The silence that settled over Fragrant Rice Village after the retreat of the Crows was not one of peace, but of suspended disbelief. It was the quiet of a theater audience after the curtain falls on a play that ended not with a tragic soliloquy, but with a custard pie to the face of the villain. The air still hummed with the residual energy of amplified cricket chirps and carried the faint, sweet-and-sour stench of fermented spirit cola. Here and there, a disgruntled pop from a settling explosive duck echoed like a final, dismissive fart in the direction of the fled demons.
For a long moment, nobody moved. They stood in the square, clutching hoes and rakes, their minds struggling to catch up with the reality that they were, against all logic and cosmic decency, still alive.
Wei Tiezhu was the first to break. The weight of the willow crown on his head felt alien, a crown of thorns made of laughter. He tore it off and stared at it, then at the path his cousin had taken. The image of Xiao'ou placidly walking away from the battlefield was burned onto his retina. He looked at the villagers, their faces etched with a mixture of terror, exhaustion, and dawning, hysterical joy.
"He… he saved us," a young woman whispered, her voice cracking.
"With… with cola and ducks," her husband added, sounding as if he were questioning the very foundations of his existence.
A slow, disbelieving chuckle bubbled up from the back of the crowd. Then another. It spread like a benign plague, until the entire square was filled with the sound of helpless, slightly unhinged laughter. They had faced death, and death had been driven away by a bad smell and loud noises. It was the most profound, most ridiculous thing any of them had ever experienced.
In the midst of the cathartic release, Yun Lian stood apart, her arms wrapped around herself. She was not laughing. The Violet Phoenix bloodline within her, the curse of perfect memory, was replaying the entire event in excruciiating detail. She saw the geysers of fizz, the glowing diagrams, the bewildered Crows. It wasn't a victory. It was a anomaly. A statistical error in the grim calculus of the Crows' operations. They would not be fooled again. The next response would be swift, overwhelming, and devoid of any patience for theatrics.
Her eyes sought out Wei San. The old storyteller was watching the laughing villagers, a serene smile on his face, as if this was the most natural conclusion in the world.
"You cannot think this is over," she said, her voice cutting through the laughter.
Wei San turned his calm gaze to her. "No, child. A story is never over until the teller puts down his pipe. This was but a single, amusing verse." He gestured to the celebrating villagers. "But let them have this verse. They have earned its joy."
"But the Crows—"
"—were introduced to a new author," Wei San finished. "One whose style they find… disagreeable." He looked towards the house where Xiao'ou had disappeared. "The boy has drawn a line in the dirt with his umbrella. The question is not if they will cross it, but how they will cross it, and what they will find waiting for them when they do."
He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. "You carry the weight of a thousand terrible memories, Yun Lian. But here, in this village, you must learn to also make room for a new one. The memory of the day the darkness was beaten back not by a sword, but by a laugh."
Inside the Wei family compound, Wei Xiao'ou was, true to his word, attempting to nap. But sleep was elusive. The effort of orchestrating the village's defense, of carefully channeling minuscule, untraceable threads of the Genesis Lance's power to ignite the casks and activate the amplifiers, had left a faint, buzzing fatigue in his bones. It was not a physical tiredness, but the spiritual weariness of a master composer who has just conducted a symphony using only kazoos and pots and pans. Effective, but deeply unsatisfying to the artist's soul.
He lay on his sleeping mat, staring at the ceiling, listening to the distant, joyous chaos in the square. He had revealed too much. Not his power, but his nature. The carefully constructed façade of the harmless lazybone now had a crack running through it, and through that crack, his family and friends had seen a glimpse of something else. Something that could calculate the trajectory of a falling heavenly genius and the resonant frequency of a fencepost. Something that could talk a Crow into becoming a turnip farmer.
The game had changed. The passive defense was no longer tenable. The Crows were a patient cancer; they would analyze the failure, adapt, and return with a strategy designed to neutralize "annoyance." He needed to be proactive. He needed to create a bigger, more distracting game.
A plan began to form in his mind, a lazy, sprawling, audacious plan. It involved the upcoming recruitment drive for the nearby sects.
—
The morning after the "Great Cola and Duck War," as it was already being called, dawned bright and clear, as if the heavens themselves were trying to wash away the memory of the previous night's absurdity. The village woke with a collective hangover of adrenaline and disbelief. The diagrams on the paths had faded, the foul smell was dissipating, and the explosive ducks were back to their serene, waddling selves, albeit looking slightly smug.
The first order of business was a council of war, held not in the formal ancestral hall, but in the main room of the Wei household, amid the smell of congee and the cheerful clatter of breakfast bowls. The attendees were Wei San, Wei Tiezhu, Aunt Wei Hong, Yun Lian, and, slumped over the table with his head pillowed on his arms, Wei Xiao'ou.
"They will be back," Yun Lian stated without preamble, her violet eyes shadowed. "The Unending Shadow does not accept failure. They will send a Plague-Class swarm. Dozens of them. Or a single, Named Crow. Something like 'Echo-That-Drowns-All-Songs' or 'Hand-That-Unweaves-Karma'. They will not come over the ridges. They will emerge from the shadows in the heart of the village itself."
Aunt Hong paled. "From the shadows? In our homes?"
"They are creatures of negation," Yun Lian explained. "Where there is light, they cast shadow. Where there is sound, they bring silence. Where there is life…" She trailed off, but the implication hung in the air.
"We cannot fight that," Tiezhu said, his voice heavy. "We got lucky. We surprised them. We can't surprise them again."
"Then we don't try," a muffled voice came from the table.
All eyes turned to the apparently sleeping Xiao'ou.
He lifted his head, his hair sticking up in tufts. "Surprise is a single-use tool. What we need is… bureaucracy."
The room stared at him.
"Bureaucracy?" Tiezhu repeated, incredulous.
Xiao'ou yawned and sat up, reaching for a steamed bun. "Think about it. What's the one thing that can slow down any force, no matter how powerful? Paperwork. Rules. Regulations. Red tape."
He took a bite of the bun, chewing thoughtfully. "The Cloud-Sovereign Celestial Dynasty mandates that all major cultivation sects conduct annual recruitment drives in the mortal territories, to 'nurture talent and maintain the harmonious cycle of heaven and earth.' The Heavenly Sword Peak's recruitment envoy is due to pass through this region in…" He looked at his grandfather. "Grandfather?"
Wei San's eyes gleamed with understanding. "…In seven days. They will be testing all youths between the ages of twelve and twenty with spiritual potential in a dozen surrounding villages, including ours."
"Exactly," Xiao'ou said, brushing bun crumbs from his tunic. "For the next week, Fragrant Rice Village is not a backwater farming community. It is a temporary administrative hub for a state-sanctioned, imperial-mandated celestial event. The envoys will be here. There will be observers, paperwork, official seals, and a great deal of noisy, complicated, and very visible spiritual activity."
Yun Lian's eyes widened as she grasped the implication. "The Crows operate in silence and secrecy. They thrive in neglect. They cannot 'Scour the Stain' if the stain is suddenly at the center of a brightly lit, heavily documented, imperial ceremony. The risk of exposure would be too great."
"Precisely," Xiao'ou said. "It's much harder to burn down a building that's hosting a tax collector. Too many forms to fill out afterwards."
It was a brilliant, cowardly, and utterly shameless plan. It was perfect.
"But," Tiezhu interjected, "that only buys us a week. What happens after the envoys leave?"
Xiao'ou gave him a slow, lazy smile. "Then, dear cousin, you and I will have passed the entrance exams and will be leaving with them for the Heavenly Sword Peak."
The silence that followed was absolute.
"What?" Tiezhu and Aunt Hong said in unison.
"You? In a sect?" Tiezhu sputtered. "You can't be serious! You'd have to get up before noon! There are rules! Chores!"
"It is a good strategy," Yun Lian admitted, though she looked pained. "The protective aura of a major sect, especially one as renowned as Heavenly Sword Peak, would be a significant deterrent. The Crows would not attack a sect disciple lightly. It would be an act of war."
"But… me?" Tiezhu said, his voice small. "I've been stuck at the Essence Condensation 3rd layer for eight years. I have the spiritual aptitude of a rock. A particularly dense rock."
"Then we will make the rock float," Xiao'ou said with a shrug. "It's only seven days. How hard can it be?"
The look of sheer, unadulterated terror on Wei Tiezhu's face was the first genuinely funny thing Wei Xiao'ou had seen all morning.
—
The next seven days were a whirlwind of activity that made the preparations for the Lazy Immortal Festival look like a moment of repose. The village threw itself into the new role with the desperate energy of actors who knew the curtain was about to rise on a performance that would determine their survival.
Banners of welcome were hung. The main paths were swept until they shone. The ancestral hall was scrubbed and prepared to host the envoys. The spirit fields were weeded with a fervor usually reserved for exorcisms.
And at the center of it all were the two cousins, undergoing a crash course in "not looking like complete farm-bred buffoons in front of celestial envoys."
The training was conducted by a triumvirate of taskmasters: Wei San drilled them on etiquette, bowing angles, and the proper forms of address for every rank of disciple they might encounter. Aunt Hong forced them into new, stiff robes she had bartered for with a traveling merchant, and drilled them on table manners, which mostly consisted of Xiao'ou being scolded for using his fingers and Tiezhu for holding his chopsticks like he was trying to stab a boar.
The third, and most demanding taskmaster, was Yun Lian.
She took one look at Wei Tiezhu's clumsy, brute-force cultivation technique—a basic Earth-Shattering Fist manual that had been in the family for generations—and let out a sigh that seemed to carry the disappointment of a thousand ancestors.
"This," she said, poking the manual with the tip of the Soul-Thorn, which she now carried like a teaching rod, "is not cultivation. This is spiritual vandalism. You are trying to carve a statue with a landslide."
Tiezhu flushed. "It's all we have!"
"Then we will find you something else," she said. She closed her violet eyes, accessing the bottomless library of her cursed memory. "The Wei Immortal Clan of old was renowned for its 'Unmoving Mountain Guardian' body cultivation art. It was a technique of profound stability, of drawing strength from the earth itself, of becoming an unshakeable pillar. What you are doing is a pathetic, fragmented echo of it. You are trying to be a mountain by throwing rocks."
She spent the next days guiding him, not in a new technique, but in reinterpreting the one he had. She taught him to feel the Qi not as a hammer to be swung, but as a root to be sunk. To draw strength from the stance, not the strike. To be the anvil, not the hammer.
To everyone's astonishment, including his own, it worked. For the first time in eight years, Wei Tiezhu felt the petrified dam of his cultivation crack. He didn't break through to the 4th layer, but he could feel it, a distant, shimmering possibility. He looked at Yun Lian with something akin to awe.
Wei Xiao'ou, meanwhile, was a model student who learned nothing. He perfectly mimicked the bows, parroted the polite phrases, and held his chopsticks with an elegance that seemed both innate and utterly detached. When asked to demonstrate his spiritual power for Yun Lian, he placed his hand on the standard testing crystal—a milky quartz used to gauge Essence Condensation levels—and it glowed with the faint, steady light of the 3rd layer. The same as Tiezhu. It was perfectly, unremarkably average.
Yun Lian watched him, her brow furrowed. She knew it was a lie. She had felt the echo of the Thunderous Silence he had used on the Crow. She had seen the precision of his umbrella-work. This… this was a mask. A brilliantly crafted, utterly convincing mask.
"Your realm?" she asked him pointedly one afternoon.
"A work in progress," he replied, smiling vaguely.
"Your technique?"
"I'm fond of napping. It's a very underrated spiritual practice."
She wanted to shake him. Instead, she turned her attention back to Tiezhu, who at least grunted and sweated with honest effort.
Throughout it all, the converted Crow, Brother Melon, proved to be an unexpectedly valuable asset. He had taken to his new life as a turnip farmer with a convert's zeal. His knowledge of shadows, however, was now used to predict the best times for planting to avoid sun-scorch, and his gaunt, silent demeanor was perfect for scaring birds away from the newly sown seeds. He followed Xiao'ou around like a lost, penitent puppy, speaking only when spoken to, his eyes now filled with a quiet reverence instead of void-like emptiness.
The day before the envoys were due to arrive, the village was as prepared as it could be. The air was thick with anticipation and the smell of fresh paint and baking. That evening, as a blood-red sun dipped below the horizon, Wei Xiao'ou slipped away from the final preparations.
He walked to the spirit field where it had all begun. He found his grassy mound and lay down, not to sleep, but to think. To feel.
He reached out with his spiritual sense, not to the village, but beyond it, to the web of karma and consequence that was now tightening around his home. He could feel the lingering, oily stain of the Crow's failed attack. He could feel the approaching, bright-and-sharp presence of the sect envoys, like needles of pure light drawing closer on the tapestry of fate.
And he could feel something else. Something deeper and older. The black-lacquered box in the ancestral hall hummed its silent song, a anchor of profound mystery. And his umbrella, the Heaven-Sundering Genesis Lance, was a slumbering dragon at his side, its power a constant, tempting whisper.
He was playing a dangerous game, layering deception upon deception. A lazy mortal atop a hidden reincarnator, atop the wielder of a primordial treasure, atop a boy who had asked a question that had broken the universe.
A soft crunch of footsteps on the path broke his reverie. It was Yun Lian.
"You are not what you seem, Wei Xiao'ou," she said, her voice soft in the twilight.
He didn't sit up. "Nobody is. You wear the face of a survivor, but you are also a princess of a fallen house, a keeper of forgotten questions, and a woman who is very bad at holding chopsticks."
A faint smile touched her lips. "Fair." She sat on the ground near his mound, drawing her knees to her chest. "This plan of yours… entering the sect. It is a good shield. But it is only a shield. The Crows will not forget. The box will not cease its silent call."
"I know," Xiao'ou said, his eyes on the first emerging stars.
"Then what is the true plan?"
He was silent for a long time. "The Thirteenth Question," he said finally. "It wasn't just a question. It was a key. And the Answer wasn't a truth. It was a… a responsibility. A very, very annoying one."
He sat up and looked at her, his face serious in the dim light. "The sects, the clans, the empires… they're all playing a game on a board they think they understand. They're fighting over spirit stones, territories, face. They're trying to climb a ladder to heaven."
He picked up a handful of rich, dark soil and let it trickle through his fingers.
"But the ladder is broken. And the game is rigged. And the one who rigged it is getting bored."
Yun Lian felt a chill that had nothing to do with the evening air. "The Codex?"
Xiao'ou didn't confirm or deny. He simply looked towards the heavens, a wry, tired expression on his young face. "Entering the sect isn't about hiding, Yun Lian. It's about getting a better seat. From the inside of a major sect, I can see the players. I can learn the rules they think they're following. And I can find the others."
"Others?"
"The other keys," he said softly. "The other people who asked Forbidden Questions. The other pieces that don't fit on the board. Like you."
He stood up, brushing the dirt from his clothes. "The envoys arrive tomorrow. Remember, you are our visiting cousin from the western provinces, here to witness the glorious ascension of the Wei Clan's finest." He gave her a lazy, theatrical bow. "Try to look impressed."
As he walked away, Yun Lian remained seated, the soil he had held now cold in her hand. The young man from the rice village was gone, and in his place was a sovereign of some vast, laughing void, a boy who held a key to a door she couldn't even see.
She looked up at the stars, not as points of light, but as holes punched in the fabric of a cage.
For the first time since her escape, the memory of her family's death was not accompanied by crushing despair, but by a fierce, burning curiosity.
What was the joke? And how could she help him tell it?
—
The morning of the seventh day arrived with a fanfare of sunshine and bird song. The village was spotless, the banners fluttered gaily, and the inhabitants stood in neat, nervous rows, dressed in their best clothes.
Wei Xiao'ou and Wei Tiezhu stood at the front. Tiezhu was sweating in his new robes, his knuckles white as he clenched and unclenched his fists, mentally rehearsing the "Unmoving Mountain" stance. Xiao'ou looked… bored. He leaned on his umbrella, his eyes half-closed, as if he were waiting for a bus that was profoundly late.
Then, they came.
Not on foot, not on horses, but on a shimmering, elongated cloud that drifted down from the sky with a soft, humming sound. It was a "Jade Cloud Skiff," a vessel that spoke of immense wealth and power. Three figures stood upon it.
The one at the front was a man in his middle years, with a stern, carved-jade face and hair streaked with silver at the temples. He wore the grey-and-white robes of the Heavenly Sword Peak, with a single, slender longsword strapped to his back. His aura was contained, but it pressed down on the village like a physical weight—the pressure of the Core Formation realm. This was Elder Guo, the recruitment envoy.
To his left stood a young woman, beautiful and cold as a frozen waterfall. Her eyes swept over the village with detached assessment, lingering on nothing. This was Senior Sister Shen Bing, the ice beauty whose reputation for ruthless efficiency was as sharp as her sword.
To his right stood a young man who made Lin Proudcrane look humble. He was tall, handsome, and radiated an aura of sun-blessed, effortless superiority. His robes were of a finer cut, and he held himself as if the very ground were honored to bear his weight. This was Senior Brother Long Aotian.
The cloud-skiff settled silently in the village square. The hum faded. The silence was absolute, broken only by the frantic beating of a hundred hearts.
Elder Guo stepped forward, his gaze sweeping over the assembled youths. It felt like being flayed with ice.
"People of Fragrant Rice Village," he said, his voice devoid of warmth. "The Heavenly Sword Peak offers you the opportunity to prove your worth. Those between the ages of twelve and twenty, step forward for the spirit-root test."
One by one, the village youths stepped up to a multi-faceted crystal prism Elder Guo produced from his spatial ring. They placed their hands on it. Most elicited only a faint, flickering light. A few managed a steady glow. The son of the village blacksmith caused it to shine with a dull, earthy brown light—a low-grade Earth spirit root. There was a murmur of excitement. He would likely be accepted as an outer sect laborer.
Then it was Wei Tiezhu's turn.
He took a deep breath, remembering Yun Lian's teachings. He didn't try to force his Qi. He imagined himself as a mountain, rooted and deep. He placed his hand on the prism.
It glowed. Not brightly, but with a solid, unwavering, deep umber light. It was the light of the 3rd layer of Essence Condensation, but the quality of the light was different. It was stable. Dependable.
Elder Guo's eyebrow twitched, almost imperceptibly. "A passable Earth root. Stable foundation. Acceptable for the outer sect." He made a note on a jade slate.
Wei Tiezhu stepped back, his legs trembling with relief. He had done it.
Finally, it was Wei Xiao'ou's turn.
He ambled forward, yawning. He gave the prism a dubious look, as if it were a particularly uninteresting vegetable. He placed his hand on it with a lackadaisical slap.
The prism glowed with the same faint, steady light of the 3rd layer. Perfectly, boringly average.
Elder Guo was about to dismiss him with a wave when Senior Brother Long Aotian snorted.
"Look at him," Long Aotian said, his voice dripping with contempt. "He can barely keep his eyes open. He reeks of laziness. The Heavenly Sword Peak has no room for sluggards who would shame our reputation."
Wei Xiao'ou looked at Long Aotian, his expression blank. Then, he did something that would be recounted in village legend for generations.
He sneezed.
It was that same, simple, sleepy ah-choo!
And just like before, a perfectly timed gust of wind swept through the square. This one did not carry Dreamroot pollen. It caught the edge of a nearby banner, whipping it forward. The banner, which depicted the soaring sword of the Heavenly Sword Peak, snapped forward and its tasseled edge—dipped in fresh, wet paint from the previous day's preparations—slapped directly across Long Aotian's face, leaving a broad, comical stripe of brilliant red across his arrogant features.
The square froze.
Long Aotian stood there, stunned, a strip of red paint making him look like a defeated clown. The villagers held their breath, waiting for the explosion.
Wei Xiao'ou blinked, looked at the paint-smeared genius, and then at Elder Guo.
"My apologies, esteemed elder," he said, his voice dripping with false sincerity. "It seems the wind here is… very enthusiastic about art."
For a single, breathtaking second, no one knew what would happen. Then, from the side of the square, a sound escaped Senior Sister Shen Bing. It was a tiny, almost inaudible puff of air. A suppressed laugh.
It was gone in an instant, her face once again a mask of ice. But it had been heard.
Long Aotian's face, beneath the red paint, turned purple with rage. He took a step forward, his spiritual pressure flaring.
"That's enough," Elder Guo said, his voice cutting through the tension like a knife. He looked at Long Aotian's face, then at the lazily innocent expression of Wei Xiao'ou. A muscle in his jaw twitched. Was it annoyance? Or was it… amusement?
He looked back at his jade slate. "Wei Xiao'ou. Essence Condensation, third layer. Spirit root… unremarkable." He paused, then added, "Accepted into the outer sect."
The village exhaled in a collective, shuddering gasp. He'd done it. Through a combination of sheer luck and breathtaking audacity, the Lazy Immortal was going to a cultivation sect.
As the envoys turned to make their final arrangements, Wei Xiao'ou caught Yun Lian's eye. She was staring at him, her violet eyes wide with a mixture of horror and dawning respect.
He gave her a slow, deliberate wink.
The first move was made. The pawn had advanced, and in doing so, had somehow checkmated the king's prized knight before the game had even properly begun.
The journey to the Heavenly Sword Peak was about to begin. And Wei Xiao'ou, the boy who napped in spirit fields, was going to take the longest, most disruptive nap in the sect's history.