Kingdom Falling | Gyuricky fifty five.

As he neared, he could hear the bustle of crowds, and he knew he must be going in the right direction. It disgusted him a little, that trials were considered such a spectacle at Seven Star Manor, that people stopped by and watched people be sentenced to death as an afternoon leisure activity. Had it never occurred to them that those were people up there with their lives in limbo? And if it had, how could they bear to stand there and cheer regardless? As if it meant nothing for a person to die before them?

Ricky could hear faint strains of someone speaking loudly over the crowd, though it was hard to make out.

“…conspiring with demons and blatant disregard of a cultivator’s honor and values…”

No. Wrong, wrong. The only thing Kim Gyuvin had ever disregarded was his own wellbeing. He was selfless to the core, so selfless that he would put himself in danger to make sure everyone else was okay.

Tianling, I need you to fly faster, he willed silently. I’m running out of time.

“…execution without trial. The punishments will commence immediately.”

Execution without trial?

Tianling, almost as if it could sense its owner’s desperation, shot forward with renewed spiritual energy, blasting through the mid-afternoon sky. The Judgment Gallery unfolded under the sky like an open scroll, and Ricky directed Tianling down. They plummeted through the sky like a stone, like a comet, soaring down towards the Judgment Gallery with desperation burning like fuel.

Right as Ricky broke through the tops of the trees, he watched the sun glint silver off the executioner’s blade as it sliced through Gyuvin’s spiritual core in one smooth swing, the shattering pieces gleaming in the light. Ricky felt his heart stop; for a long moment everything inside him seemed to freeze over, deep, deep cold running through his veins like it was trying to suffocate him from the inside. He was so far away he could hardly see Gyuvin’s face, but there was no universe in which he wouldn’t recognize him.

I’m too late…

I’m too late to save him.

Anguish ripped through him like blue hellfire, like it was his core being torn out of his body. Tianling disappeared from under him and he shot back up into the sky, a shooting star in reverse; the noon sun was piercingly bright in his eyes, but all he could see was the boy on the Judgment Gallery coming closer and closer, hurtling towards him like gravity.

He looked down.

Wings?

White wings unfolded on either side of him, glinting in the reflection of the sun. As he watched blood spill from Kim Gyuvin’s chest like the bubbling flows of springs up in the distant mountains, his body was overcome with fire, horrible burning that felt like it was ripping through him from the inside, like he was breaking every bone a thousand times over, and soon everything fell away from him.

When Ricky came to again, it was in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room. It was a small room, decorated sparsely with the bed pretty much the only piece of furniture in it. The table by his bedside had a few unlabeled glass bottles on them, most of them half-full or almost empty.

Footsteps sounded from the corridor outside and he reached for Tianling instinctively, only to find his sword sheath wasn’t by his side where it always was. In fact, he wasn’t even in his white Moonrise Palace robes, but a plain set of light blue robes that bore no design or sect insignia.

Where am I…?

The wooden door to the room slid open just then and he jumped involuntarily, startled by the creaking noise it made. A young woman peeked in, not much older than he was.

“Oh, young master, you’re awake. How are you feeling?”

“I…” Ricky swallowed, a little uncomfortably considering how dry his throat was. “Where am I?”

“You’re in a hospital,” she answered, smiling understandingly. “You were taken here by some commoners who found you collapsed on one of the streets.”

“How many days have I been here?”

“Well…about three days now. One of Seven Star Manor’s physicians came by to see you because we’re not really experts at treating cultivators, and he said that you’d be fine, just that there was something weird about your spiritual core or something. I didn’t really know what he was talking about.” She said her last sentence with a sheepish, apologetic little shrug.

Ricky wasn’t concerned about the physician thinking there was something weird about his spiritual core. It was to be expected, after all, given his condition. But if he’d been out cold in the hospital for three days, that meant it’d been three days since Gyuvin’s death.

He made the belated realization that this whole ‘unintentionally ending up unconscious in a hospital bed for three days’ situation also meant his absence at Moonrise Palace had definitely been noticed, which meant there’d definitely be some kind of punishment awaiting him when he returned.

But honestly, he couldn’t find it in himself to care. Gyuvin was gone. Everything else seemed to fade away, like stars disappearing with the coming sunrise. Ricky had come all this way, albeit without a tangible plan, but even then he’d been too late to do anything.

Gyuvin’s soul had probably reached the lower underworld by now. The underworld was split into two halves, higher and lower; most commonfolk and cultivators who died peaceful deaths ended up in the higher underworld, where the Gates of Reincarnation were, so they could safely pass through the underworld to enter their next life. The lower underworld was reserved for commoners who’d died by some unnatural cultivation-related cause, like victims of demonic possession, and cultivators who died without their spiritual core. In the eyes of cultivators, the lower underworld was eternal damnation. There weren’t many ways for a cultivator to die without their core, and even fewer honorable ones. There was no chance of reincarnation for the haunted souls that ended up in the lower underworld.

Kim Gyuvin’s soul would never again see the light of day.

As he paid the receptionist with the last few pieces of gold and silver he’d brought with him, he wondered what he was supposed to do now. Now that Gyuvin was truly gone, the only thing that had been driving him to wake up and keep moving every day was gone along with him. Could he go back to Moonrise Palace? Could he let life go back to the way it was before, and forget that he’d lost the one person he cared most about?

Ricky wondered if such a thing was even possible. He mounted his sword as soon as he stepped out of the confines of the city. 

He flew for three days and three nights without stopping, without really knowing where he was headed, but as the sun began to rise on the fourth day, he saw familiar civilisation opening up beneath his feet, and he knew where he was without having to think about it. 

He was back in Sunshower City.