Immortality Starts With Face

The obsidian leviathan flew swiftly – and with an unnerving silence – through clouds infused with the encroaching twilight. Within the heart of the vessel, a cabin insulated from the stratospheric chill by unseen formations and layers-upon-layers of expensive spirit-infused materials, Eighth Princess Long Xueyue felt the carefully constructed ice of her public persona begin to melt – not into warmth, but into the weary slush of profound exhaustion. The journey from Fallen Star City was a blur of strained courtesies, veiled threats, and the ever-present, suffocating weight of expectation.

Her silver-white hair, a river of frozen moonlight, spilled from its intricate confines, pooling around shoulders that sagged almost imperceptibly. The violet eyes, which had surveyed the chaotic auction hall with the dispassionate gaze of a winter sky observing a fleeting insect, now held a flicker of a person growing increasingly exhausted, something akin to despair.

It was a look rarely seen, even by Wei Long, her ever-present shadow. The stoic man has been with her ever since she could remember: her protector, the confidante she trusted far more than any royal; as much as anyone like her – one trapped in the gilded cage of their birthright – could ever trust another soul.

"Your Highness…" began Wei Long, engaging her in the planned after-auction debrief.

"The performance is concluded, Long," she interrupted, her voice a low sigh, the melodic cadence usually reserved for pronouncements of state now imbued with a fragile human weariness. She gestured towards the untouched refreshments – jewel-like spirit fruits and crystal decanters of wine that would have cost a minor lord a year's income.

"If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: you may dispense with the 'Your Highness' while we're alone. Here, at least, let there be some small respite from the endless masquerade!"

Wei Long, whose massive frame seemed to absorb the ambient light of the cabin, making him appear more shadow than man, inclined his head, a gesture of profound respect that was as ingrained as his own breathing.

"Your Highness," he admonished, his voice a deep rumble, like distant thunder, "even the Dragon must coil in repose, yet it remains a Dragon. There can be no respites from the Mandate of Heaven, for Heaven does not sleep, nor does the vigilance it demands of its chosen."

Xueyue's lips, usually set in a line of cool disdain or polite indifference, twisted into a wry, almost bitter smile.

"Oh, stuff the Mandate," she echoed, the words tasting like ash. "It's only a convenient justification for ambition, for cruelty, for the endless, grinding attrition of souls within the Imperial City's walls. My father, the Emperor Long Ao (long may He reign), uses it to shield his August Dao Formation realm self from the petty squabbles below, while his children… well. We enact our own… mandates in the shadows of his throne, don't we?"

She thought of her siblings, a sprawling, venomous brood.

There was the Crown Prince, Long Tianba, already ancient by mortal reckoning at two hundred and eight years old, his Nascent Soul level cultivation a suffocating weight upon the aspirations of all others, his every pronouncement a thinly veiled threat.

Then there were the others: the calculating Third Princess, already a formidable Golden Core, weaving webs of influence within the Ministry of Rites.

The warrior Seventh Prince, his own Golden Core forged in borderland skirmishes, his ambition for the throne as naked as his unsheathed blade.

Even the seemingly innocuous Thirteenth Prince, barely older than herself, yet already showing a cunning that chilled her blood.

Each was a rival.

Each a potential assassin cloaked in familial smiles and silken robes.

The Imperial nursery was but the first culling ground. The Court: now there was the true abattoir where destinies were manifested – or bled out.

Drop by agonizing drop.

"You look weary, Xueyue," Wei Long stated, for once allowing the familiarity she craved, his deep-set eyes, usually shuttered, showing a flicker of something akin to paternal concern. He had served her mother, the ill-fated Concubine Lan, and had sworn an oath upon her deathbed to protect this last, most luminous spark of her lineage.

"Weary?"

A laugh, brittle as winter ice, escaped her.

"I was born weary, Long. Born into a nest of golden vipers, each with longer fangs and crueler venom than the last."

Her own position was a bit of a jest of fate. The daughter of an Imperial concubine, her mother's beauty a fleeting currency that bought her a place in the annals of the Palace… but little lasting power. The Eighth princess, with only her younger brother, a boy of sixteen already showing creative cruelty and unsettling ambition, beneath her in the complex hierarchy of birth. Ordinarily, her path from here would be clear: a pawn in some dynastic marriage, traded to a neighboring empire or a powerful vassal lord, her cultivation gifts a mere enhancement to her value as breeding stock.

Or so it would have been, had Heaven not decided to bless – or curse – her with potential far beyond her social station. The blood that flowed in her veins was no trickle, but a Torrent. The Imperial Yin Bloodline, that rare and terrible gift, manifested in her with a potency that terrified the court Scholars and Alchemists alike. It was said to rival the Crown Prince's own fearsome inheritance. And her cultivation talent… was a whisper of true genius.

Peak Foundation Establishment before her twentieth year alive.

Not even Tianba, for all his current formidable power, had touched the threshold of Golden Core until he was nearly fifty – an achievement that had shaken the Empire at the time, yet utterly paled before her own current trajectory.

If she could condense her Golden Core… a true, high-grade Golden Core… (The thought was a distant, agonizing fantasy.)

Maybe then she could aspire to being more than a mere jeweled sacrifice upon the altar of Imperial politics.

Perhaps she could become a high-ranking Minister, shaping the destiny of provinces?

Or maybe… a political marriage, yes, but one where she held all the power, where her new home became an extension of her will?

Or perhaps even… the path whispered only in the darkest, most secret corners of her heart…

Succession.

Her father, the Emperor Long Ao (long may He reign), though at the peak of Dao Formation… was not eternal. Cultivators of his realm lived for thousands of years, true – but millennia were but heartbeats in the grand tapestry of the Dao. A Golden Core level cultivator could expect to enjoy from four to, perhaps, six centuries of life. However, if she then reached Nascent Soul within a century or two… if Tianba faltered, if the Crown Prince's Mandate proved flawed… then the game would change utterly.

These, however, were but the fever dreams of a desperate soul, she knew. The chasm before her and her eldest brother was immense. Cultivation was not a gentle ascent, but a brutal, soul-crushing climb up a mountain of broken glass.

The Qi Gathering phase, those initial nine stages, comprised, in essence, merely learning to breathe the spiritual air of the world, to draw in the invisible ocean of power that was ambient Ling Qi.

Foundation Establishment, her current realm, was where that breath became a liquid storm within, the Qi thickening, transforming, taking on hints of the specific resonances of one's spiritual root, physique, and chosen cultivation methods. There were as many possible Foundations as stars in heaven, or grains of sand upon a beach: countless variants and interpretations of unyielding earth, blazing fire, fluid water, unbending metal, burgeoning wood… and everything in between. Each Foundation was an expression of a cultivator's power and relationship with the world.

Her own was one of Frost: a Foundation of crystalline purity and breathtaking cold, built upon the exquisitely powerful Imperial Yin Bloodline.

But all paths, regardless of their elemental alignment, regardless of the power they wielded, converged before the same terrifying precipice: the Golden Core. It was more than just a name; it was a transformation, a literal crystallization of one's entire spiritual being into a single, perfect, incandescent pearl of condensed energy within the Dantian. The leap in power an advancement to Golden Core represented was not incremental – it was absolute. Even a freshly-ascended Golden Core cultivator could normally obliterate a veritable legion of Peak Foundation Establishment experts. The difference between the two was no longer merely one of degree, but of quality.

And for those like her, blessed (or cursed) with the Imperial Yin Bloodline, that chasm was slick with a particular, insidious ice.

The power her bloodline granted was immense, true: she had unparalleled control over Yin, Frost, and Water energies, a Qi capacity and output that dwarfed others of her realm, an innate resilience to cold, an almost ethereal beauty that seemed to defy the touch of time…

But there was also a cruel flaw.

With each advancement, the purity of the spiritual energy required to nourish her cultivation grew exponentially more stringent. In the Qi Gathering stages, she had been able to absorb ambient Qi like any other cultivator (though her speed had been breathtaking).

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But upon entering Foundation Establishment, the world's breath had begun to taste… tainted.

By mid-Foundation Establishment, the ordinary Ling Qi of the world was insufficient. Now, at the Peak, it may as well be poison. To even attempt to draw upon the ambient Qi of a place like Fallen Star City, (however enriched by the nearby Lake it might be), would be to invite contamination, to pollute her meticulously refined meridians with dross that would require a series of painful, debilitating purges – setting her back weeks.

Even months.

In effect, the state of her cultivation had become a siege, a prison of her own creation. She lived now entirely within specially constructed chambers within the Imperial compound, their walls, floors, and ceilings covered vast arrays of hideously expensive Qi-purifying formations, filtering and refining the very air she breathed every day. Consuming ordinary mortal – or even spiritual – foods was unthinkable. Her current subsistence comprised mainly alchemical elixirs, pills crafted from the hearts of ancient frost-jade ginseng, the crystallized tears of ice sprites, the powdered marrow of arctic spirit beasts – each dose costing a fortune that could sustain an ordinary cultivator for decades. Without the Empire's almost limitless tax revenue being funneled into her cultivation resources, her so-called "genius" would have been a tragic footnote in history, a brilliant flame extinguished before it could truly blaze.

The elusive Golden Core breakthrough, however, demanded far more than some frost-based alchemical supplements and purified ambient Qi. It required a catalyst, a singularly powerful treasure of Heaven and Earth, an item of immense, concentrated Qi that was perfectly attuned to her Yin-Frost nature, to act as the seed around which her liquid Qi could crystallize.

To say that such perfect catalysts were extremely rare would be a major understatement.

Primeval Ice Hearts from glaciers that predated the current dynasty.

Cores from Ten-Thousand-Year-Old Frost Wyrms, or similarly powerful ice beasts requiring entire teams of Golden Core hunters to bring down.

Petals from the mythical Lunar Frost Flowers that bloomed only once in a four decades, and only under the light of a specific celestial conjunction.

Their appearances were epochal events. Competition for them was not merely fierce; it was a silent, brutal war waged in the shadows by sects, ancient families, and Imperial factions alike.

And the quality of that catalyst… it was everything.

A merely "decent" catalyst would yield a "decent" Golden Core, yes. It would still grant her the additional centuries of life, plus formidable power. But…

But it would be a flawed Core, with its potential capped, her future growth stunted. For someone of her ambitions, for the silent, desperate hopes she harbored, "decent" was not merely inadequate.

It was a death sentence.

She needed something perfect.

Something legendary.

The memory of the Myriad Treasures Pavilion auction, the sheer, disbelieving shock that had coursed through her upon hearing of the primeval Frost treasure – a treasure so potent, so pure, that it required a special isolating artifact for storage – still made her heart ache with a mixture of elation and terror. It had seemed too good to be true, a desperate mirage in the desolate landscape of her search. Securing it had felt like snatching a star from the heavens.

Then, the buffoonery of that Inspector Liu, the opening of the jade box, the visible diminishment of that precious, irreplaceable essence… she was still livid just thinking about it.

But then… there was Jiang Li.

"Young Master Jiang Li," Wei Long rumbled, his voice drawing her back from the precipice of her dark thoughts. His gaze, usually fixed on some indeterminate point of vigilance, was now focused inward, a deep furrow etched between his heavy brows.

"The talismans he provided for the auction, Your Highness. The ones he… claimed to have crafted…", he trailed off uncertainly.

"Do you still find them troubling, old friend?"

Wei Long – a Seventh Level Talisman Grandmaster whose skill with that particular craft was whispered at with awe even in the hallowed halls of the Imperial Capital – let out a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of centuries of accumulated knowledge.

"Troubling, Your Highness? No. Purchasing a thousand-year-old ginseng only to find that you've been swindled with a sub-par specimen is troubling. Being distracted by emotions during meditation is troubling. Chasing down a Demonic Cultivator only to be led into an ambush is troubling."

He paused.

"These Talismans? They are an affront to the very Dao of Talismans as I have understood it for over three hundred years!"

He began to pace the confines of the cabin, a rare sign of his agitation. The obsidian floor seemed to absorb the sound of his heavy boots, but the tension emanating from him was palpable.

"When those… things… were first presented," he said, the word 'things' imbued with a mixture of contempt and grudging admiration, "I extended my spiritual senses, expecting to see something. A resonance, a fluctuation, the faintest whisper of contained power, however cleverly masked. Instead, what I found… was an utter void. It was as if the paper itself was dead to the world's Qi, actively repelling any attempt at investigation. An ingenious warding formation in the container, perhaps, I initially surmised. Maybe some lost art of concealment. But then,"

-- his voice dropped --

"when I purchased them – as a necessary precaution, I assure Your Highness, for such an unorthodox methodology could not be allowed to be disseminated freely – and later examined them at close range, with the full force of my Peak Golden Core essence…"

He stopped pacing, turning to the Princess, his usually impassive face contorted with an expression of profound intellectual anguish.

"The seals! When I finally forced them into a semblance of visibility, they were… an insult to existence itself! Random scribbles! Lines drawn with no discernible spiritual geometry, no adherence to the resonant pathways, no understanding of the sacred trigrams or the celestial flows! They looked like the absent-minded doodles of a child who had perhaps seen a talisman once, but possessed no comprehension of its inner workings! They should have been inert! Worthless!"

He spread his large hands, palms open, as if beseeching the heavens for an explanation, before his voice dropped further, down to a whisper.

"And yet, they work, Xueyue. Perfectly. Each one can unleash power consistent with a flawlessly-crafted Mid-Grade Talisman, comparable to a Foundation Establishment cultivator's technique. But how? By what aberration of the Dao is that even possible?"

His gaze was almost wild.

"It is as if the true power, the true inscriptions, exist not upon the physical medium, but in some… ethereal overlay, some hidden dimension woven into the fabric of reality itself, anchored by those crude, purposefully misleading glyphs!"

He shook his head, a shudder passing through his massive frame.

"To contemplate them is to invite madness, Your Highness. When I gaze upon them, my mind rebels against their very existence. And yet… yet, there is a kind of terrible beauty to their wrongness. A discordant harmony. Merely by attempting to unravel their impossible logic, I have already stumbled upon no less than three new theoretical pathways to enhance the resonant amplification of my own defensive array talismans. It is… humbling. And, frankly, terrifying."

Xueyue listened, rapt.

Wei Long was not a man given to hyperbole. His mastery of talisman craft was legendary within the Imperial City itself, his creations sought after even by Nascent Soul powerhouses for their reliability and versatile power. For someone of his level to be so utterly confounded, so deeply shaken…

"Which is why," Wei Long continued, his voice regaining a measure of its customary gravitas, though the undercurrent of shock remained, "Jiang Li's claim… his utterly preposterous claim that he had crafted them himself… I find myself leaning towards its veracity. There are no records, Your Highness – not even in the most restricted sections of the Imperial Archives, of any such techniques. No recorded stories of any famous ancient masters wielding such… otherworldly seals. If this were a lost art, some echo – some mention of it – would surely remain. There would be imitations. Variants of the art passed down through the generations. Entire schools founded to try to replicate the technique. These talismans… are radically different from anything anyone in the Empire has ever seen. They feel alien to me. New."

He looked at her directly.

"The question, then, is not if he made them, but how. And who, or what, bestowed upon him such insane knowledge? Is Jiang Li really a reincarnated Immortal from an age predating the current celestial order? Is he possessed by some ancient, forgotten master of talisman crafting?"

He dismissed the latter.

"No. Either that Steward or that Cousin of his would have almost certainly sensed a possession – the Qi always feels different to those who know the target."

He sighed again, the sound heavy with the weight of insoluble mystery.

"Could it be some sort of secret legacy, then? Or perhaps,"

-- and here Wei Long's voice dropped again to a near whisper, tinged with something that might have been fear, or perhaps profound awe, --

"his innate comprehension of the Dao of Talismans is simply so utterly unique, so monstrously profound, that he has intuitively grasped principles that have eluded millennia of masters…"

"But even then," Wei Long lamented, the practical craftsman reasserting himself over the stunned scholar, "even if Jiang Li's mind is able to comprehends such forbidden knowledge, there still remains the fundamental paradox."

Princess Xueyue looked up at Wei Long in askance.

"The infusion, Xueyue!" He exclaimed, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"To empower those seals, to imbue the talisman with the necessary spiritual energy to fuel a Foundation Establishment technique… it demands a substantial reservoir of pure, refined Qi. Jiang Li, by all outward appearances, is but a Fifth Stage Qi Gathering weakling. It is a level of cultivation that can barely even power a common Glowstone for more than a few hours at a time! How could he possibly infuse even one such talisman, let alone hundreds of them?"

The Talisman Grandmaster spread his hands again, a gesture of profound, helpless bafflement.

"A Peak Qi Gathering expert, a true Ninth Stage prodigy with access to limitless recovery pills and months of uninterrupted effort, might – and I stress the might – be able to craft a handful of flawed, low-grade facsimiles. But a mere Fifth Stage? To produce Mid-Grade talismans with such power and stability? It is… it is an absurdity that mocks the very laws of cultivation!"

He looked at Princess Xueyue, his deep-set eyes clouded with an unwelcome, dawning suspicion.

"And so, Your Highness, we are left with but two unsettling conclusions. Either Young Master Jiang Li did not, in fact, craft those talismans himself, and is merely a conduit – a remarkably convincing performer shielding some other, far more powerful, hidden artisan behind the scenes…"

Xueyue's violet eyes, watching him, gleamed with a sudden, intense, almost predatory light, the earlier weariness momentarily forgotten, replaced by the sharp, calculating focus of an Imperial strategist.

"...Or,"

Wei Long concluded the thought, his voice a low, disquieted rumble, the words seeming to hang heavy and ominous in the silent, opulent cabin,

"the Young Master Jiang Li we encountered… is concealing his true cultivation level. Concealing it with a skill so profound, so utterly flawless, that the Pavilion's myriad detection arrays, and even my Golden Core senses, were all utterly deceived."

A long silence descended, broken only by the faint, almost inaudible hum of the flying vessel's formations.

Xueyue stared out of the window at the indifferent stars of the night sky, her beautiful face a mask of profound contemplation.

Jiang Li.

The 'trash' of Qingshan Town.

The suddenly, inexplicably wealthy enigma.

The purveyor of impossible treasures.

The craftsman of impossible talismans.

Which truth was more likely? That he was really the puppet of some hidden, unimaginably skilled master? Or that he was the master himself, one cloaked in an illusion of weakness so perfect, so skillful, that it looked indistinguishable from reality?

Both prospects, she realized with a thrill that was equal parts exhilaration and bone-deep dread, were equally momentous.

And equally… perilous.

Her path to a flawless Golden Core, her grand ambitions for the future, seemed to have become inextricably, terrifyingly intertwined with the fate of an apparent "young man" from a provincial backwater.

A slow, dangerous smile touched her lips. The true game, it seemed, had just begun.

And it may well be a game she could win.