Pillars of Ten-Thousand-Year Profound Ice jutted up from the center, each streaked with old, dark blood. Breath misted around Jared, tasting of iron and frost, this was the Execution Platform.
Jared edged closer to the wooden railing, the rough grain biting his palms as he looked down. Thousands of robed cultivators jammed the plaza, locals, drifters, people with nowhere else to stare at someone else’s doom.
Directly ahead, the Ice-Jade Throne shimmered on its dais, its surface sweating cold light, and yet the seat, sharp, arrogant, waited empty.
The absence told Jared the City Lord had not arrived; the plaza held its breath around that single, glittering vacancy.
A steel-throated voice cracked the air, “Kneel!”
Armor clanged. Guards forced the bound prisoners flat, faces pressed toward the throne they could not touch.
Someone on the platform bellowed, “The City Lord arrives!”
A lance of blue-white light speared from the horizon, crossing the sky in one breath and slamming to a stop before the throne.
When the glare dissolved, a middle-aged Daoist in ice-blue robes stood there, cheeks thin, eyes colder than the stone beneath his boots. Each blink from those eyes poured silent force, Jared felt it settle in his lungs, this was Cyril, Lord Coldabyss, master at High Immortal Realm Level Five.
Temperature crashed. Frost blossomed across armor plates and shoulders; the chatter of the crowd knotted, then died.
Cyril’s gaze drifted over the crouching prisoners, indifferent, as though measuring insects before choosing which heel to use.
One of them, unable to swallow the silence, cried out, “City Lord, we are wronged! We are not spies from the Azure Firmament Immortal Continent! The celestials hounded us; we fled here!”
The young man’s voice shredded itself on the last syllable, leaving a raw echo.
The Guard Captain strode forward, gauntlet rising to silence him. “Insolence! Death stands over your necks, and still you spit lies.”
Cyril spoke, calm as glacial water. “Wait!”
At once the Captain froze, withdrew, head bowed.
Cyril regarded the young cultivator. “Oppressed by celestials? Refugees? How can I know this tale isn’t a cover to infiltrate my city? If Azure Firmament truly lies under celestial chains, why has the eastern region heard nothing?”
The youth shook, voice climbing. “The celestials are vast, they choke the news! Anyone who dares speak vanishes, throat slit and soul burned!”
“If you doubt, send scouts to Azure Firmament!” he pleaded. “I swear on my Dao-heart, one false word and may heaven erase me forever!”
Chains rattled as the other prisoners echoed the vow, tears streaking dirt into pale lines.
A crease formed between Cyril’s brows, doubt, thin but living, cracked his frost.
Jared knew the lord was no butcher, this purge came from fear. If Azure Firmament marched north, Coldabyss would be the first wall to break.
But what if the youths were truly blameless?
The doubt tasted like iron on Jared’s tongue. He drew a slow breath and let his own voice rise.
He let the words leave him unforced, barely louder than a conversation, yet the marble chamber caught them and carried them to every corner. “Lord Coldabyss, what they said is true.”
A sharp hush cut through the assembly, the kind of sound that belonged to steel unsheathing.
Hundreds of gazes swung toward him at once; Jared felt the weight settle on his shoulders like fresh iron.
On the dais, Cyril’s eyes narrowed to a cold sliver. “And you are? What makes you so certain?”
Jared rose slowly, letting the Cold-Iron Shackles dangle, the links already fractured by the ripple of chaotic force he had sent through them minutes earlier.
They now rested on his wrists like souvenir chains, meaningless but noisy.
Around him, spears lifted a fraction, armor plates rasping as the nearest sentries tightened their stance. He tasted their nerves in the air, metallic and thin.
The Guard Captain barked from behind the wall of helms, “Down on your knees!”
He lunged forward, palm arcing for Jared’s shoulder, an avalanche meant to drive him back to the floor.
Jared did not bother to turn. He raised his left hand lazily, touched the air with his forefinger. A soft pop, barely louder than a bubble, cracked between them.
The Captain’s strike froze three inches short, his body locking mid-motion, snarl embalmed on his face. Terror flooded the man’s eyes as he discovered even his own energy no longer obeyed him.
Seeing this, Cyril’s brows twitched.
For the first time that evening, the city lord looked truly awake, his gaze drilled into the space where Jared’s finger had moved.
That single tap carried a power so obscure and sophisticated it had sealed every vein of strength inside a High Immortal Realm Level Two cultivator, in an instant.
And when Jared stirred, the veil over his cultivation lifted, he stood revealed as Heavenly Immortal Realm Level Seven.
“Jared,” he said simply, “From the level twelve of the Lower Realm.”
His eyes held Cyril’s without heat. “As for my certainty, let’s just say the celestials and I have unfinished business.”
He flicked his wrists, the ornamental chains shattered, dissolving into glittering shards of frost that drifted to the floor.
A vast, ancient breath rolled out of him, chaotic aura, patient and unhurried, yet big enough to cradle new worlds. Even the seasoned cultivators around him felt their knees wish for the ground; the pressure came not from force. but from the memory of creation itself.
Cyril swallowed. “What… What power is this?”
The question rattled inside him long after the words escaped.
Jared’s awareness skimmed across thousands of years of study, countless doctrines pored over, countless miracles mimicked, yet nothing had ever thrummed as pure as the newborn current now curling, bright and wordless, around the pit of his heart.
He let the silence tighten just enough to be felt, then breathed the name into it, Chaotic Force.
“City Lord, you can feel it, this current outruns cycles, celestials, every lattice you recognize. If I were a scout from Azure Firmament Immortal Continent, why would I flaunt something so defiantly alien?”
Cyril’s lips never parted, yet the air around him cooled as though silence were a verdict.
Jared watched the elder’s nostrils flare, searching for fraud. The attempt faltered; the scent of the current simply had no cousin in any catalogued path. He extended a finger toward the shackled men and women.
“If you still doubt me, let my word cloak them. Should even one prove traitor in the future, any punishment you choose will fall on me first.”
“Your word?” Cyril’s gaze narrowed until his lashes nearly touched. “You stand here at the mere Heavenly Immortal Realm and presume to guarantee anything at all?”
Jared did not flinch.
“Because I reached level thirteen while still bound to the Lower Realm. Does that not stir your curiosity, City Lord, how a cultivator short of the High Immortal Realm tore through the barrier between worlds to stand before you?”
Cyril’s composure cracked, his pupils expanded, snatching every shard of light as if to confirm the impossible claim.
Jared could almost hear the titles reverberate inside the elder’s skull, two-realm barrier, membrane of law, the unbreakable edict that kept Lower Realm cultivators out of the Middle Realm until their spirits ripened.
Break that decree, and the law itself was said to crush the intruder to dust. Jared watched the calculation flicker behind the elder’s eyes.
Either an unimaginable patron had carried him through, or he was himself so aberrant that the law stepped aside. In both cases, he was far from simple.
