Flakes of grey ash peeled from Suyin’s knuckles, drifting into the cold subterranean draft like charred moth wings. The curse did not burn; it erased.
Shen Lu stepped toward her, his palm already pressed flat against the center of his ribcage. The skin beneath his torn robes pulsed with an oily, ink-dark glare. He meant to rip out his own core. He looked at her with that terrible, quiet compliance—a man perfectly content to balance his ledger in blood.
“Stop!” Suyin’s voice cracked, sharp and shrill as shearing tin. Shyness abandoned her under the sheer panic of annihilation. She slapped his wrist away, ignoring the numbness creeping past her wrist bone. “Are you deaf? You still owe me ten thousand high-grade stones for every minute you stood by the lotus pond! You think you can default on an open invoice by dying? Not on my ledger!”
Shen Lu blinked, his long lashes shadowed by the bruised flare inside his chest. “Suyin, the zero mark. Your soul is unspooling.”
“Then I’ll buy new thread!”
She pivoted, sweeping her disintegrating sleeve toward the shimmering heaps of jade, gold bullion, and sovereign-grade raw gems Yan Zun had emptied across the wet rock.
“Jiao!” she shouted.
“Mistress, no! Have mercy!” The bronze pot scuttled backward on its stubby tripod legs, its lid rattling like castanets. “I smell sovereign-grade jade! It gives me terrible heartburn! It causes internal gashes in my secondary bellows!”
“Get in the socket!” Suyin lunged, snagged the furnace’s curved handle with her good left hand, and hoisted him off his feet. She slammed the screaming cauldron into the hollow octagonal depression at the base of the weeping stone anchor. The ancient seal bit into Jiao’s bronze rim with an audible hiss of burning iron.
“Yan Zun!” Suyin spun toward the paralyzed young master. “Stop posing like a disgraced concubine! Shovel it!”
“Sh-shovel what?” Yan Zun stammered, his fingers clawing empty air where his sword hilt usually rested.
“All of it! Every coin! Every ingot! Stuff it down his hatch! Overload the array!”
“Overload it?” Yan Zun stared at the bronze pot, then down at his family’s ancestral fortune. “The core will rupture! The backlash will ignite every vein within three hundred li!”
“Then we go up in flames together instead of turning into lint!” Suyin barked, her right forearm now mottled with powdery fissures. “Feed the pot, you useless peacock, or I’ll charge you rent for dying in my cellar!”
Yan Zun’s pride snapped like brittle cane, but beneath the wounded vanity, pure desperation took the reins. He fell to his knees. His ring flashed in continuous crimson arcs, sweeping armfuls of high-grade raw crystal and cut lapis into Jiao’s gaping fire-maw.
“It’s too much! I’m bloating!” Jiao wailed, his flue pipe belching violet sparks. “I’m a vessel of subtle refinement, not a slaughterhouse incinerator! Oh, the grease on these imperial ingots—it’s scalding my lining!”
“Keep shoveling!” Yan Zun roared, sweating through his silk tunic as he kicked a box of solid-gold talismans straight down the copper hatch. “Don't you dare stop! Suyin, look at me! I am emptying the vault! See it!”
Suyin didn’t look. She was watching the stone ceiling buckle.
The reinforced granite above the altar bowed inward, fractured along zigzagging fault lines, and exploded in a shower of powdered quartz. A colossal shape dropped through the dust, clad in mutated black sinew and weeping pustules of black bile. Elder Ku—or what remained of him after the transformation—loomed twice the height of a mortal man. Four chitinous limbs protruded from his spine, clicking against the stone floor.
“Defiant insects,” Ku’s voice rumbled, three overlapping pitches bubbling through a throat deformed by forbidden marrow. His gaze fixed on Suyin’s crumbling hand. “You took my ledger. You ruined thirty decades of cultivation trade. Now your peak feeds my ascent!”
A barbed claw whipped toward Suyin’s face, fast as a lightning strike.
Shen Lu moved without a sound. He didn’t draw a blade; he simply put his own torso between the barbed limb and Suyin’s skull. The chitinous spear drove clean through his left shoulder, emerging from his shoulder blade in a fountain of black, curdled ichor.
Suyin lunged forward. “Shen Lu!”
Shen Lu did not flinch. He gripped the elder’s barbed forearm with both hands, his fingernails digging into the monster’s flesh, locking the beast in place. In the center of his chest, the false abyss-core thrummed with a heavy, rhythmic toll, beating in violent resonance with the screaming vessel behind him. Black arcs of lightning jumped from his skin to Jiao’s bronze lip.
“The polarity...” Shen Lu murmured through teeth stained red. “He wants... the bedrock to take the rot. The pillar takes... what enters the center.”
“Then let’s give it an overdraft!” Suyin snarled.
She ignored the terror paralyzing her knees. She grabbed Shen Lu’s free, blood-soaked right hand. Pain lanced through her fingers—the rot on her wrist fought against the blistering demonic heat pouring from his skin. With every ounce of leverage left in her failing frame, she hauled him backward and slammed his bleeding palm flush against the ancient pillar’s raw obsidian surface.
“Yan Zun! The pillar root! Feed the last crate!”
Yan Zun heaved a chest of pure astral topaz over his head, veins bulging along his neck, and hurled the entire iron-bound container into Jiao’s white-hot gullet. “Take it! Take every last scrap of the Yan clan!”
Jiao didn't scream this time; he simply produced a sound like a tearing bell.
The stone pillar drank the offering. Millions of jade coins combusted simultaneously in the belly of the bronze relic, converted into an uncontrolled torrent of liquid quintessence. It surged through the stone foundation, through Jiao’s melting belly, and collided straight into Shen Lu’s false core.
Suyin did not harvest the core. She used Yan Zun’s absurd, bottomless wealth as a sledgehammer, driving pure, unadulterated essence backward through Shen Lu’s poisoned meridians. The corrupted rot had nowhere to go. Pressured by the sheer, unreasonable volume of imperial gold and sky-grade gems, the dark taint inside him was forcefully stripped, filtered through the monolith’s conduits, and ignited.
A shockwave of pale, blinding dawn erupted from the pillar.
The dark miasma did not evaporate; it pulverized. Elder Ku let out a shriek that rattled the bedrock as the wave of purified power hit his mutated frame. His extra limbs cracked into white chalk. The segmented carapace withered, peeling away under the scorching blast of raw, funded light until his marrow burned to grey sand, scattering across the floor before his skull even touched the flags.
The light flared once, white and violent, then collapsed into a soft, drifting snow of spent cinder.
Suyin crashed to her knees against the stone floor. Her chest heaved, pulling in air that no longer smelled of stagnant swamp water, but of cold mountain rain and crushed pine needles.
Beside her, Shen Lu dropped flat, his shoulder wound cauterized by the discharge, his breathing shallow but clear. The hideous bruised pulse beneath his collarbone was gone, replaced by the faint, steady thump of a cleansed core.
Suyin lifted her right arm with trembling muscles.
The skin on her fingers had stopped peeling. The black tracking brand, the numbers that had hunted her every breath since the start—vanished. The flesh beneath her wrist was smooth, unmarked, and entirely whole.
Silence settled over the cavern, broken only by Jiao’s pathetic whimpering as the melted bronze pot tried to pull his deformed lid back into place.
Yan Zun knelt in the center of the completely empty chamber, coated from head to toe in white soot, looking like an abandoned funerary statue. His spatial rings were empty. His family’s thousand-year inheritance was reduced to a fine crust of crystalline residue lining the cavern walls.
He stared at the newly glowing obsidian monolith, which now hummed with a quiet, terrifying vitality, radiating clean resonance into every forgotten corridor of the mountain above.
Yan Zun slowly turned his head toward Suyin, staring without a blink.
“Did you...” Yan Zun whispered, his voice cracking into high pitch, “did you just charge the mountain?”