The synthetic opulence of Emerald Street faded into a distant memory above them. In its place was a suffocating, gelatinous humidity—an atmosphere thick with the stench of rot and chemical corrosion.
Gu Hanzhou leaned heavily against the slick, moss-covered stone walls of the culvert. Each step he took felt as if a pair of rusted bellows were leaking air into his chest. Duke Mordent's singular strike had been partially deflected, yet the residual power of the Suppression Phase had still fractured two of his ribs. His internal organs were being steadily eroded by a lingering, grey necrotic aura that hummed with a low, agonizing thrum.
Behind him, Su Qingyue was in a far worse state. Having forcibly ignited her Primal Blood to trigger that forbidden art, her presence had dwindled to a mere flicker. Half of her body leaned limply against Gu Hanzhou's shoulder, her snowy hair matted into jagged clumps by a mixture of sewer sludge and dried gore.
"Go... go to the Lightless Zone," she whispered against his ear, her voice a series of fractured breaths. "Mordent's 'Dead Zone' is strongest where the light is brightest... only there, in the deepest dark, can we blind his eyes."
Gu Hanzhou didn't waste his breath on a reply. He adjusted his grip on Su Qingyue, pulling her shivering form closer, and lurched forward toward the most forbidden territory of the Iron City—the Lightless Zone.
It was the final destination for all the city's waste.
In a world defined by a cycle of perpetual night and artificial lanterns, the Lightless Zone was a void where even the faintest synthetic spark was absent. It was a graveyard for millennia of discarded mineral slag, aberrant failures of biological experimentation, and high-concentration pollutants so toxic that even the Inquisition's most hardened executioners refused to tread there.
They passed through a massive, rusted gate that had long ago lost its actual doors, leaving only a skeletal iron frame. As they crossed the threshold, the world collapsed into absolute, crushing nihility.
There was no light. Not a shimmer. Not a spark. Even the air seemed to have solidified into heavy, immovable blocks of lead.
Gu Hanzhou closed his eyes. Vision was useless here. But within him, the Imperial Gold blood became abnormally active. The spiral vortex in his core began to rotate with a slow, grinding intensity, functioning like a bio-radar that mapped the faint vibrations in the darkness.
Scritch... Scritch...
Something was crawling across the mountain of mineral slag nearby.
Gu Hanzhou's hand settled onto the hilt of [Black Order]. The Tang Dao was in a state of ruin; after clashing with a Suppression-Phase expert, the blade was riddled with dense, hairline fractures. The dark-gold vein-tracery that once glowed with power was now dim and lusterless, as if the weapon itself had sustained a soul-deep injury.
"Don't... don't draw your blade," Su Qingyue's icy hand slid over his, her fingers trembling. "The creatures here... are hypersensitive to the ripples of Order Energy. If you emit even a flicker of killing intent, the things sleeping beneath these ruins will wake up."
Gu Hanzhou suppressed the burning sensation in his lungs, lowering his center of gravity. He felt his way through the absolute darkness, his boots crunching over things he didn't want to identify.
The temperature plummeted. This was a supernatural phenomenon—a sign that the Dark-Order pollution had reached a concentration that defied natural physics. He could feel dozens of greedy, predatory eyes peering from the ink-black shadows, watching the two intruders with a hunger that transcended mere biology.
Suddenly, Gu Hanzhou's boot struck something cold, hollow, and metallic.
He knelt down, tracing the object with his fingertips.
It was half of a shattered power-armor suit. He recognized the model from the censored history books found in the mines—a standard-issue suit from the Old Era's Imperial Legions. Inside the cockpit, a skeleton remained locked in its final position, hands still gripping the control levers. A clean, perfectly circular hole had been bored through the center of the skull, as if pierced by a needle-thin beam of pure force.
"This is an Old Era battlefield," Gu Hanzhou whispered, his voice barely audible.
"And a graveyard for humanity," Su Qingyue sighed into the darkness. "Mordent fears this place because the 'Remnants of the Old Order' interfere with his rigid laws. But what we seek... is the entrance to the Pool of Purgatory hidden somewhere in this abyss."
At that moment, a low, tectonic growl rumbled from the darkness ahead.
It didn't sound like a beast. It sounded like the grinding of a thousand rusty gears.
A massive silhouette, nearly three stories high, loomed over them. It was a monstrosity of horrific proportions—a thing stitched together from discarded industrial parts and highly mutated, necrotic flesh. The Dross Lord.
Where its heart should have been, a discarded fusion core the size of a boulder was embedded, pulsing with a sickly, toxic-green light. With every heaving breath, it exhaled a cloud of emerald-tinted poison gas.
Gu Hanzhou felt Su Qingyue's body stiffen against his back.
"It is the scavenger of this sector," she whispered, her voice laced with terror. "It has smelled the Imperial Gold blood leaking from your wounds... to a creature like that, your blood is a divine nectar it has dreamt of for centuries."
There was no way around it.
In this absolute void, in a dead zone that even Duke Mordent dared not enter, Gu Hanzhou slowly drew [Black Order].
Even with a shattered blade. Even as a spent arrow at the end of its flight.
"Old Order, New Order... it doesn't matter."
Gu Hanzhou gently lowered Su Qingyue, leaning her against a section of a collapsed steel girder. He gripped the Tang Dao with a single hand, feeling the last dregs of his dark-gold energy gather at the fractured tip.
"If you want my blood, come and see if your life is hard enough to take it."
As the Dross Lord swung a massive, scrap-metal claw downward with the force of a falling building, a silent, dark-gold flame ignited once more in the depths of Gu Hanzhou's pupils.