Chapter 42—Meeting

The fat constable turned toward the body the moment his subordinate set it down on the pavilion floor.

He looked at it for a moment, then looked at the woman.

"Is this your son?"

The woman knelt and leaned over the small form. She looked at it the way people look at things they are not yet ready to understand.

The child’s face had been torn away. Where features should have been, there was only exposed bone—the skull pale and visible beneath the remnants. She held her mouth shut as she pulled away the clothes. The chest had a cavity carved into it, hollow and clean in the way that eating, not injury, makes a thing hollow. Beneath a pair of small pants, the legs had been reduced to bone.

The fat constable looked up at the constable who had carried the body in. "Did you find him dressed?"

The man drew a slow breath. His voice was slightly unsteady. "His clothes had been thrown to the side. When I saw him like that, I couldn’t bring him in that way. I dressed him before I came."

The fat constable closed his eyes for a moment. The room felt unbearably quiet, as though no one wanted to be the first to speak.

The woman, still kneeling, did not cry. She looked at the dead child with a smile that was relieved, yet sad. Her tears did not stop. She reached up and took the fat constable’s hand in both of hers.

"Officer," she said, "please find my son."

"This child here is—" the fat constable understood. He waved the other constables over solemnly.

"He is An Chen," the woman said. "He lives two streets over from mine. His mother is—" She continued, naming the family, the street, the details she knew about the boy and his household.

"How did you know it’s him?" the fat constable asked, narrowing his eyes. The dead kid’s face was peeled away. The clothes were torn. There was no obvious mark left to identify him.

The woman closed her eyes for a moment and pointed toward the remaining neck, where a long scar ran down.

"This was a dog bite," she replied. She paused. "I still remember that hunter who released his hunting dogs at the kids."

The fat constable frowned. "Hunter... releasing dogs..." He remembered the detail.

He stood up, squeezed her hands once, and pulled her upright. "We will find your son. I promise."

He turned and began moving immediately, calling to the constables along the corridor. "Check every street in the outer city for missing children. Ask every citizen you encounter. Report everything to Chief Constable Jiao!"

They dispersed into action.

---

By the time the moon had risen to its peak, it was no longer the color it was supposed to be.

The people of Azure Cloud City noticed it gradually, looking up for different reasons in different parts of the city and finding the same thing. The moon had turned crimson. The pale purple moon they were familiar with was no longer there.

Reactions spread across the city in waves. Some people rubbed their eyes and looked again. Some fell to their knees. Some sat down where they were standing. A few said quietly, and to no one in particular, "The world is collapsing."

In the outer city slums, in the parts of the city where life had always been harder, a few old men and women looked at the crimson moon without surprise.

"Better to die than to keep hiding in fear," one old man said.

Another nodded. "At least it would be finished in one shot."

Others agreed. Even middle-aged people nearby nodded in agreement. None of them sounded afraid anymore. Only tired.

---

In the government district, the City Lord’s buildings occupied an entire street, multiple courtyards, and a main pavilion of five floors. City guards roamed the street; no one dared step in without an appointment.

On the topmost floor of the pavilion, three men sat around a round table.

They were all middle-aged. Their robes were all expensive. Their expressions were all variations of the same controlled alarm. One of them was Chief Constable Jiao.

"What do we do, City Lord Min?" the scholar with a gentle appearance at the lower end of the table asked, arms folded tightly across his chest. His gentleness had been earned over time; it was not artificial.

The man opposite rubbed his short beard and gave his opinion. "Should we call Lei Cheng? He is currently the strongest person in the city and the only Bizarre Cultivator."

"City Lord Min’s right," said Chief Constable Jiao, whose usual easy manner had entirely vacated. "It’s better than dying."

"No." The scholar shook his head, rejecting them.

"Are we going to underestimate what he can do, City Magistrate Po?" City Lord Min asked. "He—"

He was cut off by the city magistrate, who exhaled. "What do you think would happen if we called that young man for help?"

"We save ourselves and everyone else," Constable Jiao said sharply.

"And the entire city learns that their government is powerless," Po hissed. His voice was not raised. It did not need to be. "Do you understand the consequences of that?"

The room went quiet. No one argued. They simply hated that he was right.

Constable Jiao said slowly, "Civilians would panic."

They understood. "They would stop trusting the rules. Criminal activity would increase. People would act as though the law no longer existed—because in their minds, if the government cannot protect them, and itself..." He let the sentence hang. "The end is near."

Silence fell until Constable Jiao broke it.

"So... What do we actually do?"

The City Lord frowned. "Magistrate?"

The city magistrate placed both palms flat on the table. "We call for help from above. Red Valley Prefecture. We’ll contact them immediately."

They discussed the action and made rapid decisions. Soon, the meeting was dismissed.

---

In the Lei household, the night passed, and the sun came up.

Lei Cheng stepped into the garden after washing and stood looking at the sky.

Something was wrong with the light. The sun seemed different.

"The sun seems darker," he murmured. "The orange seemed tainted by something darker."

"Bizarre Qi appeared between us and the sun," Hua Mingyue said as she stood in front of him. "It affects how the light reaches us. The sun itself is fine."

"That’s a relief." He exhaled. Then his expression shifted to the focused eagerness of someone who had been told to wait until morning and had in fact been awake since well before morning. "Can we begin now? Cultivation—what would be best suited for me?"

Hua Mingyue raised her fan and held it in front of her lips with the air of a teacher who had thought carefully about where to start.

"We begin with history."

"History?" Lei Cheng blinked. "Why history? I want to cultivate."

"What do you think cultivation is?" she asked.

"A process of strengthening oneself," he said. "Building power. Pursuing immortality."

"Correct, in the simplest terms." She nodded. "Then you need to understand how that process came to exist in the form it currently takes—and why the form it currently takes is broken. Sit."

He sat on the garden steps. She sat on the rocking chair brought by servants, her fan moving in slow arcs.

"The First Era," she began. "The frailty era. In that time, humans were nothing. Not even food."

"Not even food?" Lei Cheng stared at her in disbelief. "I’ve read enough novels to know that ’human as food’ is a thing—but not even qualifying as food is something else entirely."

"In that era, the world belonged to the ancient races," Hua Mingyue said, without pausing for his reaction. "Dragons. Phoenixes. Creatures whose names you no longer have words for. Even history itself had forgotten many of them. Humans were less significant than insects to them. A snack, perhaps—something consumed without particular intention."

Lei Cheng digested this silently.

"The Second Era—the Era of Forging. Humans discovered the path of body cultivation. Physical strengthening. Tempering the body through deliberate practice and fighting. It was barbaric." She paused. "In this era, humans graduated from being a snack to being food."

"...From a snack to food," Lei Cheng sighed. "That is the progress?"

"That is the progress," she confirmed, with the composure of someone reporting a historical fact.

"The Third Era—the Era of Immortality. This is where humans genuinely began to rise. They developed the path of Immortal Cultivation—a true path to transcendence and power. Beast taming, demonic cultivation, righteous sword paths, insect taming—all branching from this root." She glanced sideways at him. "In this era, humans took down the other races one by one. They did not yet sit at the peak, but they were no longer prey."

Lei Cheng raised a hand. "I’ve never heard of anyone cultivating immortal cultivation."

Hua Mingyue stood up and rapped him on the head with her fan.

"Listen," she said, "and you will understand. Fourth Era—the Era of Martial Cultivation. Humans reviewed the ancient body-forging path and the immortal path together and synthesized something new—martial arts. A path where power was the primary goal, and immortality was a byproduct, not the other way around."

She paused to let that land.

"The immortal cultivators of the Third Era tried to stop the martial cultivators because they feared them. But they failed." Her purple eyes glowed gently, "It was the first time in history that another human path had eclipsed the immortal path. In the same cultivation realm, even an immortal cultivator armed with every artifact, talisman, and booster pill available could not defeat a true genius of the martial path."

Lei Cheng thought of Mo Yong—Level One Martial Cultivator. Mo Ming—Level Three. Both of them had been unable to handle a single Level One Bizarre Creature.

"But they were too weak?" he asked, frowning. "Level One Mo Yong just had the strength of 300 kilograms."

"No," Hua Mingyue shook her head, and her voice carried something that was not quite bitterness—more like a long acceptance of a painful fact. "What you see practiced today is not ancient martial cultivation. It has lost almost all of its original power. Almost all. What remains is a shadow."

"How?" he asked.

"In time," she said, closing the fan briefly. "Fifth Era—the Human Era. Humans reached the absolute peak. Immortal cultivation and martial cultivation were practiced side by side. Geniuses walked both paths simultaneously. Emperors rode nine-dragon chariots. Empresses rode phoenixes. Every race that had once treated humans as prey now bowed."

Lei Cheng sat with that image for a moment—nine dragons as mounts for an emperor’s chariot, phoenixes carrying a woman across the sky in an empress’s carriage. For a brief moment, he almost forgot the ruined world he was living in.

"Why does this era seem like it describes the growth of humans?" he asked. "Is the naming only for humans?"

"Indeed, the eras were named by humans," Hua Mingyue grinned widely with a hint of pride, "because no other race dared rename them and fight against humans when they were at their peak."

"And now—" Her smile faded. "The current era... the Bizarre Era."

She looked at the tinted sun.

"Spiritual Qi became corrupted at the end of the Human Era. When that happened, everything built on pure Spiritual Qi began to fail. The Immortal Cultivation path collapsed almost entirely—it requires pure Qi to function, and the purity no longer exists in the world. The ancient Martial path degraded—what remains of it has lost almost all of its original function. What we call martial cultivation today is the skeleton of a thing that used to be a living body."

Lei Cheng stood up. ’So that’s how it is. Every power path is gone—unavailable for humans.’

Hua Mingyue closed her fan and held it at her side. "And that is why the modern martial cultivators of the current era cannot handle a Level One Bizarre Creature. They are not weak because martial cultivation is inherently weak. They are weak because they are practicing a hollow copy of something that was once the most powerful path humans ever developed."

Lei Cheng sat quietly for a moment. He turned that over carefully.

"But then—" His voice rose. "If Spiritual Qi is corrupted and both major paths have failed, Bizarre Cultivation is a product of that corruption, isn’t it? It runs on corrupted Qi. If the pure paths are gone and the only functional path is corruption itself—" He looked at her directly. "Is there any path left at all for me to cultivate now?"