A fourth thunder charged. Radeon stared at the Dao chains and still felt the itch of old instinct.

Something about this still smelled wrong. Something that would bite him later.

He needed the lightning stronger. He compressed half the qi the ghosts fed him, packing it tight until his swollen form shrank.

Ten meters fell to six. He waited. He felt the descent a breath before it happened.

Lightning roared down. He let his physique take the blow, hiding the compressed energy inside him.

When the tribulation gathered for another strike, Radeon threw that concentration upward.

The sky above him tore open. Clouds thinned for a heartbeat, briefly clearing as if the world had blinked.

It was provocation made visible. Heaven answered. The charge returned heavier. A wider swath of sky darkened.

Clouds spread until an area over fifteen miles was engulfed, a dome of judgment gathering itself.

Fifth lightning descended. This time he felt eradication in it. Not pain. Not correction. Erasure.

A quarter of Radeon's squirming tentacles blew off in a wet spray of scorched essence. He snapped them back on at once.

Sixth. Seventh. Eighth. Each strike carved and tempered him. Radeon held the eldritch seed through it all.

With every bolt the links grew more complete, more real, as if heaven itself were being hammered into shape in his hands.

He looked up. Tribulation still waited. Then lightning changed.

It took a shape. A young flood dragon made of white wrath and blue glare.

It roared and dove at him, jaws wide, the air screaming around its descent.

Radeon compressed the ghostly physique and made it small to its maximum. He felt a gilded core trying to form inside him, a hard bright knot of ascent.

He did not let it settle. Before the lightning finished its bite, he forcibly pushed the qi back out through his meridians.

A move that would cripple an ordinary cultivator. A move that would turn most men into broken vessels.

Luck held him together. Infused fortune kept his pathways from snapping outright. The lightning itself did the rest, crystallizing the ghost physique instead of annihilating it.

When the clouds finally vanished, the ghosts rushed back in a wary tide. They found two crystals where Radeon had stood.

One was obsidian black, shaped like a flower. A ghost picked it up, touched the petals, and shivered within himself. This was Radeon.

The other was a green ghostly crystal over a meter tall, translucent. Within it, extremely dark shards rotated with each slow turn.

Calyx knew what to do. He began collecting body parts from the ghosts. Hair. Skin. An intestine offered with pride.

Anyone who could spare a little pitched in without being asked twice. They built what they thought Radeon should look like when he returned.

If an onlooker judged the result, only kindness would speak. That kindness would call it artistic. The word would be said only to give face.

Radeon let his awareness drift through the heap of ghostly remains. His qi reached into severed limbs and half melted torsos.

It did not merely cling to him. Radeon pressed, pulled, and molded each piece until it fit into place.

What was more, this was not simply sharing flesh. This was loyalty forced into it.

A superior ghost could seize an inferior body no matter the cultivation, and Radeon had spent a lifetime studying such beings.

In his past life he had needed them to complete his Paradoxical Devouring Arts. Now that same knowledge paid him back with interest.

When the last thread of qi settled, he returned to his human shape. His skin looked almost untouched, smooth as if nothing monstrous had just moved beneath it.

Yet the change continued inside. He began folding the Bridled Voracity Physique into his own, a vessel still unnamed, still unfinished.

Crystal meridians threaded through him, only partially at first, assimilating what had been there.

This was why he had remained in Breath Tempering. Once he stepped into Cornerstone Setting, the physical body path would harden.

Cornerstone would swell the capacity of energy, not the body that held it.

Calyx, now fully formed, crawled toward him and pressed himself flat before him. His whole frame trembled against the stone.

A wail tore from his throat like something trapped there for a lifetime finally breaking free.

Gratitude poured out of him so raw it bordered on pain. He had never imagined a miracle could touch him, much less take his shape and make it whole.

"My life is not enough, Supreme Lord. Yet this lowly ghost shall pledge this lifetime. And the next, to your service."

The last word caught in his throat. Still, for the first time in a long, long time, his voice held.

The syllables came out clean, properly formed, not spilled as shattered noise.

Radeon caught the massive creature by the front and hauled him up as if Calyx weighed no more than a feather.

Then he let his gaze rake across the others. Faces that had only known hunger now carried relief like a sickness finally cured.

"What's with the relief?" he said. "This is just starting."

He turned away and walked to Campion, who still slept where he had fallen.

adeon crouched beside him and drew, the charcoal scratching softly as the ghosts held their silence.

An incense stick burned down. Then another. When he finished, he stood and held up two sheets.

One was the establishment he intended to carve into the mountain. The other was an array.

"Anyone who knows architecture, masonry, or carpentry, step forward."

Several ghosts moved in. Their eyes tracked the lines, and their expressions shifted from doubt to reluctant respect.

The plan was clean and simple. At the lowest steps of the mountain would be simple rooms, wooden boxes three meters on a side, one window, one door, one bed.

Sixteen directions. A thousand rooms per direction. With ghost labor, it would rise like mist at dawn.

The second level would carry the weight of commerce, restaurants, shops, and better rooms.

A bedroom, a functioning bath, a small balcony, set in eight neat directions to keep flow and order.

The third layer was luxury. Fine dining, cultivation shops selling pills, herbs, talismans, and arrays, all positioned to drink in the mountain's presence and sell it back at a profit.

It also held an auction house to the north and a fighting arena to the south. The main gate faced west, toward the walled fourth layer. To the east sat a soothing healing resort and casino.

The fourth layer was where the disciples stayed.

The fifth was barred to all but Radeon, his disciples, and anyone he chose to authorize, since the herb fields lay within.

At the summit he meant to raise a great statue of himself for people to lay incense before.

Radeon had designed all of it with the highest feng shui in mind, so luck, fortune, harmony, and calm would move through the peak.

To the ghosts, the buildings were simple. Wood and stone, obeying hands that did not tire. What snagged their attention was the array.

The strokes said it would be powered by their own bodies. Murmurs rose. Doubt turned sharp.

Confusion turned to questions that edged too close to rebuke.

Radeon let them speak until their courage ran out on its own. He looked to Calyx first, then to the rest.

"You really think you're all going back to that musty cave?" he asked.

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