Descending into the depths below had been an arduous trial, but climbing back up to the surface with a body shattered and broken that was a hell in the truest sense.
Lin An stood beneath the ventilation shaft. His right arm was drenched in dark, clotted blood, the muscles and tendons shredded from forcibly twisting the laws of heaven and earth to break through the Yang Qi shackles. Yet he had no time to rest or tend to his wounds. The malevolent aura of the blind old man, still seated guard before the vault door, continued to press down upon him relentlessly a formless mountain crushing everything in its shadow.
He wound the forest spider silk, devoid of all spiritual trace, around his left arm, the only limb that could still function. His breathing was suppressed to the barest whisper, nearly stilled altogether. Lin An began to haul his own body upward into the absolute darkness.
With every inch he moved, the silk thread bit deeper into his flesh, down to the bone. Pain streaked in searing currents along every nerve. Yet his face remained impassive, cold and serene as an ice sculpture. The deep azure True Essence within him was wrung to its absolute limit, sealing in the reek of blood so that not a single droplet of its scent could escape.
When he pulled himself back up behind the iron grate at the top of the corridor, Lin An peered down below once more.
The blind old man still sat as motionless as a statue. But his misshapen ear was twitching faintly, as if sensing some subtle anomaly in the gelid air.
He is growing suspicious... Lin An assessed the situation with ruthless calm. The instincts of a beast steeped in a century of bloodshed could not be deceived for long.
Lin An had no other choice. He had to employ the Death Cycle once again.
He closed his eyes. He forced the meridians throughout his body to cease function. The heart muscle, which had only just resumed pumping blood, was violently wrenched back into stillness. The glacial cold of the void surged forth, fastening its grip upon his very soul in an instant.
This time, it was far worse than the first. His body was already battered beyond its limits. Forcing his heart to stop a second time within such a narrow window caused the boundary between life and death to begin blurring. A true, profound darkness strove to swallow his consciousness, dragging him down towards a permanent descent into the netherworld.
Lin An gritted his teeth and fought against death with a will forged of iron and steel. Using both hands, trembling and frozen as they were, he soundlessly slid the iron grate back into its original place. No trace. No sound. No scent of life.
Down below, the blind old man furrowed his brow deeply. He rose to his feet once again, sniffing the air and tilting his head to listen with rapt attention. But his world held only profound silence and the damp smell of ancient stone. Nothing moved. No heartbeat of some foolish thief slipped through. The old fiend exhaled through his nostrils in irritation before returning to his seated position.
Inside the ventilation shaft, Lin An crawled back towards the surface on the last dregs of his strength. His consciousness was so blurred it flickered at the edge of extinguishing. When he finally wormed his way out of the ventilation network and back into the outer warehouse area, he immediately released the Death Cycle.
Urk... agh...!
Lin An collapsed onto the stone floor, vomiting out a thick mouthful of black, clotted blood. His heart convulsed wildly, hammering as if about to burst through his chest. Soul-rending agony blazed through every fiber of his being. He swiftly sealed his own acupoints with rapid precision, staunching the bleeding and stabilizing the meridians to prevent them from fracturing further.
He had succeeded. The priceless treasure lay within his dimensional pouch, and no one within the Cross-Continent Trade Guild had the slightest inkling that the innermost vault had been breached.
Lin An picked up his bamboo hat and placed it back on his head, concealing a face now ashen and pale as a corpse. He staggered, melting into the shadows of the warehouse, exploiting the shift change of the guards and the blind spots in the formation arrays patterns he had memorized to his very bones. He slipped out onto the chaotic streets of Zephyrstone City's lower district without leaving a single trace.
Late into the dead of night, within Room Number Twenty-Four of the Old Hearth Inn.
The Old Master had been pacing back and forth in front of the bed, his heart churning with dread. The old man's hands were clammy with sweat. He knew his son was undertaking something that defied the heavens themselves the most reckless and audacious act in the region's commercial history.
The door bolt shifted softly, just once.
The wooden door swung open, and Lin An's figure stepped through.
The very instant the candlelight fell upon his son's form, Old Master Lin recoiled half a step in sheer shock, his eyes flying wide with utter horror.
At that moment, Lin An looked no different from a wraith that had just crawled up from the deepest pit of hell. His dark gray traveling cloak was tattered and soaked through with dark, clotted blood. His right arm hung limp and lifeless, the skin split wide to reveal the savagely ravaged muscle beneath. His face was ashen white, utterly bloodless, and his lips were cracked and parched like those of a dead man.
"An'er!" Old Master Lin lunged forward to support his son's swaying, unsteady frame. "Heavens... you... you're gravely wounded! Did the magical formations activate? They found you, didn't they?!"
"No..." Lin An replied, his voice a dry, feather-light rasp. He coolly deflected his father's supporting arms, dragging his feet as he stumbled over to collapse into a seated position on the wooden bed. "The formations... fools... they saw nothing..."
"But your condition... this is...!"
"This is the price that must be paid..." Lin An closed his eyes, drawing a deep, shuddering breath to suppress the pain. "To deceive the instincts of the old devil guarding the door... I had to cross the line of death itself... This arm bore too much of the burden of twisting the laws..."
He opened his eyes. Amidst the profound exhaustion, his pitch-black pupils gleamed with a cold, unyielding ferocity.
"But I have obtained it, Father."
Lin An reached into his dimensional pouch with his left hand and pulled out a piece of pitch-black metal misshapen, asymmetrical and laid it upon the wooden table.
The very second that shard of metal touched the air, the atmosphere inside the cramped room seemed to grow instantly heavier, as if being devoured. The bright candle flames were pressed down, dimming and flickering low as though cowering before something unseen. There was no scent of qi power, no sacred radiance. There was only a profound, unfathomable 'emptiness' that made any who gazed upon it feel revulsion and primal dread from the very depths of their soul.
The Old Master stared at the metal shard. His body trembled involuntarily, without understanding why. The instincts of an ordinary mortal screamed at him to retreat from this accursed, ill-omened object.
"This thing... what is it?" the Old Master whispered.
"It is a fragment of ultimate truth..." Lin An stared at the shard with a deep, profound gaze. "The Trade Guild were fools to imprison it within a Black-Blood Steel case and shackle it with Yang Qi. They believed it to be a powerful demonic weapon, but in truth... it is a key."
Lin An swiftly stowed the metal shard back into his dimensional pouch, preventing its aura from leaking out and drawing the attention of any cultivator within the city.
"Father. At the break of dawn, go to the airship port. Purchase two ordinary-class tickets on the fastest departing flight. Pay no mind to which city it is heading for. Our only objective is to leave this valley as swiftly as possible," Lin An ordered decisively, despite his body being on the verge of complete ruin.
"But securing tickets at the last moment, just as the grand auction is about to commence won't that appear suspicious?"
"If we remain until the Trade Guild opens the vault three days from now and finds nothing but emptiness inside that case... By then, the entirety of Zephyrstone City will be sealed shut, and every independent cultivator within the city will be interrogated under the shadow of death." Lin An closed his eyes and began circulating his True Essence to mend his fractured meridians. "Buy the tickets. We have what we came for... It is time for the phantoms to vanish."
The first light of dawn struggled to pierce through the dense veil of mist that smothered the valley, yet it could not reach down to the lowest stratum of Zephyrstone City.
Inside the cramped room of the Old Hearth Inn, the air remained frigid and heavy. Lin An sat cross-legged upon the wooden bed. His breathing was ragged and laced with a dry rasp from his throat. The deep azure True Essence within his dantian labored with desperate intensity, struggling to mend his fractured meridians and suppress the septic backlash of having forced the Death Cycle twice in rapid succession.
Every time he circulated his qi power, wave after wave of agony surged through his spine, as though frozen nails were being hammered into his vertebrae. Yet Lin An merely clenched his jaw, refusing to let out even half a cry.
The door was pushed open softly. Old Master Lin stepped in, bringing with him the cold draft of the outside. The old man concealed his trembling hands within the sleeves of his crimson traveling cloak before laying two wooden tablets carved with runic markings upon the table.
"Lowest-class airship tickets. Our destination is 'Cloudhaven Citadel' in the Eastern Domain," Old Master Lin whispered, reporting the results of his task with swift efficiency. "I used silver specie and some of our spare silk garments to barter with traveling peddlers who were desperate for coin to secure these tickets. No transaction was recorded with spirit stones. Our names do not appear in the Trade Guild's registry. The vessel departs in one hour."
Lin An slowly opened his eyes. His gaze was shot through with a web of crimson capillaries, a stark testament to the grievous internal damage he had suffered.
"You have done superbly, Father," Lin An rasped. He pulled out a low-grade blood-coagulating pill plundered long ago from a disciple of the Vermillion Iron Sect and tossed it into his mouth. Though it would do next to nothing to heal his torn Ethereal Meridians, it could at least help mask the stench of blood upon his breath. "It is time to go."
He picked up his wide-brimmed bamboo hat and placed it upon his head, pulling the brim low to shroud a face as ashen and pallid as paper. His large gray cloak was cinched tighter to conceal his right arm, hanging limp and utterly unresponsive.
Walking out of the inn and melting into the early morning crowd was a daunting challenge. Today, Zephyrstone City was more densely thronged than ever. Cultivators from every corner of the world were flooding into the city, preparing for the grand auction that very night. Every street was clogged with carriages drawn by domesticated spirit beasts, and the air clashed with the chaotic, manic auras of qi power.
But while all others converged towards the city center, the two Lins walked against the current of the masses, heading upward towards the vast platform of the airship port perched on a higher stone tier.
The airship dock was colossal. Several gigantic vessels, built from dark spirit-wood, were moored alongside the piers. The thrumming roar of runic engines rumbled so deeply that the very earth trembled. At the departure checkpoint, only a handful of Trade Guild guards were stationed, as the bulk of their forces had been diverted to secure the city's entrance gates and the Grand Auction Hall.
Old Master Lin walked ahead, the wooden tickets clutched in his hand. His demeanor was that of an utterly ordinary merchant, weary from a long journey. However, as they approached the ticket-checking archway, a hulking guard bearing the aura of the late Qi Gathering realm extended a long-hafted glaive to bar their path instantly.
"Halt," the guard barked, his voice curt. His sharp, piercing eyes swept over their meager luggage. "Today marks the commencement of the grand auction. The entire world is flooding into the city. You are merchants why are you scurrying to flee as if escaping your debts?"
Old Master Lin did not panic. He cupped his hands in a deeply respectful bow, while crafting the bitterest, most convincing smile he could muster.
"Ah, Sir Guard. My son and I are but humble traveling peddlers. We came hoping to buy some common medicinal herbs to resell," the Old Master sighed heavily. "But this grand auction has driven the cost of living to terrifying heights. Lodging has tripled in price. Even basic food has become so expensive we can no longer afford it. If we stay any longer, we'll starve to death long before we ever glimpse the auction goods. So I've decided to cut my losses, purchase the cheapest airship tickets available, and flee to another city to re-establish ourselves."
As he spoke, the Old Master subtly stepped closer to the guard, deftly slipping a sum of mortal silver coinage into the man's palm along with the wooden tickets. The bribe was no precious spirit stone, but it was more than enough for a lowly grunt to buy several flagons of fine wine.
The guard weighed the coins in his hand, his stern expression easing slightly. Avarice and a cultivator's innate contempt for ordinary mortal merchants dulled his vigilance. Yet his instincts as a cultivator still stirred. He narrowed his eyes, glancing towards the young man in the gray cloak who stood hunched behind the old man.
"And what's wrong with that whelp? Why does he keep his head bowed like that?" the guard demanded, unleashing his 'Spiritual Sense' to probe brashly across Lin An's body.
In that split second, Lin An nearly stopped breathing.
His body was grievously wounded. Maintaining the state of 'Emptiness' to conceal his qi power at this moment consumed more strength and inflicted more torment than having his flesh carved by a knife. The guard's Spiritual Sense was like a hundred razor-sharp needles piercing into him and scouring every inch of his body.
Lin An had to madly suppress the deep azure True Essence's instinct to retaliate. If he allowed even the slightest flicker of qi power to rebound, the guard would instantly realize that the young man before him was no ordinary mortal, but a master at the Foundation Establishment realm!
Dark, clotted blood welled up in his throat. Lin An had to swallow it back down with excruciating difficulty. The bitter, metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth. He feigned a violent, racking cough, his entire body convulsing. He hacked and wheezed like a man in the terminal stages of a wasting disease.
"Cough... cough... Forgive me, Sir Guard... The air up here on the platform... it is so bitingly cold..." Lin An forced his voice to tremble into a pitiful, rasping quaver.
The guard's Spiritual Sense swept over Lin An's form and detected nothing beyond a frail, weak body. There was no trace of qi. No spiritual fluctuations. Only physical exhaustion that made him appear on the brink of death from sickness.
"Tch! Shivering like a hatchling utterly annoying," the guard retracted his Spiritual Sense with a disgusted grimace. He hastily waved his hand, as if afraid of catching some contagion. "Scram and get on your ship before I change my mind and hurl the both of you to the bottom of the ravine!"
"Thank you, Sir Guard! Thank you!" Old Master Lin bowed his head frantically. He quickly grabbed his son by the sleeve and pulled him swiftly through the checkpoint archway.
Once they were out of the guard's line of sight, Lin An secretly let out the searingly hot breath he had been holding. A cold, clammy sweat erupted across his back. He had just walked the razor-thin line between a successful escape and being surrounded and annihilated by the Trade Guild.
They navigated along the narrow wooden gantries until they reached the berth of the lowest deck of a colossal airship. This section had no private cabins, only rows of old hammocks and the stale, choking stench of runic engine fumes. It was designated for the laboring class and destitute merchants. Yet to the two Lins, this was the safest place in the world at this moment.
Lin An collapsed onto an old wooden crate in the corner of the hold. He pulled his bamboo hat down over his face and shut his eyes instantly, sinking into a state of healing meditation.
A deep, resonant horn blast thundered across the valley, signaling the commencement of departure.
The colossal runic engines roared to life. The Wind-Gate Formation Arrays carved into the vessel's underbelly operated at full power, propelling the gargantuan wooden vessel weighing hundreds of thousands of catties to slowly ascend above the earth. The vibration was so intense that passengers on the lower deck had to cling tightly to the support pillars.
Old Master Lin stood gripping the edge of a small, circular porthole, gazing out at the world beyond.
The airship slowly tilted its bow upward and soared into the sky, leaving behind the glittering, brilliant lights of Zephyrstone City far below. The light blazing from the central Auction Hall shone brighter than anywhere else, a testament that the grand auction the gathering of elite masters from all across the land was about to raise its curtain.
The old man watched that sight with an indescribable feeling. While those superhuman masters, beings capable of overturning heaven and earth, were sitting and sipping tea, preparing to throw colossal fortunes into a savage bidding war... they had no way of knowing that the most precious and dangerous treasure of all had already been stolen, snatched out from under their noses by a sickly young man in the lowest deck of a departing freighter.
"We have flown out of the cage, An'er..." Old Master Lin murmured to himself, casting his gaze ahead towards the sprawling sea of dark gray clouds that shrouded the endless peaks of the Ten Thousand Beast Mountain Range.
Behind them lay the maelstrom they had left in their wake. Ahead lay a boundless, unending world.
The lowest hold of the airship was a purgatory of damp wood, alchemical exhaust, and the suffocating heat of desperate bodies.
They were housed in the very belly of the colossal vessel, a sprawling, dimly lit cavern where daylight never reached. The constant, bone-rattling tremors of the massive wind-arrays driving the ship forward made true rest impossible. The air was thick with the stench of cheap tobacco, sweat, and the bitter residue of low-grade medicinal pastes used by injured mercenaries.
Lin An sat in the darkest corner of the hold, wedged between a stack of rotting cargo crates and the curved, iron-reinforced hull. He had not moved a single muscle for three days.
To the other passengers huddled in the gloom, he looked like a corpse slowly cooling in the shadows. His face was entirely devoid of color, his lips cracked and pale. His breathing was so shallow that it did not even stir the motes of dust drifting past his nose.
Lord Lin sat beside him on a thin, tattered straw mat, acting as a tireless sentinel. The older man had completely shed his refined merchant demeanor, adopting the hunched, fiercely protective posture of a refugee who had nothing left to lose. He kept a firm grip on a simple iron dagger hidden beneath his robes, his bloodshot eyes constantly scanning the shifting groups of thugs and failed cultivators who prowled the lower deck.
Internally, Lin An was fighting a brutal war of attrition.
The physical tearing of his flesh was the least of his concerns. The true danger lay within his Qi Sea. Forcing himself into the 'Death Cycle' twice in such a short span had fundamentally destabilized his foundation. The ethereal meridians that connected his physical body to the absolute void were heavily frayed, leaking a freezing, destructive aura into his own internal organs. If he did not stabilize the collapse, his own cultivation path would devour him from the inside out.
And then, there was the artifact.
The jagged, pitch-black shard he had stolen from the Black-Blood Steel crate rested quietly within his spatial pouch, but its presence was deafening to his soul. It was not a magical treasure. It did not contain vast amounts of spiritual energy or ancient martial techniques.
As Lin An cautiously probed it with his dark blue True Essence, he realized its true nature. It was a fragment of a dead epoch a piece of existence that had been entirely severed from the Heavenly Dao. It was a physical manifestation of absolute desolation.
He could not simply leave it in the pouch. The dense, suffocating aura of the shard was slowly bleeding through the spatial barrier. Sooner or later, a high-level cultivator on the upper decks of the airship would sense the anomaly.
He had to consume it.
With a profound, silent exertion of Will, Lin An drew the black shard out of the spatial pouch and directly into his Dantian.
The moment the shard entered his Qi Sea, an agonizing, soundless explosion of cold tore through his mind. The dark blue lake of his True Essence violently rebelled, boiling and churning as the black shard attempted to assert its primordial dominance. It sought to drag everything his life force, his memories, his very existence into its lightless depths.
Lin An ground his teeth together, the physical muscles of his jaw straining until they threatened to snap. Blood slowly seeped from his nostrils, staining his pale upper lip.
He did not fight the shard's desolation with radiant energy or stubborn life force. Instead, he opened the floodgates of his own void foundation. He let his True Essence mirror the artifact. He proved to the shard that his Dantian was a colder, deeper, and more absolute abyss than the dead epoch it came from.
Slowly, agonizingly, the black shard stopped rebelling. It began to dissolve, melting into his dark blue True Essence. The color of his Qi Sea shifted, losing its blue tint and settling into a profound, terrifying black. The dissolved essence flowed into his frayed ethereal meridians, patching the torn spiritual pathways with the indestructible weight of the void.
The process took hours of excruciating, silent torment.
On the evening of the fourth day, the fragile peace of their dark corner was broken.
Footsteps approached, heavy and deliberately intimidating. Three men stopped in front of Lord Lin. They wore stained leather armor and carried crude, serrated sabers. The man in the center, a brute with a missing ear and a jagged scar across his throat, radiated the coarse, unstable aura of the third level of Qi Condensation.
In the mortal world, he would be a warlord. On this ship, he was merely a bottom-feeding extortionist who preyed on those too weak to afford the upper decks.
"The air in this corner is getting expensive, old man," the scarred man grunted, leaning his weight casually against a cargo crate. His greedy eyes flicked over Lord Lin's burgundy robes plain, but woven from quality material and then shifted to the seemingly comatose Lin An. "You've been taking up space for four days. The boys and I are collecting the deck toll. Two pieces of silver, or we throw the sick kid out the disposal chute to feed the mountain birds."
Lord Lin did not panic. He had dealt with thousands of men like this in the trade cities. He kept his hands visible, reaching slowly into his robes.
"We are just poor travelers seeking a healer in the East, brothers," Lord Lin said, his voice entirely steady, laced with the perfect amount of weary submission. He pulled out two small, tarnished silver coins and held them out. "This is all we have left for medicine. Please, accept it as an apology for our intrusion."
The scarred man looked at the two silver coins. He sneered, his gaze shifting back to Lord Lin's hands. He had noticed the faint, lingering callouses on the older man's fingers the marks of an abacus user, a man who handled ledgers and wealth, not a simple refugee.
"Two silver pieces is the toll for the old man," the brute spat, stepping closer and resting a hand on the hilt of his saber. "The sick kid costs more. That spatial pouch on his belt looks heavy. Hand it over, and maybe we let you keep your teeth."
Lord Lin's eyes narrowed slightly. He knew that showing weakness to a predator who had smelled blood would only invite a slaughter. He shifted his weight, preparing to draw his hidden iron dagger, knowing fully well he stood no chance against a Qi Condensation cultivator.
Before Lord Lin could move, a cold, raspy voice echoed from the shadows.
"The toll is paid."
The scarred man flinched, stepping back instinctively.
Lin An slowly raised his head. His eyes were open. The pupils were completely pitch-black, devoid of any reflection, looking less like human eyes and more like two bottomless pits carved into a dead face.
The scarred man felt a sudden, inexplicable chill run down his spine, but his pride as a cultivator refused to let him back down before a sickly youth.
"You're awake, little corpse," the brute sneered, drawing his serrated saber an inch from its scabbard. "I said, hand over the pouch, or I'll take the whole arm with it."
He reached his thick, calloused hand forward, aiming to grab Lin An by the collar of his grey robes.
Lin An did not raise a hand to block. He did not circulate any visible True Qi. He merely stared at the approaching hand.
A single, invisible strand of his newly assimilated void intent extended from his Dantian. It was not a physical attack. It was a localized enforcement of absolute stillness.
The strand brushed against the brute's wrist.
There was no sound of breaking bone, no flash of elemental magic, no spray of blood. The scarred man's arm simply stopped mid-air. The color instantly drained from the limb, turning the flesh a sickly, ashen grey from the fingertips up to the elbow.
The connection between the man's flesh and his soul had been cleanly and utterly severed.
The brute stared at his own arm in horrific confusion. He tried to move his fingers, but there was nothing there. No pain, no sensation. It was as if the arm belonged to a statue.
Panic, raw and primal, finally shattered his arrogance. He stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet and crashing into his two companions. He clutched his dead, grey arm, his mouth opening in a silent scream of absolute terror. He didn't know what had happened. He hadn't felt a spell, hadn't seen a weapon. He had merely touched the shadow of a demon.
"Leave," Lin An whispered, his voice carrying the weight of a closing tomb.
The three thugs scrambled backward on their hands and knees, scrambling over each other in their desperate haste to escape the dark corner. They fled into the crowded depths of the hold, not daring to look back.
Lord Lin let out a long, shaky breath, his hand slowly releasing the hilt of his hidden dagger. He looked at his son, noticing the profound, chilling darkness that now resided in Lin An's eyes.
Lin An closed his eyes again, leaning his head back against the cold iron hull. The exertion had cost him, but the black shard was now his. The foundation of the void had been tempered.
The massive airship groaned as it hit a turbulent current of wind, continuing its relentless journey eastward across the endless sea of clouds.