Chapter 23 | A Flying White Tiger

The column reassembled on a ridge overlooking the approach to the fourth cache.

Calid stood at the front and studied the area very well. Shao Wen’s memories were hazy in exact details of the area, but one thing was clear and present in all his memories. Fear. True fear unlike anything the old man had felt until the moment the demonic cultivators attacked and no other orthodox or righteous sect would help them.

He frowned and looked at his ninety-four disciples. “Cover your faces.”

Ninety-four expressions of confusion looked back at him.

“Cloth, scarves, sleeves, torn robes, whatever you have. Cover your faces from the eyes down. Do it now.”

Lin Mei was the first to comply, tearing a strip from her already diminished robe and wrapping it across her nose and mouth. The others followed with varying degrees of speed and competence. Liang Hao used a strip of bandage. Feng Jun used his sleeve, held in place by his teeth, which gave him the appearance of a person who had gotten into a fight with his own clothing and was losing. Chen Bao used a piece of dried fish wrapping that Gao Shan had given him, which was functional but aromatic.

“Why?” Duan Rong asked through a strip of cloth.

“Because I am telling you to, and because the alternative involves consequences that I would prefer not to explain and you would prefer not to experience.”

Duan Rong’s remaining ear turned red above his mask, but he didn’t press the point.

Calid turned to the remaining Foundation Establishment cultivators. “This applies to all of you as well. Especially you… Cover your faces and suppress your Qi signatures to the minimum you can manage…” he paused and turned back. “The facility ahead contains resources we need. Formation flags, equipment, materials. You will enter in groups of four, collect what I designate, and leave. You will not explore beyond the areas I mark. You will not remove your face coverings under any circumstances. You will not speak above a whisper. You will not deviate from the collection route.”

He paused again, this time much longer to make sure they were listening.

They were.

“And you will not, under any circumstances, proceed past the red stone markers in the floor. Am I understood?”

Ninety-four masked faces nodded.

“Good. Lin Mei, organise collection teams. Four per group, ten-minute rotations. Start with the storage halls on the western side. I will handle the eastern section personally, do not stray anywhere close to that area.”

The facility was built into a cliff face, larger than the forge complex and more carefully concealed. The entrance was a narrow fissure in the rock that widened into a corridor lined with formation flags, hundreds of them, mounted on iron poles that were driven into the stone walls at precise intervals. The flags themselves were works of art, inscribed with patterns so fine and so complex that Calid’s Qi sense registered them as a continuous field rather than individual objects.

Elite-grade formation flags hand crafted by a distant ancestor of the sect that had supposedly reached a realm above the Golden Core realm. The kind that could anchor arrays capable of concealing entire valleys, defending mountain passes, or containing beings of cultivation realms that made even the Patriarch tremble at the thought of the creatures escape.

The kind that were currently being used to cage a Flying White Tiger.

Calid had never seen or heard of something so strange. A tiger? Flying? Might as well tell him pigs could to.

Except, Shao Wen’s terror was a viscera response that sent trembling waves through his entire body.

This was mythology given form.

A creature that was held in the same stratosphere as he would put phoenixes and dragons.

Calid directed the collection teams through the western storage halls, where mundane supplies, secondary formation materials, and equipment had been stored in quantities that suggested the Patriarch had been preparing for either a very long siege or a very large project. The teams moved in disciplined silence, faces covered, Qi suppressed, collecting and departing with efficiency.

None of which went into the System Inventory. That remaining space was for the Elite-grade formation flags.

When the western halls were half-cleared, Calid walked east alone.

The disciples all watched him vanish wondering if they would see their Patriarch again.

The corridor narrowed as it progressed deeper into the cliff. The formation flags grew denser, their inscriptions more complex, their Qi signatures brighter. The air thickened with contained power, a pressure that built with each step until it sat on his chest and pushed against his eardrums.

Red stone markers appeared in the floor.

Calid stepped past them.

The corridor opened into a chamber.

Said chamber was large, cathedral-large, carved from the living rock of the cliff with a precision and skill that spoke of decades of work and the kind of resources that only a Patriarch could command. The ceiling rose fifty meters overhead, lost in shadow. The walls were lined with formation flags so dense they overlapped, creating a continuous barrier of inscribed silk and iron that hummed with a resonance Calid could feel in the air.

In the centre of the chamber, surrounded by the densest concentration of formation flags Calid had ever seen, sat a single cage.

It was seventy feet across and forty feet tall, constructed from bars of spirit-infused metal that were each as thick as his forearm and inscribed with binding formations that made the flags on the walls look like student exercises. The bars glowed with a faint, pulsing light that cycled through shades of white and gold in a rhythm that matched—

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Calid paused as he came to realise that it matched a heartbeat.

Inside the cage, sitting with a composed dignity was the Flying White Tiger, massive paw over paw.

It was magnificent.

Six feet at the shoulder while sitting, which meant it would be considerably taller standing. Its frame carried the kind of mass that suggested large was a word that applied to other tigers and this one required its own vocabulary. Its fur was white, pure white of fresh snow on a mountain peak that had never been touched by anything as mundane as footprints. Wings folded against its flanks, each one large enough that Calid’s awareness estimated a wingspan of fifteen meters minimum.

Its eyes were gold and swirled with blue Qi.

They found him the moment he entered the chamber, tracked him as he approached, and held him with an intelligence that was unmistakable, undeniable, and deeply, fundamentally uninterested in pretending to be anything other than what it was.

This was not an animal.

This was a true Spirit Beast that had transcended its original limitations.

A creature strong enough to fight the Patriarch and defeat him if not for the formation flags.

Calid stopped ten feet from the bars.

The tiger regarded him.

The silence stretched for several seconds, during which the formation flags hummed and the chamber’s contained pressure pressed against Calid’s Qi sense. The tiger’s golden eyes performed an assessment that was thorough and arrived at conclusions that it kept to itself.

“A shame you’ve been sealed here for so long,” Calid said.

The tiger’s chest rumbled. The sound was deep enough to vibrate the stone floor and resonant enough to make the formation flags shiver on their poles. “You’ll free me?” The voice was a bass that came from somewhere behind the ribcage and arrived in the air fully formed, carrying inflection and grammar and the particular cadence of a being that had learned human speech and found it adequate for its purposes if somewhat limited in its capacity for expressing contempt. “Strange for a member of the White Flame Clover.” it paused and licked a massive paw, claws out…