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Chapter 38: TO FORBODE
🕑 Added 2024-10-09 02:56:44 +0000 UTCCHAPTER
38
TO FORBODE
JIEYUAN
—∞—
Radiant Gold City. You’d be hard-pressed to miss it, what with the massive, hundred-foot-tall wall of gold that enclosed it.
Jieyuan was high in the sky, on a composite cloudcraft, one much smaller than the one that had been used to transport the disciples to the Gleamstone Forest for the Hunt, but still big enough to carry the eighty or so people—he’d done a rough headcount earlier—on top of it, with room to spare.
He was near the back, by Meiyao and Daojue, having joined them after his brief talk with Wanxin. Around them were other disciples, about two-thirds of them wearing topaz. Counting them, the sect was taking sixty-four disciples to the Radiant Gold Summit. The other three cabals of the Radiant Gold District would similarly be taking the same number of disciples with them.
Even before they’d left the Gleaming Stone Mountains, still overflying the sect, he’d been able to see Radiant Gold City in the distance, as a mostly indistinct glowing golden blotch. Now they were much closer—about halfway there—and he could properly make out the wall that surrounded it, the wall it was famous for. A featureless, uniform wall of solid gold that fully surrounded the city, shining brightly against the glare of the midday sun.
All cities were walled and under the protection of at least one cabal. The walls were needed to keep the mundanes that lived inside it protected from the mundane beasts that roamed the land. There were smaller villages and smaller settlements outside the walls, usually close to cabals, which tended to keep the surrounding areas mostly devoid of chromal beasts, but they didn’t tend to last long. It only took a single chroma beast—even a first-sign Redsoul one—to tear any such settlement to shreds, often in a matter of minutes.
Usually, these walls were made of stone, and then inscribed with tenth-sign chromalization inscripts. Radiant Gold City was the exception. Its wall wasn’t made of mundane gold, but brightgold—the chromal gold created by the realmskill that, although although lacking in terms of combat application, was the cornerstone of the Radiant Gold Sect. Radiant Gold Transmutation, which allowed its user to permanently transform any nonliving substance they touched into brightgold.
By his sides, Daojue and Meiyao were both silent. Daojue was stone-faced as usual, but there was something surly about Meiyao’s silence, something simmering. Every once in a while, one of the Liangshibai—more often than not, Meiyao’s stepmother and half-brother—would glance back at her. Jieyuan even caught Zhaoyong, the chief protector, looking her way once, graying eyebrows furrowed, highlighting the marks the years had left on his face. Meiyao’s father, on the other hand, didn’t look in Meiyao’s direction even once since the passing look he’d given her after they’d landed on Topaz Square.
Meiyao pointedly ignored it all.
Jieyuan considered saying something, but he wasn’t sure what. Now wasn’t the time for talking, either, what with the other disciples around them. And Meiyao had shown herself to be prickly enough as far as her family issues were concerned that, though they’d grown closer of late, he wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if she threw him off the cloudcraft if he struck a nerve. The fact that he wouldn’t die—not unless he landed on something chromal—worked against him, because it might that she might actually do it.
Radiant Gold City was closer now, and past its wall were the buildings. He didn’t know how it was in other cities, but here everything was hard lines and sharp angles, and most buildings were several stories tall. The city was planned—all of it, each and every single one of its buildings. Deeper into the city he could see another circular, brightgold wall—with another, smaller wall further inside, and then a fourth wall still, forming concentric circles, each one considered its own city. The First City at the very center, with the Fourth City being the outermost one, each one bigger than the last.
The city had started with just its innermost wall, thousands of years before, and over the years it’d expanded. First, a new wall was built, and then the space between them was filled. The Radiant Gold Sect, as the city regulator, oversaw all construction work—though most of that job had been left in the hands of their mundane partners, chief among them the Haoyujin family.
Jieyuan ran his eyes over the many buildings ahead of them, the way they all connected perfectly to each other, like pieces of a puzzle. He could see the city plans clearly in his mind’s eye. The Radiant Gold Sect was currently preparing for another expansion, for erecting a fifth wall, a Fifth City. One of the Haoyujin’s biggest ongoing tasks was working out the logistics of it, the stone and wood they’d require to raise a makeshift skeleton wall that’d then be transmuted into brightgold.
Preparations for the expansion had started with his great-grandfather. The construction work itself should start still the next decade, and it’d last at least two more generations of Haoyujin leadership. Cultivators had a different understanding of time than mundanes. Redsouls already lived for three hundred years, and they often planned things centuries in advance.
Jieyuan focused on the sprawling building complex that took up a great deal of the city’s innermost circle. Comprising it were the tallest buildings in the city, at seven stories, considerably taller than the four walls. City regulations limited all other buildings to six stories at the most. What drew his eye wasn’t its size, though, but the fact that all of it—all the interconnected buildings, angular-looking buildings—were made of brightgold. The Radiant Gold Palace. Jieyuan had been in it once, before, and he’d never forgotten the look of it.
Cabals had their seats located outside cities, usually in isolated locations like valleys and mountains. But every cabal was connected to at least one city. They had to be, as they needed a steady supply of mundanes to bolster their numbers, and also somewhere their members could send their relatives who’d decided that a cultivator’s life wasn’t for them. And in those cities, they’d install a palace, an external administrative division. It was where the first few stages of the entrance trials for mundanes were held.
Jieyuan looked away from the Radiant Gold Palace, away from the First City. He found what he was looking for in the Second City, near its outer wall, on the west side. Another sprawling building complex. Its buildings were mostly made from white stone, and they were arranged in such a way that they appeared to form the outline of a gemstone from above, just like the pattern of the Liangshibai eyes, the outline forming a decagon. The Gleaming Stone Palace.
Also in the Second City, on the opposite side, was a circle of vibrant green that looked like a small, forested area, like a very dense park. It was, in fact, a single, dome-like building, grown from the ground in the form of trees that, despite their unnatural shapes still had branches extending out of them, had branches filled with leaves. The palace of the Viridian Death Cult. He’d never been to it before, unlike with the other two palaces, and for good reason. Everyone knew that any mundanes that strayed too close to the Viridian Death Palace would be kidnapped and killed—or, if they were particularly unlucky, converted.
Near the Viridian Death Cult, but separated by a wall, in the Third City, was the palace of the Xiyunfeng Clan, the youngest of the Radiant Gold District cabals, founded about two thousand years ago. For a few generations now, they’d been petitioning for a place for them in the Second City like the other two cabals, but the Radiant Gold Sect kept putting it off.
In the meanwhile, the Xiyunfeng Clan tried to make up for the location of its palace by making the palace itself as grand as they could. They’d made full use of all the land the Radiant Gold Sect had allowed them, and all the palace’s dark, grayish buildings were six stories tall. Most of that space, as far as Jieyuan knew, went unused. The Xiyunfeng Clan had the least members of all the Radiant Gold District cabals, and they didn’t have that many to spare to its palace.
They were past the outermost wall now, the Fourth City below them. Beyond the city walls, to the west, was a mountainous dome, vibrant green in color. It was about half a mile tall, brushing some of the lowest-hanging clouds, and took up most of the horizon.
The Viridian Dome, entirely made up of thick, impenetrable viridian mist. Jieyuan didn’t know its exact dimensions, but the most accurate estimates said that several hundred Radiant Gold Cities could fit inside it. That dozens of the Gleaming Stone Mountains could’ve fit inside it. Around the base of the dome, he could just barely make out the browns and greens of the forest that surrounded it.
That was the object of worship of the Viridian Death Cult, the Viridian Death Forest. Of the three chromal woodlands near Radiant Gold City—the other two being the Gleamstone Forest and the Fatebloom Woods—it was by far the biggest one, and generally agreed upon to be the most dangerous and forbidding of the three.
Like the Gleamstone Forest, the Viridian Death Forest was divided into an inner forest and an outer forest. The Inner Forest was the area inside the dome—nobody knew, for sure, that what was inside it was in fact a forest, but that was generally agreed upon to be the case—whereas the trees surrounding it made up the Outer Forest.
The Outer Forest was hardly safe—it was teeming with chromal beasts, the strongest at tenth-sign Redsoul—but past the Viridian Dome, it was no man’s land. Nobody who’d ever ventured into the Inner Forest had ever returned. The Incandescent Serenity Sect had sent several hundred tenth-sign yellowsouls into it to no avail over the course of many failed expeditions throughout the past couple of millennia.
Near the Viridian Dome was a much smaller dome of a similar color, but lacking its amorphous, solid look. Rather, it was just like the Viridian Death Palace in Radiant Gold City—chromal trees grown out of the ground in such a way as to form a single, massive building covered in a thick shroud of leaves. The seat of the Viridian Death Cult, about ten times the size of their palace in the city, but still thousands of times smaller than the Viridian Dome it sat beside. Supposedly it looked just like the Viridian Death Palace, except scaled many times over. Jieyuan hadn’t been to either, so he couldn’t judge the truth of that, and he was perfectly happy to stay in the dark as far as that matter was concerned.
But as Jieyuan returned his gaze to the Viridian Dome, a creeping, sinking feeling settled over him, and he got the impression that what the future had in store wasn’t quite up to him. Not anymore. He’d already gotten tangled up in the matters of both the Gleamstone Forest and the Fatebloom Woods. What were the chances that he wouldn’t somehow get involved with their bigger, meaner cousin as well?
Note to self, Jieyuan thought. Look into the Viridian Death Forest. And the Viridian Death Cult.
The Fatebloom Heart thrummed ominously in his chest. That gave Jieyuan a pause. Ominously. Hearts don’t beat ominously—there’s no such thing as an ominous beat. Jieyuan concentrated on the feeling, and he found that this sense of foreboding was coming from his bond with Huaxin.
Something you want to tell me? he sent back through their bond. He didn’t forget the Fate in Fatebloom.
Huaxin didn’t answer.
Great. Now he had his own heart keeping secrets from him and acting mysterious. Jieyuan wasn’t a curious person, not by nature, but at this rate, he might just end up becoming one.
The composite cloudcraft slowed as they neared the Gleaming Stone Palace, coming to a stop right on top of it. They descended directly downward, quickly but not quite plunging, into the courtyard at the very center of the gemstone-shaped complex.
The courtyard looked similar to the one they’d landed in at the Justice Bureau, just two days ago, surrounded by open corridors made of white stone. But where the Justice Bureau’s courtyard had been square, this one was surrounded by ten short walls, forming a decagon, mirroring the shape of the Gleaming Stone Palace itself.
Four months ago, he’d stood in this very courtyard, together with all the other Radiant Gold City mundanes hoping to become cultivators.
Already on the ground, waiting for them, was a small group of cultivators. At their head was a Liangshibai man—topaz-eyed—wearing a prime elder’s uniform, citrine robes with a lightcoat over them. Jieyuan knew him, but not from his brief visit to the Gleaming Stone Palace four months ago, as the man had been absent for the entrance trials. Rather, the man was famous in Radiant Gold City, and his father had even met with him a few times before. The head of the Gleaming Stone Palace, Liangshibai Yiming.
Yiming stepped up as soon as the cloud landed on the ground, a broad smile on his face, arms wide. “Finally. You all sure took your sweet time.”
