Pov: Vik
Rewriting a person's memories is a delicate surgical procedure. If you use brute-force soul magic, the victim ends up drooling like a turnip, and any half-decent cultivator who scans their mind will immediately notice the scar tissue.
Fortunately, I had the Maya Manifestation Technique and a steady hand with Prana.
Sitting on a wooden stool in the courtyard of Anonymous Hall, I rested my index finger lightly against the forehead of the unconscious Luther. Beneath my fingertip, the basic illusion layer of Maya wove directly into his recent neural pathways, replacing the memory of our continental cruiser encounter and the Great White's brig with a vivid, terrifyingly realistic false history.
In Luther's newly edited mind, he had spent the last two weeks working as a secret courier for "Sect Master Ruby," transporting a captured girl named Lina Rosewell into West Oak City's underground vaults. He clearly "remembered" watching Ruby use her black obsidian ring to crush a four-legged shadow spider inside Lina's head, laughing hysterically as she declared that the "idiot boy riding the mountain behemoth in the Kingdom of Mercury" was nothing more than a walking purse waiting to be skinned for her Apex Flesh-Forge Protocol.
I pulled my finger back and repeated the process on four of the six blood-aproned rogue alchemists Roman had captured in the sewers, tailoring two of them for the Gu Master in Blackwater Province and leaving the last two completely untouched—save for a physical projection crystal of Ruby's human dissection tables stuffed into their breast pockets—for our righteous sword-boy, Ye Xiao.
"All done," I said, dusting off my hands and adjusting my gold-rimmed spectacles. "Lina, are the signal relays attached?"
"Woven straight into the inner seams of their collars with zero-mana fiber, Master," Lina reported proudly, tapping her brass tablet. "They don't emit any spiritual waves. Instead, they piggyback on the Western Continent's public commercial satellite network like lost cell phones. As long as they are above ground, we'll get crisp audio and 4K video feeds right here in the hall."
"And the delivery mechanism?" I asked, glancing at Roman.
"The Great White has surfaced in three separate inland river channels over the past hour using its short-range spatial jump," Roman replied, crossing his massive arms. "The pneumatic torpedo tubes have been refitted with soft-landing air cushions. We can launch the packages straight to their destinations from fifty miles away without leaving a single spatial trace."
[System: Host, you are literally firing hostages out of submarine torpedo tubes like Amazon Prime packages. If the Geneva Convention existed in this world, they would have to write a whole new chapter just for you.]
'No one is getting hurt, chatbot. I even had Lina put little parachutes on the capsules. It's practically a luxury skydiving experience.'
"Send them out, Roman," I ordered, scooping Pushpa off the stone table and settling her comfortably around my neck. "Once the torpedoes clear the tubes, submerge the Great White back into the deep glacial lake and cut all active engine emissions. Noah, Xiaoran, Lina—into the cultivation hall. If I see anyone slacking off before the show starts tomorrow, Chintu gets to sleep in your dorm room."
From the edge of the pond, the three-foot-tall baby T-Rex let out an excited, squeaky "Rawr!" and wagged his heavy green tail, clearly thrilled at the prospect of a sleepover.
Lu Xiaoran's face paled instantly. Without saying a word, he grabbed Noah by the collar and sprinted toward the cultivation hall at Mach 2, with Lina bolting right behind them.
Pov: Third Person
Three hundred miles west of West Oak City, high atop the snow-covered peaks of the Heavenly Sword Pavilion, the cold night wind howled through a secluded cliffside cavern known as the Cave of Ten Thousand Broken Blades.
At the center of the freezing stone platform sat a nineteen-year-old youth dressed in plain, faded grey outer-sect robes. His black hair was tied back with a frayed hemp rope, and across his knees rested a notched, rust-covered iron broadsword that radiated a terrifying, ancient sharpness.
He was Ye Xiao—once mocked as the crippled sword-slave of the outer peaks, now whispered of in fear and awe by every disciple after he survived his fall into Sword-Burial Cliff three months ago.
Floating silently beside his shoulder was the translucent, miniature phantom of a white-bearded old man with a sword mark between his brows.
"Little Xiao, steady your breath," the ancient sword spirit murmured in his mind. *"Your Chaos Sword Intent has already reached the 5th Circle equivalent. Once we expose the Third Elder for pushing you off the cliff at next week's Grand Assembly, the Sect Master will have no choice—" *
WHISTLE—THUD! THUD!
Before the sword spirit could finish, two muffled impacts echoed from the snowbank just outside the cave entrance, followed by the soft fwoosh of silk parachutes dissolving into ash.
Ye Xiao's eyes snapped open, flashing like cold steel. In a single heartbeat, he was on his feet, his rusty iron sword drawn and humming with lethal Qi as he dashed out onto the icy ledge.
Lying in the snow were two middle-aged men wearing thick leather aprons soaked in dried blood and green alchemical bile. Both men were bound in high-grade spirit-suppression cord.
"Who goes there?!" Ye Xiao barked, his sword tip stopping half an inch from the throat of the greasy-haired alchemist as the man groaned and woke up from his sedation. "Did the Third Elder send you to assassinate me?!"
"D-Don't kill me! Don't kill me!" the greasy alchemist shrieked, his eyes nearly popping out of his skull as he felt the suffocating sword intent pressing against his Adam's apple. "We aren't assassins! We're just alchemists from West Oak City! Please, spare us, Senior! Junior Elder Ruby ordered us to do it! If we didn't extract the spiritual roots from those mortals, her monster vats would have failed!"
Ye Xiao froze. His brow furrowed deeply. "Junior Elder Ruby? The 'Prismatic Fairy' that the First Elder just inducted into the inner sect with full honors last month? What nonsense are you spouting about extracting mortal spiritual roots?!"
"Wait, Little Xiao," the ancient sword spirit floated forward, his spectral eyes narrowing as he pointed at a glowing crystal badge that had rolled out of the alchemist's pocket onto the snow. "Touch that recording stone with your Qi."
Ye Xiao flicked a strand of sword Qi into the crystal.
Instantly, a thirty-foot-wide holographic projection lit up the snowy cliffside—bright enough that dozens of patrolling outer- and inner-sect disciples on the neighboring peaks stopped dead in their tracks and looked up in horror.
Projected clearly against the night sky were the forty-eight towering glass vats of the Bloodborn ancestral vault, the screaming rogue cultivator strapped to the iron dissection table with his chest clamped open, and the clear, recorded audio of Ruby's orders to harvest the citizens of West Oak City like livestock to build a synthetic monster army.
On the neighboring peaks, gasps of sheer revulsion erupted from the watching disciples.
"That's... that's the Bloodborn estate in West Oak City!" "Junior Elder Ruby is practicing forbidden flesh-forging arts on innocent civilians?!" "How could our righteous Heavenly Sword Pavilion harbor such a demonic fiend?!"
Beneath the glowing projection, Ye Xiao's hand trembled on the hilt of his rusty iron sword. The righteous fury burning in his chest caused the snow within twenty meters to vaporize into white steam.
"Using the banner of our Heavenly Sword Pavilion to butcher the weak like pigs..." Ye Xiao's voice dropped to a chilling, righteous roar that echoed across the mountain range. "So the First Elder's prized 'Prismatic Fairy' is nothing more than a demonic witch wearing human skin! If the inner-sect elders are too blind and corrupt to cleanse this filth, then my sword will do it for them!"
With a single furious kick, Ye Xiao launched himself off the cliff, riding a streak of blinding silver sword-light straight toward the eastern horizon and West Oak City.
At that exact same moment, eight hundred miles south in the rotting, miasma-choked swamps of Blackwater Province, a swarm of ten thousand blood-winged locusts descended upon two unconscious men who had just dropped into the mud near the marsh border.
Sitting atop the back of a thirty-meter, hundred-legged armored centipede was a pale, gaunt youth with hollow dark circles under his eyes. He wore tattered black robes that smelled of dead insects and dried venom.
As two of his mind-reading brain-leeches burrowed into the temples of the waking alchemists and transmitted their "memories" back to him, the gaunt youth suddenly stood up on the centipede's skull.
His dry, cracked lips twisted into an unhinged, ecstatic grin.
"An Immortal-Grade Blood-Devouring Mother Gu... hidden inside an obsidian ring in West Oak City?!" the Gu Master rasped, his voice trembling with fanatical greed as millions of venomous insects began boiling out of the swamp water around him. "And the foolish woman holding it doesn't even know how to feed it properly, using crude flesh-vats instead of true Gu refinement?! Hahaha! Heaven truly favors my path! My little babies, tonight we march north and feast on a 'fairy'!"
And four hundred miles to the northwest, on the barren rocky plains bordering the Kingdom of Mercury, the earth shook with slow, apocalyptic tremors.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
A four-legged mountain behemoth—so colossal its back supported a towering black stone citadel—paused in its stride. Surrounding the behemoth's legs were dozens of fifty-meter-tall armored giants whose heads scraped the low-hanging clouds.
High on the balcony of the black citadel, the black-haired, red-eyed youth stared down at a trembling, mud-spattered blonde nobleman who had just been dragged up from the plains by a two-headed gargoyle.
It was Luther.
"I-I swear I'm telling the truth, Great Lord!" Luther sobbed, groveling on the cold stone balcony and wetting his silk pants for the third time that week as his rewritten memories poured out of his mouth like a broken dam. "I was the one who delivered Lina Rosewell to Sect Master Ruby in West Oak City! I saw it with my own eyes! When that black spider monster appeared in the girl's head, Ruby sucked it straight into her black ring, laughed, and said that the 'pathetic little boy playing with oversized clay giants in Mercury' wasn't even worthy of being her footstool! She said once she finishes her Flesh-Forge army this week, she's going to march over here, skin your mountain behemoth alive, and turn its hide into a pair of boots!"
CRACK!
The stone railing of the balcony shattered into powder under the black-haired youth's bare hand.
His crimson eyes flared with a murderous, humiliated rage that turned the sky above the citadel blood-red.
[DING! SYSTEM QUEST TRIGGERED: CRUSH THE ARROGANT PLAGIARIST!][TARGET: SECT MASTER RUBY (WEST OAK CITY). REWARD: 1,000,000 MONSTER EVOLUTION POINTS + ABSORPTION OF THE 'GLUTTONY RING'!]
"Turn my Behemoth into boots...?" the youth hissed, a terrifying, psychotic smile stretching across his face as he raised his hand toward the eastern horizon. "She dares to steal my prey, eat my Mind Flayer, and mock my Monster Legion?! All giants—full march! By tomorrow night, I want West Oak City trampled into flat dirt!"
Pov: Vik
Back in the cozy main hall of Anonymous Hall, I sat in my favorite cushioned chair with a warm bowl of Roman's ginger lotus soup in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other.
In front of me, three floating holographic screens projected by Lina's satellite relays showed three very angry, very dramatic young men marching toward the exact same coordinate on the map from the west, the south, and the northwest.
[System: ...Host. All three of them took the bait without a single second of critical thinking. Do any of these Chosen Ones actually have a brain inside their skulls?!]
"When your entire life is carried by plot armor and cheat codes, your critical thinking muscles naturally atrophy," I said calmly, blowing on a spoonful of warm broth while Pushpa slept peacefully in my lap, her tail curled neatly over her nose. "Now, let's see how our dear 'player' Ruby enjoys her surprise raid event."