Bloodline of the Forgotten Emperor

The maids undressed me from the ceremonial robes with the brisk, wordless efficiency of people who had done this a thousand times and expected nothing interesting from the thousand-and-first, and I let them, mostly because arguing about my own modesty in a body I'd owned for less than two hours seemed like a losing battle I didn't need to pick today.

*You handled that reasonably well,* the System said, once we were alone again. *For a man who tried to negotiate a refund forty minutes ago.*

*I'm allowing you exactly one joke per hour,* I thought back. *You've used it.*

*Noted, Host. This Almighty Assistant works hard for you, so let's not test what happens if you use up your quota twice in one morning.* A pause. *Your uncle is here.*

That got my attention faster than anything else had all morning. Zaitian's memories supplied the face before the door even opened — Long Baiyu, third elder of the direct line, a broad, weathered man who'd apparently spent the last two years watching his nephew's bloodline fail to awaken with the specific, helpless frustration of someone who genuinely cared and had run out of ways to show it.

He looked at me the way a man looks at a wall he expects to have to knock down again.

"You surprised everyone in that hall," he said. No preamble. Zaitian's people, I was learning fast, did not do preamble. *Hope I'm safe. Better keep everything smooth — I've won an Oscar for less convincing performances back at the office, and this is not the moment to remember I'm not actually him.* "Myself included."

"Would you have preferred I let them finish humiliating the clan?"

Something shifted in his face — not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. "No. I'd have preferred you'd done it two years ago, before it became necessary." He studied me a moment longer, and I had the uncomfortable sense of being read like a report. "You're different since last night."

*He's not wrong,* I thought, keeping my expression as flat as I could manage. *Just not in the way he thinks.*

"Being cornered clarifies things," I said, which was true enough to pass for an answer.

He grunted, apparently satisfied, or at least willing to let it go. "The Patriarch wants you on the Spine by midday. If your bloodline's finally decided to wake up, he wants proof it can survive something harder than a ceremony hall."

*The Patriarch. My father.* Even filtered through Zaitian's memories, that word landed heavier than "Clan Leader" ever could have. "Can I not go?" I asked, mostly to see what he'd say.

Baiyu's expression didn't so much as twitch. "Better hurry to the Spine, unless you'd like your father administering the punishment for lateness personally and another thing is that other top prodigies of the clan will be there with you"

*What a pain in the ass,* I thought, and said nothing else.

"The Spine," I said instead, and Zaitian's memory obliged — nine thousand stone steps carved into the fossilized remains of a Primordial Dragon Emperor who'd died so long ago that no one remembered the war he'd died in, only that he had. Cultivators climbed it as a rite, each step heavier than the last, testing not strength but the will to keep going when everything in your body told you to stop.

*That sounds like exactly the kind of thing that kills people,* I thought at the System.

*Statistically, yes. You'll be fine. Probably.*

*I don't think that's the reassurance I need right now.*

---

The Ten Fangs were already gathered at the base of the Spine when I arrived, and I recognized them the way you recognize coworkers you've never actually spoken to — familiar shapes, unfamiliar people. Long Shen stood a little apart from the others, arms crossed, cold in a way that made my own attempts at composure look amateurish — Nascent Soul, Zaitian's memories supplied, the only one of the ten who'd already crossed that threshold. Long Wei was doing stretches with the loose, restless energy of someone who'd rather be fighting something than climbing stairs, his cultivation base settled comfortably at Core Formation's upper stage. The rest clustered in twos and threes at various points along Core Formation and the higher layers of Foundation Establishment, sizing me up without bothering to hide it.

I was, by a wide margin, the weakest cultivator on this mountain. Foundation Establishment, Layer 2 — a full realm and more beneath most of the people standing around me, and everyone here almost certainly knew it, bloodline or no bloodline.

"So the rumors were wrong," Long Jing said, stepping forward first. She had the kind of directness that suggested she found subtlety exhausting. "Good. I was tired of hearing about it."

"You and me both," I said, and meant it more literally than she could have known.

Long Shen didn't say anything at all, just looked at me the way you'd look at a variable that had changed without warning — worth noting, not yet worth trusting.

The Spine itself rose ahead of us, nine thousand steps disappearing into cloud cover so thick I couldn't see where it ended, and I felt something in my chest that had nothing to do with Zaitian's memories and everything to do with the very human, very Li Wei part of me that had once been afraid of a four-story walkup with a broken elevator.

*This is going to be a problem,* I thought.

*Only if you think about it that way,* the System said. *The Spine doesn't care about your legs. It cares whether you quit.*

*I don't think that's the reassurance I need right now either.*

We started climbing.

By the hundredth step my legs had gone from burning to something closer to arguing with me directly, and it didn't take long to understand why the gap was so obvious — Core Formation cultivators drew on a reserve I simply didn't have yet, and each of them climbed like the mountain owed them the favor. Long Wei passed me around step two hundred without slowing down, barely winded, throwing back something that might have been encouragement or might have been an insult — I genuinely couldn't tell, and decided not to ask. Long Shen passed not long after, and didn't bother saying anything at all.

By the three hundredth step, most of the Fangs had pulled well ahead, their chatter fading into the rhythm of breath and footsteps somewhere above me. I was climbing on will alone at this point, whatever the System's earlier line had meant by that, and I fell into step near Long Jing — partly because she'd slowed her own pace without comment, and partly because she seemed the least likely to say something I couldn't answer without giving myself away.

"You climbed this before?" I asked.

"Twice. Failed the first time." She said it without embarrassment, which I appreciated more than I expected to. "Made it to the four hundredth step and turned back. My knees still remember it."

"What made you turn back?"

"Fear," she said, simply. "Realized I was more scared of what was at the top than of quitting." She glanced at me sideways. "You planning on being honest about anything today, or was the hall a one-time event?"

*She's sharper than she's letting on,* I thought, and adjusted accordingly. "I'm planning on making it to the top. Honesty's a separate project."

That, at least, got something like a laugh out of her — short, surprised, genuine.

Past the four-hundredth step, something in the air itself began to change — a weight settling over the Spine that had nothing to do with altitude. Zaitian's memories caught up with me a beat too late, the way they always did with things I should have known instinctively: past the five-hundredth step, the Spine's own pressure and law-oppression began compounding with every stride, steep enough that cultivators all the way up to the Heavenly Immortal realm used this stretch deliberately, to refine and stabilize their dantian under conditions nowhere else could replicate. Nobody climbed past the five hundredth step on cultivation base alone. Not even a Core Formation prodigy could out-muscle law itself.

Which meant, I realized somewhere around step four hundred and ninety, that whatever came next was going to hurt everyone here, not just me.

---

We reached the five-hundredth step as the light started dying out of the cloud cover above us, and my legs had progressed from arguing with me to outright open rebellion.

"It's impressive for a starter like you to make it up here," Long Jing said, and for a moment I couldn't tell if it was genuine or a test.

*Impressive my ass — look at how badly my whole body is shaking right now.*

"It's nothing," I said instead. "I'm amazing. Aren't I?"

She laughed, short and startled, the same laugh from before.

By the six-hundredth step the air had gone from heavy to actively oppressive, pressing down against my chest like a hand testing how much weight I could take before I folded, and I understood — too late, as usual — exactly what Zaitian's memory had been trying to warn me about. This was where the Spine stopped being a staircase and started being a verdict.

The step beneath Long Jing's foot cracked.

She was a good fifty steps ahead of me when it happened — not broke, cracked, a long fault line spreading fast across ancient stone that had apparently held for longer than most civilizations, right as the compounding pressure caught up with her and she put her weight down at exactly the wrong moment. I heard it before I saw it, a sound like the whole mountain clearing its throat, and by the time I turned, the section of the Spine under three of the Fangs — Core Formation and Nascent Soul both, pressure or no pressure — had already begun to give way beneath them.

*System,* I thought, already moving, *tell me this is the kind of thing your data has a plan for.*

*Working on it,* the System said, and for the first time since I'd woken up in this body, it didn't sound amused at all.