Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Chapter 143: Cold Front

Morning of the final day, Skyedge looked like somewhere that had never bled.

Xuan walked the main path at dawn and barely knew the place he’d grown up resenting. The flagstones threw back a wet shine. New banners hung the length of the approach, black ground with red running the borders, the sect’s colors finally reading like a choice instead of an apology. The east wall waited under the lanterns Yu had bullied out of the town, unlit in the daylight but ready for dusk. Three days ago this place had reeked of funeral smoke. This morning it could pass for a power.

He’d been poured into the heir’s formal robe at first light, and it was nothing like the everyday black-and-red of the disciples. Lian had brought it out from somewhere with the care owed a relic: deep crimson worked over black, the dragon-mark of the heir’s line picked out at the shoulder in dark thread you only caught when the light shifted. He felt like a blade someone had finally bothered to polish and mount on a wall.

Everywhere he looked, three days of panic had hardened into order. The feast hall stood dressed and waiting, long tables and warm light behind new screens. Disciples who’d spent two days on their knees with brushes now lined the path in pressed ranks, Wei Tianming among them, upright and recovered and looking quietly smug about having outlasted Lian’s command. The two wives moved through all of it making last corrections to things only they could see, Yu counting something under her breath, Lin Hua nudging a hanging over by a hand’s width as though the whole alliance turned on it. Maybe it did. He’d stopped betting against either of them.

By mid-afternoon the whole leadership had gathered at the front gate to wait. Lin Zhen stood at the head of them, tall even now, the long frame of a man who’d worn out more duel platforms than most elders had ever stepped onto, gone half-gray at the temples and grayer through the beard than he’d been two years back. He leaned a fraction onto his good leg; the other, the one the road ambush had ruined, he kept under him and bore without a word.

The council ranged out behind him in their best, the two wives in colors chosen to honor the guests without bowing to them, Kai a pace to the side with his mother’s blade on his back and his face shut. Nobody spoke much; everyone watched the road.

He spoke low, for Xuan alone, without turning his head. "Keep clear on what today is, and what it isn’t. Su Han and I mean to bind our houses together against what’s coming. That gets signed whether or not you and his heir ever trade two warm words." A dry edge came into it. "The marriage is on the table because it tightens the knot. It is not the knot. Don’t go carrying the whole alliance on whether a girl takes to your face."

’No pressure,’ Xuan thought. ’Two sects and a war, that’s all.’

[ He’s right, for what it’s worth. ] Mira. [ The alliance is the prize. You’re a bonus clause. Try to be a good one. ]

He turned the word over while they waited. Bonus clause. Two years ago he’d been a joke with a sword he couldn’t lift, and now a frost-sect heir had come a hundred miles to weigh whether he was worth a line in a treaty. The promotion kept catching him off guard.

The cold arrived before the column did.

It came up the path ahead of them like a season changing its mind, a thin bite in the spring air with no business being there. The banners showed at the last bend below the gate: Frostmoon’s pale blue and white topping the final stretch of the climb, a column ascending in tight order behind a tall older lord with frost-white hair and a face that surrendered nothing. Su Han. He took the steep ground like a man who’d bargained hard his whole life and rarely walked off the loser.

And at his shoulder climbed Su Qingyue, and the recognition caught somewhere behind Xuan’s ribs.

She looked every degree as cold as the air she’d pushed ahead of her. Black hair drawn back and pinned with the cracked-ice clasp he remembered, a robe the pale blue-white of deep winter, a face composed to the point of a shut door. Where her boots met the fresh flagstones, the faintest bloom of frost flowered and died. She was lovely the way a frozen lake is lovely, which is to say it looks like it’ll hold your weight right up until the instant it doesn’t.

Her gaze found him in the row of Skyedge faces and stopped. For one breath she read him head to foot, the way she used to read opponents from across a tournament floor, and the small curve he remembered touched the corner of her mouth. Whether that meant she was glad to see him or had merely filed away three fresh facts about him, he couldn’t have said which. With her it was never only the one thing.

He had half a courtly greeting assembled and waiting when Mira’s voice cut straight across it, stripped of every gram of play.

[ Han Ying’s in. ] Flat, fast. [ He just walked through the gate of Blood Fang’s main base. Their heart, Xuan. We have eyes inside the enemy’s home as of this second. ]

And there it was, the worst possible timing arriving precisely on schedule.

In front of him: a Frostmoon heir who read people for sport, close enough now that the chill rolled off her in a wave, her eyes working over his face. Behind his eyes: the inside of Blood Fang, finally split open, every secret his family had bled for about to pour through a dead man’s borrowed sight. He had to be wholly present for one and wholly gone for the other, with exactly one head to manage both.

[ I know. ] Mira, low and grim. [ And of every person on this continent you could go cross-eyed in front of, you picked the one who once caught you drifting from clear across a market street. ] A beat. [ So don’t drift now. ]

Su Qingyue came up the last of the path, crossed the few paces to the Skyedge line, and halted in front of him. Up close the cold was a pressure against the skin, and her eyes had not once left his face.

"Lin Xuan." Her voice came level, low, unhurried. "You look like you’re already somewhere else."