The Ancestral Celestials descended on the demon capital in a procession that the crimson sky had never held before.

They came down through the clouds in formation, the massive winged turtle at the center, the cluster of pig-faced Celestials and the various other beings arranged around it, and the demon citadel below them fell silent. The lesser demons in the streets stopped moving.

The members of the 72 Dukes who had been heading toward the Demon Tower with their armies halted where they were, because whatever was descending was not something they had any intention of being near!

They gazed down with caution as they came.

Their perception was a thing apart from anything the Lands of Stone produced. The Demon Tower that Damian and the others stood in may as well not have existed to them.

They could see through it, see all of it, sense every being within its walls and floors as clearly as if the structure had been made of glass. They swept their attention across the whole region where the obsidian pillar had originated, taking in everything, missing nothing.

Damian gazed back at them from the top of the tower. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

He stood at the edge of the runic platform with the crimson sky above him and the procession of Celestials descending toward him, and he watched them with the same calm he watched most things.

Behind him, his Ama’s expression had gone serious, the warmth of the reunion set aside for the moment. Serala had moved to his other shoulder, her wings tense, her eyes hard, ready.

The Celestials searched.

They looked for the source of the obsidian power, the being who must have released a beam grand enough and sacred enough to reach all the way to their floating lands above the clouds. They looked for an Ancestral Celestial they didn’t recognize, some powerful peer who had come down into the demon territories and done something significant. They swept the region for the kind of presence that should have been behind such a thing!

They didn’t find it.

What they found instead was a young being on top of a tower with an aura they couldn’t quite grasp. Not the aura of an Ancestral Celestial. Not the aura of anything they had a name for. Something foreign, something that their perception slid off of when they tried to measure it, present and undeniable and entirely outside their frame of reference.

And as they searched and found no powerful Celestial here, their caution began to fade.

Because the logic was simple, and it was the logic that beings like them had run for as long as beings like them had existed. If there was no powerful Ancestral Celestial here to have released that unique beam of obsidian power, then the power had come from something else. A treasure. An artifact!

An inheritance left behind by something ancient, the kind of thing that occasionally surfaced in the world below and was far too valuable for the lesser beings near it to keep.

Excited expressions began to appear across the procession.

A treasure too big for its current holder was, in the experience of every Ancestral Celestial present, exactly the kind of thing that should change hands.

The massive winged turtle settled in the air above the tower, its hundred-mile bulk casting the entire citadel into shadow, its radiant blue eyes fixing on Damian with an attention that carried both weight and a growing interest. When it spoke, its voice rolled across the demon capital with the confidence of a being that had not encountered anything it needed to fear in a very long time.

"It seems something grand has risen here," it said. There was arrogance in the voice, but there was intelligence beneath the arrogance.

"I am Xuanwu. Among the High Ancestral Celestials of the lands above the clouds, my name carries some small weight." A pause that suggested the weight was not small at all.

"Could the young friend down there let us know exactly what happened? Sometimes treasures too large for those who find them appear in the world. And when they do, the wise thing, the proper thing, is to give them away to those who can put them to their best use."

The procession waited.

Damian looked out at all of them. The turtle. The pig-faced Celestials he recognized the lineage of from Zhuque. The various other beings, each one above the Ninth Circle, each one carrying a developed Ancestral Land within their existence, each one looking at him now with the particular brightness of a powerful thing that believed it had found something worth taking.

He was calm.

"Right now," he said, "all of you have a choice."

His voice carried across the crimson sky without effort, reaching every member of the procession.

"You can go back to your lands above the clouds, and you can stay out of this. You can decide that whatever drew you down here is not worth what it might cost you, and you can leave. That... is one choice." He looked at the winged turtle.

"Or you can let your greed get the better of you. You can decide there is a treasure here, and you can try to take it. That is the other choice."

He let it sit.

"In the next few minutes, all of you either leave here in one piece, or you may not leave here at all. You know nothing about me. You don’t know what I am. You don’t know what I can do. Maybe you can push me around. Maybe you cannot." His obsidian eyes moved across the gathered Celestials.

"Why take a risk that large over a guess that small? There is no treasure here, by the way. There is only me, and the choices each of you is about to make."

He held the turtle’s radiant blue gaze.

"Make your choices. And be careful of the adversity you bring on yourselves."

...!

Silence settled over the procession.

The Ancestral Celestials looked at each other. They looked at the young being on the tower, foreign and unbothered, telling a gathering of beings who had exceeded the Nine Circles to be careful of the adversity they brought on themselves!

Oh!

They had come down expecting to find a treasure, or a peer, or a culprit they could hold accountable for Zhuque’s death. They had not come down expecting to be warned.

He was so young. That was the thing several of them kept returning to. So young, and so foreign, and so completely unafraid of a procession that should have made any being below the clouds prostrate itself in terror.

None of them could measure him!

And for now, that uncertainty was enough that not one of them made a move!