Fractured Mandate of Heaven IV

The world fractured—not with the clean break of shattered jade, but the wet rip of flesh parting from bone. Reality peeled back in concentric blisters, revealing pulsating strata of memory and consequence.

Young Zhe Ran's golden core detonated with the fury of a betrayed sun. That celestial furnace—once praised in odes as "Heaven's Loom Woven in Flesh"—ruptured into supernova splinters. Meridians unraveled like silkworms boiling in their own glands, spiritual energy geysering forth in a chromatic vomit that seared the very air. Three disciples evaporated mid-retreat, their ashes forming Rorschach blots of condemnation on nearby boulders. The village stream erupted into steam snakes that coiled around screaming children, their blistering touch leaving burns shaped like classical hexagrams.

And the elder—poor wretch Huang Bo—crystallized where he knelt. His final tear sizzled down carbonized cheek-fissures, etching the character for mercy into jawbone exposed like a fossil in shale. The doll-clutching girl stared at his remains, her singed lips moving in silent recitation of burial rites taught by ash.

Elder Shu hovered above the carnage. "Heretical waste," he spat, the words leaving his mouth as corporeal slugs that writhed in the mud. With a gesture refined through centuries of elegant cruelty, he sent Zhe Ran's broken form cartwheeling into the smoldering village square. Luminous Cicada's corpse glittered amidst the ruins, its blade warped into a question mark of corroded meteoric iron. "Let him live," the elder decreed, "as the monster his pride birthed."

The memory dissolved like sugar in vinegar, leaving them choking on crypt air thick with spores and unsaid truths. Mei-Xing's eyes mirrored the village girl's hollow stare, pupils dilating with the weight of shattered dogmas.

"Your... sacrifice," she began, hesitant to continue.

Zhe Ran's laughter bubbled up through phlegm and mycelium. A chrysanthemum forced itself past his cracked lips, petals contorting into Zhuangzi's smirk rendered in cancerous flora. "Sacrifice?" Pollen puffed from the bloom's central stigma, spelling the characters for wú wéi in midair before dissipating. "No." His tongue uncurled like a split slug, revealing bud clusters forming the word chose.

Mei-Xing's sword hand steadied, blessed steel kissing necrotic flesh. Sap-blood wept down the fuller, its hissing steam coalescing into ephemeral scrolls the Analects. "Then why?" Her voice cracked like winter ice over poisoned wells. "Why cradle that abomination of a Tome?"

Moonlight speared through the crypt's fissures, illuminating the Tome squirming against Zhe Ran's chest. Its cover—a mosaic of facial skin fragments stitched with still-twitching sinew—quivered under her gaze. The lips along the spine parted, whispering in a polyphonic rasp that merged Schopenhauer's German with Legalist Chinese: 

"Will und Vorstellung... mandates carved in infant marrow..."

Zhe Ran's smile split into a thousand hyphae strands. "To savor each truth that gutted me," he crooned, fungal teeth grinding out quartz dust. "To feast on the maggots squirming in our virtues." His eye-sockets bloomed nightshade flowers, their pistils tracking her tremors. "And to plant mirrors in your marrow... until you all see..."

Thunder growled like a starving beast. Beyond the crypt's oozing walls, the Philosopher's Bloom shuddered in its fungal cocoon—a chrysalis large enough to birth world-eating moths.

Mei-Xing's nostrils flared with inhaled resolve. Chains formed anew and snapped taut around Zhe Ran, each link flaring with the incandescent fury of ten thousand Confucian edicts. Her final binding chant:

"By earth and blood, chaos bound,

Let husband's rot be wife's crown."

The ritual bit. Chains dissolved into mercurial worms that burrowed through Zhe Ran's necrotic flesh. His scream birthed a greenhouse explosion—corpse flowers erupting from his pores, spore-clouds painting crypt walls with damnations. The Tome shrieked through three dozen grafted mouths, its pages flapping like trapped bats.

Zhe Ran's final coherent thought pierced the maelstrom—a desperate filament of humanity clinging to her face's contours: Her eyes... why do they grieve?

Then the orchids came.

They burst from his auditory canals in velvety profusion, pistils drilling into his prefrontal cortex. Petals smothered his ocular cavities, their suffocating perfume drowning reason in synaptic static. The crypt filled with screaming flora—peonies wailing dirges, lilies shrieking syllogisms, jasmine buds gasping final arguments against existence itself.

Mei-Xing stood motionless amidst the botanical bedlam; somewhere beneath the fungal cacophony, the Tome chuckled wetly, turning another page.