Chương 24: Holy Land (3)

The door to the central chamber was not locked. This came as a surprise to Lin Che, as the team outside had been treating the far junction as a hard boundary for weeks, and he'd assumed the door itself would present some additional mechanism — a sigil, a test, or just something commensurate with what was apparently behind it. Instead, when he pressed his palm flat against it, it simply swung open with a creak. The chamber itself was vast, which itself was an understatement.

The sourceless light here was dimmer and more amber than in the corridors, and the ceiling rose into darkness far above — high enough that the upper walls were not visible, but rather even reinforced eyes would see a gradual loss of definition as the light failed. The floor was smooth stone cracked in long radiating lines from the centre outward, the kind of damage that suggested something enormous had hit it or been thrown onto it with significant force at some point in the distant past.

Along the walls, the same heavy rings as the outer chambers, but large, and many of them had been pulled clean from their anchoring points, leaving only craters behind. The chains that had connected them lay in coils on the floor, rusted to the colour of dried blood. Not all chains ended on the floor, however. One ran from a ring on the far wall across the length of the chamber and ended in a collar of dark metal around the neck of the largest living thing Lin Che had ever been in the same room as.

He stood in the doorway and rubbed his eyes to make sure he was not seeing things. It was a wolf. This much was clear in the way that a mountain is clearly a mountain — the category was unmistakable, but the scale transformed it into something unrecognisable. Lying on its side, it measured the length of the chamber that made it feel like a cramped prison cell. The body was deep-chested and long, built for sustained, inexorable force. But what stopped him the longest was the fur.

It was not grey or white or black, but shifted between all three depending on the angle of the light and the observer. It was silver at the chest and along the spine, but closer to a blue-grey at the edges of the ears and tips of the paws. The rest of its body contained a darkness that was nearly absolute. It was mesmerising. The face was long and narrow, and unmistakably in pain. The injuries were extensive and old.

Deep scarring across the left flank meant that the fur had grown back wrong compared to the surrounding coat, tracing the outline of wounds that must have been catastrophic at the time. The right foreleg was held at a slight angle — perhaps something had healed incorrectly at some point. Along the neck, beneath the collar, the fur was worn entirely away, and the exposed skin was cracked, bruised, and discoloured, with chemical burns from the constant contact with metal.

It had been in this chamber for a very long time. Its eyes were open, pale gold with a vertical pupil. Lin Che felt sorry for it. He understood that this one had not stayed here out of choice, but because it had not been able to leave. That whatever had injured it so severely had done so long enough ago that the injuries had all healed improperly. He took a step into the chamber. The wolf's head lifted slightly. He took another. It began the process of standing, which was slow and effortful.

The incorrectly-healed foreleg took the weight badly, and the breathing became laboured as it committed to the movement. Despite this, there was no hesitation in moving, perhaps as the creature had got used to its injuries and decided they weren't worth crying over any longer. Standing, it was as large as it appeared, possibly even more so. It occupied much of the vertical space in the building. The chain went taut.

The ring held for a couple of seconds before the anchor point, rusted through over a very long time, pulled free of the wall with a crack that the chamber amplified into something more seismic. The chain hit the floor in a long collapse, and the wolf was no longer attached to anything. It looked at the chain and then back at Lin Che. Then, it lowered its head, and the amber light shifted across its silver-dark fur, and it charged.

Lin Che moved — body computing trajectory and vacating space before even noticing the charge — and the wolf passed through where he'd been and met the far wall with a concussive impact that sent cracks racing up the stone from the point of contact. Rubble fell from the ceiling onto its head. It shook itself and turned around. The second charge was lower, with the wolf adjusting its angle slightly to cut off Lin Che's path. He jumped up, legs infused with Qi, and landed on the back of the creature in motion.

It almost shook him off, before he continued jumping off instead of allowing it to slam him to the ground. The landing jolted up through his legs with incredible force. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Lin Che knew he could not hurt the creature, nor did he really want to. He was redirecting it and staying out of its way, which was completely different to hurting it, he told himself.

The third charge he redirected properly, with both palms pushing with full strength at the side of the skull, the force of which was significant enough to stagger him four steps back. His hands were numb to the wrist, and the wolf had barely deviated from its path. He reset his position, just as the wolf did. Its breathing was much more laboured than before, the old wounds on its flank darkening as the exertion reopened them. It was bleeding and it was not stopping. It lowered its head for the fourth charge.

Lin Che flared up his Qi, running Liuhe at all six harmonies and the Hollow Bell at full capacity. The external Qi that had been pooled around him since the breakthrough was there, present and available, but he still did not know what to do with it that was useful. The wolf charged. He moved right, brought both hands up, and, without conscious direction, the external Qi moved with them.

It followed the trajectory of his palms the way it would have if his palms had been extended eighteen inches further than they could reach. It met the side of the wolf's skull at the angle his hands were positioned for, and it transferred force along that angle, redirecting the wolf's own momentum. The wolf hit the floor. The impact was harder than anything he'd managed physically, with the push of the Qi providing zero warning for the wolf to brace its body for the direction of force.

The full mass had been redirected, and the floor cracked beneath it. Lin Che stood there and looked at his hands. He didn't have time to think. The wolf was getting up. Slower, this time. The foreleg was worse — the impact had aggravated whatever the original misalignment was, and the leg was shaking with effort simply by bearing weight. The left flank was bleeding, too, and its breathing sounded more like a chesty cough than anything else.

He thought that it was dying regardless, and that it had probably been dying for a long time. The charge it had just taken towards him represented a significant portion of what it had remaining. It lowered its head one final time. He was already moving in response. Both hands up, external Qi extended to their full available reach, with Liuhe at absolute capacity and the Hollow Bell steady beneath.

The wolf's trajectory was information he'd calculated in his subconscious already, and he moved outward from the path and Qi met the neck and chest at angles that would use the wolf's own mass to drive it down completely. Slam! The wolf hit the ground, and this time decided not to get up. The legs stayed down and its head lowered to the stone with a deliberate surrender.

The breathing was loud and then much quieter, before it became one slow exhalation that went on for much longer and was not accompanied by inhalation. Lin Che stood in the silence of the chamber, his legs shaking. The only thing keeping him up was the Liuhe Breathing Method. He looked up at the far wall, where the chain had been anchored. Next to the anchor point was a carved symbol — a circle with a single line through it that he had seen on the entrance to this chamber. He reached up and pressed it.

The portal opened in the centre of the chamber floor, a circle of light roughly two metres across. It was nothing like the refractive shimmer of the tractor entrance, and instead lit the room from the centre with a beauty that was overpowered by its bleak surroundings. Lin Che looked at it before taking out his notebook and walking back through the corridors. He worked methodically, from the junction outwards. The doors all opened the same way, swinging open after he pressed a palm on them.

He mapped each chamber in turn with its rough dimensions and whatever they contained if they were points of interest. He counted a total of twelve chambers, most of which were empty. He sketched the full layout across a two-page spread and marked each item of interest with a small notation key in the corner margin. He wrote, at the bottom of the sketch: central occupant deceased. Large wolf-type spirit beast, severely injured prior to arrival and chained to far wall.

He closed the notebook and went back to the central chamber, before stepping through the portal.

The air was warmer once again, with Lin Che having his first feel of sunlight in who knows how long. He'd stopped tracking the days spent in the holy land, knowing that the action of doing that would just drive him insane. He could smell the wheat from the old farm. Elder Mao was standing four metres away, his hands clasped behind his back. His expression, for the first time since Lin Che had met him, had gone from its serious nonchalance into one of pure and utter shock. Beside him, Jianfeng dropped his coffee.

Lin Che took a breath of fresh air and held out the notebook open to the map he drew. Elder Mao took it and examined the layout sketch. He went through the subsequent pages at a faster pace before reading the final notation, and was still for a moment. He looked up.

"Do you know how long you spent in there?" he said. Lin Che considered for a while.

"I'm not sure. The light doesn't change in there." Elder Mao turned to Jianfeng.

"One hour and fifty-six minutes," said Jianfeng, after checking his phone too many times to confirm he wasn't wrong.

"We were about to start making calls. There wasn't time yet to fly anyone — we only had one hour and fifty-six minutes." Elder Mao coughed.

"The team has been mapping the outer corridor for some weeks," he said, choosing his tone carefully.

"They have not reached the junction."

"The creatures are manageable," said Lin Che.

"With the right technique and enough knowledge of their patterns and patrol routes."

"You gathered all that information in the span of two hours?" Lin Che nodded, slowly.

"Good." He closed the notebook.

"This is thorough work." Lin Che gathered this was as much of a compliment that Elder Mao was willing to give.

"You should understand that what you have just done represents considerably more than the mandate I gave you three hours ago, which was to stand in a field and receive a debrief." Lin Che said nothing.

"I am not criticising the outcome — far from it. What you have done provides you with plenty of merit for your formal introduction into the family, but I will be required to provide a full debrief to the rest of the clan. The details of your breakthrough will not be discussed." That was, Lin Che understood, another form of assistance. His debt to Elder Mao kept on growing.

"Thank you," he said. Elder Mao handed back the document.

"Keep this," he said.

"Make a cleaner copy when you're home and send me the copy." He turned and began walking back towards the car. Jianfeng was still looking at the portal.

"One hour and fifty-six minutes," he said again, this time to no one in particular. Lin Che put the notebook in his pocket and followed Elder Mao across the field.