Though the immortal sect had been turned upside down, the effects had yet to reach the mortals of Great Wan.

Apart from some burned plants, Guangyun Palace was already as good as new, but Emperor Jiahe, Zhou Huan, kept feeling that the bed beneath him was shaking. After Pang Jian had left, he had woken with a start twice, pursued by one confused dream after another. Now it was the cold eyes of his father, struck dead by heavenly lightning, and now it was his fourth younger brother Zhou Xi’s bloodless face.

In this confusion, Zhou Xi’s face changed into his own. He felt that he was like a corpse, lying all alone in a coffin. His imperial robes were embroidered with black dragons, identical to the dragon shadow that had nearly swallowed Jinping whole.

When the fireworks from the Xuanyin Mountains suddenly rose into the sky, Zhou Huan, on waking with a start, cried out “Father!” and sat up, cold sweat soaking his inner robe. When he was finished watching the “show,” he found himself huddled at the foot of the bed like a nervous bird.

There came the sound of urgent footsteps. Zhou Huan came back to his senses, and nameless anger rose in his heart. He threw his jade pillow at the eunuch who came in at a trot. “It is forbidden to run in Zihuan Palace, haven’t you learned the rules?!”

A corner of the jade pillow broke off when it hit the ground. The eunuch fell to his knees in the doorway with a thud. “Y-your Majesty, come look, quickly!”

The court assembly was canceled that day. Accompanied by the rising sun, Zhou Huan’s wide sleeves raised a wind as he walked.

He seemed to want to run headlong, but the fastest part of his body was from the neck up. He gave off the powerlessness and obsolescence of something that had been left behind by the passage of time.

Emperor Jiahe had ascended the throne fourteen years ago. Among mortals, he was in fact no longer young. Had he been one of the herb gatherers of Western Chu, he might have reincarnated twice if he’d been in a hurry. But for a noble who had never missed a dose of low-grade elixirs, the early forties were the good days, when one had grown to full maturity and could begin to make waves. He had rather rushed ahead into elderliness.

Zhou Huan’s belly was substantial, but his cheeks were so sunken in they looked emaciated. He had once had the serene eyes peculiar to the Zhou family—turned neither up nor down, the inner and outer corners of the eyes practically on a level, of moderate size. But now it seemed they could no longer hold themselves up; his eyeballs protruded more and more, making his eyes larger and larger, and the outer corners had begun to droop. The countenance that had been kindly in his youth had become pathetic. His eyelids, so thin they were translucent, couldn’t shield his panicked gaze.

He burst almost disheveled into Changming Palace—the residence of the Empress Dowager.

There was deathly silence in Changming Palace. Eunuchs knelt everywhere. Sweat flowed at the temples of the imperial physicians bustling in and out. Empress Yao, who had arrived a step ahead of him, didn’t even dare to raise her head.

The phoenix head that automatically watered the plants in the courtyard activated just then. Under the horrified gazes of the young palace maids, the gears unscrewed the stopper and sprayed water all over the emperor as he charged in.

Ice-cold droplets fell on Zhou Huan’s face. He ignored them. Eyes fixed straight ahead, he rushed through slender rainbows into the empress dowager’s sleeping quarters. He saw an emaciated hand hanging down beneath a heavy screen, with inauspicious purple-black on the nails.

Zhou Huan shook. For a moment, he nearly lost consciousness. Many people stepped forward to hold him up all at once and call out nonsense like “May His Majesty’s health be preserved.” Empress Yao only cried.

Zhou Huan flung off the eunuchs, gathered all his scant courage, and haltingly walked in. He saw Empress Dowager Zhang with her eyes wide open, her chest heaving violently, like a combustion cylinder about to explode.

His legs went weak, and he went to his knees beside the bed.

Fourteen years ago, when Zhou Huan had fearfully ascended the throne, he had legitimately welcomed back his mother, who had spent the better part of her life in the cold palace.

Everyone said he was kind and benevolent, that he had ushered in a prosperous period of goodness and peace, sweeping away the chronic diseases of prior regimes. Only Zhou Huan himself was perfectly well aware that it was his renowned tyrant of a father who had swept away the chronic diseases. The new policies had been left to him ready-made by his predecessor, who had been unable to realize them. Since succeeding to the throne, from the major issues of disaster relief and road repairs to the minor ones of the imperial household’s expenses, he had never made a single decision of his own.

“Mother, Mother…” This “orphan” of over forty helplessly clutched at her sleeve. “Mother…what have you done? I don’t understand, what’s wrong…?”

Empress Dowager Zhang had suffered a “sudden acute illness” early in the morning—no one dared to say she had been poisoned, having consumed a poisonous gas made by a master. It was very valuable. It couldn’t be detected by the spiritual sense of a cultivator below an ascended spirit. If a mortal breathed in a single drop, all remedies would be useless. The imperial physicians were all bustling for nothing.

No one could have access to such a thing without having once belonged to a big family.

“Out…everyone out…”

Empress Yao made out what she was muttering and quickly stood to dismiss all the attendants. On tip-toe, she returned to kneel at Zhou Huan’s feet. Through sobs, she whispered, “Mother…Mother ordered me to send a letter to Ziming in the southern mines, I…I sent it according to her orders, and when I looked back, she had…”

The empress’s younger brother by a concubine, Yao Qi, had spent a whole year tormenting and being tormented by Luo Qingshi in the Latent Cultivation Temple, each leaving the other with unending trauma—one’s Way of the Heart had nearly exploded from anger, and the other to this day felt ill whenever he saw a boy of similar stature to Luo Qingshi. Yao Qi had opened his spiritual eyes in the final days before the Latent Cultivation Temple was about to shut its gates. After leaving the mountains, he had gone to do odd jobs in the southern mines.

In recent years, Zhou Huan’s relationship with Empress Yao had been very distant. Looking at that woman, who had all the backbone of a lump of dough, he felt like he was looking into a mirror, despising her more the more he saw her. The empress was out of favor, and she made no waves. She spent all her time in Changming Palace joining Empress Dowager Zhang in her vegetarian meals, rarely having contact with outsiders. Hearing that she had sent a letter to the southern mines, an ominous premonition rose out of nowhere in Zhou Huan’s heart. “What did the letter say? Show me!”

Empress Yao, trembling, presented the downgraded immortal tool she had used to contact Yao Qi. Zhou Huan snatched it away and read it rapidly. He went numb all over.

A shed skin had rebelled against the spiritual mountains…the end of the Xuanyin Mountains was near…less than a hundred years…immediately make an inventory of reserves in the southern mines…

The big clock in Changming Palace reached the hour just then and made a lengthy tolling, striking the ears like a death knell. Zhou Huan abruptly came back to his senses. His face ashen pale, he said with a forced smile, “This…this… Mother, this can’t… How could you just send this kind of…”

Then he quickly leapt up and slapped Empress Yao, knocking her to the ground. “Stupid bitch! Whether it’s true or not, how could you send vitally important information like this through a mass-produced downgraded immortal tool?! It’s no different from printing it in a toilet bulletin and announcing it to the whole world! Are you trying to kill us?!”

Empress Yao’s sharp cry made the people waiting outside think the empress dowager had passed. With a rustling, they all knelt.

Glance sweeping over the empress dowager’s derisive eyes and purple lips, Zhou Huan suddenly realized something: this was wrong. Empress Yao might not understand, but his mother belonged to a noble family. How could she not know about the taboos of downgraded immortal tools? And why had she taken poison?

All these years, his mother had been in contact with the silent Li clan. They had occasionally had instructions for him, but they had never told him the whole story.

“Have you…done this on purpose?”

Empress Dowager Zhang could no longer speak. Zhou Huan crawled to her bedside, tears and snot falling, and shook her hand forcefully. “Mother, have you gone mad? What the hell were you thinking? What am I supposed to do? What will I…”

Holding up her spasming eyelids, Empress Dowager Zhang laboriously focused on Zhou Huan’s blurred form. She simply couldn’t tell the sounds of these two wailing “Mother” apart; they were truly a perfect match.

“How strange,” she thought, “this is actually mine and Zhou Kun’s son. What went wrong?”

The roots of the Zhang family weren’t as deep as those of the four big clans, but its descendants had worked hard; many able officials had come out of it, and they had intermarried with Xuanyin’s Li clan for hundreds of years, tying them inextricably together. Before, practically every generation had had a direct descendant receive a selection card. There were thirteen members of the Zhang family in the inner sect, the one with the highest cultivation among them already a near-ascended spirit, merely a step away from becoming a peak master. Once they stepped over that pass, the Zhang family could say it had “immortal roots.”

And in Heaven’s Design Pavilion and the southern mines, the family’s members were innumerable. During each New Year celebration, the family would open up a small hall where blue-clothed “divinities” would descend from the sky.

Empress Dowager Zhang’s disposition had been impetuous and unyielding in her youth. She was never willing to be left behind. She studied literary and martial arts and spent all her free time in company with spiritual stones, striving to develop her spiritual sense, never taking part in the dull poetry gatherings and flower festivals of Jinping’s noble young ladies. She had left her mediocre older brother in the dust, dreaming that one day she too could wear the blue clothes.

But in that class, though the Zhang family spared no effort in the struggle, in the end they obtained only one spot in the quota for selection cards. It would truly have been a waste to give it to a daughter without any special talents; better to use her for a marriage alliance with another family, to widen the pathway for future generations.

When people were trampled by irresistible powers, they often had two types of reactions: either they would raise their weak mantis arms in indignation and resist, even if it meant dying under the trundling wheels; or they would climb into the carriage trampling them, grit their teeth and carve themselves into a totem to leave behind, then pledge their life to safeguarding that totem—to getting justice for all they had been forced to accept and all they had suffered.

The strong-minded Empress Dowager Zhang belonged to the latter type.

When the Grand Selection Year passed, she had a fit of crying, waved goodbye to her high-spirited youth, and entered into an engagement with Zhou Kun, who had just sent off his last loved one.

At the time, Emperor Taiming had not yet become a scheming old lunatic. His family had buried the older brother he had depended on, the immortal mountains had snatched away the sister who had been his companion since childhood, his mother was in the ground, his father was on the memorial altar. He was alone, angry, and confused. As if grasping at a life-saving straw, he mistakenly set all his hopes on his first wife.

And the two of them had gone through a period of extremely sincere feelings. When passion was at its headiest, they had even thought they could be a pair forever.

Sadly, they hadn’t chanced upon good times.

At the time, with Rosy Cloud Peak unexpectedly gaining a master, Xuanyin’s thirty-six inner sect peaks were nearly all taken. All the sect’s families were as tightly wound as could be. Each Grand Selection class was a silent fight at close quarters; it had also influenced the state of affairs at court. The Li and Zhang contingent were aggressive, the Zhao and Lin clans wouldn’t budge, and Zhou Kun was naturally iron-willed and resolute. The internal strife in the inner sect and in the mortal world grew fiercer and fiercer. Empress Dowager Zhang was caught in the middle, wavering between her husband and her family. The hostility between emperor and empress grew stronger and stronger.

By the time Zhou Kun deliberately provoked a disaster, bringing the conflict between the Li and Zhao clans to the forefront in the mortal world, husband and wife were hardly on speaking terms. The harem was full of blooming flowers; the “happy news” of one pregnancy after another was announced. She reached the end of her endurance. All kinds of tactics had been unsuccessful. She nearly set aside her pride and went to him to ask for a reconciliation.

But fate makes fools of people. Just then, the “sky” above the Li family’s heads in the inner sect fell.

The power of the once flourishing Li clan fell like a mountain. For all its future generations, those related by marriage, and close friends—countless people who had formerly been “superior”—the path to immortality was forever severed.

Empress Dowager Zhang’s family was tied up in it. At the final juncture, she chose to be the Zhang family’s daughter, not Great Wan’s empress. She illicitly leaked information to her clan, having no idea that Zhou Kun was prepared. He personally shot down the messenger she had sent to her family at the gates of Guangyun Palace. Her family members were either put to death or sent into distant exile with no hope of return.

The power of the Li and Zhang bloodline in court had been practically pulled up by the roots. After this, the empress spent half her life in company with the oil lamps of the cold palace.

She was a person like a phoenix, who had longed to question heaven and earth. She had come together with Zhou Kun because of family and nation, and she had come to this dead end because of family and nation. She had never paid any attention to the irrelevant trifles in the harem. Zhou Kun had always thought that apart from Lady Lin, she hadn’t even had a clear look at any of the consorts or concubines. She didn’t have such small-minded thoughts.

No one knew that her first time seeing Lady Xi, she had been scorched into a panic by Xi Ziyi’s beauty. Learning that Lady Xi was related to Cui Ji, she had immediately awarded her favorite pearls and hairpins from when she had been a girl to her servants.

Out of jealousy, Empress Dowager Zhang had even committed the single pointless “folly” of her life—she had placed a “bewitchment” she had coincidentally obtained in her youth onto a palace maid named Xiao Song, whom that country girl Lady Xi had brought into the palace.

The bewitchment was normally useless, and Empress Dowager Zhang felt it was beneath her to use this little trick to harm others. Even if a master had come along, they wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong with that palace maid. Only on the night of the full moon could she activate it. On every full moon night, holding the corresponding “dreaming pearl,” she could see some of the daily trifles happening in Yuying Palace through the maid’s dreams.

She had only…wanted to see whether he really would be enchanted by that beauty.

After placing the bewitchment, she instantly regretted it, feeling that it was conduct unworthy of her position. That was just when her family was toppled. She had no time to attend to children or relationships. In a flash, she had forgotten about that act of petty jealousy.

When she once again recalled it, everything had changed.

Living in the cold palace alone, in what mood did she sneak into Xiao Song’s dreams? Hard to say. Perhaps she only wanted to compound her suffering. When one has nothing, suffering is also pleasure… But unexpectedly, from that insignificant vase Lady Xi, she discovered something tremendous.

It turned out that into every generation of the Zhou family was born an unknown possessor of natural spiritual bones, and this generation’s natural spiritual bones had somehow chosen to reincarnate in Lady Xi’s womb.

The palace maid Xiao Song was the most handy of Lady Xi’s servants. In the years immediately after the third prince was born, she was the one who always looked after him. Through her, a pair of surprised and horrified eyes saw Zhou Ying, and glimpsed from that sinful boy a corner of the Zhou family’s eight centuries of secrets.

As the Crown Prince Zhou Huan grew up, she at last used this incompetent son to contact the Li and Zhang families. There were still a few people around the edges of the southern mines who were relatives of the former Zhang family. As she cautiously observed Zhou Ying, she sent the information out, investigating along with her family the circumstances behind the Zhou family using the spiritual bones of their children as sacrifices. They pieced together an appalling truth… Then, in that year, all those with Ways of the Heart of common origin that could be traced back to the Dignitary of Code Li Fengshan received a “heavenly edict.”

Everyone was excited to the point of tears, thinking that heaven had at last opened its eyes and was prepared to set things to rights.

In that moment, Empress Dowager Zhang believed that she was carrying the weight of a sacred duty and heaven’s will on her shoulders.

Zhou Ying was fifteen years old then. He brought up wanting to leave the palace early to establish his own household. Empress Dowager Zhang didn’t know what he was up to. That fiend seemed to have reincarnated with the memories of some demon. He had always been strange. Looking at him too long was chilling. If he were allowed to leave Guangyun Palace, it would be hard to spy on him in the future.

So they determined to act that year. After long observation, they chose Liang Chen—a miserable wretch whose Way of the Heart had preceded his spiritual bones, who believed with all his heart that he was acting for the good of the nation and the people.

The heavenly edict said that the Southern Sage had sealed the Territory Map in the veins of the earth, which even Zhao Yin didn’t know. Only a person who inherited an ancient demonic god’s accompanying plant could reach into the Territory Map and become a living Territory Map rubbing, aid them in obtaining control over the Territory Map and take back the Xuanyin Mountains.

Those people had severed their path to immortality. Unless they struck at the roots, they would never be able to free themselves.

But the earthquake in the Resurrection Vortex alerted the Zhou family. Princess Anyang, Zhou Qing, took charge; the remaining agents planted in the southern mines were cleaned up. Something went wrong with that good-for-nothing Liang Chen; he didn’t manage to digest the ancient demonic god’s inheritance in eight years, and he was nearly killed by the hidden bones. In his haste, he revealed himself ahead of schedule, and everything immediately slid in an incalculable direction: the Impassable Sea scheme failed, Zhou Kun died, and then came the fall of the Zhao family…

Immortals and mortals alike seemed to have been caught in an accelerating vortex.

It turned out that while the stars could be deceived, destiny wasn’t up to humans.

Now, it was all over.

Just then, two black-clothed people appeared out of nowhere like steam in the Empress Dowager’s sleeping quarters and picked up the limp Zhou Huan. “Your Majesty, the Empress Dowager has ordered us to conduct you safely away from the palace.”

“No, I… Mother…”

Empress Dowager Zhang’s gaze was becoming dimmer and dimmer. She struggled to smile at her newly arrived family members. Idiot, the heavenly edict was forced to speak and then suddenly fell silent. It must be that Zhi Xiu has already received word. The game is as good as lost. The Territory Map and the dragon shadow reappeared under his nose; what happened in the past can no longer be hidden. If you let them find their footing, you won’t survive.

“Mother! Moth…”

First it was sight, then hearing. She could no longer hear Zhou Huan’s raucous voice, either. In a daze, Empress Dowager Zhang seemed to return to her girlhood, when her engagement had just been fixed. Zhou Kun, who had still been Crown Prince then, had snuck out of the palace to see her. When he was discovered by the master being kept by the Zhang family, he didn’t hide; he openly offered up a letter. But when he bent his head, his ears were red.

The letter started out written as formally as a memorial to the throne, but further on, he called her “Yunying,” and further still, there were fallen flowers from Jinping’s four seasons folded into the letter paper… Where had they all gone?

Oh, yes.

Her hand dropped.

Forty years ago, they had turned to ashes in the cold palace’s furnace.