The Golden Throne

Li Huowang stood still, his eyes wide as he took in everything before him.

He had always been indifferent to money, but when a palace cast entirely from gold appeared before his eyes, he still felt an overwhelming sense of shock.

The golden palace before him looked utterly solemn and sacred. Even the falling snow seemed to vanish as it touched its surface.

"They all went in here..." Li Huowang muttered, looking at the bloody footprints on the distant golden bricks. Carefully maintaining his invisibility, he moved forward.

Walking alone through a realm of gold, Li Huowang's feet pressed against the golden bricks as he gazed at the golden hall. He almost felt like he was dreaming. How wealthy must Great Liang be to build such a colossal city of gold?

Following the trail of bloody footprints, Li Huowang quickly approached the entrance of one golden hall. The left scroll read: "The Emperor's mandate rules the nine domains; this is a daunting task—how dare one not revere it?" The right scroll read: "Heaven's heart blesses unwavering virtue; eternally preserve it, and seek its peace."

Li Huowang looked up. The massive plaque above bore three gleaming golden characters: "Throne Hall."

"Throne Hall, is it..." Li Huowang frowned and stepped inside. He didn't care what this place was called. He cared more about where the Heart-Turbid, North Wind, the one he was searching for, was right now.

The Throne Hall was vast and empty, with nothing but colossal pillars carved with six-clawed golden dragons. The space was so vast that even Li Huowang's deliberately slowed footsteps echoed faintly.

"Where did those Zuowandao run off to so quickly? And why would they come to the Great Liang Imperial Palace for no reason?" Li Huowang suppressed his growing anxiety and unease, quickening his pace toward the six doors at the back of the hall. But when he reached them, he found there were no doors there at all!

"Huh?! A ghost wall? Here, in the Great Liang Imperial Palace?" Li Huowang's heart suddenly clenched.

"Dad," Li Sui spoke up.

"What is it? Now's not the time."

"Dad, there are words on your arm."

Hearing Li Sui's words, Li Huowang instinctively raised his hands and saw that on the inside of his left forearm, words had been carved with a blade.

"This place is strange—time and memories will be forgotten. Carve it down with a knife!"

Li Huowang was certain this was his own handwriting, yet no matter how hard he searched his memory, he couldn't recall when he had carved it.

"Wait! I've seen this kind of scene before!"

Just as Li Huowang was about to take out a knife to carve the words "Heart-Turbid," he found that the characters were already written on his arm.

And next to those two characters, other words had been added. "He's nearby! Find him quickly! I've been trapped here for half an hour!"

These words sent a chill down Li Huowang's spine. In his memory, he had only entered this Throne Hall a few minutes ago—how could that much time have passed?

At that moment, Li Huowang also felt a wound on his thigh, deep enough to reveal the bone.

"I'm injured? When?!" Gritting his teeth, Li Huowang pried open the flesh and discovered fracture lines on his thighbone—lines from a divination.

Clearly, in order to find the Heart-Turbid, he had already performed a bone divination on it, without his own knowledge.

Committing the twisted shapes of the bone fractures to memory, and carving them onto his hand, Li Huowang began searching within the Throne Hall.

As he did, more and more writing appeared on his arm.

"Have you checked the southeast corner yet?"

"The area behind the eastern dragon pillar has been thoroughly searched. Don't bother."

After making several quick rounds, Li Huowang stopped in the very center of the Throne Hall—the only spot without any reminder written on his arm.

Staring at the familiar patterns on the golden bricks, his expression grave, Li Huowang gripped the hilt of his sword with both hands and thrust it into the spot with force.

Gold, though valuable, is relatively soft compared to other metals. Against the Purple-Tasseled Sword, which could cut through iron like mud, it really was no different from yellow clay.

Li Huowang easily pried open the golden brick. When he looked inside, he saw that the compacted earth beneath had been pushed aside at some point, revealing the rooftop of a structure made of red tiles.

This building buried in the earth was very small—barely taller than a man. It resembled a small earth-god shrine.

Without a second thought, Li Huowang raised his bronze coin sword and gave it a sharp flick from a distance. "Dai! Mingda Tuowala—urgent, as decreed!"

The tiled roof of the small shrine was torn open, revealing a familiar face. It was the Heart-Turbid—the corpse of the Heart-Turbid that Chief Recorder and his men had gone through so much trouble to capture!

Its limbs were completely bent and sewn onto its body with golden thread. But it wasn't just the limbs—its eyes, its mouth, everything on its body had been sewn shut with golden thread, turning it into a Heart-Turbid human log.

In this state, every part of it except its head and chest was covered in golden-painted swastikas, interlocking and entangling with one another, as if draped in a monk's robe of swastikas.

These swastikas weren't just on its body; they spread from it into the surrounding soil.

Li Huowang flicked his bronze coin sword again. It hooked onto the Heart-Turbid and yanked it hard.

The Heart-Turbid, sitting upright in the small shrine, was instantly pulled into the air. As it separated from the golden swastikas, the entire golden hall seemed to dim by several degrees.

When Li Huowang saw that no new writing had appeared on his body, he finally breathed a sigh of relief. That trouble was finally over.

He had already wasted too much time. Li Huowang couldn't afford to waste any more. He glanced at the Heart-Turbid's corpse and quickly headed for the distant exit.

This time, without any mishap, Li Huowang made it out smoothly. But before he could even breathe a half-sigh of relief, he froze as he looked at the distant golden halls. "Wait... could it be that every single golden hall has a Heart-Turbid buried beneath it?"

"There are, but not all of them," the silent Hong Zhong spoke up again.

"These golden halls form a kind of astral constellation formation. I don't know enough about the specifics to identify which one. Heh. It seems that the Heart-Turbid you went through so much trouble to capture is being used as the formation's eye."

Hearing Hong Zhong's words, Li Huowang's expression turned ugly. A being as dangerous as a Heart-Turbid was only fit to be a formation eye here? What exactly were they planning?

Forgetting everything else, Li Huowang quickened his pace and continued deeper in. This was a huge problem. North Wind had gotten mixed up in a place this dangerous—he absolutely couldn't let anything happen to him!

Once bitten, twice shy. Li Huowang made sure to stay as far away from the surrounding golden halls as possible from then on, sticking only to the open corridors and plazas.

If there was truly no path, he simply forced a hole through the golden wall.

Maybe Li Huowang's method was working, or maybe the people ahead of him had already cleared the traps along the way. Either way, everything went smoothly for the next stretch.

Following the trail of blood, Li Huowang traveled north. As he passed through a high wall, his keen hearing caught the sound of chanting and metallic clashing from behind several more walls.

"Found them!" Unable to contain his excitement, Li Huowang hurried toward the sound.

After struggling through another golden wall, the space before him suddenly opened up.

The first thing to hit him was a black-and-white vertical pupil in the low-hanging clouds above, surrounded by a full set of sixty-four hexagrams made of bronze.