A Waste of Time

Chapter 112: Resonant Loom

Ten-Thousand Beast Mountain — Ping Xueling’s humble abode.

The beauty stood in her small garden with a tin watering can hooked in two fingers, tipping a patient stream over soil that had gone thirsty while she was away babysitting brats. Dew-beads clung to the serrated leaves, fattening then slipping down to the cracked terracotta lip of a pot. The Mountain’s morning breath drifted across her yard—thin mist braided with the scent of damp bark and cold stone—softening the crooked fence and the lopsided stepping-stones she’d always meant to straighten.

She had slipped back into black the moment she tore off the Sect’s formal robes for Outer Elders. The cloth hugged her like shadow poured over moonlight, tracing curves designed to make men forget their names—if any were here to forget them. A stray breeze lifted the hem just enough to flirt with her knees, then died, leaving the yard as empty of admirers as it was full of weeds.

Damn geezers kept questioning me for hours. Ping Xueling squatted, bracing a forearm over a thigh as she pinched out pale, greedy shoots trying to steal what belonged to her flowers. Roots crackled between her nails. A smirk crooked her lips at the memory of Grand‑Elder Mo Qiuya threading that needle’s‑eye smile and poking at Shen Duan’s patience. The Disciplinary Chief hadn’t blinked. He played it by the book and denied the old hag her toy. You should’ve seen your own face, Granny, when the shelf you thought you owned got bolted to the wall.

In the council hall, the Elders had looked ridiculous: men and women in green robes perched on their benches like timid children while the “real” grownups locked horns. Every time Mo Qiuya’s squinty gaze slid across a row, expressions curdled—some openly ugly, some strained into neutrality that sweat immediately betrayed, glistening at temples, collecting at the collar. Xueling could still hear the dry rasp of sleeves and the small, guilty swallows that traveled the room like mice.

No one dared cough. No one dared try anything clever under Shen Duan’s watch. The Disciplinary Chief’s presence was a drawn Bow: silent, tight, promising consequence. Everyone knew that if they made a wrong move they’d be keeping the brat company inside the Temporal Sealing Formation—suspended mind and body both until the last grain of punishment fell.

When the verdict dropped, Mo Qiuya rose, harrumphed, and let her gaze rake the chamber. The gesture alone made men and women shrink inside their green—robes suddenly their last line of defense against unreasonable age and reputation. A flick of blue robes, a turn, and the Grand‑Elder’s footfalls cracked like thin ice as she left the main hall. The tension she shed clung to the rafters long after.

Ping Xueling had been dismissed—to the foot of the Mountain, to her post, to this garden where the day refused to remember the night’s noise. She straightened, stretched until each vertebra sang, and yawned lazily, the kind of yawn that unspools a body’s hoarded fatigue.

Boy… I really hope you don’t fall into Mo Qiuya’s hands. She set the can aside and rolled her wrists, watching veins climb and fade beneath skin the color of dawn tea. That woman didn’t look like she had good intentions for you. I’d bet my house she’s already cooking something with you tied as the ribbon on top.

Her work here was done. Babysitting completed, report delivered, claws cleaned. She’d even walked away with a little prize: a slim vial of the kid’s blood—payment for trouble, compensation for all the bats she’d lost when Daemon carved almost a third of her swarm out of the air in less than a minute. She clicked her tongue at the memory; the garden’s wind‑chimes answered in thin, apologetic notes.

Thankfully the brat was a spent Arrow then… Otherwise I would’ve had to open the box and spend my trump cards just to keep him off me.

She ground the heel of her boot into the neat pile of uprooted weeds until sap bled into the dirt. People would think she’d dominated him. People loved tidy stories. But Xueling knew better. The fight had been close—closer than the audience would ever believe—tilted only because luck had tugged her sleeve from the start, and because the boy had thrown himself between his people and her fingers.Under an eye the beauty could not lend, the truth of that clash lived elsewhere—inside the boy’s cold arithmetic. He had stepped between strike and servants, between danger and the beating hearts that followed him, turning his flank, breaking the clean line of advantage; that was the visible mistake, the one pride and confidence helped along. But beneath that choice, a stricter law ruled him. If the shroud over Ippo—and the chain of hidden truths braided to it—ever so much as fluttered, Daemon would have offered himself without bargaining. He would have walked forward with empty hands, gaze level, letting every hostile sight fix on him while the one thing that mattered slipped back into shadow.

He kept a private ledger of priorities scored deeper than pain: first, Ippo; second, the lines of retreat that kept Ippo moving; third, the faces and names that disguised that movement; last, his own body and breath. In the moment the ledger tilted, the decision would not be dramatics—it would be procedure. No bluff, no Sword flashed for theater. He would become the decoy, the lure, the noise. He would draw the net to himself and hold it there until ropes bit and joints sang, because anything else risked a revelation that could not be undone.

He knew what exposure would mean. Secrets do not die cleanly; they explode, and the shrapnel makes new hunters. If Ippo were dragged into daylight, every trail he had burned shut would relight, every sealed door would remember it had hinges. Sects would weigh him as resource or threat; scholars would pry; the wrong kind of faith would sprout in the wrong kind of men. The boy’s life could continue after that, yes—but it would not be his life. It would be a map everyone else owned.

So he moved the way a Shield moves: interposed, stubborn, accepting damage as currency. He spent position. He spent stamina. He spent the view others had of him—as reckless, as overconfident—because those were coins he could earn back. But Ippo’s cover? That was not a coin. That was the vault. Break it once, and everything inside turned to air.

If the veil ever truly lifted, he would not wait to be taken. He would surrender deliberately, shaping the narrative with his own hands—confession in the right measure, silence in the right places—so that pursuit followed the noise he made and not the quiet he protected. In that arrangement, humiliation, chains, even a sealed meridian were acceptable losses. The alternative was an existential erasure, and for Daemon there was no calculus in which that could be allowed.

Ten-Thousand Beast Mountain — Inner-Circle, belly of the Mountain.

The belly of the Mountain hummed on ledgers and whispers. Steps on stone. Tokens clacking. Robes sliding past robes as Junior Cultivators kept their eyes down and their numbers up. Everyone bowed to the grinding rules and tried to steal a mouthful more than the next person. Spirit Resources moved like bowls passed down a long table—too many hands, never enough stew.

Since yesterday, that ordinary scramble carried a single taste. A story slipped out of the Mission Hall and grew fat as it moved. Second mouth added weight. Third mouth added teeth. By the fifth, horns. It rode tea steam, training sweat, the hush between gong strikes—picking up speed as it went.

Some had tried to sign an easy mission. Clean, tidy, protected. The quota was already sealed when they arrived, and they were left staring at the backs of ten Disciples walking out with the most famous Instructor in the Outer Circle. Lucky, the watchers thought. Back by dusk with points in their sleeves.

One day later, the ten filed up the Mission Hall steps again—dusty, bruised, and waiting to hear their penalty for failing to catch a mortal kid. The Clerk didn’t change his face. The ledger did. The word stamped on the slip might as well have been a hammer: failure.

It shocked the ones who had watched them leave, but the quake ran deeper because two faces in that line were candidates for promotion in the next Sect-Competition. Seeing “fierce” turn thin in daylight made the rest of the Inner Disciples lift their heads a little. If those two bled on a soft run, maybe the ceiling has a seam. No one said it aloud. They didn’t have to.

The ones truly delighted lived behind curtains. Factions that prefer the dark laughed with their lips closed and pushed rumors they had prepared in advance. They muddied five banners by name—Lin Qinghai, Chu Ren, Zhao Wei, Zhan Lei, and Yu Tianwu—twisting praise into luck, merit into bluster, strength into pose. Then they pushed harder.

They went fishing in shallow water. Fence-sitters—Disciples who liked to see both fields—felt notes slip into their sleeves and hands pull at their elbows. Join us a while. No oaths. A loaned Talisman. A private spar. A stipend that doesn’t dry up by day ten. The pitch was smooth. The hook was barbed. Some almost bit.

Two names made the recruiters bold: Liu Yuying and Han Ruyue. If there was weakness to smell, they meant to buy it. Boxes and courtesies started arriving. Promises followed. Protection inside the camp. A paved path to the podium. Resources poured by the jar.

The day turned loud. Old wisdom walked in and sat down anyway. Beauties are attracted, not bought, and certainly not threatened—no matter how soft the threat.

The girls paid visits.

At one door, Liu Yuying’s knock sounded like a decision. The lacquered wood jumped. Chairs scraped. A few smiles died. The envoy began his speech about “opportunity”—then swallowed half his sentence and one small tooth when her palm clipped his jaw. No Skill name. No glow. Just clean mechanics and a bad minute for him. A guard twitched; the slap that answered him rang like a small gong. “Keep your Resources,” she said, and left the way she came.

At another hall, Han Ruyue didn’t trade lines either. She walked in, lifted the couch that a silk tongue had chosen as a stage, folded it aside without scuffing it, then set two fingers under the speaker’s chin and tipped her face toward the light. “Speak plain,” she said, tone even. Two light taps wrote the lesson on the bones. Chewing would be a careful act for days.

A third threshold had two doormen with crossed arms. Yuying stepped left. Ruyue stepped right. Hinges wailed. Bones did too. One man counted lanterns on his way down. The other sat without being told. No wreckage. No speech. Just receipts written where everyone could read them.

They vented. The Inner-Circle did the rest, carrying the story in short, sharp lines. By sunset, recruitment looked like a joke told poorly. Fence-sitters smiled into their sleeves. The five banners held their silence and let it weigh different.

Next day, a call from the Main Hall pulled bodies out of galleries and lines into a single hush. A scroll snapped open under the seal. The voice carried clean from the steps.

“Next full moon, rewards for the Sect-Competition are as follows. Second and third place: one vial each, three drops per vial, Blood-Essence from a Body-Refiner at Peak-Perfection of the Nine-Stars Realm.”

The hush thinned. Eyes sharpened. Hands flexed as if remembering the weight of a Sword. Even those who hid their hunger forgot to hide it for a breath.

“And first place,” the voice said after the pause, “one vial with a single drop of Blood-Essence taken from the heart.”

The stone heard it. So did the people. Thoughts clicked into numbers. Friends turned into quiet rivals. Plans rearranged themselves around a single, clean point.

Liu Yuying and Han Ruyue stood a shoulder apart in the crowd. Bruises slept under cloth. Their eyes were clear.

Lose to him one day. Collect on the Mountain the next, one thought.

Fail once. Then make the prize make sense, the other answered the same way.

The belly of the Mountain picked up its beat. A Bow sang in a gallery; a Blade found a post; a Spear took a line. Politics didn’t stop. They only learned they’d have to shout to be heard over training.

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