“Deal,” Teng Rui rasped, though the bile rising in his throat tasted of soot and copper.
A thundering crash echoed above before the beast could answer. Debris rained into the subterranean gloom, followed by the arrogant, piercing whistle of descending sword beams. Three silhouettes plummeted down the central fissure, landing with practiced poise upon the obsidian rubble.
“Elder Wu! Elder Shen! And that sycophant Ba Rong!” Cai Yilan hissed, her silver rapier clearing its scabbard with a sharp hiss. “Zhuo Kuang sent his pack hounds to clean up the pit.”
Guo Tai dropped down beside them, having scrambled down the service chains just paces behind the elders. He wiped soot from his cheek, grinning with jagged teeth that looked slightly sharper than normal. “They think you’re already swallowed whole, brother Rui. Shall I tear their arms off?”
“Save your blood,” Teng Rui muttered. His vision swam with spots of gray, but the fire in his chest burned with bitter fury. Traditionalists. Men who measured heavenly truth solely by how many stones their qi could split with a dull blade.
Teng Rui lifted his wolf-hair brush. Instead of an ornate composition that would gouge his soul deeper, he swept his wrist in an unadorned, recursive geometric square across the tunnel throat. Pure black soot materialized against the damp subterranean air, spreading into a web of glistening lines before settling invisible against the stone arches.
His wrist flared with a dull ache. The hidden death clock ticked down by a solitary digit: [2,999].
Elder Wu, a haughty man whose beard was braided with silver rings, took a measured stride, his heavy steel broadsword leveled toward the darkness. “Teng Rui! Cripple! Step into the light and accept the mercy of decapitation! Elder Shen, flank the left. Ba Rong, secure the beast’s flanks!”
Elder Shen nodded gravely, vanishing in a burst of high-tier wind-stepping arts. With lethal grace, he soared—
*Crack.*
Shen’s face smashed squarely into solid granite. He bounced backward, landing flat on his backside, nose gushing red. “What trickery! The tunnel was wide open!”
“Fool!” Ba Rong barked, sword drawn, charging down what appeared to be an empty passage thirty paces wide. He sprinted with terrifying momentum, screaming a battle cry, only to slam forehead-first into the exact same jutting rock Shen had just struck. The sound resembled a melon bursting open under a hammer.
“Imbeciles!” Wu roared, his face purpling with rage. “There is nothing there! Look with your spiritual sight! It is an open grotto!”
Wu advanced, thrusting his broadsword ahead. The tip passed through thin air, but when Wu took a step, his shoulder lodged firmly into an invisible corner. He twisted left, took two strides, and found himself wedged between two stone teeth that had definitely not been there an instant ago. When he turned to back out, his forehead cracked against an overhanging slab.
“Elder Wu! Behind you!” Shen yelled from the floor, thoroughly disoriented.
“I am behind you, you senile bat!” Wu bellowed, his voice echoing from somewhere above their heads, though his boots remained planted on the stone. “Where is the boy? Where is the exit? Why does the floor feel like an incline?”
From the shadow of the great dragon’s snout, Guo Tai began to chuckle. The chuckle deepened into a guttural rumble that rattled his ribcage. “Look at them, Yilan. Canglan’s finest swordsmen, bested by an ink line.”
Yilan lowered her rapier an inch, her mouth slightly agape. “He wrote… *Maze*? Just the glyph for labyrinth?”
“A simple concept holds the cleanest trap,” Teng Rui murmured, leaning heavily against a rib of stone. His ribs burned, but a grim smirk tugged at the corner of his lip. “They search for qi flows to parry. They do not comprehend spatial intent. To their senses, every wall is an open door, and every door is a stone tomb.”
“Curse this place!” Ba Rong shrieked. He swung his blade wildly, severing his own topknot. “The walls are shifting! The rock is biting me! Elder Wu, strike to your northwest!”
Wu unleashed a magnificent golden sword arc. The blazing crescent soared five feet, curled violently in midair like a startled snake, and slammed directly into Ba Rong’s rear end, sending the junior elder skidding face-first into another jagged shelf.
“My dignity!” Ba Rong wailed, clutching his singed robes.
“Enough watching,” Guo Tai said. His knuckles clicked, skin darkening beneath his sleeves as veins of violent amethyst began to pulse along his forearms. The forbidden lineage surged, banishing his easygoing grin and replacing it with savage glee. “My turn to play.”
With a casual sweep of his arm, Guo Tai tore an eight-foot stalactite clean off the cave roof. The stone groaned and snapped like dry kindling. He caught it by the tapered end, weighed it in his palm, and hoisted another with his off-hand.
“Guo Tai, what are you doing?” Yilan demanded, half-fascinated, half-horrified.
“Target practice,” Guo Tai laughed.
He tossed the first massive stone spire into the air, caught the blunt base, and flung it like an oversized dart. The projectile whizzed across the hall, slipping effortlessly past the boundary of Teng Rui’s spatial construct.
*Thwack!*
The blunt stone slammed directly into Elder Wu’s gut. The proud elder folded like a discarded bamboo mat, wheezing out every breath in his lungs as he was pinned against the rock face.
“A hit!” Guo Tai beamed. He hoisted an even larger chunk of mineral, twirling it on the tip of one finger before launching it sideways. It banked off an archway and clipped Elder Shen’s shin, eliciting a soprano shriek from the dignified warrior.
“Demon! There is a demon throwing mountains!” Shen howled, crawling on all fours, his crown askew, frantically batting at empty air as though invisible hornets were swarming his skull. “Retreat! Sound the retreat to the upper court!”
“There is no retreat, dog,” Teng Rui whispered coldly, advancing to finish the vermin with a flick of his brush.
Before ink could meet air, the entire subterranean cavern groaned.
The humor died in an instant. The temperature spiked, shooting from chilly dampness to an unbearable, stifling furnace in a fraction of a heartbeat. Moisture vanished from their clothes. The very puddle of ink pooling on Teng Rui’s palette sizzled, turning to dry crust.
*Boom!*
The ceiling did not merely crack; it detonated. Thousands of tons of reinforced bedrock evaporated into white-hot slag as a pillar of volcanic wrath bored through from the arena above. Liquid stone poured down like a hellish waterfall, splashing against the ancient seals binding the slumbering dragon.
Through the roaring inferno, a massive silhouette drifted downward on plumes of superheated ash.
Zhuo Kuang landed with the concussive weight of a falling star, his boots vaporizing the stone beneath him. In his right hand rested a weapon that defied standard smithing: a seven-foot executioner’s blade forged not of iron, but of churning, compressed orange magma, held rigid by sheer, tyrannical muscle density.
His amber gaze swept past the cowering, bruised elders, past Guo Tai’s demonic mantle, and locked onto Teng Rui with absolute, ravenous hunger.
“A clever flea,” Zhuo Kuang bellowed, the sound vibrating the stone until grit rained like hail. “Playing with children’s toys while hiding beneath my dragon’s belly.”
He lifted the magma blade, pointing its dripping, molten tip straight at Teng Rui’s throat.
“Let us see how many characters you can paint when your hands are melted to the bone.”