Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 91 - Chapitre 100

The first indication that the family's problems were only beginning came at dawn on the fourth day, when Long Ruyan went to the nursery to check on her great-grandsons and found the cradles empty and both boys on the ceiling.Not climbing. Floating. Long Jianfei, four days old, was drifting under the rafters on his back with his fists in his mouth, entirely content; Long Qing hung beside him, turning slowly, examining the roof beams with an expression of grave scholarly interest. When the matriarch came through the door they both looked down at her at once, and Long Jianfei, delighted, kicked his legs, and said, in a voice that was unmistakably a four-day-old baby's—high, breathy, wobbling, with the syllables coming out round and soft the way they do before teeth—"Gwamma! Up!"Long Ruyan, who had faced the Grudge of the Four Wars without blinking, made a sound like a kettle and had to sit down.What the family established over the following weeks, with the Registry taking notes and t

The Supreme Plane at six years old was not the world the family had married together at the Door, and the difference could be measured in the only unit that matters: what it could survive.The Eye of the Dao had broken through its ninth realm in the fifth year, and the plane's laws had thickened with every breakthrough until reality itself had become dense enough to blunt weapons that had once ended civilizations. Cultivators who left the plane on charting missions came back reporting the same strange sensation—that the outside universe felt thin, undercooked, like a house with no foundation. New heavens budded annually. The Hundred Trials had become the Nine Hundred. And in the last winter, at the ninth breakthrough, something happened that the Ten Thousand Dao Academy had predicted and nobody had truly believed: the plane's ascent-line, the projected road from world to higher dimension, stopped being a curve on a chart and became a visible thing in the sky—a shimmering rising seam a

They went eight days later, and they went badly.Not through anyone's fault. The family did everything correctly: Long Chen and Long Fei at the head of a company that could have taken an age's worth of enemies, [Origin Sight] running wide, Ye Qing's records-craft mapping every step, Long Zhao's Ward doubled and the eight children under strict and repeatedly stated orders to walk behind the adults. The company crossed the Grey Valleys, entered the third fold, and stopped, because the third fold was empty.There was nothing there. Not concealment—absence. [Origin Sight] found no chamber, no altar, no seam, no lie. Ye Qing's charts declined to record anything. The Eye of the Dao, asked directly for the first time in its existence to look at a specific place and report, returned the calm equivalent of a shrug: nothing witnessed; nothing to witness."It's here," said Long Jianfei, frustrated, turning in the empty air. "It was right here.""I believe you," said Long Fei, and the elder twin'

It was Long Qing who turned first.The silver-eyed boy had been last to pile onto Long Cang, because Long Qing was always last to do anything loud, and he was still holding a fistful of his great-great-grandfather's black robe when something went through him like a struck string. He came up off the floor slowly, frowning—the frown that was his mother's exactly—and turned toward the dais, and toward the row of imperial children standing before it, and toward the woman in white in the middle of them.The other seven felt him feel it. That was how the eight worked; it had never needed explaining.Seven heads came up at once.And in eight small chests, on eight sets of ribs, in eight places nobody in that hall could see, the mark of the First Emperor woke of its own accord and pulled—not toward the Emperor on his steps, whose burning ledger was the most sophisticated mark in ten thousand years; not toward any of the six imperial children; but toward one still woman in imperial white who h

Eight children looked at the Emperor of the Human Supreme Realm, and then back at Xuan Ji, and then at each other, and performed the fastest collective recalculation in the history of two realities."Your father," repeated Long Jianfei, in the strangled voice of a boy who has just realized he threatened a relative."My father," said Xuan Ji."So he's—" Long Rui counted on his fingers, mouthing generations, and arrived at the total with visible horror. "He's our great-great-great-grandfather.""Yes.""And we—" Long Yao's hands went to her mouth. "We were going to fight him. Great-Grandma, we were going to fight the whole room.""Yes," said Xuan Ji, and something happened to her face that had not happened in fifty-five years: she laughed. Once. Helplessly. "You were. Eight of you. Against a Radiant Supreme, six Pillars, and three hundred delegations." She looked at Long Jianfei, and then, deliberately, over the boy's shoulder, at her father on the steps. "You would have lost.""We'd hav