half-kneeling and half-collapsing on the floor, looked up.
"Even then, you were… a cultivator?"
"A failed one," she replied. "My clan had no more resources to support it after our disgrace. But the body remembers. The soul remembers. And Jiang Xue… saw something in me."
The Crucible's runes dimmed slightly, as if they too were pausing to listen.
"She offered to help," the Paragon went on. "She gave me her time. Her notes. Her scrolls. She adjusted my stance when she saw my balance falter. She lent me her own meditation cushion when she saw my knees tremble."
Her lips curled not in fondness, but bitterness.
"She gave everything without withholding."
Kai's voice scraped up from his throat like rusted iron. "She… wanted you to grow."
"She did," the Paragon admitted. "She guided me in techniques that no handmaiden should have touched. She let me read from her own cultivation journal. She shared her breathing patterns. Her spiritual maps. Her theories on resonant harmonization between opposing energies. She spoke to me not as a servant, but as a sister."
She turned away.
"And I hated her for it."
The Crucible pulsed.
Kai stared, eyes burning.
"Why?"
The Paragon's shoulders tightened. "Because I could never understand how someone like her—born with everything—could be so careless with what she had. She gave her love away like it cost nothing. She gave her time away. Her trust. Her power. As if she'd never known fear. Never known hunger. Never had to claw her way through rot to survive."
Her voice was shaking now—not with grief, but the cold edge of long-restrained rage.
"I often wondered why she got that life. And why I had to be the one bathing her feet in rose water."
She turned, and in her eyes burned something terrible and ancient.
"So I told myself this: If her life was so easily held, then I would take it. If her kindness was real, she'd never defend herself against me. And if it wasn't… she would fall like anyone else."
Kai's fists clenched weakly.
You watched it happen," he said. "Didn't you?"
The Paragon smiled slowly. "Of course."
Her voice dropped to a near whisper.
"I was there that day, hidden on the cliffs above the northern dueling grounds—shrouded behind a light-bending talisman, silent, still. I watched as Jiang Xue walked into the clearing to face Erniang with poise and strength and righteousness—never suspecting that her own body was betraying her with every breath."
She stepped forward, her tone laced with grim delight.
"And I watched as Pu Erniang exploited that weakness. As her strikes landed just a fraction too easily, her pressure too overwhelming. I watched Jiang Xue falter, her form breaking where it never would have before, her footwork sluggish, her breath ragged, her spiritual lines staggered."
She closed her eyes, remembering.
"She fought like a lioness trapped in deep water. And in the end, she fell—not because Erniang was stronger, but because she had been poisoned, primed for failure."
Kai's fists shook.
"And you just stood there."
"I savored it," she whispered. "The moment when Jiang Xue finally saw the betrayal, when she realized something was wrong, when her eyes darted—just briefly—toward the cliffs. I was there. I saw her see me."
She opened her eyes again, bright with a cruel shine.
"And then Erniang struck the final blow."
Kai's voice was low, trembling with rage. "You took the sword."
"I waited until the body cooled," the Paragon said simply. "Until the battlefield was silent. And then I descended, cloaked, unseen. The Peerless Sword still pulsed faintly with her Qi, unwilling to leave her side."
She gave a quiet laugh, almost wistful.
"But I took it anyway. Whispered a few choice words to the corpse, just in case her soul lingered. Something like, 'Thank you for the gift.'"
She tilted her head toward Kai.
"And just like that, the last piece was mine."
She let the words settle into the silence, like a needle pressed into the skin.
"I brought her sword, her precious Peerless Sword, to Shen Zhenhai. I knew he couldn't awaken it. Only her daughter could. Yet I told him it was Jiang Xue's final wish that her weapon go to someone 'worthy.'"
"And he believed me, of course. Shen, the ever-hungry vulture. He was so desperate to lay claim to even a scrap of her legacy—so obsessed with taking what wasn't his—that he swallowed the lie whole."
Her voice dipped to a whisper laced with contempt.
She stepped lightly along the Crucible's edge, her robes trailing behind her like drifting smoke.
"Letting him keep it served two purposes. It kept his ambition satisfied and his mouth shut."
She looked down at Kai and added, almost sweetly:
"And besides, watching him fail again and again to unlock its secrets? That was its own kind of poetry."
She stopped in front of a swirling pattern of light on the floor an echo of memory, or perhaps pride.
"Then I returned to the place she had hidden even from her closest allies. Her personal cultivation sanctuary, carved into the depths of the Earthroot Mountains. She never locked it against me. Why would she? I was her 'sister.'"
The light in the Crucible dimmed, shadows pulling inward.
"And what I found there…" She inhaled deeply. "Every scroll. Every unfinished theory. Every half-tested formation and meditation pattern. She had recorded her thoughts in layers—encrypted, yes, but not beyond me."
She looked at Kai as if daring him to question her.
"I was always a genius. Jiang Xue said it herself. It took me three years to finish what she started. Six to go further. Ten to break the thresholds that kept me tethered to mortality."
She lifted a hand, and golden light bloomed at her fingertips—Immortal Qi, rich and endless.
"Then I ascended."
Kai trembled, pain wracking his limbs, but he met her gaze anyway.
"You used her teachings… to become what she could've helped you become freely."
The Paragon's smile faded.
"Yes," she said, simply. "And sometimes I wonder. If I had asked her, would she have given me that path anyway? Would she have embraced me as a sister, removed the chains of servitude, and told me to go be great?"
She looked down, for a flicker of a moment—eyes distant.
"Perhaps. But it wouldn't have erased what I endured before. The years of shame. The weight of my clan's ruin. The taste of dust on my tongue while she dined with sages."
Her voice dropped to a whisper.
"So I made sure her child would know suffering too."
Kai's heart surged in his chest.
"You wanted Yin Shuang to suffer."
"I needed her to," the Paragon said. "So she would understand. So she would grow with grief stitched into her bones, just as I had."
The Crucible tightened, immortal energy surging again, pulling at Kai's soul like riptide.
The edges of his vision flickered.
"I'm tired of your voice," he muttered.
The Paragon blinked.
"What?"
"I said," Kai growled, "I'm tired of hearing your voice."
He collapsed, breath heaving. His body wouldn't move anymore. The pain was beyond pain. His spirit was unraveling thread by thread. Soon, only the hollow shell of his soul would remain.
"I've lingered long enough anyway," she laughed mockingly at Kai, "There is nothing else left, Kai Feng. No miracle hiding in the walls. There's nothing more to see your spirit will dissolve within the hour."
She began to walk toward the Crucible's boundary, her steps slow, unhurried. Her figure began to fade into a shimmer of golden mist—her form unraveling not from weakness, but will. A graceful exit, as if stepping back into the heavens she believed she had earned.
She paused just before vanishing, her form flickering at the edge of golden light, half-immortal and half-illusion. Her voice drifted back through the Crucible like a breath of scented poison—sweet, poisonous, and impossible to forget.
"May your final thoughts be of all the truths I gifted you," she said, her tone soft as silk and twice as cutting. "Let them keep you company… in the dark. Farewell, Kai Feng. I look forward to savoring the pill you'll become."
Then she was gone.
No ripple marked her exit, no curtain closed behind her. There was only silence.
And the Crucible hummed on—ancient, hungry, patient.
But in that silence, something stirred.
Not from the walls. Not from the immortal glyphs.
From him.
A flicker of light trembled in Kai's chest. Weak at first. Barely more than an afterimage in the void.
Then it ignited.
The Celestial Eclipse Manual burst from within his robes, wreathed in golden radiance. It hovered in the air before him, spinning slowly—pages of moonlight unfurling like a lotus in bloom.
The glow deepened, shifting from gold to silver, then to a luminous balance between the two—day and night, sun and eclipse.
The glyph at the manual's heart spiraled once and bloomed.
And from within that blooming light, a figure emerged.