Chapter 175: Tamamo no Mae Tries to Undo the God Sealing Array
The battle did not pause for gods.
It simply found new shapes to wear.
When the strongest elites of Zhao's past, the Hufu Qishe warriors, poured out from the warped light above Jingxing, they did not descend like a simple reinforcement. They came like a remembered era given muscles.
Warhorses pounded the earth. Riders fanned outward, circling the Qin formation with the ease of veterans who had done this a thousand times. Bowstrings sang. Their ranks were dense, yet their movement was disciplined, advancing and withdrawing with measured tension.
With the power of ghosts and gods behind them, a Zhao that should have been on the edge of collapse suddenly gained hundreds of thousands of archers in an instant.
They were the Hufu Qishe of every generation since King Wuling of Zhao, the elite cavalry that had once shocked the world.
Yes.
That was the point.
This was not the Zhao of the present standing on those walls.
This was Zhao stretching across nearly a century, from the moment the Hufu Qishe became a symbol onward, gathered into a single night and forced onto one battlefield.
Even at Zhao's height, that would have been impossible. Top grade warhorses were rare, and true archers rarer still. The King's personal cavalry rarely exceeded ten thousand.
Yet the thing in the sky did not care about what was possible.
It cared only that history existed.
And so Qin was no longer fighting Zhao.
Qin was fighting the accumulated elite of Zhao's generations.
Still, the Qin Army did not retreat.
There was no weakness in their formation, no tremor of hesitation, because Zhao had divine aid.
And so did they.
More than that, the King had arrived in person, standing on the front line with the black banners around him.
At that same instant, the sword of Great Qin entered Rowe's grasp.
High above, the sharpness he had borrowed from tens of thousands of Qin soldiers condensed into a blazing point of light in his hand. It was not iron, not steel, not a weapon stolen from a waist. It was the national edge itself. The will that made a blade more than a blade.
Below, tens of thousands of Qin soldiers surged forward, one after another.
A Hufu Qishe rider released an arrow and dropped a man cleanly.
The next Qin soldier stepped over the body without slowing and slashed at the horse's legs.
Another rider spurred into the formation, trying to split it open, only to be caught by a forest of spears. He was lifted off the saddle and pierced through in midair.
Qin soldiers did not fear death.
The Hufu Qishe were projections. They did not understand death at all. It was not that they were brave. They were simply unacquainted with fear.
And Qin, for all its reverence for Heaven and fate, still did not fear death either.
At this moment, Heaven had borrowed the qin sword from the Qin Army. The qin sword in the hands of Qin became, in effect, the sword of Heaven.
"My Great Qin, ten thousand years!"
A young general roared as he charged.
A middle aged officer bled from the shoulder and still laughed as he struck.
"Great Qin, ten thousand years!"
"Ten thousand years!"
"Ten thousand years!"
The roar rolled through the night like a tide.
The hundreds of thousands of archers were suppressed.
Not by technique.
By a spirit that did not bend.
On the wall, Li Mu stared for a long time before the life drained from his expression.
"The soldiers of Qin have reached such a level," he murmured.
Then he exhaled, and the air sounded like defeat.
"My Zhao lost fairly."
Facing an army like this, reverent yet fearless, who could they not defeat. Who would dare claim they could not.
In the Qin formation, Ying Zheng watched the distant wall and spoke without turning his head.
"Do you know why Zhao was defeated?"
He was asking Wang Jian, who stood beside him, still stained with the smoke of command.
Wang Jian opened his mouth.
From a strategist's view, he could name a thousand reasons. Qin's morale. Qin's discipline. Qin's weapons. Qin's numbers. The pressure of the gods behind them.
But his throat tightened.
Because he understood Ying Zheng was not asking about any of that.
Ying Zheng's eyes remained fixed on the battlefield.
"Zhao's defeat lies in knowing only how to ask, and never how to give. When facing immortals and gods, they are naturally at a disadvantage."
He smiled, sharp as a drawn edge.
"And Great Qin's victory lies in asking and giving."
"Even the gods of Heaven must borrow the qin sword from Great Qin."
Then he laughed, loud and clean, and the sound scattered into the night wind.
Around him, Qin soldiers cheered, their voices echoing between Heaven and earth.
Above, Rowe lowered his gaze. The borrowed sharpness in his hand grew denser, more coherent. He gave a quiet chuckle.
Revere Heaven. Fear fate. Do not fear death.
This was not new.
It was the old courage that once lived in the blood of Yan and Huang. The spirit the ancestral gods of this land had once demanded of their own people. Many had forgotten it. Many could no longer remember what it felt like.
Only Great Qin, through reform and hunger and hard years, had clawed back a fragment of that past.
That was why Consort Yu had compared them to the Yan Huang allied army and the Jiuli tribes.
That kind of spirit belonged to an era that could still touch myth.
The human battle had already decided its victor.
So next.
"It is my turn."
Rowe stepped forward with the qin sword in his hand. To mortal eyes, it was as if a brilliant sun was slowly descending over Zhao, pressing down, closing the distance, and finally colliding with the unnameable thing that hovered over that land.
The closer he came, the clearer the whispers became. The formless muttering layered over itself until it was almost a texture against the mind.
Within the distortion, countless eyes seemed to open.
Countless gazes converged at once.
According to the information Consort Yu had passed to him, the Six Heavens Ancient Ghost hidden within Zhao was Di Jun, the chaotic aspect peeled away from Di Ku, an emperor who had once held the sky.
From the storm, a fragment of will pushed through.
"Great Old Ones… companion?"
It was not purely an Outer God. Not entirely.
These things were the ancestral gods' discarded chaos, so a sliver of rationality still existed, thin as a hairline crack in a sealed jar. It recognized something in Rowe that felt similar.
Then that recognition curdled.
Similarity became hostility.
Hostility became terror.
Because Rowe raised the qin sword that carried the will of a nation.
Because the human order of Great Qin had become a blade aimed at the cracks where it hid.
The storm shrieked.
Roars overlapped until the air itself felt like it was splitting.
Rowe kept walking, steady as a bell standing between Heaven and earth. The grand chime of his own existence spread outward, pressing back against the noise.
Clang.
Clang.
Clang.
The sound carried weight. It forced the thing in the sky to recoil for a heartbeat, as if it had glimpsed a Chaos vaster than itself.
As if it had seen invisible mist, countless unseen tendrils, striking countless unseen drums.
A faint, amused voice rose somewhere even deeper.
"This one… changed since before."
Tamamo no Mae stood in a resplendent palace that was not located in the present world, but in the deeper seam of human order, below even where Di Jun crouched.
From there, she watched the present like a reader watching a page.
Her golden eyes narrowed, and for the first time, the fox's expression carried something close to solemnity.
Even at this distance, she could feel Rowe's change.
Not stronger, not weaker. Not a matter of output or scale.
A shift in the way he existed.
The way he manifested.
It resembled the path some ancestral gods had once taken when they tried to break through by touching the Outer Gods' side of reality, merging, then peeling themselves free.
Had he stepped onto that road too?
Tamamo no Mae's lips curved upward.
She reclined on a high seat, tails drifting lazily behind her like living silk, as if she were merely enjoying a performance staged for her pleasure. Her amusement was genuine.
Surprise that Rowe had walked that path.
Excitement, because it sharpened her desire to conquer him.
Their initial conflict had been a struggle for Authority. Rowe had taken the sun's concept through Fusang, and that had collided with her claim.
But after their previous meeting, her objective had changed.
She wanted him.
Not only because of the resentment she carried toward the old gods of this land, but because Rowe was, by any reasonable measure, worthy prey.
Strong enough.
Decisive enough.
Wise enough.
And reckless enough to walk a road the ancestral gods themselves had once treated as nine deaths for one step.
There was also one more reason, petty and painfully real.
He had mocked her for failing to find a lover.
Tamamo no Mae's smile widened.
"Since you dared to mock me," she murmured, "then you will become the price."
Her palm extended, and from this depth of human order, she stroked the world below from a distance.
Because of Rowe, she had failed to seize the sun's full Authority over the Divine Land. But she had gathered fragments during this time, enough to tug at natural phenomena by adjusting her own state.
So the heavens shifted.
And the earth answered.
As the sky skewed under her touch, the change did more than empower Di Jun. It forced the premature revival of other Six Heavens Ancient Ghosts, already stirring due to Great Qin's eastward expansion.
Chu, where Rowe had already dealt with Taiyi, remained empty.
But in Yan, a faceless giant rose from the mountains, limbs unraveling into boneless tentacles that dragged across the horizon.
In Qi, thousands of orbs of light filled the sky, and within each orb something like an eye and a mouth seemed to lurk.
In Han, a pitch black flower bloomed in the air, its edges fringed with writhing tendrils, a pair of crimson eyes opening at its center.
In Wei, yellow mist spilled across the land, and a figure in yellow robes emerged, the hem trailing viscous strands like living mud.
One by one, the Six Heavens Ancient Ghosts revealed their shadows, reaching out from the seams of human order to distort reality.
They were the sealed chaotic aspects left behind by the gods each state had once worshipped.
And now they manifested, pushed forward by Tamamo no Mae's hand.
Of course, her goal was not simply to unleash them.
What she truly wanted was to use their pressure to undo the God Sealing Array.
A great thaumaturgical working formed in the ancient Investiture of the Gods era by Jiang Ziya, the Heavenly Equal Supreme, using the planet's suppressive force to pin Chaos beneath human order.
She wanted the world to fall into complete disorder.
Only then could she plan, step by step, toward what she desired.
"How will you break this, Great Monarch?"
With a gentle motion of her palm, she returned her gaze to Jingxing, to Rowe on the front line.
The Divine Land trembled. Mortals did not notice the minute shiver, but to Rowe it was unmistakable.
The Qin Army was still assaulting Jingxing. Li Mu still resisted with the desperation of a man refusing to let his home become a footnote.
And Rowe still approached Di Jun step by step.
Above his head, the shadow of his path manifested, sometimes as an ancient bell of impossible scale, sometimes as a swirling chaos that suggested countless unseen limbs striking at the void.
It was the echo of many Outer Gods germinating through the seed Abigail had left in him.
A Chaos older than Di Jun.
Not just hierarchy.
A law.
Older Mystery overwrote newer.
As Rowe advanced, Di Jun retreated.
Retreated again.
Its true body remained curled within human order, and what hovered in the sky was only a projection, a mask pressed into reality.
Even so, it retreated as if the retreat could save it, backing away until it struck a boundary and could not go farther.
At that moment, a thin unease flashed through Tamamo no Mae's eyes.
Because Rowe still had not swung the qin sword.
Not once.
He held it, but did not strike Di Jun with it.
It was not hesitation.
It was timing.
He was waiting.
Waiting for the real target.
"I found you, Tamamo no Mae."
The voice detonated beside her.
The unnameable whispers surged, too close, too sudden. She could not suppress them in time.
"Migu!"
The fox cried out, shocked out of her composure, and fell back.
In the human world, star rain drifted down like scattered sparks.
Rowe finally swung the qin sword.
Not at Di Jun.
Not at the other Ancient Ghosts awakening across the states.
But at the fox who had been peering through the pages of history, coveting the earth and coveting him.
Other things might be difficult to claim with certainty, but one fact was simple.
Rowe's perception had always been mercilessly precise. Any attempt at observation, any thread of information probing the present, had to pass through a model he could read.
He had noticed Tamamo no Mae long ago.
From the moment he stepped beyond the Qin Pass, before the war even began.
He simply did not move.
He let her believe he was focused only on Di Jun.
He let her reach further.
Let her use her power to interfere with the present world.
And once she did, he calculated her.
To deal with the Six Heavens Ancient Ghosts one by one was a method.
But cutting the throat of the one pulling the strings was cleaner.
The raised qin sword split through the crevice of human order like sunlight cutting through paper.
A line of light appeared.
A vast blazing sun surged upward and crashed straight into Tamamo no Mae's palace.
"Tamamo no Mae," Rowe said, smiling as he looked down at her, "we have finally met properly."
Tamamo no Mae stared at him, rage and shock tangling in her throat.
"Mi… migu?"
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