Xīng Hé gathered the survivors in the Main Hall.
Fifteen faces looked back at her—hollow eyes, gaunt cheeks, the particular exhaustion that came from months of constant fear. They had retreated here after the massacre in the inner disciple courtyard, dragging themselves back through the broken barrier, back to the relative safety of the Core Sect district.
Relative safety. As if anywhere in this place could truly be called safe.
"We need to understand what we're dealing with," she said, her voice steadier than she felt. "The layout of this place. The hierarchy. Where the real dangers are—and where we might find what we're looking for."
She had spent the past weeks piecing together information from the texts they'd found. The Main Hall had contained records. The Training Ground had held instructional materials. Even the partially accessible areas of the Alchemy Tower had yielded fragments of understanding.
Now she shared what she'd learned.
"This Sect was organized by power. Housing, privileges, access—all based on hierarchy. The outer district held the weakest practitioners. Bottom disciples. The ones still learning the foundations."
Nods around her. They had seen the outer district. Had fought through its contaminated inhabitants. Had barely survived beings that were supposedly the weakest this place had to offer.
"The middle section—here, the Core Sect area—was for the main disciples. The ones who had proven themselves, who had earned advancement beyond the basics." She gestured at the empty halls around them. "It was empty when we arrived. I don't know why. Maybe they were relocated before whatever happened. Maybe they were the first to fall."
"And the inner district?" someone asked. A boy whose name she should remember but couldn't quite grasp—four months of death had blurred faces together, made individuals into interchangeable pieces of a dwindling whole.
"Stronger. Much stronger. The inner disciples had advanced further along their paths. Their Dao was more refined. Their sacred weapons more developed."
*They're probably Domain stage and close to Ascendant in their own power system.*
She paused, letting the implication settle.
"That's why twelve of us died to one of them."
Silence. No one wanted to remember. No one could forget.
"Beyond the inner disciple residence, there should be more. Pavilions for weapons and scriptures. Technique libraries. And depending on how many elders this Sect had—elder quarters. Private cultivation spaces for their most powerful members."
"And at the top?" Another voice. A girl this time, her tone carrying a dread that matched what Xīng Hé felt.
"The highest peak." Xīng Hé looked toward the windows, toward the wrong-colored sky and the distant silhouette of buildings that rose above everything else. "The Sect Master's residence. Whoever led this place—that's where they would have lived."
The weight of it pressed down on all of them.
They had barely survived the inner disciple residence. Had lost twelve people to a single practitioner of the Dao of Music. And the hierarchy they faced only grew more dangerous the further they advanced.
"The sacred weapons start appearing at the inner disciple level," Xīng Hé said. "That's what we're here to retrieve. Tools imbued with the practitioners' Dao—objects that can help divine existences understand related concepts."
She didn't add what she really thought: that they had been sent to harvest a dead civilization. That the mission had never been about exploration or discovery. That twenty-one of them had died to collect resources for elders who saw them as expendable.
She didn't need to.
They all understood by now.
"So what do we do?" the boy asked.
Xīng Hé took a breath.
"First, we survive. And right now, that means food."
---
The rations had been exhausted three days ago.
They had been given supplies for two weeks—enough to sustain them while they searched for local resources. The briefing had assumed they would find food quickly, that a place this size would have stores and provisions they could access.
The briefing had been wrong.
The outer district's cooking pavilion had been destroyed. Collapsed walls, shattered equipment, whatever stores had existed reduced to rubble and rot. They had found nothing edible, nothing salvageable.
The middle section had fared no better. A small dining hall, meant for the core disciples, had been similarly demolished. The cooking pavilion attached to it was gutted—not by time or decay, but by violence. Something had torn through these places deliberately, destroying everything that might sustain life.
"The inner disciple residence," Xīng Hé said. "That's the only option. They have a cooking pavilion—I saw it during..." She trailed off. *During the massacre. During the chaos that killed twelve of my teammates.* "It's still intact. And they have storage areas."
"We can't go back there." The girl's voice cracked. "After what happened—they'll be on alert. They'll—"
"We'll starve if we don't."
The words came out flat. Final.
Xīng Hé looked at the survivors, seeing the hunger that had sharpened their features, the weakness that was beginning to show in their movements. Three days without food. For mortals, that would be uncomfortable. For divine existences at the Resonance stage, it was dangerous—their enhanced bodies demanded more sustenance, not less.
They were running out of time.
"Thirteen of us will go. Myself and..." She counted, selecting those who were still capable of movement. "We find the storage area. We take what we can. We get out before anyone sees us."
No one argued.
They were too desperate to argue.
---
The cooking pavilion was on the far side of the inner disciple courtyard.
They approached in silence, moving through back passages and side corridors that Xīng Hé had mapped during their earlier exploration. The disciples they passed seemed unaware of their presence—going about their daily routines, training and studying and living lives that would end the moment contamination awoke within them.
The cooking pavilion was different from the others they'd seen.
It wasn't just a place to prepare meals. It was a place of cultivation—a training ground for practitioners of the Dao of Cooking. The texts had mentioned such paths. Dao that focused on creation rather than destruction, on sustenance rather than combat.
But they didn't eat.
That had confused Xīng Hé at first. A cooking pavilion with no dining hall attached. Practitioners who trained in the preparation of food but didn't consume it themselves. The inner disciples, she had learned, had advanced beyond the need for physical sustenance. They absorbed energy directly—the same energy that powered their Dao, cycling through their bodies in ways that made food unnecessary.
But the cooking pavilion still existed.
And the storage areas still held provisions—ingredients for practitioners who hadn't yet transcended mortal needs, supplies for those still walking the early steps of their path.
They found the storage area on the east side of the pavilion.
It was larger than Xīng Hé had expected—shelves stretching toward a ceiling lost in shadow, filled with containers and packages and preserved goods that had somehow survived whatever catastrophe had befallen this place. She produced the space pouch from her robes—the dimensional container she'd been given for the retrieval mission—and began directing the others.
"Take everything that looks edible. Preserved items first. We don't know how long we'll need to make this last."
They worked quickly. Quietly. Hands grabbing containers, stuffing them into the space pouch, moving with the desperate efficiency of people who knew their survival depended on speed.
They were almost finished when it happened.
One of the children—a boy near the back of the group, whose hunger had perhaps made him careless—opened a door.
Not a storage door. The door to the main cooking area.
"Wait—" Xīng Hé started.
Too late.
---