Chapter 71: Class-A Celestial Detainee
Time seemed to contract around her, every instinct sharpening to a single point. Su Yao met the tidal wave of malice head-on. Her Void-Severing Glaive materialized in a flash of crimson light. She swung it in a wide, horizontal arc to cleave the space in front of her.
A rift tore open in reality, a void of absolute nothingness. The raging essence of Chi You crashed into this void and, stalled. It was like a river hitting a bottomless dam. The formless fury churned at the edge of the rift, unable to cross. Its chaotic energy was being siphoned into nothing.
The two points of molten bronze flared with surprise, then renewed rage.
“You're a relic,” Su Yao stated. Her voice carried over the howling spiritual wind. “A fossil of a bygone age. Your war is over. The battlefield is dust.” She took a step forward. The rift held firm. “These fools think they can wield you. I'm just reminding you that you're obsolete.”
The essence recoiled in outrage at the insult. It gathered itself. The shadows and fire condensed into a colossal, spear-like projection aimed at her heart.
But Su Yao was already moving. She vanished from her spot, reappearing directly behind the manifested form. Her glaive lanced out at the lingering, frayed threads of the ritual’s control matrix that still clung to it like spiritual cobwebs.
With precise, surgical strikes, she severed them. Each cut caused the essence to shudder in disorientation. It was being cut off from the anchors the cultists had tried to impose.
“Your would-be masters are gone,” she said. Her voice was cold and clear. “You're free. And you have nowhere to go.”
The spear of malice dissolved as the essence wavered. Its form became less distinct. The raw, undirected hatred was still there. Though without a purpose or a target, it was just energy. Was it dangerous? Yes. But it was manageable.
Su Yao lowered her glaive. The void-rift snapped shut. She stood facing the simmering cloud of ancient war. It was a stalemate. She couldn't destroy it, but she had successfully neutered its immediate threat.
Her gaze then shifted to the groaning form of Master Wen, struggling to rise amidst the shards of his broken ritual. The cultists were either unconscious or had fled.
“The show’s over,” Su Yao said, walking toward Wen. “Time for the director’s commentary.”
She hauled him up by his lapels. His void-like aura was flickering, weakened.
“You didn't want to control it, did you?” she hissed. Her eyes bored into his. “Not really. You wanted to become it by using a soul-transference ritual. You were going to use that essence as a new body and identity, the ultimate power grab.”
Wen coughed. A speck of blood stained his lip. “A vessel requires a pilot,” he rasped. “Why resurrect a god when you can become one?”
“Amateur,” Su Yao spat, dropping him. “You can't handle the mailroom, and you thought you could run the corporation.” She looked back at the confused, simmering essence of Chi You. “Now, you're going to tell me who funded this little identity crisis.”
Before Wen could answer, the ambient energy in the chamber shifted. The essence of Chi You, untethered and purposeless, began to pulse with a new, unsettling rhythm. It was listening.
From the shattered remains of the black jade sarcophagus, a faint, silvery light began to glow. It felt utterly alien to Chi You’s malice. There’s something else in there.
Su Yao’s gaze snapped from Wen’s crumpled form to the pulsating silvery light emerging from the sarcophagus fragments. It was a stark, pure contrast to the roiling darkness of Chi You’s essence. The cool celestial energy felt ancient and meticulously ordered.
Wen stared. His hollow eyes widened in genuine, uncomprehending shock. “That isn’t part of the vessel’s matrix,” he whispered. His voice was frayed. “The manifest, it was only the War God’s core.”
The silvery light intensified. It resolved into the form of a complex, rotating seal covered in characters of celestial mandate. Then it hovered in the air between the confused essence of Chi You and Su Yao.
Recognition jolted through Su Yao. It was a celestial quarantine seal.
They found a celestial prison, she realized. The pieces clicked into a terrifying new configuration. And they broke it open thinking it was a gift box.
The Chi You essence recoiled from the silvery light. Its form rippled with agitation. The celestial seal was a memory of its imprisonment, an authority it instinctively rebelled against.
“You idiots were grave-robbing a maximum-security celestial prison,” Su Yao said. Her voice was low and sharp as she turned back to Wen. “You released a convicted god.”
Wen’s face, already pale, went ashen. “The energy signatures, the historical records, they only indicated a potent, warlike consciousness. The sellers guaranteed...”
“Sellers?” Su Yao’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Who sold you a sealed celestial criminal?”
Before Wen could stammer a reply, the celestial seal pulsed once, powerfully. A wave of energy washed outwards, scanning them. It passed over the Chi You essence, over Wen, and over Su Yao.
When it touched Su Yao, it paused. The seal shimmered, and for a moment, the image of a familiar, elegant script flashed within the light.
Jinse’s work, Su Yao thought. She was the warden.
The seal’s purpose became clear. It was a monitoring device that acted as a beacon. It had just recognized an unauthorized breach and sent out a distress call.
Somewhere, in the halls of the celestial bureaucracy, an alarm was now ringing.
The Chi You essence, enraged by the seal’s activation and the celestial energy it represented, gathered itself for another explosive release. This time, its fury felt different. It felt more focused and desperate as it tried to break free before the celestial guards arrived.
Su Yao looked from the raging god-fragment to the terrified architect to the glowing seal. The situation had just escalated from a cultist problem to an interstellar incident.
“Congratulations,” Su Yao said to Wen. Her voice dripped with icy sarcasm. “You managed to annoy heaven itself. I almost respect the scale of your incompetence.”
She watched the celestial seal pulse with increasing urgency. Its light cast long, frantic shadows. The Chi You essence was thrashing against it, a caged beast sensing the approaching cultists.
“Right,” Su Yao declared. Her Void-Severing Glaive vanished in a wisp of crimson light. “This is above my pay grade.”
Wen stared at her. Blood trickled from his split lip. His hollow eyes were wide with disbelief. “You can't just leave! This is a celestial-level event!”
“Precisely,” Su Yao said, brushing imaginary dust from her sleeve. “I'm a consultant. All I do is break things. I don't fill out the triplicate forms required for an inter-dimensional containment breach.”
She took a step back, already beginning to phase out. “You wanted to be a god? Good luck explaining this to the actual management. I hear their audit process is excruciating.”
“Wait! The buyers! The information!” Wen choked out, scrambling forward.
“Tell it to the magistrates,” Su Yao said as her form started to shimmer and dissolve into the shadows. “I'm sure they'll be very interested in your sourcing. My part of the contract is complete. The local disturbance is neutralized. The rest is your divine mess.”
And with that, she was gone.
She reappeared a mile away, leaning against the wall of a convenience store. The sounds of the city were mundane and blessedly quiet. In the distance, over the container yard, the sky flickered with an unnatural, silvery light. Sirens, both earthly and spiritual, began to wail.
Su Yao pulled out her phone and sent a single text to Zhang Wei.
Xiao Ling: Scenario 7. Celestial assets have been notified and are en route. Stand down all teams. This is now a heavenly matter. Don’t get involved.
Putting the phone away, she bought a can of coffee from the vending machine, and took a long sip. Let the celestials deal with their escaped convict and the idiot who sprung him. She had a sequel to market and her own biography to plan.
Some problems, she decided, were best left to the universe’s HR department.
The celestial light show over the container yard intensified, painting the night sky in hues of silver and gold that felt both beautiful and terrifyingly official. Su Yao finished her coffee. She crushed the can in her hand and tossed it perfectly into a recycling bin twenty feet away.
Her phone buzzed with a message from Zhang Wei.
Zhang Wei: Heavenly Mandate Enforcement is on site. The area is sealed with a ‘Divine Quarantine: don’t Perceive’ ward. What the hell did you do?
Su Yao typed back with one thumb, entirely unperturbed.
Xiao Ling:I delegated. Tell accounting I'm submitting a hazard pay invoice for exposure to celestial bureaucracy.
She could already imagine the scene of celestial clerks in flowing robes materializing with clipboards, efficiently bagging the confused Chi You essence as evidence, and reading Wen his rights in a dead language.
The poor fool was probably trying to argue contractual technicalities with a being whose job description was ‘Enforcer of Cosmic Order.’ It was a satisfying thought.
A flicker of silver light caught her eye as a small, formal-looking scroll tied with a golden ribbon materialized in the air in front of her and dropped into her hand.
She unrolled it. The message was brief, written in the flawless, impersonal calligraphy of the Celestial Court.
To the entity known as Su Yao, operating under the vessel designation ‘Xiao Ling.’ Your assistance in flagging an unsanctioned dimensional breach and the attempted misuse of a Class-A Celestial Detainee has been noted. A formal commendation has been added to your permanent record.
Su Yao stared at the scroll. She let out a short, sharp laugh. It was a commendation for departing early and letting the mess fall to someone else. The sheer, absurd bureaucracy of it was almost endearing.
It continued.
Please be advised that the entity ‘Wen’ is now in celestial custody and will be undergoing a full audit of his operations and spiritual assets. All associated mortal assets have been frozen pending investigation.
So much for finding his financiers through mortal means, she mused. The celestials were probably already dissecting his soul for ledger entries.
The final line of the scroll was the most interesting.
The Celestial Ministry of Commerce has opened an investigation into the illicit artifact trade based on evidence recovered from this incident. Your future cooperation may be requested.
Su Yao let the scroll dissolve into motes of light. A celestial crackdown on the supernatural black market. That could be useful. Or incredibly annoying.
She walked through the bustling morning streets. The city was moving on, oblivious. But the quiet satisfaction she'd felt moments ago curdled into a familiar, grinding irritation.
And I'm not any closer to uncovering who Li Xuan’s first wife was, she thought. The old grievance rose to the surface like a bad taste. Or why their entire bloodline is so fundamentally, generationally troublesome.
She had toppled a false prophet, neutralized a convicted god, and indirectly triggered a celestial audit of the black market. Yet the original, personal mystery that truly mattered to her remained stubbornly out of reach.
Who was the woman Li Xuan had married after supposedly poisoning her? The true ‘Madam Li’ whose existence had spawned a cursed bloodline? The one whose potential madness might be sealed on the moon, according to Kayo’s plagiarized theory?
Every path she went down, every enemy she dismantled, seemed to be a distraction from that core question. The Chi You Men, the false Seimei, and the Yamato corporation were all new growths on a rotten tree. She was just pruning branches. The root, the original sin of the Li family, remained buried.
His descendants are a walking catastrophe, she fumed internally, stepping around a group of tourists. Politically naive, spiritually volatile, and magnetically attractive to trouble. It has to be her influence. That first wife. What was she?
A god? A demon? Some kind of primordial chaos spirit? Something powerful enough to warp a bloodline for centuries. And Li Xuan, the righteous Daoist, had married her. Why? Out of love? As a political move? Or as some kind of penance?
The celestial commendation scroll felt like an insult now. They were praising her for mopping up a spill while ignoring the cracked foundation of the entire building.
She stopped at a crosswalk. Her eyes narrowed. The answer was in the source, the Li family itself. Their records, their tombs, and their most guarded secrets held what she needed. She had been playing around the edges, dealing with the symptoms.
It’s time to stop asking politely, she decided. Li Xiu and her polite evasions, the family’s ‘lost’ histories, it was all a shield. She needed to tear it down.
She pulled out her phone and sent a message to Li Xiu.
Xiao Ling:We are done with sequels and publicity stunts. You will grant me unrestricted access to the Li family’s oldest archives. The sealed ones, the ones you claim don't exist. Today.
Li Xiu’s reply came back almost instantly, laced with a genuine panic.
Li Xiu: There ARE no archives! Everything from before Old Duwang sank was lost with the city! The family records begin AFTER the catastrophe. We have nothing from the time before that!
Su Yao stared at the message, the screen’s light reflecting in her cold eyes. The crosswalk signal beeped impatiently, but she stood frozen in the middle of the flowing crowd.
Of course, she thought. The irritation crystallized into a cold, hard certainty. It’s erased.
The sinking of Old Duwang was the perfect cover. It was a natural disaster that conveniently obliterated the paper trail leading back to Li Xuan and his mysterious first wife. The Li family’s history was manufactured from that point onward, beginning with the bored noblewoman’s novel.
She typed back. Her fingers stabbed the screen.
Xiao Ling: Then you have nothing left to hide. And I have no more reasons to be polite. If the paper trail is gone, I'll get the truth from the source itself
Li Xiu’s reply was frantic.
Li Xiu: What source?!
Xiao Ling: The one that never forgets, of course. Like the land, the blood, or rhe spirits still tied to your name.
Putting the phone away, she ignored its subsequent vibrations.
Su Yao needed to perform a spiritual interrogation. She would tear the answers directly from the fabric of the family’s curse and the lingering echoes in their blood.
She turned toward the one place that would hold the deepest, oldest echoes. the Li family tomb. Su Yao had already found Li Xuan’s recipe there. But perhaps she had left too soon. She hadn't been looking for a ghost then. Now, she was.
Only this time, she would summon the very first Madam Li. She would drag the spirit of Li Xuan’s wife out of the silence of history and make her answer for the chaos she had spawned.
The celestials could keep their audits and commendations. She was going to hold a tribunal of her own.
Su Yao stood before the entrance to the Li family tomb. The faint, fading resonance of the celestial quarantine miles away still lingered in the air. It was a pristine, orderly energy, fundamentally opposed to the messy business of necromancy.
Perfect. She mused, a plan forming with brutal simplicity. The residual celestial energy should be more than enough to perform the ritual.
Celestial power was the ultimate authority. It could compel truths even from the most stubborn echoes. She would use the heavens’s own weight as a battering ram against the doors of death.
Walking a wide circle around its entrance, her footsteps left faintly glowing imprints on the earth. With each step, she drew on the dissipating celestial mist in the atmosphere, pulling the silvery energy down like threads of light and weaving them into a harsh, compelling array directly into the ground.
This was a subpoena, enforced by celestial mandate.
“By the authority of the court you so recently annoyed,” Su Yao announced to the silent tomb. Her voice echoed with an unnatural, metallic timbre. “I call the foundational spirit of this bloodline, the first root. You, the one who bound her fate to Li Xuan will answer.”
The array flashed white and the ground within the circle trembled.
Shadows pooled in the center of the array. They fractured into a swirling, chaotic vortex of half-formed faces and screaming mouths. A chorus of the dead all vied for attention. The entire cursed lineage, it seemed, was trying to answer the call at once.
A man’s face, contorted in the agony of the family’s curse, wailed soundlessly. A woman’s visage, radiant but hollow, reached out with a desperate allure. The echoes of countless Lis, all defined by the foundational flaw emerged at once.
“Silence,” Su Yao commanded. The celestial energy in the array enforced it. The chaotic vortex stilled, compressed into a single, trembling point of darkness.
The celestial array flared. Its silvery light turned harsh and judicial. The compressed point of darkness trembled, and then Su Yao felt a tearing sensation that ripped through her very soul, as if she were being split in two.
She gasped, staggering back. Her hands flew to her head as a vision of a life not her own flooded her mind. The taste of the Enlightenment brew, a final, betrayed breath, and then nothing. There was only a void followed by a new awakening inside a new body under a new name.
From the swirling darkness, a figure coalesced, stepping forward into the light of the array. She was clad in the pristine white hanfu of the Jade Purity Maiden. Her face was a mirror of Su Yao’s own, but etched with a weary sorrow. The figure’s eyes held the same ancient knowledge, but clouded with a grief that had drowned itself in wine.
Su Yao stared. The pain receded into stunned disbelief. “You?”
The Maiden looked back at her, equally confused. Her voice was a soft echo of Su Yao’s own. “I am you. The you that came after. After the poison, after Li Xuan’s well-intentioned failure.”
She gestured vaguely. Her movements were sluggish, as if weighed down by memory. “He thought he could save you from the Jade Emperor’s curse. Instead, he killed you. But your soul, it cycled back. Into me. I was his wife.”
Su Yao’s mind raced, connecting the fragments. “You are the first wife. The one who started the Li bloodline.”
The Maiden nodded. Her expression crumbled. “We had children, two sons and a daughter. They were beautiful. But Li Xuan had made enemies, powerful ones. They couldn't reach him directly, so they targeted us and our children.”
Her voice broke, and she looked away. The scent of spiritual wine seemed to cling to her form. “They died one after the other by plagues and ‘accidents’, all orchestrated. I couldn't bear it. My grief awoke the old thirst. The celestial punishment he had tried to cure you of consumed me. I fell into the bottle and never climbed out.”
She met Su Yao’s eyes again. Her gaze sharpened with a bitter clarity. “That’s when he knew. Li Xuan saw the same pattern. He realized you were trapped, that your soul was cycling through lives, each time cursed to forget and then remember in the worst way.”
Su Yao stood in silence. The pieces of centuries snapped into place. The betrayal, the poison, the reincarnation, the cursed bloodline were all a tangled web spun from Li Xuan’s own legacy of conflict. She had been hunting a ghost, only to find it was a reflection of herself.
The Maiden’s form began to fade as the celestial array dimmed. “He tried to protect us,” she whispered. “But some debts can never be paid.”
Then she was gone, leaving Su Yao alone in the sudden quiet. The weight of the truth settled on her shoulders like a shroud.