Chapter 478: My Disciple

"You are my disciple. The sole inheritor of the Drunken Peak. And if you have decided to flip the board... if you have decided to march into the kitchen of the World Will and demand a refund on this trashy timeline..."

He reached behind his back, grasping the hilt of a weapon he had not drawn in three hundred years.

With a metallic shing, Jiu Zui drew his sword.

It was not a rusted, chipped blade. It was a masterpiece of flowing, liquid silver steel, humming with the pure, devastating power of a Sovereign who had stopped holding back.

"Then know this," Jiu Zui declared, planting the tip of the sword against the glass floor. "This fight is not yours alone. I don’t care if the Heavens audit us. I don’t care if the Seers rewrite the stars. I will shatter the astrolabes. I will burn the archives. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in this universe that I will not destroy to ensure you get to walk out of this tower and cook another meal."

It was the ultimate, undisputed vow of a Master.

Ji’an looked at him, a fierce, brilliant, terrifyingly confident smile breaking across her face.

"I’m holding you to that, old man," Ji’an smirked, twirling her spatula. "Because the Yelp review I am about to leave this universe is going to require a lot of property damage."

A slow, sarcastic clapping sound echoed across the chamber.

Yan Zhaoge was standing a few yards away, brushing a patch of singed purple silk off his sleeve, looking at the two of them with an expression of cynical amusement.

"A beautiful, deeply moving display of found-family sentimentality," Yan Zhaoge drawled, his amber eyes glittering. "I am practically weeping. Truly, the emotional climax of the century. There is just one, highly inconvenient flaw in your grand declaration of war against the cosmos."

Jiu Zui sneered at him. "And what is that, Zhaoge? Did you forget to clock out?"

Yan Zhaoge didn’t smile.

He raised his hand, pointing a long, elegant finger toward the ceiling.

"The flaw, Jiu Zui," Yan Zhaoge said softly, "is that you are standing in a heavily monitored server room, you just detonated three high-yield incendiary explosives, and the anomaly just bypassed the primary firewall of the Eclipse Corridor. You tripped the alarm exactly four minutes ago."

The ambient lighting in the Grand Astrolabe Chamber shifted.

The soft, ethereal starlight filtering through the glass ceiling was instantly extinguished. The rotating rings of brass and gold above them ground to a halt, emitting a screeching sound of metal against metal that vibrated in Ji’an’s teeth.

The glowing blue runic algorithms inscribed on the rings flared into a blinding, hostile, aggressive crimson red.

A heavy, mechanical drone began to echo through the chamber. It sounded like the grinding gears of a colossal, uncaring machine waking from a long slumber.

"Oh," Ji’an muttered, looking up at the glowing red rings. "That doesn’t look like a welcoming committee."

"It is not," Yan Zhaoge confirmed, his purple robes snapping as the atmospheric pressure in the room began to warp and compress. He casually reached into the void, manifesting a long, slender, incredibly lethal-looking smoking pipe made of pure, dark starmetal. He didn’t light it. He held it like a wand.

"The High Council of the Star-Seers," Yan Zhaoge announced, his voice tight with anticipation. "They have recognized the systemic breach. They know you are here, Ji’an. They know I brought you. And they know exactly what you are trying to do."

A swirling vortex of dark, cosmic energy ripped open in the center of the chamber, directly beneath the frozen astrolabe rings.

"How many?" Jiu Zui asked, his grip tightening on his silver sword, his aura flaring to meet the incoming threat, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his disciple.

"All of them," Yan Zhaoge smirked, a manic, thrilled light burning in his amber eyes. "They are deploying the Celestial Purge Protocol. They are coming to erase the glitch manually. Or worse... do something that was never done before..."

The vortex expanded, the dark energy pouring out across the reflective glass floor like a tidal wave of ink.

From within the vortex, the towering, imposing, hooded figures of the Star-Seers began to emerge, their faceless visages radiating hostility.

Lin Ji’an didn’t take a step back.

She looked at the army of cosmic auditors pouring into the room.

She looked at her alcoholic, ferociously protective master standing on her left and the overtime-obsessed, pyromaniac CEO standing on her right.

She raised her cast-iron spatula, the Heart Fire igniting the metal into a blinding, white-hot beacon.

"Alright," Ji’an grinned, her silver hair whipping in the violent cosmic winds, her voice ringing out with the tyrannical authority of a Head Chef during the dinner rush.

"Order up. Let’s start slicing."

****

The glass floor of the Grand Astrolabe Chamber mirrored the swirling, infinite galaxies projected across the domed ceiling, creating the terrifying, vertigo-inducing illusion that Lin Ji’an was standing on the edge of the universe.

The air was thick, tasting of ozone, burnt copper, and the crushing, suffocating weight of authority.

Ji’an stood with her feet planted wide, her chest heaving with the exertion of the Heart Fire. The heavy cast-iron spatula in her hand burned with a brilliant, blinding white heat, casting long, defiant shadows against the approaching tide of darkness.

On her left, the Sovereign of the Drunken Peak, her master, Jiu Zui, held a sword of silver that hummed with centuries of suppressed, alcoholic rage.

On her right, Yan Zhaoge, the Sovereign of the Iron-Stove Monastery, casually gripped his starmetal pipe, his midnight-purple robes billowing in the sudden atmospheric pressure drop.

They were a vanguard of three, standing against the architects of fate.

The swirling vortex of dark, cosmic energy in the center of the chamber continued to bleed its ink-like shadows across the floor.

From within the vortex, the Star-Seers emerged.

They did not walk; they glided, their feet hidden beneath the hems of heavy, hooded robes spun from the fabric of the night sky itself. Silver constellations shifted and rotated across their garments, mapping the destinies of billions of mortals.

Their faces were obscured by the deep, impenetrable shadows of their hoods, rendering them as a legion of faceless, bureaucratic reapers.

Ji’an tightened her grip on her spatula, her silver-flecked eyes narrowing into slits.

She bent her knees, dropping her center of gravity, preparing to launch herself into the fray.

She expected a massacre, or expected the Seers to summon weapons of celestial light, to unleash the furious, cleansing wrath of the Heavens upon the anomalies who had dared to breach their server room.

But the attack never came.

The dozens of Star-Seers who had poured into the chamber stopped thirty paces away from the trio. They did not raise their hands or weave offensive incantations. Instead, they moved with a synchronized, chilling, and mechanical precision.

Like the parting of a dark, cosmic sea, the Seers smoothly divided themselves into two straight, parallel rows, creating a wide, unobstructed pathway leading directly from the swirling vortex to where Ji’an stood.

They bowed their hooded heads in unquestioning reverence, their hands clasped inside their sweeping sleeves.

They were making way for the elite.

The grinding, metallic drone of the astrolabe rings above them slowed to a heavy, rhythmic pulse, like the heartbeat of a dying leviathan.

Through the parted ranks of the ordinary Seers, three figures emerged from the vortex.

The ambient temperature in the chamber plummeted, extinguishing the residual warmth of Ji’an’s Heart Fire.

These three did not wear the standard midnight-blue robes of the lesser bureaucrats. They were draped in garments of pure, blinding white starlight, interwoven with threads of spun gold that depicted the cyclical rotation of the karmic wheel.

They did not wear hoods.

They wore intricate, towering crowns of forged celestial brass, and their faces were fully exposed to the harsh light of the cosmos.

They were the High Council. The triumvirate of the Stargazing Tower.

The undisputed pinnacle of the World Will’s authority on the mortal plane.

The two flanking elders possessed faces that looked like they had been carved from marble, cold, flawless, and devoid of human empathy.

Their eyes were pools of blue light, lacking pupils or irises, burning with the cold logic of a universe that viewed mortal lives as nothing more than numerical data on a ledger.