The Celestial Yang Palace crouched above the clouds like a mountain grown out of sunlight. Its eaves caught the wind and sang old hymns; its pillars were carved with the names of ancestors who had once crossed the world's skin and left footprints on the face of heaven. In the throne hall, tapestries of gold and jade fluttered without breeze, as if the building itself breathed with memories.
Saint Emperor Yang Daolong sat alone upon his throne. He did not need attendants this hour; the hall watched him as much as he watched the world. Even in stillness his presence pressed like a hand against the world's chest — measured, cold, and absolute. The kind of presence that could bend weather and hush disputes in distant border towns with nothing more than a frown.
When the rift in space opened, the hall did not startle. It only adjusted, like a vast bird turning its head. At first a gaunt old man stepped through the split — a beggar's guise, white hair ragged, the robe stained with a thousand roads. His surface was dust; his motion, an old man's shuffle. But the Emperor's eyes found him and, with a single, low sound, the façade broke into a thousand motes of light.
From the mote-light a young man assembled: broad shoulders, a gait that never learned humility, robes that carried the silver sheen of dawn. He wore no crown, but his aura carried the authority of one born into rulership. This was Yang Daotian, Saint King of the Eastern Yang Kingdom, the Emperor's younger brother, and one of the four pillars that kept the dynasty from tipping.
Daolong's voice was dry as old wood. "You still like your disguises."
Daotian bowed with a soft, almost mocking, smile. "Why not? It keeps you amused, elder brother."
They spoke like brothers do — clipped, languid, dangerous in the comfort of kinship. Their words wrapped around a history that the halls remembered but the banners pretended not to.
Daolong turned his gaze forward as if to shut the world out. "You were not called back to the palace. Why return now?"
Daotian's expression changed; the easy smile folded into something narrower. He stepped closer, and the distance between sibling and sovereign became a measured conversation of duty and counsel.
"I came because the rivers mutter," he said. "Because the smell of something old has moved through the mortal world. I thought you should know."
Daolong's eyes darkened. The hall felt the change like a tide pulling at its foundations. "Describe it."
For a long breath Daotian did not answer. He let the silence act as a lens. When he spoke the words were simple and slow, each a coin dropped into a still pool.
"There is talk of a Beast Tide rising."
At the words, the formations carved in the pillars seemed to shiver. The Emperor sat straighter. A thousand maps unrolled in his mind: river mouths, trading routes, defensive talismans, people sleeping under roofs that would not hold against what he imagined next.
Daotian began with measured clarity, the cadence of a man schooled in strategy and the long patience of empires.
"Beast tides come in cycles," he said. "Not random floods of beasts, but the world's own pulse—an exhalation of its leftover hunger. They are not all the same. The order matters."
He drew a line in the air with his fingertips and the carved dragons on the pillars traced it like attendants marking time.
"Every ten years the lands tremble with a swarm—thousands of first-order Qi Condensation demon servants. They march like locusts: destructive, merciless, led sometimes by a second-order demon soldier or two. Those are the localized disasters, the kind that take villages and test generals."
Daotian paused, and the Emperor's face showed no emotion except the sharpening of attention.
"Every hundred years, the tide is led by a Golden Core demon — the difference is that such a leader brings coordination and cunning. Cities that survived the ten-year tides die in the hundred-year ones. The grind is harsher."
"Every five hundred years," Daotian continued, "the scale steps higher. Beasts of Monarch rank appear — kings, emperors, sovereigns among demon species. Their presence rewrites battlefields. They take temples, topple small sects, and force the great to respond."
Daolong's fingers pressed into the armrests. The words had weight. That was the kind of history that left scars on the bones of the land.
"Every thousand years," said Daotian, "the tide is led by saintly beasts. Minor saints, great saints themselves turned predator and lord. Their march is like an army of planets; they do not merely destroy settlements — they change the spirit-geometry of regions. Cultivation veins shift; spirit-qì flows redirect. Those are the tides even old families watch with prayers and coin."
The Emperor's jaw tightened.
Daotian's voice dropped further. "Every five thousand years, Saint Kings and even Saint Emperors among beasts come forth. And once every ten thousand years… the tide is led by a Mortal Dao Beast Ancestor. When that happens, kingdoms redraw themselves. The Dao Ancestors stir, and the world remembers why they are called ancestors."
Silence followed the list like a full stop. The throne hall seemed smaller, the distance to the clouds closer and thinner. What Daotian described was not myth to them; it was the ledger by which borders were kept and sacrifices judged. They had prepared for tides; they had felt the shadow of them in harvested grain and empty temple bowls.
Daolong's tone was cold, even as a father's hand might be. "The tide is not yet at our shores?"
"Not yet," Daotian said. "But the murmurs are stronger this cycle. The beasts' voices travel farther. The weak hearts tremble. I came to see if the rumor was true — if a stir had reached the veins of our territory."
"And?" Daolong asked.
"It's true. The signs are there." Daotian's voice was steady. "Salted earth pockets are shifting under the southern marches. Beast cores have been found further from their dens. The spirit winds are thinner in places that should be thick with qi."
Daolong took this in, policy already forming like frost upon a pond. "We will strengthen the markers, rotate patrols, and send vessels to the tribes to arrange sacrificial pacts. The border clans will be paid to muster. The Dao Temples must be signalled."
Daotian nodded. "And the sects?"
"They will be ordered to hide their knowledge or use it," Daolong said. "No banner needs be raised that will draw the world's predators sooner than necessary."
They spoke further into the mechanisms of defense — talismans to be submerged in rivers, spirit-iron to be reforged, cultic rites to be amplified. The two brothers moved with the intimacy of those who knew how to solve problems with economy and cruelty. Even as they traded strategy they touched on lineage and law — the shards of history where their people kept the Dao Ancestors' memory alive.
Conversation drifted from logistics to the more philosophical weight of it. Daotian tilted his head, looking at the far horizon that the palace's great windows offered, where clouds and truth mixed.
"There is a strange pattern to these tides," he mused. "They are not random acts of hunger. They are… responses. The world corrects imbalances. Where cultivation regimes have bled too much of the spirit veins, where mortals have loom-fed greed into sacred places, the tides gather. They are the world's immune reaction."
Daolong folded his hands. "Then our duty is to maintain balance. To become the scalpel, not the fever. And if a tide is inevitable we must choose how and where it strikes, so our people survive."
They were two rulers contemplating a storm — one mapping defenses, the other marshalling meaning. The conversation wove between the practical and the metaphysical, the kind of talk that ancient families traded across incense and old wine when they needed the right kind of thinking to bend fate.
After a time Daotian fell silent, and the hall returned to its deep breathing. Then, with a shift of tone that made the Emperor's brow crease into a panel of carved stone, Daotian said, "There is a movement separate from the tide — a personal stir. Small, but clear."
Daolong looked at him. "Explain."
Daotian approached the throne's edge, and though his voice remained low, the authority behind it made every servant in the palace press their backs straighter.
"I saw it with my own eyes," he said. "In the outskirts near the Monarch Spirit region. A mortal-born youth — a minor outer sect hand — was touched by something that should not touch a disciple. A relic, faint and broken, but carrying an aura beyond the mortal scale. Not fully immortal in form — fragmented — but not of this world's simple forges."
Daolong's expression did not change. He was a man who had seen treasures cross from myth into reality. But his hands flexed just once on the armrests.
"Describe its shape," Daolong commanded.
"A guard wine-type tresure," Daotian said. "No longer whole. A fragment with a spirit that looks like music when it hums. Broken; it was near-ruined. Yet when it sang it spoke of a magnitude past second-bridge treasures. Someone had sought it and the thing answered."
"I couldn't even sense if not for seeing that young man enter"
Daolong did not smile. His voice was flat. "A broken immortal treasure. Dangerous. The law of karma will cling to it."
Daotian continued, softer. "It was not a shout or a roar. It was a quiet note — as if the relic itself asked for a steward. The youth was touched in a way that made him steadier. And then, the relic hid. It was not taken. It was not plundered. It sheltered."
"No one will seize it openly," Daolong said. "You know our customs. Theft of an immortal artifact is not simple greed — it is courting calamity. The immortal clans do not rush. They watch. They wait."
Daotian's gaze sharpened. "There is another matter. While I was there, something else occurred. A nascent-level cultivator — was present. She became entangled with the heart beweaching lotus and… her condition was strange. There was a poison involved that affected her minds. She might have been entangled with that youth"
At those words the Emperor's composure frayed, a hairline of heat forming in his tone.
Daolong, though a bit surprised low to that moment, cut like a blade. "Are you saying an outsider was involved? A mere 1st order and 4th order?"no matter what if they interfere or not that was a immortal seed they should keep an close eye
Daotian inclined his head. "Yes."
For a second something old and terrible passed over Yang Daolong's face — not fear, but an ancestral anger that had been recorded in the bones of the family for generations. The two brothers did not speak for a long span. The hall was a tide of listening.
Finally, Daotian leaned in, and his words came in a small, blunt package meant to land with force.
"Something happened to YinLong."
It was an ordinary sentence. It trembled as it left his mouth and then the throne hall fractured with the weight of it.
The Emperor did not hear the details. He did not ask for them. The hall filled with the sound of movement as Yang Daolong rose and his aura spilled like molten iron. The carved dragons on the pillars seemed to belch smoke.
He did not wait to be told. He did not listen.
His voice roared — a thunderclap that would have broken the walls and echo across the continent and the 1st true heaven, if not for a mortal dao formation set up by a dao ancestor of Yang clan.
"What… has happened to my son?"