Chương 108: Turning His Back (2/3)

Without a physical chronometer, Shi Yan relied entirely on the biological metronome of his own body.

While hiding, he had dropped his heart rate to one single, hollow thump per minute to achieve Absolute Zero—a controlled death masquerading as survival.

To calculate the lost time, he applied a basic spatial-velocity equation, the numbers clicking through his mind with mechanical precision. The procession of paper dolls had been moving at a stiff, uniform pace of approximately 1. 5 meters per second—he'd tracked their gait through the slit of his mask, measuring stride length against the bone-paved intervals beneath their feet.

Based on the fading wail of the funeral flute—now a distant, ghostly thread of sound barely distinguishable from the market's ambient moan—and the time it took the bruised purple glow to withdraw a hundred meters down the avenue and dissolve completely into the fog, he judged that he had remained functionally "dead" in the shrine's shadow for just under two minutes.

Add in the five-minute post-contact safety buffer, and the numbers aligned immediately with cold, unforgiving clarity.

He had roughly ninety-three minutes remaining before the bridge collapsed at 5: 00 AM. Twenty of those would be spent marching back to the Sump through the twisting, predator-thick warrens. Another thirty had to be reserved as a hard tactical buffer in case of hostile interception—ambush, pursuit, or worse.

That left exactly forty-three minutes of operational time to secure the information he came for.

Forty-three minutes to map out the Cloud-Mirror Sect's Shattered Realm, identify the location of the Celestial Marrow, and find a path through the Yin-miasma that didn't involve massacring innocent villagers to refine a blood-pill.

If I abort now, I survive the night but fail the long-term campaign. I remain blind to the Cloud-Mirror threat, and my progression stagnates. That is an unacceptable outcome.

His jaw clenched hard beneath the mask, teeth grinding briefly against the bitter arithmetic of necessity.

Then, he continued his march toward the center of the Ghost Market.

…

As he walked, iron-shod boots striking the pavement in steady, measured rhythm, he noticed the immediate shift in his surroundings.

The claustrophobic alleys—walls leaning inward like closing jaws, dripping with mildew and crawling shadows—the chaotic, wretched stalls piled high with unidentifiable viscera and cursed trinkets, and the decaying wooden pagodas that groaned and swayed despite the absence of wind, all began to give way to something far older. Something that predated the filth and desperation of the outer market.

The architecture grew grander, monolithic, and silent. Structures rose on either side of him like the ribs of some colossal, long-dead beast—smooth stone columns wider than his armspan, carved with weathered glyphs he couldn't read but instinctively recognized as warnings. The crushed bone beneath his boots was replaced by massive, perfectly square slabs of polished black obsidian that reflected the sickly violet sky overhead in warped, liquid smears.

Each step rang out with a dull, resonant clack that echoed far too long in the oppressive stillness.

The disorganized noise of haggling demons—shrill bartering, wet snarls, the scrape of claws on stone—faded into a heavy, oppressive quiet that pressed against his eardrums like submerged pressure. This wasn't a slum anymore; this was the dead heart of the dimension. The place where even monsters feared to raise their voices.

Eventually, the narrow avenues opened up entirely, stone walls peeling back like drawn curtains, giving way to a massive, perfectly circular plaza sunken into the bedrock like a wound carved into the earth itself.

Shi Yan came to a halt at the precipice of the plaza, his entire body going still with the disciplined freeze of a soldier who'd just spotted enemy fortifications. His eyes immediately locked onto the colossal structure dominating the dead center of the vast, open space.

A statue—no, a stele?

It was a monument of terrifying, oppressive majesty.

Standing over eighty feet tall—the height of a seven-story building—the monolithic obelisk reached aggressively upward into the violet, inverted sky of the dimension like a blade thrust through the world's throat.

It was carved from a single, unbroken slab of jagged, pitch-black stone that seemed to devour the ambient light around it, creating a zone of visual distortion where the edges blurred and the air itself looked bruised. There were no statues, no ornate dragon carvings, no symbols of religious worship or sectarian pride. It was just a brutal, geometric slab of raw history—unadorned, uncompromising, and impossibly ancient.

Down its smooth, sweeping surface, hundreds of glowing, blood-red characters cascaded like open wounds weeping light. They were written in a jagged, primordial script that Shi Yan didn't recognize—harsh, angular strokes that looked less like language and more like the scars left by claws dragging through stone. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

The characters didn't just glow; they pulsated. They throbbed in a slow, rhythmic cadence—throb... throb... throb—expanding and contracting with the steady, hypnotic tempo of a buried heartbeat, as if the massive obelisk was a living, breathing entity with a heart buried deep inside the stone, pumping something older than blood through veins of fossilized rock.

Water was bleeding from the very top of the monument, pouring from an invisible source at the apex. But it didn't look or behave like normal water. It cascaded down over the glowing red letters in thick, heavy sheets, moving far too slowly—viscous and deliberate—like liquid mercury mixed with frozen oil, clinging to the stone in unnatural rivulets that defied gravity's pull before reluctantly sliding downward.

Even from over two hundred feet away, standing at the elevated edge of the plaza with empty air between him and the monument, Shi Yan could feel the ambient pressure radiating off that liquid. It held an unnatural cold that made the hairs on his arms stand on end beneath his vambraces—not the sharp, biting cold of winter wind, but a suffocating, heavy dampness that felt like taking a deep breath inside a flooded iron lung.

It was a suffocating pressure that seemed to demand the environment submit to its weight, the very air bowing under invisible force.

For a brief, unguarded moment, Shi Yan just stared, his breath shallow and his posture momentarily slack.

Despite the eerie looks and feeling of the empty surrounding—the unnatural silence, the abandoned perfection of the plaza, the wrongness that clung to every angle— It's magnificent, Shi Yan thought, eyes narrowing behind the mask's slits as something almost like reverence flickered through his tactical assessment. It reminded him of the first time he had seen a massive piece of unexploded ordinance in the field—a rusted, half-buried bomb the size of a sedan, sand-scoured and ancient, yet still lethal.

A perfect, terrifying piece of architecture possessing a terrible, undeniable beauty in its capacity for annihilation.

To stand before something so ancient and incomprehensibly powerful made the petty squabbles of the Cloud-Mirror Sect feel infinitesimally small—like insects fighting over a grain of rice beneath the shadow of a mountain.

But that profoundly human awe lasted for precisely three seconds before the cold, rigid programming of the soldier violently overrode it, slamming back into place like a steel shutter.

Of course this is not a tourist attraction. Beauty in this world is always a predator's camouflage.

His shoulders squared. His breathing steadied. His gaze sharpened into a weapon.

He scanned the perimeter with methodical precision, eyes tracking left to right in overlapping sectors. The plaza itself was geometrically perfect—a flawless circle over three hundred feet in diameter, edges sharp and deliberate—which meant it was entirely artificial. Constructed. Designed.

But more importantly—it was empty.

In a sprawling, overcrowded black market where thousands of dead and living cultivators were constantly fighting for a square foot of trading space, elbowing and snarling over scraps of cursed silk and brittle spirit jade, this massive, pristine plaza was completely abandoned.

There were no stalls pitched against the stone perimeter. No demons lingering in the shadows cast by the obelisk's bulk. No paper-doll merchants trying to sell artifacts near it, no incense smoke curling upward, no bloodstains marring the obsidian slabs.

Nothing native to this market dared to step within the perimeter.

It's a kill zone, Shi Yan concluded instantly, his tactical instincts screaming confirmation. A massive, localized area-of-effect hazard—like stepping into a minefield marked only by the absence of life.

His footsteps stopped entirely, boot soles gripping the obsidian. His brow furrowed tightly beneath the mask, creases forming across his forehead. His right hand immediately dropped to his side, fingertips grazing the invisible threshold of his bio-locked spatial pouch, muscles coiling in preparation to instantly draw his Heavy Saber if the situation degraded.

Then… he noticed another anomaly.

Exactly one hundred feet away from the base of the massive black obelisk—measured with unnatural precision, as if marked by invisible boundary lines—forming a perfect, wide semi-circle like supplicants arrayed before an altar, sat an assortment of living cultivators.

There were perhaps twelve of them in total, scattered across the arc in deliberate intervals. They were not walking. They were not talking to each other. They were all sitting in rigid, cross-legged lotus positions, spines straight as iron rods, their eyes fixed intensely on the glowing red script of the monolith with the unblinking focus of men staring into the sun.

Shi Yan noticed that they were sweating profusely—rivers of moisture pouring down faces and necks, soaking through expensive robes and pooling on the obsidian beneath them. Steam was rolling off their shoulders in thick, curling plumes, rising into the violet sky as their bodies desperately vented heat like overworked engines on the verge of catastrophic failure.

Even from this distance, he could see the subtle, violent tremors wracking their muscles—shoulders twitching, hands clenched white-knuckled against their knees, jaws locked so tight he could see the cords of tendon standing out beneath their skin—as if they were physically straining against an invisible, crushing weight holding them against the obsidian floor like insects pinned beneath glass.

Hostages? He narrowed his eyes, scanning for captors, for chains, for formation flags.

Then a transparent screen flashed before his eyes, text materializing in clean, clinical lines.

[Entity Recognized: Independent Cultivator] [Cultivation Resonance: Tier-2 Peak (Slag-Purge Realm)] [Threat Assessment: LETHAL] Tier 2 peak? So it's called Slag-Purge? This was the first time he had come into contact with a being at peak Tier 2, while he himself was still at late-stage Tier 2, the White-Hot Realm. The gap between them—narrow in numerical terms—represented a chasm in actual combat capability.

But that was not his entire focus.

Then another transparent screen flashed before his eyes when he snapped his gaze to a woman sitting three feet to the left, dressed in flowing crimson robes that rippled and steamed as they fought against the unnatural cold radiating from the monument.

[Entity Recognized: Hidden Sect Elder] [Cultivation Resonance: Tier-2 Late (White-Hot Realm)] [Threat Assessment: LETHAL] This…

This time Shi Yan was silent, his breath held entirely as his vigilance clocked to the maximum, every nerve firing at combat readiness as he locked onto an impossibly still figure at the very center of the formation—a figure so motionless they resembled a statue carved from pale jade, clad in pristine, spun-silver robes that shimmered faintly even in the dim light, untouched by sweat or steam.

[Entity Recognized: Unknown Sovereign Entity] [Cultivation Resonance: Tier-3 Early (Shattered-Halo Realm)] [Threat Assessment: FATAL BEYOND CALCULATION] Shi Yan's breath hitched slightly, his heart giving a single, hard thump against his ribs like a hammer striking an anvil.

Tier-3…

Shattered-Halo Realm.

Besides those guards from the Wei Clan back then—distant, untouchable figures he'd only glimpsed through layers of palace security—now he'd met another cultivator at Tier 3 in the flesh.

But…

A Shattered-Halo realm expert. A literal walking pseudo-immortal, a being who could shatter mountains with a gesture and boil rivers with their aura alone, basically strong enough to contend with the great powers entrenched in Skycloud City.

Yet, despite their overwhelming, terrifying power—despite the sheer metaphysical weight they carried—their condition was absolutely horrific.

The silver-robed figure's face was ashen, lips bloodless and trembling. Veins stood out starkly along their temples, pulsing visibly with each labored breath. Their hands, resting on their knees, were clenched so tightly that blood seeped from beneath their fingernails, dripping in slow, dark drops onto the obsidian.

What the hell is pinning them down? Shi Yan thought, his eyes darting frantically across the plaza in sharp, scanning sweeps, searching for tripwires, array flags, hidden snipers, anchored talismans—anything that could explain this.

I don't hear suppressing fire. I don't see any offensive formations glowing on the ground. There are no spatial locks binding them—no shimmering barriers, no chains of light or shadow. Yet they look like they're sitting inside a microwave, struggling to breathe, their bodies cooking from the inside out.