Chapter 22: Phoenix Tower Drenched in Blood
The morning mist of the divine capital Luoyang was saturated with the hue of blood. Shen Qinghuan stood before the Ying Tian Gate, gripping Xue Huaiyi's gilded kasaya. The bowstrings of three hundred deathsworn soldiers glistened with dew, their arrowheads aimed at the bright yellow figure atop the city tower. The snake-patterned golden seal on her wrist slithered toward her tiger's mouth—a dire omen of "Dragon Fights in the Wild" as recorded in the *Dragon-Shaking Scripture*.
"Do you still recognize the scent of this Mandarin Duck Bliss Powder?" Shen Qinghuan raised a porcelain vial, the aphrodisiac seized from Xue Huaiyi's meditation chamber last night glinting with an eerie purple sheen in the dawn light. "If you don't want tomorrow's *Great Cloud Sutra Commentary* to record the Empress Dowager defiling a Buddhist temple with her paramour…"
Before she could finish, Wu Meiniang let out a soft chuckle. The beaded curtain of her twelve-layered phoenix crown cast blood-red shadows across her brow. With a flourish of her wide sleeves embroidered with golden phoenixes, she personally drew a three-stone bow.
"Let me teach you a lesson." The carved feather arrow tore through the silence with a shriek. "This is how you use a discarded pawn."
Xue Huaiyi's scream lodged in his throat as the arrow pierced his left eye. Shen Qinghuan caught the familiar scent of saltpeter—the arrowhead was coated with the mercury poison from the Daming Palace's alchemical furnace explosion! Before his corpse hit the ground, his flesh melted into a stinking puddle of blood, leaving only the gilded kasaya flapping in the wind.
"Release the floodgates!" With Wu Meiniang's delicate shout, the Luo River beneath the Tianjin Bridge surged backward. Shen Qinghuan retreated three steps, spotting hundreds of bronze figurines rising from the water—the very seven-star sacrificial offerings unearthed beneath the Mingtang. The East Sea pearls embedded in their eye sockets now pulsed in sync with the neon frequencies of Lujiazui's skyscrapers.
---
When earth-shaking war drums rumbled from the foot of Mang Mountain, Mingyue was leading five hundred Black Armored cavalry in a surprise assault on the Shangyang Palace. Her lance skewered the last of the Thousand Bull Guards, but she reined in sharply before the Lingbo Hall. The ninety-nine white jade steps were strewn with copper coins, forming the forty-fifth hexagram of the *Tui Bei Tu*: "Wood and Frost."
"We've been tricked!" Caiyun's soft sword shredded the hall's beaded curtain, only to reveal Wu Meiniang's twelve ceremonial robes hanging empty from the rafters. Suddenly, a bronze crane in the corner spewed toxic smoke. Caiyun hurled a thunderbolt pellet in response, and the firelight revealed forty-nine copper mirrors arranged in a Primordial Eight Trigrams array, each reflecting a different temporal version of Luoyang.
"Watch the floor tiles!" Zun's Miao blade cleaved through a trapdoor, but three hundred golden-masked Shen Ce soldiers poured from the tunnel below. Their steps followed the positions of the Qimen Dunjia, their invulnerability reminding Mingyue of Qingfeng's dying words about "living corpse soldiers."
Caiyun's Emei stingers pierced a masked soldier's throat, drawing not blood but mercury. She suddenly understood why Wu Meiniang had willingly burned the Wanxiang Divine Palace—those alchemical furnaces were never for refining elixirs, but for forging killing machines across millennia.
---
At that moment, the South Market's flag pavilion had become a living hell. Shen Qinghuan's command flag stood atop the tavern's eaves as her modified eight-ox crossbow carts were surrounded by living corpse soldiers. Her snake-patterned golden seal slithered to her palm. She ripped open her robe, revealing the "Reverse Bow Sha" drawn in cinnabar over her heart.
"Kan position, fire!"
Three hundred arrows soaked in black dog blood streaked through the air, pinning the living corpse soldiers to the broken pillars of the Tianjin Bridge. Shen Qinghuan leapt onto the city tower, only to see Wu Meiniang playing a zither on the stargazing platform. The seven strings of the scorched-tail qin, forged from meteoric iron of different eras, shimmered with the laser light show of the Shanghai Center Tower as she plucked them.
"You've lost." Wu Meiniang's fingertip grazed the Shang string, the sound shattering the jade pendant in Shen Qinghuan's bosom. "From the day you crossed over, I've been waiting for the seven stars to align."
Shen Qinghuan spat a mouthful of black blood, stunned as Qingfeng's dying moments emerged from the broken jade—it turned out the assassination at White Horse Temple that day was a calculated ploy of self-inflicted suffering, divined by Wu Meiniang using the *Yi Si Divination*. Her snake-patterned golden seal surged toward her eyes, and in excruciating pain, she finally saw the truth: the souls of all the fallen warriors were being sucked into a bronze taotie beneath the Taichu Palace.
---
When Caiyun awoke, she found herself suspended by iron chains from the Mingtang's dome. Nine black iron chains pierced her pipa bones, and droplets of blood fell onto the armillary sphere below, causing its star map to display the longitude and latitude of Shanghai's Lujiazui. Beside her, Zun had been turned into a "human candle," a merman wick inserted into his skull, burning the essence of his natal star.
"Beautiful starfall sand, isn't it?" Wu Meiniang caressed the bloodstains on the armillary sphere. "Refined with the resentment of the dying, it can open rifts in time and space." She abruptly tore open her phoenix robe, revealing a zircon from Shen Qinghuan's time travel embedded in her chest. "What Xu Cairen swallowed back then wasn't ordinary poison."
At that moment, Mingyue's spear crashed through the window. She had breached nine layers of guards alone, her spear tip three inches from Wu Meiniang's throat when the entire Mingtang began to collapse. Amid the rubble, Shen Qinghuan glimpsed the cruelest truth—the faces of the bronze figurines were identical to the white-collar workers of 21st-century Lujiazui.
"Did you think time travel was a coincidence?" Wu Meiniang laughed maniacally in the dust as her twelve ceremonial robes burned simultaneously. "From the Zetian Gate to the Oriental Pearl Tower, I've waited for you for thirteen hundred years!"
As the last Cheng Tian pillar fell, Shen Qinghuan grabbed Mingyue's hand and leapt into the Luo River. The water reflected not their faces, but the collapsing skyscrapers of Lujiazui. Her snake-patterned golden seal tore through her skin, and she finally understood the bronze taotie's roar from the riverbed—it was her father's final cry before drowning in a septic tank.