It didn’t take long, once Yoshika had shaken off the suppression of Qin Yang’s domain, for the man to make an appearance before her in the skies above Qin. One of his heavenly host appeared before her in midair, already mid-swing as his straight sword shot out towards her neck.

  Yoshika parried the blow, but even through Jianmo, the force of the strike was jarring, knocking her meters away. The puppet body sneered and darted forward to follow up. This time, Yoshika dodged, darting to the side with a brilliant fsh of Jia’s Lightspeed Traversal.

  “What’s the matter, Qin? Too cowardly to face me yourself? Or are you so arrogant that you think a puppet like this is enough to defeat me?”

  The puppet body grimaced, its usually pcid face more expressive with the emperor controlling it directly.

  “You dare to speak of cowardice after sending your pet dragons to fight in your—”

  Divine Art: The Sixth Arm of Asura—Star Sundering Ssh

  The emperor’s puppet disintegrated in a wave of pure destructive force from Eui’s technique, and Yoshika flew on, contemptuously ignoring what he’d been trying to say.

  “It is rude to interrupt someone in the middle of speaking.”

  Another puppet appeared moments ter, standing in thin air and matching her flight with ease.

  “Says the man who crashed our wedding uninvited to pick a fight. I wonder if being thrown away as fodder was the grand future these men had in mind when they joined your path.”

  “They know their pce, unlike you. Do not mistake me for a pathetic dual cultivator like yourself—only able to wield borrowed and stolen power and mistaking that for true strength.”

  “Whatever happened to the philosophy of the strong nurturing the weak? That was the one thing I liked about your teachings.”

  A philosophical debate really wasn’t what Yoshika had in mind, but she was happy to stall for time if he’d let her. She wasn’t flying aimlessly, but her true body was a distraction from her real goals, and the more Qin focused on her, the better.

  “When the weak refuse to accept their pce—when they try to overturn the rightful order out of petty jealousy or for shortsighted personal gain—it is not tyranny to crush such dissent. Indeed, to allow it is a weakness. You would coddle your subjects, allowing them to wallow in unearned luxury and eternal stagnation. That is a far greater tyranny!”

  She was about to respond when six more puppets appeared surrounding her, the essence around them twisting in a familiar and inauspicious way. Yoshika tried to blink out of the center of the formation, but Qin’s body doubles somehow followed her every move as if their position was spatially anchored to hers.

  Divine Art: Eternal Seven Point Star Sealing Formation

  A heptagram of visible divine essence snapped into pce around her, one of Qin’s puppets at each point of the star. In the center was absolute stillness, as sound, light, air, and everything else was violently ripped away, leaving only Yoshika trapped in the timeless darkness, her essence rapidly draining away.

  Unlike Yan De’s weaker facsimile, this formation left no weaknesses for her to exploit. She wryly considered that she’d had a pretty bad history when it came to barrier formations, and she was getting quite sick of people trying to trap her.

  Divine Art: Voidbreak

  Drawing from the limitless wellspring within her, Yoshika deliberately carved a surgically precise hole in reality and stepped through. The scar in the world touched briefly on the Void, by its nature, but when she emerged, she was back in the physical realm without ever having fully left it.

  She wasn’t about to risk giving her father an exit now—the st thing she needed was to give the emperor another ally.

  “Tsk! What a troublesome legacy that accursed man has left behind. Does it not trouble you to inherit the techniques and treasures of such a despoiler?”

  Yoshika rolled her eyes and beheaded another puppet before it could decouple itself from the sealing technique—whatever was anchoring them to her had been broken by the Voidbreak art.

  “I’m sure you could do so much more despoiling if they were yours instead.”

  “Impudent child! You know not how it corrupts you, turning you away from the true path of heaven.”

  As their battle raged on, Yoshika allowed a small thread of her attention to split off and check on her other selves. Eunae and Kaede had it easy, pcing anchor talismans for her formation at key points in Goryeo and Yamato.

  Eunae watched over her talisman as it carved its part of the formation into her family’s precious Sky Hall, permanently altering the irrepceable formation. Only her mother and cousin shouting in protest presented any threat, but she remained vigint.

  Kaede pced her talisman in the ruins of Kasuga—the site of her final confrontation with the demoness Yu Meiren. The city was reduced to ashes, and the nd around it toxic and barren from Meiren’s vicious miasma, even so long after her death. Despite the inauspicious nature of the pce, it served as a critical bancing point in the grand formation. Few things could survive in the vicinity, but Kaede remained in case of interruptions.

  Jia and Eui had more dangerous targets, but they hadn’t made it to their destinations yet, so Yoshika returned the bulk of her focus to the fight in front of her.

  Qin Yang had a seemingly limitless supply of puppet bodies and essence clones to throw at her, and if she didn’t know any better, she’d think that he was the one trying to distract her.

  That thought drew her up short, her brows furrowing. Distract her from what?

  As if on cue, a horrible juddering sensation rocked her soul realm, causing all of her bodies to spit blood. Heian’s voice rang out urgently inside her mind.

  “Mom! He’s attacking! The wards are being pressured by at least three domains, and I’m pretty sure one of them is Shen Yu!”

  So much for Sovereign Shen being neutral. Things had been so much easier when her existence wasn’t spread out across half a continent and multiple dimensions, she mused.

  “Can you hold them?”

  “I’ll try, but I don’t think so. That st attack killed my other half while I was inhabiting Chou’s formations.”

  “Are you alright?! Don’t risk your life, sweetheart! I’ll be there as soon as I can!”

  She sensed a mental eye roll from her daughter.

  “I’m fine, Mom, but you should hurry.”

  Heian’s immortality was hard for even Yoshika to understand, but she knew that losing one of her liminal alternate selves would leave Heian vulnerable for a while until she could cultivate a new one.

  One of the puppet-clones attacking her noticed her distraction and grinned smugly.

  “Trouble, Empress?”

  “I was wondering why it took you so long to attack us in the spirit realm. I should have known it was because you had to go groveling for help.”

  Emperor Qin sneered, but didn’t dignify her with a response as his body doubles renewed their assault. Rather than retreat right away, Yoshika once more spared a thread of attention for her other bodies. Jia and Eui had nearly made it, but it was clear that Yoshika’s distraction wasn’t as effective as she’d hoped, so she decided to change tactics.

  Yoshika had been on her way back to the Flowing Purewater, which would have served well as an anchor point for the formation, but instead she channeled as much power as she could manage into Lightspeed Traversal in order to fsh across the continent as a beam of light. Qin’s puppets couldn’t stop her in time, and while the maneuver left her badly drained, her divine essence was already rapidly replenishing as she appeared in the sky over the imperial pace.

  It wasn’t just the Sovereign’s Tear that was replenishing her, she realized. The people within her soul realm were empowering her—their faith, their hopes resting on her as she fought for them, gave her literal and figurative strength. Yoshika gave her friends and supporters a silent prayer of thanks as she took in the chaos around her.

  It was a scene of utter pandemonium, as two enormous dragons blotted out the sky, engaged by Qin Yongliang and his sisters. Qin Xiang threw out shimmering barriers that absorbed the iridescent and azure streams of dragon fire, as Qin Ling—empowered by the absorbed essence—returned fire with brilliant rays of purifying radiance. Qin Yongliang, for his part, coordinated a veritable horde of qi constructs, millions of independent motes of power that flew at the dragons from every angle, slipping through their defenses and wearing them down with constant harassment.

  “What are you doing here?!”

  The Dragon Lord’s voice resounded in her mind, sounding vexed but unable to entirely hide the twinge of relief at the arrival of backup.

  “Helping! Where’s my grandmother?”

  Rather than the Dragon Lord answering directly, Long Xiaofan’s giant whiplike tail snapped in the direction of an open, sprawling complex on the northern side of the pace. Yoshika wasted no time in flying towards it, but the twin princesses moved to block her.

  “Empress Yoshika! Suddenly so eager to enter the harem.”

  “I’m afraid that our offer has been rescinded, by our father’s direct order. You had your chance.”

  Yoshika scowled at the pair. This close to the seat of Qin’s power, she could feel the suppression of his domain ramping up by the second, empowering his kin just as much as it weakened her. To think that the true origin of his domain was so much further away.

  “Move!”

  Qin Xiang scoffed.

  “I don’t know what makes you think you can give us orders in our own home, but—”

  “I said move!”

  Eunae’s power might have been changed by her soul’s entanglement with Yoshika, but Yue’s had not. The princess contemptuously erected one of her signature barriers, then gaped in shock as the power infusing Yoshika’s voice smashed through it like gss. All the power Qin Xiang had accumuted with her sister after millenia of segregated cultivation did nothing to protect her—the shallow comprehensions of her path crumpling like paper before the concentrated ire of a nascent goddess.

  The light faded from her eyes and she dropped limply out of the sky, alive but disconnected from her own senses by Yue’s Melody of the Dreaming Moon.

  “Sister!”

  Qin Ling dove after her sister, leaving Yoshika to proceed to the imperial harem unimpeded. From within the pace, the pressure of Emperor Qin’s domain redoubled while at the same time another focused assault rocked her soul from within. She was running out of time.

  Following the faint connection she felt in her blood, Yoshika ignored the panicking eunuchs and imperial consorts, striding through the halls and courtyards until she came to an eborate pagoda, upon which a woman was lounging without a care in the world as the chaos unfolded around them.

  She had a striking resembnce to Yue, with the same bck hair and green eyes, though despite her youthful appearance, there was a timeless age behind her eyes that was impossible to miss as she looked Yoshika up and down. The only hint of her draconic ancestry was the way the essence in the air moved around her, reminiscent of Long Ruiling’s unique magic or Haeun’s summoning.

  “And who might you be?”

  It was a simple, direct question, though Long Qiuyue didn’t sound particurly concerned with the answer as she took a drag from a long, thin pipe.

  “Your granddaughter, among others.”

  Qiuyue raised an eyebrow at that.

  “Among others? Never mind, I don’t care. So that is my grandmother rampaging up above, then?”

  “And her brother, yes.”

  “Why? I’m not important enough to warrant that kind of attention.”

  Yoshika pursed her lips.

  “Aunt Xiaofan seems to think so.”

  “Not the Dragon Lord, and not the emperor either. She’s here for a reason. You’re that reason. Why? I ask again—who are you?”

  She sighed.

  “My name is Empress Yoshika of Jiaguo, Goddess of Unity. Emperor Qin has decred me his enemy, and so I’m here to rescue you so that you cannot be used as a hostage against my family.”

  Her grandmother scoffed.

  “No you’re not. I already told you I don’t matter. What are you really doing here?”

  Yoshika smiled sardonically as Qin Yang—the man himself, rather than one of his body doubles—came storming into the courtyard. She turned to face him, interposing herself between the emperor and Long Qiuyue.

  “Would you believe that this is all a diversion?”

  She spoke the answer directly into her grandmother’s mind, unwilling to risk letting the emperor catch on—assuming he hadn’t already. Qiuyue blinked up at her then took a long drag of her pipe, blowing out a thin cloud of smoke as she sighed.

  “Ah. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, good luck then, Miss Goddess, but I suspect you’ve just involved me in history’s most eborate suicide.”

  DarkTechnomancer

  RMullinsEtlyEmilinVictorMineOdunskiTodorNaimahDvorakQThomasRobinCogAlexis LionelAttheriskKitVailArusanSaganatsuStephaneCeldur Ey'linAlexandraIrateRapScallionFraxxThe Test SubjectYandronBerjSorcoroMax C.SoloMarkAvaAuribiaVietDomMeliMeliDHAndrew C.SeasparksJoseph H.ShadeByTheSeaBerynRanzbartConnor B.Taylor W.LuRayafaceZeodeicasiaJessj0ntsaJanLarryParrish6J0ker9GiantOrangeK Geagle0108thkiwFISHLADTatsu DThe HumanTarantismElisahRuRobisqueSalmunaJake T.EmanymTAFmrblueRhaidDamian Z.itbeme12321Joseph C.

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