Ascension Is a Hook - Chapter 3
After leaving the hidden chamber, I fell ill.
For seven days, I burned with fever.
My dreams were full of water.
Black water.
The Xuanwei Sect lay submerged in it, its mountain gate like a stone sunk to the bottom of a pond.
The sect leader preached beneath the water. The elders meditated there.
My senior brothers and sisters sat cross-legged with their eyes closed, contented smiles on their faces.
Countless lines hung down from the surface. At the end of each dangled a golden speck of bait.
They tilted their heads back, mouths slightly open.
Like a pond full of fish waiting to be fed.
I screamed with all my strength.
“Don’t bite!”
“That isn’t a chance at immortality!”
“It’s a hook!”
No one heard.
They only chanted:
“I want to become immortal.”
“I want to live forever.”
“I want to transcend.”
When I woke, Lu Xingzhou was sitting beside my bed.
I started in alarm.
He was thinner than before, pale, his eyes bloodshot. Yet his aura had deepened.
He was already half a step from Tribulation Transcendence.
One more step, and he would reach the realm Master had attained.
“You’ve been down below?” he asked.
I did not answer.
“Qinghe took you?”
I looked at him.
“You knew all along.”
He said nothing.
Slowly, I sat up.
“You’ve seen it too, haven’t you?”
Snow was falling outside. It settled on the bamboo leaves, weighing the branches down.
After a long time, he said, “I saw a little.”
“Then why are you still cultivating?” My voice shook. “You know ascension means being caught. Why keep going? Why help the sect leader hide it from everyone?”
He looked down at his hands.
A sword cultivator’s hands: long-fingered, steady, lightly callused.
“Because I have already cultivated for three hundred years.”
“What kind of reason is that?”
He smiled. It looked worse than weeping.
“You can call ascension a lie, Little Brother. But for that lie, I gave up my parents, my wife, everyone I knew in the mortal world. I gave up three hundred years of life among people.”
“I carved out my human desires, little by little. Ground myself into a sword.”
“And now you want me to stop?”
He looked up, his eyes frighteningly red.
“Then what has my whole life been?”
I had no answer.
Quietly, he said, “I saw the hook on the day Master ascended. I saw him struggling too.”
“But do you know what I thought in that instant?”
I did not ask.
He went on anyway.
“I thought the hook was beautiful.”
A chill ran down my spine.
He closed his eyes.
“I know it’s bait. I know what lies above may not be the immortal realm.”
“But I still want to bite.”
“I want to know what’s behind that hook.”
“I want to know what this thing we’ve worshipped as heaven all these years really is.”
“More than anything, I want to know if Master is still alive.”
My head snapped up.
“Master is alive?”
“People who are caught don’t necessarily die at once,” he said. “A fish out of water struggles for a while too.”
My hands clenched the quilt.
He looked at me.
“In three days, I face my tribulation.”
“No!” The word burst out of me.
“The sect leader has already arranged it,” he said calmly.
“The sect leader knows too?”
“Of course he knows.”
That left me cold to the core.
Lu Xingzhou stood.
“Come to Heavenwatch Terrace in three days.”
“Why?”
“You see most clearly,” he said. “I’m going to bite that hook.”
“Watch where the line comes from.”
