Chapter 350 - 349: The Butcher’s Table
Location:The Hidden Sanctum — Council Chamber of the Eternal Quorum
Date/Time:TC1854.01.31 (One day before the deadline)
The Council Chamber of the Eternal Quorum had not changed in eight hundred years.
This was not a metaphor. The phase-shifted space that housed the Hidden Sanctum existed slightly outside Ascara’s temporal flow, and the chamber reflected this with the particular perfection of a room that had never been touched by weather, age, or the slow erosion of time that gave normal architecture its character. White jade walls without a single crack. Formation crystals in their alcoves burning with the same intensity they’d held since installation. Chairs carved from spirit-wood that hadn’t aged a day, arranged in a semicircle of twenty-one seats around a central dais.
Twenty-one seats. Always odd. The Sanctum had maintained this number since its founding — an odd count to prevent deadlocked votes, a principle that assumed the council would disagree about things worth disagreeing about.
They did. Frequently. About everything except the things that mattered.
Sixteen council members were already seated when the session began. Ages ranging from five hundred to fifteen hundred years, each sustained well past their natural span by rituals that the lower ranks of the Sanctum knew only as "longevity protocols." Their robes were pristine. Their faces were smooth. Their cultivation signatures radiated the quiet authority of beings who had outlived empires and intended to outlive several more.
Elder Qin Weiran, who at eleven hundred and twelve years held the informal position of senior voice among the sixteen, opened the session with a summary of intelligence reports.
"The deadline expires tomorrow. The sect has not complied. They have, in fact, expanded — population now exceeds eighteen thousand. Formal alliances with three celestial families and the Blackhawk Mercenary Guild. The Lin family has sent a conditional delegation." He turned a jade slip in his fingers — a nervous habit that his five centuries of political maneuvering had never cured. "They also appear to have acquired an Aeralith Felis and bonded a pre-Cataclysm spirit tree."
Murmurs around the chamber. An Aeralith Felis was a name most of them hadn’t heard spoken in a millennium. A spirit tree was supposed to be extinct.
"The girl herself has advanced to Peak Core Crystallization," Qin continued. "She carries a spirit weapon of unknown origin. Her inner circle includes a Mid Soul Ascension cultivator — Shen Wuyan, the splinter defector."
"Shen Wuyan." Elder Luo Hanying, eight hundred and forty, leaned back in her chair. "We hunted that woman for three centuries. She’s still alive?"