Chapter 571 - Tournament Begins
Mount Hua had not seen this many people in forty years.
They came from the outer villages first, summoned by formation-message two days prior, the paper cranes arriving at farmhouse doors and market stalls and the small, practical homes of the mountain’s lower settlements with the sect’s official seal pressed in pink wax and a message that said, simply: ’The ancestor has requested your presence at the Selection. Bring your family.’
Nobody refused.
Nobody who received a message from the Plum Blossom sect with ’ancestor’ written in its first line and the formation signature of the sect master’s personal seal refused to come.
They arrived the morning of the tenth day in steady streams — farmers with their cultivator children, merchants with their sons and daughters who had tested into the sect’s outer divisions, village matrons with the proud, anxious faces of women whose children had been in cultivation training for years and who had never been invited to watch.
The sect’s outer training ground had been transformed.
The central platform — a raised stone square forty feet on each side, its surface carved with the sect’s foundational formation arrays, its edges demarcated by pale jade posts connected with pink silk rope — stood at the ground’s center. Around it, tiered viewing stands of carved stone held outer disciples in their white-and-pink robes, inner disciples behind them in their finer versions, and on the highest tier, the visiting families, the village elders, the merchants and farmers looking out over the platform with the wide, slightly awed expressions of people who had come to the mountain expecting a cultivation ceremony and had arrived instead at something that felt, in the bones, like something older.
The platform was flanked on its northern edge by a single elevated seat.
Not the sect master’s ceremonial throne — that remained in the main hall. This was a simpler structure, carved mountain stone with no ornamentation, its surface polished smooth by age. It had been placed there at the ancestor’s instruction, relayed through Elder Mengsha two days prior, and nobody had questioned the instruction because Elder Mengsha had relayed it with the specific, calm, completely-sure tone of a woman who had been substantially reorganized by the person giving the instruction and was not going to debate his furniture preferences.
The sect master’s seat — her official chair on the reviewing platform — stood empty.
This had been noticed.
The outer disciples noticed it first, then the inner disciples, then the visiting families in their high tier. The whisper moved through the crowd in a wave: ’the sect master is not seated. The sect master has not appeared. The elders are present but the sect master’s chair is empty and the ancestor’s seat is above it.’
The four elders were present.
They sat in a precise row to the left of the ancestor’s elevated stone, their robes immaculate, their hair perfectly arranged, their cultivation bases presenting the full authority of Peak Nascent Soul practitioners to anyone capable of reading them — which was most of the assembled disciples.
What the disciples could not read, because it operated below the level of deliberate cultivation perception, was the faint, continuous pulse of the Plum Blossom technique running in each elder’s lower dantian at a depth and intensity that had not been there eleven days ago. Or the specific, involuntary physiological responses that Tianlong’s proximity was producing in bodies that had been, within the last week, thoroughly introduced to the source of those responses.
Elder Fanxue sat with her hands flat on her thighs and her spine perfectly erect and the stiff points of her nipples pressed very firmly against the inside of her inner robe in a way that she was managing through deliberate, continuous cultivation suppression and would continue managing until he left her range.
Elder Caifen’s enormous tits were creating similar management requirements.
Elder Ruiwen’s bare-shaved pussy had been damp since approximately thirty seconds after she took her seat, and she had decided that information did not need to be examined.
Elder Mengsha looked at the assembled disciples with the expression of a woman who had achieved the Transcendence Threshold, whose body had been used in three creative positions and two less expected ones, and who was currently thinking about cultivation selection criteria with her whole professional mind and also could not entirely stop her hips from pressing slightly together whenever she forgot to actively prevent it.
None of the assembled disciples noticed any of this.
They were all looking at the stone seat.
Which was empty.
He arrived without announcement.
One moment the seat was empty. The next, it was not.
He did not come from the direction of the main pavilion or the inner halls or any of the prepared entry points. He simply walked in from the mountain’s edge — from the direction of the plum tree grove at the compound’s western face, his dark hair loose, his outer robe hanging open at the collar, his bare feet on the stone path.
He sat.
The assembled gathering went silent with the abruptness of a room in which a door has been very suddenly closed.
Not because he did anything.
Not because he projected his cultivation aura or released his spiritual pressure or made any deliberate display of the scale of what he was. He simply sat, and the silence came because every cultivation base present — from the Qi Condensation children in the outer rings to the Nascent Soul elders in their row — registered the same thing simultaneously.
The thing they registered was not identifiable through any current cultivation framework. It was older than frameworks. It was the registration that living things make when they are in proximity to something that is, in the most fundamental sense, on a different order of being. A moth does not have a concept for fire. It simply goes toward it.
Seven hundred and twelve disciples, four elders, and a mountain full of visiting families all turned their faces toward one stone seat at the same moment.
Tianlong looked out at them.
His gold-crimson eyes moved across the assembled crowd with the unhurried survey of a man taking inventory of a field. Across the white-and-pink robes, the young faces, the cultivation auras ranging from faint Qi Condensation flickers to solid mid-Foundation Establishment glows. Across the visiting families in the high tier — the farming couples, the village merchants, the mothers with their proud and nervous faces.
His eyes paused.
On the high tier, third row, left of center. A woman. Not young — the comfortable, settled age of a woman in her mid-forties whose features had the arrangement of someone who had been genuinely beautiful in her younger years and had aged into something more interesting.
Her hair was dark with threads of silver at the temples.
Her robes were village quality, not cultivation formal — well-made and carefully kept, the clothes of a woman who owned modest things and maintained them with dignity.
Her mouth was full and soft.
She was watching the platform below with the attentive, warm expression of a mother who was proud of her child and slightly nervous and trying not to show the nervousness because her child might see.
In the front row of the inner disciple section, a young man was looking back at her with the exasperated, affectionate expression of a son who had noticed his mother’s nervousness and was trying to signal her to compose herself.
Tianlong’s cock did not move. He was not in a position where it could. But the interest registered in a place below deliberate thought — the specific warmth of the Horny God Physique identifying something it found compelling.
’Strong familial bond,’ some ancient part of his cultivation assessment noted. ’Clean energy. No manipulation. Genuine.’
He moved his gaze on.
The selection would proceed.