The fourth murder happened on the sixth day.
Fengli brought the news. He arrived at the watchtower camp with blood on his boots and fury in his eyes, his usual composure stripped away by what he'd found.
"Zhao Fengli's scouting partner. Named Wei Lun. Earthen Heart Sacred Body — one of the seven." He dropped onto a camp stool, hands hanging between his knees. "Found him in a collapsed building three miles east. Same pattern. Aged. Drained. Left like garbage."
Rhen set down his tea. "How long ago?"
"Body was still warm. I missed the killer by hours, maybe less." Fengli's jaw worked. "That's four. All Sacred Body holders or above. The killer is escalating — the gaps between murders are shrinking. First two were days apart. This one was less than twenty-four hours after the third."
Suyin's foresight had been tracking the pattern. She unrolled a map of the Altar's pocket dimension — hand-drawn, based on her visions, marked with red dots where each murder had occurred.
"The kills form a circle," she said, tracing the dots. "Not random locations — a pattern. Each murder is roughly equidistant from the center of the Altar. The inner ring, where the Primordial Empress is sealed."
"They're mapping a formation," Rhen said. The realization hit him with the force of a physical impact. "The murders aren't just harvesting spiritual essence. They're placing it. Each kill is a node in a formation circle around the Altar's core."
Fengli stared at the map. "A formation that requires spiritual essence as fuel? That's—"
"Ancient. Pre-Sacred Sect. The kind of formation the Primordial Empress's civilization used." Rhen's mind was racing. "The Celestial Altar is a seal — a prison for the Empress. The formation the killer is building could be designed to interact with that seal."
"Strengthen it or weaken it?" Mingxue asked. She'd been listening from the doorway, her right arm in a sling — the lightning damage was healing but not healed.
"I don't know. But either option is catastrophic. If the seal weakens, a True God realm entity breaks free. If it strengthens, the Sects gain ten thousand more years of control."
"We need to find the killer before the next node is placed," Fengli said.
"The circle has seven points," Suyin said, studying her map. "Four are filled. Three remain. Based on the spacing, the next node should be..." She pointed. "Here. Northwest sector. Near a formation tower that's been off-limits since the Assembly began."
"Off-limits how?"
"The Assembly judges declared it a restricted zone. Dangerous formations, unstable structural integrity. Standard safety protocol." Suyin's silver-streaked eyes met Rhen's. "Except that the tower's formations are perfectly stable. I can see that through the foresight. Someone flagged it as restricted to keep competitors away."
"A judge." Rhen stood. "The same judge who's committing the murders. Using their authority to create hunting grounds."
"We go tonight," Fengli said.
"We go carefully." Rhen looked at the map. Three people, up against a Sacred Sect elder with the power to drain spiritual essence and the authority to move freely inside the Altar. The odds were terrible.
But four people were already dead. And three more would die if the formation was completed.
---
They moved at nightfall. Not just Rhen's team — Fengli came with his Great Zhao squad, five Chi Sea cultivators with grim faces and sharp swords. Tiankui sent two of his Yuanyang disciples as scouts, unwilling to commit more without proof but not willing to do nothing.
The northwest formation tower rose from the ruins like a broken finger, six stories of ancient stone with formation arrays visible on every surface. In the amber dome's nighttime mode — dimmer, the light cycling down to simulate darkness — the tower's formations glowed like a skeleton made of golden light.
"Guard perimeter is three hundred yards," Suyin reported, her foresight sweeping the area. "Two Sacred Sect cultivators — not judges, regular Sect disciples. Rotating patrol. They don't know why they're guarding the tower. They were told it's standard safety enforcement."
"Chi Sea level both," Mingxue assessed, studying them through the darkness. "Not a problem."
"The judge won't be at the tower now," Rhen said. "The kills happen during competition hours — daylight, when teams are active and disappearances can be attributed to beast encounters. The tower is the preparation site, not the kill site."
"Then what are we looking for?"
"Evidence. The formation being built. Traces of the spiritual essence being used. Anything that identifies which judge is responsible."
They neutralized the guards. Mingxue handled it — two precise strikes from behind, controlled force, unconscious but not dead. The disciples would wake up with headaches and no memory of the past hour. Fengli's team took watch positions while Rhen, Suyin, and Mingxue entered the tower.
The interior was intact. Formation arrays covered every wall, floor, and ceiling, but these weren't the ancient formations of the Primordial Star Realm. They were new — freshly carved, the spiritual energy still wet in the grooves. Someone had been working here recently, using the tower as a workshop.
"Look at this," Suyin whispered.
The tower's central chamber held the evidence. A stone table, cleared of debris, covered in jade slips — formation diagrams, cultivation charts, and a map identical to Suyin's, but with all seven nodes marked. Four were labeled with names and dates. The names matched the murder victims.
The remaining three nodes were labeled with descriptions, not names. "Supreme Yin." "Primordial Water." "Solar Supreme."
Rhen's blood froze. "Suyin. Lingwei. Tiankui."
"Three of the highest-rank spiritual bodies at the Assembly," Mingxue said, reading the jade slips. "The formation needs seven nodes, each powered by a spiritual body of increasing rank. The first four were Sacred Bodies. The last three are Innate Dao Bodies and a Solar cultivation physique."
"The formation is designed to interact with the Empress's seal," Rhen said, examining the diagrams. His knowledge of formations was limited, but the Eternal Vow helped — translating fragments, identifying patterns. "It's not strengthening or weakening the seal. It's... redirecting it. Channeling the seal's power outward."
"For what purpose?"
Rhen read the central diagram. The Eternal Vow translated with increasing urgency.
**[Formation identified: the Seven Stars Longevity Array. Ancient Sacred Sect technique, designed to extract the sealed entity's divine essence and convert it into longevity elixir. This is the 500-year harvest. The murders are not incidental to the Assembly — they ARE the Assembly's true purpose.]**
"The harvest," Rhen said. "The 500-year cycle. This is it. The Assembly doesn't just screen for spiritual bodies — it uses them. Seven cultivators, killed and placed in a formation, which extracts divine essence from the Empress's prison and converts it into immortality elixirs for the Sacred Sect masters."
The room was silent.
"Ten thousand years," Fengli said from the doorway. He'd followed them in. "Ten thousand years of this. Every Assembly cycle. Seven lives, sacrificed to extend the lives of the people in charge."
"More than seven. They harvest others outside the formation — the 'disappeared' prodigies. But these seven are the core. The foundation. Without them, the formation fails."
Rhen looked at the three remaining labels. Supreme Yin. Primordial Water. Solar Supreme.
Suyin. Lingwei. Tiankui.
All three were inside the Altar right now. All three were on the kill list.
"We need to warn them," Mingxue said. "Tiankui and Lingwei. They don't know they're targets."
"Tiankui I can reach — we have an alliance." Rhen looked at the jade slips. "Lingwei is the problem. She's Taihua. The strongest Sacred Sect. Her own faction may be complicit."
"The Taihua Sect Master is one of the five judges," Fengli added. "If the killer is a judge, and if Taihua is involved—"
"Then Lingwei is being guarded by the people who plan to sacrifice her."
The horror of it settled over the room. A young woman, already trapped in a forced marriage, already fighting a system that treated her as breeding stock, was now a node in a ten-thousand-year-old murder machine. And the people she called family might be the ones holding the knife.
Rhen gathered the jade slips. "We take the evidence. All of it. Then we find Lingwei before the killer does."
"She won't trust you," Suyin said. "She doesn't trust anyone. Approaching her with a story about Sacred Sect conspiracies will sound like a recruitment pitch."
"I'm not going to pitch her. I'm going to show her the jade slips and let her draw her own conclusions."
"And if she draws the conclusion that you're trying to manipulate her?"
"Then she's smart enough to investigate on her own, and smart enough to find the truth."
They exited the tower. Fengli's team maintained the perimeter. The night was quiet — the Altar's ambient qi hummed, the formation tower's new carvings pulsed with stolen energy, and somewhere in the dark, a Sacred Sect elder was preparing the next kill.
Rhen held the jade slips and thought about a girl with silver-white hair who played an instrument alone because no one had ever been allowed to hear.
The Eternal Vow was silent. For once, it had nothing to recommend.
Some choices didn't need an artifact's guidance.
