Cheers,
Patrick G. Laplante
Previously in Painting the Mists
To fix his core, Cha Ming travels to Haijing City, the underwater capital of the Sea God Empire with Huxian and his four disciples. By joining Haijing Academy, he swiftly climbs up the ranks to the peak of mortal alchemy. He finances his journey by discovering Grandmist flames, a mysterious alchemical flame capable of creating Grandmist pill seals.
With the help of Sun Wukong, he attempts to forge a Nirvana Pill, a transcendent item that can heal his core. He succeeds in crafting the pill but fails to protect it from the plane’s pill tribulation. Defeated, he is forced to pursue a new path through runic alchemy, leaving his fated opponent, Zhou Li, to plot and scheme freely with the upper echelons of the city.
Earlier in his journey to Haijing, Cha Ming had befriended the crown princess of the Sea God Empire, Gong Shuren. To spite Zhou Li, who’d gone out of his way to destroy the Water Source Marrow Huxian and friends had discovered, Cha Ming participates in the legendary Sea God Trials. Little does he know that this is a trap. Due to his two soul-bound treasures, the Clear Sky Brush and the Space-Time Camera, the trial’s difficulty increases exponentially. Zhou Li and his favored candidate for emperor manage to squeeze out a narrow victory and claim the Sea God’s Crown.
Cold and defeated, his core still broken, Cha Ming is ready to give up. Fortunately, Huxian discovers the secret of the Sea God Trials: the Sea God Clock Tower. With his help, Gong Shuren begins attuning the artifact, which is a step up above the Sea God’s Crown.
Time waits for no one, however. While she is busy attuning the artifact, Zhou Li instigates a war between Haijing City and the Northern Alliance using a combination of clever manipulation, fiendish sharks, and an armada of battleships from the South. Desperate to defuse the situation, Cha Ming rallies the scholars in Haijing, allies of his disciples, remnants of the city guard, and friends of Huxian. They arrive too late to prevent conflict but just in time to stop a total rout. Gong Shuren arrives just in time, wielding the Sea God Clock Tower to execute the Southern Alliance’s forces as well as the traitorous ministers of her brother, the emperor. Disaster is prevented, but much blood is shed.
In Gold Leaf City, Hong Xin stabilizes her power as the new Red Dust Mistress. In so doing, she discovers a terrible secret: The Red Dust Pavilion was involved in an illegal and despicable scheme to harvest souls for the Spirit Temple. A faction in the city uses evidence of this wrongdoing to blackmail her and her sisters into indentured servitude.
To make matters worse, Hong Xin and the Red Dust Pavilion are forced to kill and capture their former members, important agents of the Spirit Temple. Cornered, with angry Spectral Assassins breathing down her neck, Hong Xin goes to Wang Jun for help. Together, they are able to extract secrets from their captured members, facilitating a heist that they use to counter-blackmail their oppressors.
Wang Jun, riding on the coattails of his victory in the Song Kingdom, comes home to a less-than-pleasant reception. He is given the title of auditor general of the Wang family. Part and parcel with his role is a noncompete with his brother, whom he must outearn to win the family leadership. Desperate and willing to try anything, he starts an industrial revolution by endowing all non-cultivators in the North with qi-cultivation capabilities. By heavily leveraging his position in this growing market, he gains significant ground on his brother’s assets.
Unfortunately, his duties as auditor general uncover a dark secret of the Wang family. His brother, Wang Ling, has been secretly enriching himself through illegal soul trade with the Spirit Temple. Frustrated by both the ethics of the situation and the potential legal ramifications if discovered, he reveals this to the family patriarch, Wang Wuling, but it turns out he’s known all along. Angry and dejected, Wang Jun helps the Red Dust Mistress, the disguised Hong Xin, to deal a dreadful blow to the Spirit Temple. In their fight, he discovers her true identity, a silver lining to the otherwise depressing situation.
Cha Ming has left Haijing and is journeying southeast from Beihai to Gold Leaf City. Hong Xin, having finally freed her sisters, turns her attention to rebuilding the Red Dust Pavilion. Demoralized by the state of his family, Wang Jun decides he can no longer play an honest game with them. West of the Song Kingdom, a calamity awakens.
Prologue
All was quiet around a dark pit, carefully wedged beneath two demonic mountains far away from human eyes. There were no birds flying above, and no rustling of tree leaves in the gentle wind. For there was no wind here; the light breeze that normally blew through these mountains was stagnant. It lost all momentum the moment it reached the darkness and lingered around the pit, where something breathed. It was a continuous breath, always inhaling and never exhaling. The sides of the pit crumbled away little by little with each passing second.
A horn poked out from the pit as a creature—black and humanoid, yet walking on all fours—pulled itself out. It had been resting, for eating was hungry work. Days ago, he had successfully devoured the nearest mile of spirit woods. It had taken him until now to convert the vital demonic energy into something useful.
Now, he hungered. The ravenous pit inside him was empty and needed to be filled. He looked around, scanning east and west, looking for something, anything that moved. Not even the wind did. Everything he’d missed in his first pass had run away, forsaking their birth land rather than facing certain death.
Which way should he go? How fast should he travel? These basic instincts were in their infancy, nudging him slightly to the northwest. There, a mountain stood strong, its powerful beasts
