The mechanical voice, flat and unfeeling, carved through the heavy air of the hall. “Anomaly Detected. Designation: Teng Qingshuang.” My mind reeled. Anomaly? What in the Blighted Depths was that? My gaze snapped to Qingshuang, expecting to see the flush of panic, the tremble of fear that would betray her stoic facade. This was her moment of reckoning, the consequence of her recklessness. Instead, she turned to me. Her eyes, usually obscured by the shadow of her perpetually furrowed brow, were sharp, glinting with an unnerving focus. There was no fear, no hint of a reaction to the chilling declaration. Only cold, calculating assessment. Before I could utter a single word, before I could even process the absurdity of the situation, her hand shot out. Her grip on my forearm was like a vice, shockingly strong for her slender frame, but it wasn't the strength that arrested me. It was the sheer, unhesitating force of it, the absolute lack of any preamble or warning. “Your cultivation base is stable,” she stated, her voice low and brisk, a mere observation. “Excellent. Hold still.” “Hold still?” I retorted, trying to yank my arm back. What was she doing? “Teng Qingshuang, what madness–” She ignored me, her attention already elsewhere. Her free hand moved with blinding speed, not towards a weapon, but tracing intricate glyphs in the air, her fingers leaving faint, glowing trails of raw qi. My core, usually a meticulously governed reserve, suddenly surged, pulled by an invisible current emanating from her. It was a dizzying sensation, like my internal meridians had been hijacked. She was using me. As a conductor. As a *grounding wire*. “Confound it, Qingshuang!” I gritted out, the raw power coursing through me making my teeth ache. “This is an outrage! You can’t just–” Her voice cut through mine, sharp as a blade. “Minor discomfort, Changyuan. Focus. We are bleeding power.” The slab of void-etched floorboard, still humming malevolently, began to pulse faster, its inky tendrils elongating, snaking towards the shelves behind us, towards the very pillars holding the chamber's ceiling aloft. The 'Anomaly Detected' voice seemed to emanate directly from it, a low, formless hum beneath its words. Qingshuang’s hand, still clutching my arm, pulsed with the power she was siphoning. Her other hand, having finished its air-drawn script, plunged into a pouch at her waist, extracting a handful of small, obsidian shards. She flung them with precision. They didn’t simply strike the floor; they *embedded* themselves, surrounding the pulsing void slab in a hastily constructed, yet undeniably powerful, containment lattice. A faint wall of heat haze rose from the obsidian shards, boxing in the artifact. The tendrils of darkness recoiled, hissing, as if burned. “The Nine-Vein Void Matrix is a soul-devouring construct,” Qingshuang murmured, her eyes fixed on the struggling artifact. “It feeds on ambient essence. A simple ward will hardly slow it.” Just as she spoke, a new sound emerged from the void slab. A voice, soft and melodious, imbued with a warmth that felt utterly out of place in the sterile room. It was a voice I knew, a voice that had often offered gentle encouragement or soothing words during our grueling training sessions. “Qingshuang? My dear junior sister… what have you done? Are you hurt?” The breath seized in my throat. It was Lu Wenshun’s voice. Perfectly replicated, down to the slight tremor of concern that always laced his words when he spoke to her. I could almost see him, standing there, his kind eyes clouded with worry. It was a cruel, insidious trick, designed to lure her, to exploit her past affections. I expected her to falter, to show some sign of recognition, some pang of her former attachment. Even I, her rival, felt a flicker of unease at the void’s cunning mimicry. How could she not? Qingshuang, however, didn't even blink. Her gaze remained utterly impassive, her grip on my arm unyielding. She only tilted her head slightly, a subtle shift that indicated she was listening, but not swayed. “Terrible pitch,” she declared, her voice flat, as if critiquing a poorly tuned instrument. “Wenshun’s baritone has more resonance. And his concern always trends towards tedious rather than urgent.” My jaw almost dropped. *Terrible pitch?* She wasn't fooled, not for a second, and her reasoning was… completely devoid of human emotion. Without hesitation, she retrieved a thin, metallic spike, no longer than her forearm, from a hidden sheath at her back. It gleamed with intricate sealing runes. “A basic containment lattice will not hold it indefinitely,” she explained, her voice as calm as if she were parsing old treatises. “A localized pin is required to sever the void’s ambient feed. Once it’s contained, we can study the resonance.” With a swift, brutal motion, she plunged the spike into the center of the void-etched slab. Not into the pulsing darkness, but directly into the ancient, petrified wood. The slab shrieked. A sound like grinding granite, a tearing of reality itself, filled the chamber. The shadowy tendrils lashed out wildly, thrashing against the boundary, creating ripples of distorted air. The ground beneath us trembled. The shelves, the very walls, groaned under an unseen pressure. “Qingshuang!” I shouted, bracing myself. This was no crude binding; it was a violent expulsion. The mechanical voice, now laced with a strained, guttural quality, boomed, “VOID INTEGRITY COMPROMISED. EXPULSION PROTOCOL INITIATED.” With a final, ear-splitting scream, the void slab bucked and convulsed. The blackness writhed, then coalesced, not retracting, but *ejecting* something. A small, green projectile, covered in mottled warts, was violently spat out of the collapsing rift, sailing through the air before landing with a wet, squelching thud right at Qingshuang’s feet. The rift in the slab sealed shut instantly, the complex array lines on its surface glowing a furious red before fading back to an inert, ancient black. The defensive ward around it vanished. The repository fell silent, save for the heavy breathing of myself and Qingshuang. The green projectile twitched. It was a toad. A rather large, ugly toad, with three legs and an eye that seemed to perpetually twitch. It lifted its head, blinking slowly, then let out a gargantuan groan. “Confound it all!” the toad croaked, its voice surprisingly deep and gravelly. “Did you have to throw me out like a sack of rancid grubs? My dignity, gone! My spiritual essence, rattled! And my third leg nearly dislocated!” It hopped clumsily, then fixed its bulbous eyes on Qingshuang. “You! You’re the reason for this crude re-entry, aren’t you, you insufferable array fiend?” Qingshuang merely stared at the talking toad, her expression unreadable. “A three-legged spirit toad,” she mused aloud, as if observing a new specimen. “An unexpected variable. Your expulsion resonance suggests a symbiotic link to the Nine-Vein Void Matrix.” “Symbiotic link?” The toad scoffed, puffing out its warty throat. “I was simply a reluctant observer, a *detained* entity, until you decided to rupture the fabric of reality with that clumsy pin! My name, for your information, is Sun Ya. And I was quite comfortable in my suspended sleep, thank you very much.” Sun Ya hopped closer, its single eye fixed on Qingshuang with an intensity that belied its comical appearance. “But since you’ve rudely awakened me, I suppose I have to deliver the bad news.” It paused dramatically, then continued, its voice dropping to a theatrical whisper. “The Myriad Steles Enclave has exactly thirty days. A single month until the hollow vacuum completely collapses, erasing every soul within this crumbling prison realm into nothingness. Enjoy your research, ‘insufferable array fiend.’” A single month? The realm collapsing? This was far beyond Qingshuang’s ‘predestined death’ scenario. This was an apocalypse. I looked down at my arm, where Qingshuang’s fierce grip had been, still throbbing with residual force. I pulled back my sleeve, intending to rub the ache away. Terror hit hollow and cold: faint, inky black lines, barely visible, were tracing their way up my forearm. They pulsed faintly, mirroring the intricate, soul-devouring patterns of the nine-veined construct Qingshuang now possessed.

Grounding the Void