Chương 137: The Everlasting Empire

Leo started walking toward the hole in the seal, heading to rejoin the rest of his team on the other side. Arthur was trying to pry apart the formation lantern using his La Ferrari Eclipse.

"Arthur, stop!" Kevin shouted.

"Do you have any idea how old this thing is? You're going to damage it."

"You can study it after I figure out if it fits in my storage ring," Arthur said.

"Besides, there are probably more inside. Why are you so hung up on this one?" Leo turned around. He noticed that the two Lords hadn't moved since their conversation. They weren't following him.

"You're not coming?" Leo asked Lord Ironhorn. Ironhorn spread his hands.

"The seal is the Dragon Throne's decree. Broken or not, this old man still answers to the Court." He gestured at Shattervow, who stood with his arms crossed.

"Whoever broke through has already defied Imperial Law. If this old man follows in their footsteps, we become accomplices." Leo looked at them. He understood. Although Ironhorn and Shattervow were vastly more powerful than him, there were rules they had to follow. Laws they were constrained by. There were some things that they simply could not do, and this was one of them. Leo decided not to make it hard for Lord Ironhorn.

"Sounds good. I'll let you know if I find anything interesting inside." He paused.

"Is there anything I should know about the Everlasting Empire? The only thing I know is that they were known for producing puppets and jiangshi." This time Lord Shattervow was the one to respond.

"Puppets and jiangshi?" He stroked his chin.

"This Seat did not know the Empire was associated with both arts."

"Your information is probably credible. The Imperial Court has forbidden jiangshi cultivation since time immemorial. This Seat always assumed the prohibition was a matter of orthodoxy. But if the Everlasting Empire's research into jiangshi brought about their ruin, the Court would have had far more practical reasons to ban the entire branch of study." Shattervow's gaze drifted toward the broken gate.

"This Seat will say one more thing. The Everlasting Empire, although glorious in its time, is hopelessly outdated. Their hexagram formations are extremely inefficient in their usage of spiritual qi. No modern cultivator would bother recreating such wasteful arrays." He met Leo's eyes.

"If someone has broken a Tier Five seal to dig up the Empire's secrets, they did not come for formation theory. They came for jiangshi." Leo nodded.

"Thank you, Lord Shattervow. I'm sorry we got off to a rocky start. Maybe we can work together in the future." Ironhorn stepped in before Shattervow could respond.

"This old man must apologize on Lord Shattervow's behalf for his earlier hostility. He has been suffering from certain... domestic tribulations... that have left his temperament somewhat uneven." Shattervow's face twitched. His expression turned ugly. Leo tried very hard not to laugh, but ended up disguising it as a cough. Ironhorn quickly added, "If you find anything of note down there, send word to this old man. After the war cools down for the winter, you can find me at Crimson Lotus City." Leo nodded.

"Sounds good. It's been awhile since I last visited. I kind of miss it." Ironhorn paused. Then he raised a hand.

"On second thought. Leo, you are banned from entering Crimson Lotus City. Send someone harmless. Maybe Kevin." Now it was Leo's turn for his expression to turn ugly.

Leo led his team down the corridor, all four of them flying just above the pale stone floor. The passage descended in long diagonal stretches, reversing direction every few hundred yards. Array scripts lined the walls, their carved lines shifting subtly as the group passed. Leo kept his divine sense extended in a constant sphere around them, searching for any sign of movement. Nothing. Just stone and the faint pulse of ancient qi. He found himself glancing back the way they had come. Strange.

Now that the Lords were gone, he began to miss them. They were just four fragile Foundation Establishment cultivators flying deep into the unknown. After about twenty minutes, the corridor opened into a vast chamber. Leo stopped at the entrance, standing before a cavernous space that stretched out before him. The ceiling soared high above, its distant reaches lost in shadow. Massive columns lined the walls, each pillar covered in intricate spiritual engravings that still glowed bright despite their age.

Colossal mechanisms of grey stone and spirit filled the chamber's edges. Formation inscribed gears meshed with rotating cylinders. Enormous pistons pumped up and down in a steady cadence, as if they were the lungs of some great machine. Everything was still working. In the center of the chamber sat a massive platform with raised edges and array runes carved into every surface. Grooves of spiritual qi channels converged on it from all directions, connecting the platform to the rest of the machine.

Kevin stood at the edge of the platform, staring at the nearest column with his mouth hanging open.

"This is incredible. These arrays have been here for thousands of years. Maybe longer. And look at them." He pointed at a section of wall where the scripts were particularly bright.

"No degradation at all. The qi circulation is still perfectly stable."

"Hey Leo." Mike's voice echoed across the chamber.

"Come look at this." Leo turned. Mike and Arthur stood on the raised platform in the center of the room, both staring at a large lever in the middle. Leo flew over and landed beside them.

"I think this is an elevator," Mike said. He gestured at the formation patterns radiating outward from the lever.

"I bet this whole platform descends when you pull it." Arthur was already reaching for the lever.

"Hold on." Mike grabbed his arm.

"Leo, what do you think? Should we go down?" Leo glanced down at the platform beneath his feet. Faint wisps of Slaughter Qi drifted up through the seams where the elevator met the shaft walls. Whoever broke through the seal had probably gone down this same elevator. And if the Slaughter Qi was already seeping up, whatever had been contained below was likely already released. This was probably going to be a one-way trip.

The moment they descended, they'd be walking into a containment zone designed to hold something the Imperial Court couldn't handle. Leo shrugged. Worst case, they could just self-detonate and return to Earth. He turned back to Mike and nodded.

"I'm game. We didn't come all this way to turn around at the interesting part." Kevin walked over to the edge of the platform and stopped. His eyes fixed on the faint wisps of black qi drifting up through the seams. He took a small step back.

"You guys go ahead." He swallowed.

"I'm going to stay up here and, uh, document the formations." He mimed a camera.

"You know, like take some screenshots and bring them back to Earth to analyze. I can probably write a paper on these hexagram array runes." He nodded to himself, warming to the idea.

"Maybe I'll win a prize or something." Arthur gave him a grin.

"Go knock yourself out, kid. Have some fun." Leo looked at Arthur in surprise. That was unusually generous. The old boomer just shrugged and smiled. It was strange that Arthur wasn't giving Kevin a hard time about staying behind. But the more Leo thought about it, the more it made sense. The last time they fought together was in Crimson Lotus City. They had worked well as a team, but only because Leo's Spiritual Coordination Nexus let him direct everyone like extensions of his own body.

His omnidirectional divine sense fed them real-time awareness. His commands kept them synchronized. That nexus was gone now. After advancing to Foundation Establishment, Leo hadn't had time to lifebond a replacement. Without it, he couldn't communicate with Kevin mid-fight. Couldn't position him. Couldn't warn him. Kevin probably wouldn't be very helpful down there anyway. Leo turned to Kevin.

"I hope you find something good. If this trip ends up being a complete disaster, at least we can look forward to checking out whatever cool formations you bring back home." Kevin nodded eagerly.

"Okay." He took a step back.

"See you guys back in New York." Mike gave him a thumbs up and pulled the lever. The platform shuddered once, then began to sink. Kevin's figure shrank above them. The ceiling of the chamber closed over their heads, and they were sealed underground. The shaft walls glowed. Faint at first, a pale blue-white luminescence crept along the carved grooves. As they descended deeper, the glow intensified as the engraved channels grew wider. The air felt sticky.

Like as if there was a thickness that settled into Leo's lungs and refused to leave. The Slaughter Qi had been wisps at the surface, barely noticeable. Here it grew thicker with every passing second. He could almost taste it in his throat. Something deep in his brain told him to go back up. That this was a bad idea. Mike shifted his weight. Arthur's hand drifted toward his sword. They said nothing. The platform kept sinking. The Slaughter Qi grew thicker.

Leo swept the area with his divine sense and found nothing out of the ordinary. His perception was clear. He could read the formation scripts on the walls. He could feel Mike's heartbeat and Arthur's steady breathing. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. Everything was fine. His body just didn't believe it. The shaft walls fell away, revealing a sight that made Leo's breath catch in his throat. A city hung suspended over a vast underground pit.

Towering angular buildings of pale gray stone defied gravity, connected by narrow bridges and catwalks that crisscrossed the abyss without guardrails. The bottom, if there was one, was lost in impenetrable darkness. The architecture was monolithic. Sharp angles and clean lines sliced through the black. Towers reached into unseen heights while bridges spanned impossible distances.

Despite the apparent abandonment, eerie blue light emanated from windows and doorways, tracing the edges of stone and casting long shadows across the walkways. Leo activated his ortho-k vision and immediately wished he hadn't. Slaughter Qi rose from below. It climbed in slow, thick columns from somewhere far deeper than the cavern floor, seeping from the darkness between buildings and the chasms the bridges spanned. The energy swirled and coalesced into a suffocating miasma.

It seeped through empty windows, filled abandoned structures, made the blue light flicker and dim. Leo tried to look away and couldn't. His gaze kept drifting downward, pulled toward the source the way a man standing on a ledge feels the ground calling him to jump. Something down below wanted to be seen, and he felt compelled to oblige. He quickly shut off his ortho-k vision. The world snapped back to normal sight. Blue light and gray stone. The vast network of buildings and bridges spreading beneath them. Waiting.

His hands were shaking. Mike glanced at him. Arthur's grip on his sword had tightened until his knuckles went white. After maybe ten more minutes of descent, the platform touched down with a heavy thud and locked onto a bridge. The bridge led to a temple supported by a single thin column that dropped into the darkness below. The pillar looked too narrow to hold the structure's weight, but the building sat steady.

Spiritual qi channels pulsed with slow blue light that outlined the massive double doors at the entrance.

"So." Arthur cracked his neck.

"We following this bridge, or should we fly off and check out the other buildings first?" He gestured at the city sprawling around them. Mike stared at the endless black pit below. His jaw was tight.

"This place gives me the creeps. I want to spend as little time here as necessary." Leo followed his gaze. He agreed with Mike, and it wasn't just because of the Slaughter Qi. He had sensed something below. Something he was not yet ready to face. Arthur shrugged.

"Works for me. Less walking, more looting." They lifted off the platform and flew along the bridge. The moment they crossed onto the bridge proper, the carved channels beneath them flickered to life. Rune patterns activated in sequence, spreading outward from their position like ripples. A pale glow rose from the stone, tracking their movement as they flew. Leo's divine sense swept the bridge ahead. No threats. Just ancient stone and ancient qi, still cycling through pathways laid down thousands of years ago.

The temple responded to their approach. Light bloomed across its facade. The massive doors at the far end of the bridge swung inward, revealing a dark interior beyond.

"That's not ominous at all," Mike muttered. Arthur laughed.

"Relax. It's rolling out the welcome mat." A light clicked on inside, welcoming them.

"Get ready for a fight." Leo engaged the shield on his flying sword, and a thin red bubble enveloped him. They flew through the open doors. The interior of the temple was vast. The ceiling rose a hundred feet overhead. Array runes more intricate than anything they had encountered above covered the walls. In the center of the chamber, two colossal statues towered over them. Each one stood forty feet tall, humanoid in shape, carved from wood so ancient it had turned to stone. Leo studied them with his divine sense.

The first statue held a staff taller than the statue itself, planted against the floor with a brilliant crystal on top. The second statue held a spear with a leaf-shaped blade easily ten feet long, mounted on a shaft of spiritual iron. His divine sense pressed deeper, reading the material composition. Tier Four. The entire statue. The weapons. The internal formation architecture. Everything was Tier Four.

"Hey." Mike's voice was tense.

"The doors." A spirit barrier flickered across the doorway. Interlocking shields materialized in the air, layering on top of each other until a solid wall of spiritual energy blocked the exit. The doors closed behind the barrier with a boom that echoed through the chamber. They were trapped.

"Well." Arthur activated the shield of his Eclipse.

"That's not good." A sound came from behind them. Creaking. Deep, slow, like ancient wood remembering how to move. Leo turned. The faceless heads of the statues split open, revealing eyes formed from Top Tier spiritstones. The puppets fixed their unblinking gaze upon the intruders. Spiritual qi began to fill the statues, tracing through grooves and channels from the ground up. The blue climbed the grooves of their legs, spread across their torsos, and ran down their arms toward their weapons. The staff lit up.

The spear lit up. The puppets attacked.

The spear puppet moved first. For a moment, its movements appeared almost clumsy, its body contorting at unnatural angles. But the spear itself was lighting fast. The weapon accelerated through an arc. Formations deep within the puppet's joints fired, and the leaf-shaped blade snapped forward, crossing thirty feet in the time it took Leo to blink. He was already gone. By the time the spear tip reached his previous position, Leo was fifteen feet to the left and climbing.

The impact was thunderous, kicking up a cloud of pulverized stone and mortar as the spearhead punctured the wall behind him. Leo counterattacked instantly. The Sunshifter sang through the air, its Tier 5 formations blazing as he drove the blade toward the spear puppet's wrist. The gap between the interlocking segments looked like a weak point. His sword bit into petrified wood. And stopped. He'd expected resistance. He hadn't expected a complete halt.

The Sunshifter was outputting peak Nascent Soul power, and the edge had penetrated maybe half an inch into the puppet's surface. The material was too heavy, too dense. The puppet's other arm swept toward him. Leo wrenched the sword free and dropped. The massive wooden fist passed through the space his head had occupied. Wind buffeted him as it passed. His mind raced. Cutting through these constructs was impossible. He couldn't block them either.

The only thing he could do was keep dodging, hoping to spot some sort of weak point. A searing beam of concentrated light suddenly scorched across his divine sense. Leo threw himself sideways. The staff puppet had unleashed a lance of pure energy from its crystal, painting a deadly line through the space Leo had just occupied. The beam scored a molten furrow across the temple floor. Stone cracked and popped in its wake, glowing orange at the edges.

"ARTHUR, MOVE!" Leo's shout came a fraction too late. Arthur had already committed to his attack run, his Eclipse driving toward the staff puppet's head. He saw the beam fire. He tried to redirect. His Eclipse's thrust kicked in and he broke right, climbing hard. The beam burned past his original position, a line of concentrated destruction that turned stone to slag. But the beam didn't stop. The crystal pivoted.

The line of Tier 4 qi swept across the chamber in a smooth, relentless curve, tracking Arthur's flight path with mechanical precision. Arthur tried to redirect. His Eclipse flared as he reversed thrust, attempting to break the beam's pursuit. He zigged left. The beam adjusted. He zagged right. The beam followed. Leo was already moving, throwing gravity bombs, trying to disrupt the staff puppet's aim. The explosions detonated against the staff without visible effect. The tracking continued uninterrupted.

He saw Arthur's flight path curving right. He saw the beam's trajectory adjusting, leading the target. He saw the exact moment when the two lines would meet. He was fifty feet away. He had maybe one second. He couldn't reach Arthur in time. The beam found its target. Arthur's shield flared crimson for a fraction of a heartbeat. Then it was gone. The Tier 3 barrier offered no resistance to Tier 4 output. The beam passed through Arthur like he wasn't there. One moment the old man was flying.

The next moment he was gone. Leo's stomach dropped. Then the spear puppet lunged at him. No time. He needed to protect Mike. Leo spun away from the thrust, his body moving on pure instinct. He threw himself between the puppets and his remaining friend. He couldn't damage these things. He couldn't block them. All he could do was to try to keep their attention on him instead of the easier target.

"Left! Left now! The crystal's charging!" Mike broke left. The beam scorched the air behind him, close enough to singe his robes.

"Reverse! It's correcting!" Mike tried to reverse. His Eclipse's thrust kicked in a half-second late. The beam swept past his shoulder. It wasn't working. Without the Spiritual Coordination Nexus, his warnings were just words. Sound traveling through air. Delay measured in seconds. Against opponents this fast, those seconds stretched into lifetimes. He needed to find a way to damage these things. He needed to find it now. The spear puppet lunged again. This time it went straight for Mike.

Leo tracked the energy surge through its arm. The formation arrays along the weapon cycled through a different pattern this time. Something new.

"MIKE! BACK OFF! IT'S CHARGING SOMETHING!" Mike heard him. His Eclipse pulled up and away, putting distance between himself and the puppet's reach. The thrust came. The same jerky windup. The same sudden acceleration. Mike read the trajectory. He dodged. The spear tip passed by him with maybe a foot of clearance. Clean miss. He'd made it. The spearhead grew. A phantom extension erupted from the blade. The leaf-shaped tip expanded into a spectral version of itself, ten times the original size.

The phantom blade filled the space Mike had dodged into. What had been a near miss became a glancing hit. The spectral edge clipped Mike across the torso and sent him spinning. The staff puppet was already readying its follow up. Leo saw it. He read the charge building, calculated the firing angle, projected the beam path. Mike was tumbling. Mike couldn't evade. He couldn't save Mike. He couldn't reach him. He couldn't do anything except watch. The beam fired. Mike vanished in a flash of light.

Leo had never felt so helpless. He couldn't save his friends. He couldn't crack the puppets. He was stuck in an impossible situation, and this time there was no way out. Although both the puppets and his sword were technically both Nascent Soul level treasures. There was a huge difference between them. His flying sword was a thin blade of T3 material. Its power came from optimized T5 formations that elevated the tier. The puppets were giant mountains of pure T4 material. Their strongest defense was sheer mass.

Leo could do very little to them. The only thing he could do was dodge and hope the puppets ran out of spiritual qi before he did. But after a few more exchanges, the puppets stopped. Mid-stride. Mid-swing. Both constructs froze simultaneously. They gave Leo one last look, then straightened. They marched back to the center of the chamber, back to their original positions. They became silent statues once again, as if nothing had happened. The chamber fell silent.

Leo swept the room with his divine sense in frantic pulses. The puppets were inert. The crystal on the staff had gone dark. The spear hung motionless. But the spirit barrier on the door was still active. He was locked inside. He hadn't won. The fight hadn't ended. Nothing he'd done had damaged these constructs or triggered a shutdown protocol. Someone had turned them off. Someone was watching. Leo scanned the room frantically. His breathing came hard and fast. The adrenaline in his system had nowhere to go.

His mind raced. Arthur and Mike were dead. Of course, they would respawn, but the knowledge didn't help. He kept seeing the moment they died. He kept thinking about how helpless he had felt. Leo had been right there, but he couldn't save them. If this had been Earth, if those had been real deaths, he would be standing in this room alone with two corpses. Leo forced his breathing steady and pushed the thought down. He could deal with it later. Right now, someone was watching him, and he needed to find out who.

A door opened in the wall, revealing a passage beyond. A figure walked through the doorway. Leo's blood went cold. The Gold Core cultivator that appeared wore the Moderator's uniform, the dress of the Catacombs that marked the wearer as a representative of the Great Ascension Immortals. Leo recognized the white robes, the blank ceramic mask. He had spent four days staring at the Moderator from across a competition floor, watching him preside over formation challenges. But this was the Azure Profound Continent.

A different world entirely. The white-robed figure should not be here. The Enemy. Leo thought to himself. He's here. The figure stopped ten feet away.

"Leo Chen." The voice was wrong. It came from behind the mask, muffled and distorted, but it was in English. Not Common. Not Gothic. English.

"We meet again."