The room was utterly silent but for the steady dripping into the meditation pool, just like it had been for the past ten years. It was a soothing sound, muted and vast amongst the wide-open space, a heavy darkness handing between the vermillion eaves vaulted above, heavy and glistening with the weight of its age. A glittering array of scarlet jade flagstones of innumerable shapes radiated out from the edge of the pool, seemingly random, yet not— Daoist Bleeding Horizons had been there when the stones had been laid, creating the greatest qi-gathering formation on the entirety of Ca Cao.

He sat still, breathing in careful rhythm, legs crossed in perfect meditative poise— poised on the tip of a blade, on a jade stele, stabbed into the very heart of the meditation pool. It was automatic at the point he’d reached— the furious vortex of his nascent soul devoured everything before it, pulling and pulling at the energy of heaven and earth and subsuming it into himself. Not a single whisper of air moved in the chamber, but if his will slipped for even a moment the entire mountain beneath him would tremble with his unrestrained presence.

As was only fitting, for a master cultivator in Late Sundering.

As was only fitting, for the Sect Master of the Bloody Saffron Sect.

Another drop hit the meditation pool below him. Soon, he’d reach the peak of his realm, and then… perhaps the Ever-Joyous Harmony of Bells Sect would be willing to accept a new elder. It would be years before then— decades at the least, centuries if he wasn’t as fortuitous, but it was the single most important thing left for him to consider—

As if the universe was mocking him, the moment he thought that, the door to the cultivation chamber was unsealed. A shaft of wan light— winter’s, with the hint of yin cold that was carried to him on the air, he knew— catching on the pillars and faint golden filigree, and falling onto the blood of the meditation pool. Scowling, Bleeding Horizons leapt to his feet, sweeping his sword out from underneath him and sailing twenty feet over the meditation pool to land gently on the tiled edge. “Who dares interrupt me?”

“Is that how you greet an old friend?”

“Elder Flowing Blade? I thought you were in closed door cultivation?”

“Ha! Shows what you know. Some new developments have arisen, and the council of elders agreed that your oversight was necessary.”

His expression soured. “Truly? I would not trust some of those dottering fools to hold their own chopsticks, much less make decisions about my

closed door cultivation.” Most of them were far too old, master cultivators who had broken through to Sundering ages ago only to stall out in the esoteric realm. It made them… difficult to deal with, at times. “I was close to a breakthrough. This will set me back by years, Flowing Blade.”

“Friend, you’ll want to see this. The video is beyond marvelous— trust me, it’s worth a decade or two.” Well, now he was curious. Flowing Blade rarely spoke with such enthusiasm— he was enthusiastic, as far as cultivators went, but only to an extent; for him to be so sincere about something… it must have been at the very least fascinating.

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He stepped out of the cultivation chamber and closed the door behind him, then grabbed hold of the world around him with his qi, darting out of a window of his Eightfold Yang Pagoda. The whole sect spread out below him— the towering central mountain he lived at the apex of, its forested slopes and craggy rocks, and little dotted buildings every so often breaking through the green. The bloody lake, the fields of brilliant scarlet flowers even so deep into the cold of a northern winter… and as he rose higher, Flowing Blade close behind him, he could see the eight outer mountains grow small beneath him, and even in the far distance East Saffron, spread out like a blanket of glowing silver, glittering, towers outstretched to heaven in mortal vanity. Lights electric, and blinking, visible only because of his advanced cultivation.

“You’re too fast.” He didn’t sound at all exhausted, but Bleeding Horizons could feel the ragged edge to his old friend’s qi. He was a whole step lower than him. “Slow down next time…” but, despite that, he just hovered beside him for a bit, staring out at the whole of it. Their domain. Their responsibility. It was a heavy burden for a cultivator to bear… sometimes, he could almost understand what the ancients had thought, when they sought to separate themselves from the world.

Almost.

Flowing Blade pulled a tablet out of his spatial ring— which was wasteful, who even kept toys like that in what minimal space a storage treasure allowed? He opened his mouth to restart their long argument— then paused, as he watched the video. It was a simple clip, clearly taken from something far larger… but…

It had been almost a century since Bleeding Horizons had last found himself at a loss for words— since the imperial general and the former sect master had fought over East Saffron, and destroyed half the city, and they’d made him sect master in her stead, but this? This simple video? It stole his breath away and chilled his qi. No doubt there were thousands of mortals and lesser cultivators who would watch it and aspire to such realms of power… but Bleeding Horizons was at the very edge of Pinnacle Sundering. He had met Immortal-Ascension cultivators before, had even once before stood in their presence as they sparred—

Watching Egress IIb shatter to pieces on the screen in front of him, for the first time in centuries, he felt like a powerless child again. “Things are going to get worse, aren’t they?” It wasn’t really a question, but Flowing Blade nodded anyways. “The sect needs to be prepared for this.”

“Respectfully, Sect Master, but how can the Bloody Saffron Sect prepare for someone who can blow up planets?”

“Obviously we’re not going to deal with whoever did that. Leave that to the Immortal Ascension cultivators and people with death wishes— no, we need to prepare the sect for the aftershocks.”

“Then you really think…”

Bleeding Horizons nodded, and sighed, looking out over the serenity of his domain for a long, long moment— imprinting it in his mind. What a profoundly fragile thing… and, he smiled grimly, just barely— it was not a happy smile. “In truth…” he feared, “it might already be inevitable.”