NABC The Rising Sun
The Rising Sun
Mingtian was .The door to Guxi’s office slammed open, loud enough to startle the woman as he stormed in, slamming a hand down on the desk. “Where. Are. .” For a long second, the woman didn’t respond— too shocked by the sheer that he’d burst into her private residence— before her aura slammed down against him with a suddenly force.
He didn’t let himself be deterred, though. He wasn’t going to let something as simple as a weak second-step cultivator’s aura get in his way— not when he had a goal in mind. A piece of paper in his hand burned up— blank, not that Guxi knew that— and the totality of her aura was , crushing her instead. Joined, then, by an even greater power for just a second, cracking the floor around her and scattering the papers on her desk. The fancy pens made a pleasant noise as they skittered off the side and fell to the ground.
As the last of the paper burnt up, he released the pressure. “I won’t ask the same way twice.” Guxi gasped for air, wide-eyed, barely keeping herself from falling over.
“Do you have—”
“Any idea of what I’m doing? Of course I do. Or was it not that decided that the way the laws of the city bend to supreme might?”
“You’re just a mortal.”
“I could kill you with a . In this space— between you and me— I might as well be a .” He sat down on her desk, giving her a furious look— a look, deathly cold, so redolent with the essence of his distaste that even an would have curled up in fear beneath its cruel dominance. “What did you to them?”
“Nothing!” She squeaked out, face aflame with something that might have been terror, or might have been . “I didn’t do anything to them! I didn’t hire those assassins!” For a long moment, they froze there— him, burning with a stranger god’s fury, her, pinned beneath that immolating disgust— before he turned away and pulled back his domain, recentering himself with a breath.
It… tracked. Unfortunately, it tracked. He would have to have a reason to kill Guxi, but mere wasn’t a particularly good cause and everyone would suspect him anyways.
She’d sent assassins after him before, but their relationship changed. In the same way that everything tended to, though rather faster than he’d expected— on the timespan of mortals as it was. He wasn’t a teacher anymore, and her son wasn’t his student; she’d never attacked the kids before. Perhaps she wanted them out of her way… but, now that the difference between them was like heaven and earth, her motivation to do so was only so much the lesser. It wasn’t like getting rid of them would somehow magically make Xinshi capable of getting into the Bloody Saffron Sect.
He slumped. Just a little. Mortal emotions truly come and ebb with such fervor… “where are they, then?”
“In their rooms. I —” she stressed that word— “that they don’t come out until they return to the University. I’ll be scheduling transportation for them tomorrow. It’s best that they remain out of the public eye when it comes to these sorts of things— the memory of the city can be shallow, so long as they can’t it.”
“Fine.” He crossed his arms behind his back, standing straight— standing, with all the presence of the cultivator he definitely . “Fine. But if I find that you were behind this…”
“I wasn’t.”
“Then I will rain destruction on you, the likes of which this city will remember for a hundred generations.”
“I don’t know who it was.” Her words, though, fell on deaf ears.
Mingtian had already left.
………
His second stop was more of a courtesy than anything. He even called Jie and told him that he’d be stopping by, if only to make sure that the person he was visiting was actually when he arrived…
Nothing stopped him as he strode into the Academy, past those all-too familiar doors, architecture and hallways, and classrooms, and all the various different things he from the time they’d been his. Winter break wasn’t over yet, so the students hadn’t returned— but there enough people in the building that his presence was noted. Whispers followed in his wake, which… he supposed that his falling out with Yuxan was less private than either of them would have liked.
Some of them were bold enough to follow him— but bold or not, none of them stepped into Yuxan’s office. None but him.
The familiarity of the place was… striking. It was almost nostalgic, the fond memory of that victory… he supposed that Yuxan was probably still upset over the loss.
“Mingtian. It’s been a while.” It was almost amusing, how much the principal tried to that sort of unbothered ease, perfectly graceful as he stood there. “I heard what happened, and, of course I—”
“Did you do it?”
“Do what?”
Mingtian stalked forward a few steps, and slapped him. It was an satisfying thing to do. “I am playing games, Lan Yuxan. I you this small leeway, your petty games, out of respect— respect for the authority of your position, respect for East Saffron and the city I live in, respect for the time I spent as your subordinate, duplicitous as the arrangement was. I gave you more than you could deserve… and now—” he slammed his hands down on both sides of the desk, “I am . Did. You. Do it?” He breathed, almost, in the glowing aftermath of that sudden and furious . All the little things that Yuxan had done to annoy him over the past months…
Perhaps even more than Guxi, he just wanted to and be done with it. When he’d been one of the divines of the Divine Immortal Ever-Scouring Affray Sect, anyone who treated him with that level of respect would have been
Whatever Yuxan saw in his eyes, in the burning depths of his hatred laid bare— whatever it was, it him. Mingtian could taste it, in his aura, could see it, in the way he gulped and leaned back slightly. “I… no, no, I didn’t do anything. Other than the stuff that I ” he flinched back as Mingtian leant forward— “which ended! After I sent the cat your way, that was the last thing I did, I promise! I’m not stupid enough to stand against someone who can withstand the whatever-under-the-heavens that damn cat was!”
“You’re not lying to me, are you? Because if you are…”
“I won’t! I promise, I won’t! I’m done. I’m done, I’m if I’d known from the start I wouldn’t have done anything please, please, immortals above and hells below, just— just, spare me. I won’t.” He was all but blubbering at that point. “Please.” Rasping, shuddering as he breathed— knowing how close he’d truly gotten to his own demise. “. Just… truce. I won’t ever bother you again, just, just…”
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Oh, how he to slap him again and. How he wanted to show him just what sort of power he’d messed with. He to…
Except.
Except, it wasn’t . It wouldn’t help solve the problem. It was finished. Between the two of them… Yuxan wouldn’t bother him again, not if he knew what was best for him. If he killed him, then he’d have to deal with all the consequences of that, and…
He sighed. “Fine. If I hear from you again…” he turned around, and stalked out through the crowd of instructors and staff trying and failing to listen for even the slightest hint of what’d been going on in Yuxan’s office— leaving, behind him—
A pathetic wreck of a man.
………
The man who materialized in the holding cell for two of the cultivators who’d attacked his dis— — was not Leng Mingtian. Not as the city of East Saffron knew him, at least— no; he was sunlight condensed, golden brilliance, burning , a solar refulgence cast into the shape of a man. He was fury, dripping from the heavenly spheres. He was dominion, perfect and absolute, a crystalline coruscant geometric thing. He was their small psychopomp.
To them, as he laid hands on them and bid them , as did the rising sun, power rushing through their bodies and purging the sedatives that kept them asleep— he was .
They blinked open their eyes, and found themselves ensnared in his world. Filigrees of golden light ran down the concrete walls, curling around the windows and across every surface, and shimmering, where they touched the hard steel bards.
“W… what is this?” The first of them, a man with a raspy voice and a throat wound from some poorly controlled technique, pushed themselves to their feet, clearly still delirious. “I’m… is this our hell? I thought that we’d…”
The second groaned beside him. “The bastard disciple stopped us from eating the pills. You were kind of out of it at the moment.”
“Then this is some sort of…”
“Impressive,” Mingtian said, feeling nothing but . “That you can sit here and ignore me, when you’ve already fallen into my grasp.”
They whirled to face him, clearly ill at ease. “Who are ”
“I am your greatest nightmare.”
The man hesitated. The woman immediately tried to rip out her own throat, screaming— “we live and die for the clan!”
Smart.
Not smart enough.
Golden lines of force erupted the walls faster than they could , formations waking and guided by his will binding— freezing both of them in place. He wasn’t gentle about it, either. “You understand the sort of situation you’re in. Good. Perhaps you’ll be wise enough to tell me what I want to know, and I will give you the honor of a clean death.”
“You— you can’t do this! The laws of East Saffron—”
“Mean to me.” He cocked his head. “You really don’t understand, do you? You think that I, of all people—” his voice, rising, that carefully leashed anger finally slipping that leash— “care about the laws of a tiny, city?” His qi boiled within him, pulling harshly at his seals that only survived with how well he’d designed them. “To think that two would transgress against me and think that they could hide away behind the walls of an organization made up of children and misguided neophytes?”
They were trembling, now, but he couldn’t bring himself to . He’d lined the room in various kinds of suppressing seals so that he didn’t have to care, and beneath their aegis he released all but the last seal and a hole in reality. The ragged hole to the Chaos Sea shimmered and bled in impossible aquamarine color, tinged fathomless, and the two assassins stared at him in a slowly dawning horror.
They knew, of course, .
He lightened his grip on the portal, and with a sudden everything in the room was pulled into the vast and infinite tumult of the Chaos Sea. Enshrined within the roiling, chaotic currents, he finally let loose the very last remnants of his seals, carrying them far, away from the glimmer of light that was Aurelia below.
Enshrined in perfect, golden power, he wrote the words of their prison out of the very stuff of chaos, binding them in chains that would have held a god and suspending them above the nothing. “You have sinned against the Immortal Sovereign of Boundless Radiance, and for that…”
“I’ll tell you, just— please, let me live!” The woman hissed at the man to shut up and take his death with dignity, but the man… well, he was pretty sure that he was still deluded about the situation he’d found himself in. “It was the—”
“It was the Twenty-Sixth House Under Heaven! The Zhangs hired us and equipped us with everything we needed, and even told us where to go. We were only able to know their movements because the councillor for the precinct is part of a Zhang branch family!”
“Hm.” He to crush the both of them and be done with it, and mete out justice to the suddenly so attractive target… but something bugged him about her sudden change in demeanor. “I hope you don’t mind if I .” He had never been particularly good at the arts mental, but one did not need to be a psychic cultivator to understand the mind— and he’d had a lot of time to understand whatever he wanted.
He had left his needles behind in the Celestial Realm, but one did not, not merely desert their most treasured techniques. And, for him— ever since his first ascensions, when he’d just barely begun to grasp what qi even — that had been his .
He pulled upon that binding set into his spirit; that vast thing, set into his , came to life and spooled out around him his thread, his Thread. A gossamer light thing, as wide as a single starlight beam and as glitteringly sharp as the sun’s harshest ray. It , golden incandescent, molten bright, impowered by his domain enough that the very Chaos Sea around them shivered in its presence. It was not merely mortal, nor quite — but rather in-between, trapped in the same state he was, quasi-immortal, exquisitely powerful.
He made a gesture— unnecessary, really, given his mastery over the technique— and the thread split apart, a swarm of glimmering haloing the wide-eyed woman. Runes flickered in their shape— shallow, without his needles to sew them into reality, but still radiating an ancient and implacable power utterly foreign to the small realm he stood in.
He swiped down, and the threads descended.
In the end, she’d wasn’t so much a anymore as an incredibly detailed painting of gore splayed out and hoisted, a still sparking net of neurons and floating wires and . He’d been eviscerated like this once or twice in the past; it was never a fun experience.
Poking through her mind was like… between the aura of her dissipating spirit, his domain, and the many, formations he could bring to bear, it was possible. Still, it was like walking through a dark forest at night. He simply didn’t have the sort of he needed to use any of the powerful immortal formations that would have made the task more doable. Zhang… , he prompted her, and she dreamed of the Twenty Sixth House Under Heaven… as .
Clever.
He turned to the man who was staring at the mad, twisted sculpture of golden thread and flesh he’d made of his companion. “She lied to me.”
“Is she still…”
“Alive? Yes. ” Not as such; her ego had been snuffed out pretty much as soon as he’d pulled her apart, and she lived only to respond to his prompting and answer his questions. Still, that didn’t mean his other prisoner had to that. “She can feel every single thing I’ve done to her. She each thread, each cut neuron, each drop of blood running down their golden length… all alive, ignited with her immeasurable pain. is her hell.” He called forth another thread, directing it to hover threateningly in front of him as he tightened his chains. “Now… will lie to me?”
“N-no! It was the Twin Pines clan! We were sent by the Twin Pines clan, because, rivals, the… I don’t know, the It was probably because of the duel Song Banwei lost to—” he’d heard enough. He had his lead.
He had his .
A spark of sunlight set the Chaos Sea alight around them, a burning conflagration leaping out to expand until a small sun consumed every trace of his passing—
Leaving behind nothing at all.