Chapter 482: Wangchen?

She stood with her feet planted wide, her heavy cast-iron spatula blazing with the white-hot intensity of the Heart Fire, challenging the architects of destiny to a brawl.

But as the echoes faded, absorbed by the suffocating, stale air of the celestial server room, the gears in Ji’an’s pragmatic, cynical mind began to turn.

The adrenaline of her own bravado receded just enough for the logic to set in.

’Wait a minute,’ Ji’an’s internal monologue stuttered, the fiery rage momentarily cooling into cold, calculating suspicion.

She stared at the Head of the Tower.

The ancient, statuesque elder with the black, void-like eyes hadn’t flinched at her threat. He simply stood there, his hands tucked into his golden-threaded sleeves, projecting an aura of unassailable patience.

’Why are they offering me a deal?’

Ji’an’s eyes darted across the ranks of the Star-Seers. There were dozens of them.

They controlled the fundamental algorithms of the universe.

They had casually orchestrated seventeen lifetimes of agonizing, inescapable tragedy just to balance a ledger.

They were gods of administration.

If a cockroach infiltrates a Michelin-star kitchen, the Head Chef does not sit down with the cockroach and politely ask it to sever its ties to the pantry in exchange for a peaceful life in the alleyway.

The Head Chef simply brings down a heavy boot and sanitizes the floor.

’I am the cockroach,’ Ji’an deduced, her grip on the spatula tightening. ’I am the glitch, the anomaly they have been trying to excise for centuries. They don’t want me alive. They have absolutely no use for me.’

So why the sudden shift in policy? Why the polite request?

If the Stargazing Tower possessed the unilateral power to delete her, they would have done it the moment she stepped out of the Corridor of the Eclipse. The fact that they hadn’t, the fact that they had deployed their highest-ranking executives to negotiate a plea deal meant exactly one thing.

They couldn’t kill her.

Or, more accurately, they couldn’t kill her without catastrophic collateral damage.

"You’re lying," Ji’an stated, her voice slicing through the heavy silence of the chamber.

She didn’t yell, but the volume of her voice dropped to a chilling, conversational murmur that was infinitely more dangerous.

Yan Zhaoge raised an eyebrow, glancing at her from the corner of his eye. Jiu Zui subtly shifted his stance, bringing his silver sword an inch higher, ready to intercept any sudden celestial strike.

"You don’t care about shedding blood in this chamber," Ji’an continued, taking a slow, measured step forward, her silver-flecked eyes locked dead onto the Head Seer. "And you certainly don’t care about showing me mercy. You’ve murdered me seventeen times. You’ve poisoned me, stabbed me, and burned me at the stake. You don’t have a sudden moral objection to taking my life."

She pointed the glowing, white-hot tip of her spatula directly at the elder’s face.

"The Red Thread of Fate," Ji’an hypothesised, the pieces of the puzzle snapping together with terrifying clarity. "It’s a two-way street. It binds my soul to Xie Wangchen’s. If you strike me down while the thread is still active... the karmic backlash doesn’t just hit me. It also hits him."

The middle elder did not blink, but the two flanking Seers, the ones with the glowing blue eyes, subtly, almost imperceptibly stiffened.

It was a microscopic reaction, but to a Chef who spent her life reading the expressions of lying line cooks, it was a glaring neon sign.

"That’s it, isn’t it?" Ji’an sneered, a dark, victorious, but unsettled smirk crossing her face. "You can’t just delete me, because the thread is rooted too deeply. If you shatter my soul, you also shatter his. And for some reason... you need him intact."

She let the silence hang, letting the accusation marinate.

"You’re asking me to cut the thread voluntarily," Ji’an summarized, her voice dripping with venomous mockery, "because blood magic requires the consent of the bound party to sever. You literally don’t have the administrative privileges to do it yourselves. You’re locked out of your own system, and you need my password."

Yan Zhaoge let out a low, rich, vibrating chuckle that echoed across the glass floor.

"I told you she was brilliant, old man," the Overtime Boss drawled, tapping his starmetal pipe against his palm, thoroughly enjoying the bureaucratic humiliation. "You cannot out-negotiate a woman who manages food costs for a living. She knows exactly when she’s being lowballed."

Jiu Zui didn’t laugh, but a fierce pride burned in his eyes as he looked at his disciple. "Well deduced, brat. The Heavens are just cowards hiding behind paperwork."

The Head of the Tower did not break his statuesque composure. The black, void-like eyes remained fixed on Ji’an, devoid of frustration.

"Your deductive reasoning is functional, anomaly," the elder conceded, his telepathic voice ringing with an oppressive, metallic hum. "You perceive the mechanism of the lock. But you remain blissfully ignorant of the treasure it secures."

The elder slowly raised his right hand, the wide, golden-threaded sleeve falling back to reveal an arm that looked as though it were carved from pale, ancient jade.

"You assume we desire to preserve the Ice Demon out of some misplaced sense of mercy. You assume we view him as a mere mortal prodigy caught in the crossfire of your existence."

The elder turned his hand palm-up.

"Allow us to correct your foundational misunderstanding of the universe."

The glass floor beneath them shuddered violently.

The spinning, grinding brass and gold rings of the Grand Astrolabe above them suddenly flared with a blinding, hostile crimson light.

A concentrated beam of celestial energy shot down from the apex of the domed ceiling, striking the center of the chamber with the force of a meteor.

Ji’an threw her arm over her face, squinting against the blinding flash, while Jiu Zui and Yan Zhaoge instantly deployed kinetic shields to block the shockwave.

When the light faded, the air in the chamber was freezing.

Not the crisp, natural cold of a winter mountain. It was an unnatural, soul-crushing, absolute-zero chill that instantly frosted the breath in Ji’an’s lungs and coated the polished obsidian pillars with a thick, jagged layer of black rime.

In the center of the impact crater, floating three feet above the glass floor, was a cage.

It was not made of iron or steel.

It was constructed of interlocking, rotating rings of condensed starlight and heavy brass, vibrating with a high-frequency suppression field that warped the very air around it.

And suspended inside the cage, bound by chains of glowing blue celestial script that pierced directly through his wrists, ankles, and collarbones, was Xie Wangchen.

Ji’an’s heart stopped.

The blood completely vanished from her face, leaving her as pale as a ghost.

The heavy cast-iron spatula dropped from her hand for the second time that day, but this time she didn’t even hear it hit the floor.

"WANGCHEN!" Ji’an screamed, her voice tearing from her throat in a hysterical wail.

She lunged forward, abandoning her defensive posture, driven by pure panic.

She didn’t make it two steps.

Jiu Zui’s calloused hand shot out, grabbing the back of her white inner-tunic, yanking her violently backward with enough force to lift her off her feet.

"Let me go!" Ji’an roared, thrashing wildly in her master’s grip, kicking and clawing, her silver-flecked eyes completely consumed by terror. "Let me go! They have him! Master, let me go!"

"Hold still, you idiot brat!" Jiu Zui barked, his voice straining as he struggled to restrain her newly ascended Body Fusion strength. "Look at the cage! It’s a Star-Iron Severance Matrix! If you touch those bars, the kinetic feedback will instantly vaporize your arms! I am not letting you amputate yourself!"

Ji’an stopped thrashing, her chest heaving, tears of horror springing to her eyes as she stared at the cage.

Wangchen was unconscious.

The Sovereign of the Eternal Cloud Peak, the terrifying Ice Demon who had caught Lu Jianheng’s legendary sword with two bare fingers, who had threatened to freeze Yan Zhaoge’s volcano, who had slaughtered armies in the snow just to buy her a few seconds of life, looked utterly broken.

His pristine white robes were scorched and torn.

His beautiful, shimmering silver hair was matted with dried blood.

His head hung limply against his chest, completely unresponsive.

The glowing blue chains of celestial script dug deeply into his flesh, actively siphoning his absolute-zero aura, rendering his immortal vessel powerless.