Chương 115: Do I Still Need Her? (3/3)

Shi Yan gave a faint, curt nod—just once, barely perceptible beneath the shadow of his iron mask. The gesture carried no warmth, only confirmation.

Now that the terms had been settled, the alliance between them was considered forged.

The two moved together. With the scarred woman leading the way, they left the narrow alley and stepped into the vast plaza paved in obsidian stone, where the remaining eleven cultivators still sat locked within agonized trances, blood seeping from their pores as though their flesh itself were weeping. The cold stone underfoot gleamed dully beneath the greenish corpse-light, slick in places where condensation had gathered from the frigid, poisoned air.

Each breath Shi Yan drew tasted faintly metallic, tinged with sulfur and rot—a miasma so thick it settled on the tongue like oil.

Neither of them spared the rogue cultivators so much as a glance. To do so would have been to acknowledge weakness, to betray hesitation. The woman's boots scraped softly against the obsidian as she moved with practiced caution, her acid-burned cloak trailing behind her like a tattered banner. Shi Yan's heavier tread followed, the pitted iron of his armor creaking faintly with each measured step.

When they reached the very edge of the invisible hundred-foot killing boundary—the place where the Stele's baleful cognitive radiation became fatal—the scarred woman lowered herself into a steady, uneven crouch. Her knees bent with the controlled ease of someone long accustomed to fieldwork, though her right leg trembled slightly as it took her weight. She undid the heavy cloth bundle in her hands with swift, practiced motions, her fingers working at the knotted cord until it fell away.

The fabric peeled back to reveal a flawless slab of Mirror-Obsidian, polished until it shone like still black water under moonlight. It was roughly the size of a legionnaire's riot shield, its surface so perfectly smooth that not even the faint ripple of her breath disturbed its glassy reflection.

She raised the black mirror with both hands, arms straining slightly under its considerable weight, and adjusted its angle little by little—tilting it a fraction to the left, then fractionally upward—until the towering, grief-stricken form of the Stele was perfectly caught within its surface. The reflected monument seemed almost more real than the original, its lines sharper, its malevolence distilled and compressed within the obsidian frame.

"This mirror can sever much of its soul-bewitching intent," the woman whispered in a rush, her voice tight and strained as though each word cost her. Her eyes remained fixed upon the reflection alone, pupils dilated wide in the dim light, not daring to cast even the slightest look toward the true monolith looming at the edge of her sight. A bead of sweat traced down her scarred jawline despite the bone-deep cold.

"I can make out the outer form of the characters, but to break the cipher, the sequence must be roused. You must place your hand upon the primary cluster at the base and trace the glowing lines the moment they awaken. No matter what sounds enter your ears, do not halt. This thing often breeds devilish voices and false hearing."

Her breath misted white in the air as she spoke, hanging there for a heartbeat before dissipating into the poisonous haze.

"Understood," Shi Yan said, his tone flat and utterly devoid of emotion.

He did not waste words asking further. Reaching over his shoulder with one gauntleted hand, the iron plates of his vambrace scraping softly against his pauldron, he removed his heavy saber—the weight of it familiar, reassuring—and silently returned it to his bio-locked pouch. A faint spiritual ripple pulsed outward as the dimensional storage accepted the weapon, barely perceptible unless one was watching for it. Now both hands hung free at his sides, ready.

Then he stepped across the invisible boundary without hesitation.

The instant he crossed the hundred-foot mark, the air changed.

It felt as though he had walked into congealed glue, thick and clinging, pressing against his armor from all sides. The atmosphere itself seemed to thicken, to gain weight and substance, until each breath required conscious effort to draw. At the same time, a shrill metallic whine began to scrape against his ears, as if countless rusted blades were grinding together within his skull—a sound that existed somewhere between hearing and sensation, vibrating through bone rather than air.

It was the lingering psychic radiation of dead immortals, probing wildly for a soul to crush, their final hatreds still clawing at the living world centuries after their deaths.

Shi Yan passed a rogue cultivator whose nose bled without cease, twin rivulets of crimson streaming down over his lips and dripping from his chin to pool in the hollow of his throat. The man's face was waxen, slack-jawed, eyes rolled back until only the yellowed whites showed. He seemed utterly unaware of Shi Yan's presence, his whole mind trapped in a desperate and perilous struggle against forces he could neither see nor comprehend.

Step by step, Shi Yan arrived at the foot of the Stele.

At such close range, the black stone felt strangely alive, almost warm beneath the touch—not the comforting warmth of sunlight, but the feverish heat of infected flesh. The savage and terrifying characters carved upon its surface pulsed with a violent crimson light, as though fresh blood flowed through ancient wounds, throbbing in time with some vast, unseen heartbeat. The script twisted and writhed at the edges of perception, refusing to hold still, each stroke seeming to breathe with malevolent intent.

Good, Shi Yan thought, a trace of cold satisfaction settling in his heart like frost crystallizing on glass. It was smoother than expected. In this world, where nearly every path concealed a killing trap or hidden array, he had long assumed that something so important could not possibly be approached without resistance.

But... when I prepare for a bitter siege, the gate is left standing open?

Though he inwardly lamented this rare stroke of fortune with no small suspicion—in his experience, open gates were often the deadliest traps—he let out a soft breath that misted white before his mask and raised his unarmored right hand. The cold air bit at his exposed skin, raising gooseflesh along his forearm.

Yet before pressing his bare palm against the stone, he paused for the briefest instant to inspect its surface, his soldier's instincts demanding one final check for tripwires, pressure plates, anything out of place. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Unbeknownst to him, seventy feet away, the scarred woman had stopped breathing altogether. Her chest remained frozen mid-inhalation, lungs burning with the effort of holding still. Her fingers clenched the edges of the obsidian mirror so hard that her knuckles ached, the bones pressing white against her scarred skin, tendons standing out like cords beneath the surface.

No... damn it.

When she saw the masked young master stride fearlessly to the Stele only to stop short before touching it, her heart sank at once—a leaden weight dropping into her stomach. Inwardly, she cursed, believing the pressure of the Stele had frozen him in place just as it had the other fools in the plaza, their minds shattered before they even realized the danger. The hope in her eyes swiftly dimmed, turning to bitter resignation. The light in her pupils seemed to gutter like a candle flame starved of air.

It is finished...

She shook her head slowly, the motion heavy with defeat, ready to lower the mirror and flee at once before the Stele claimed his life and drew the notice of the Ghost Market's Enforcers—those faceless hunters who tolerated no disturbances within their cursed domain.

But then she saw it.

His hand touched the Stele.

There was no burst of blood. No miserable scream. No convulsive spasm or sudden collapse. He did not even tremble. His armored form remained as solid and unmoved as the stone itself.

Her breath caught in her throat, eyes widening until the whites showed all around her dark irises.

Meanwhile, within the dark depths of Shi Yan's mind, the cold blue radiance of his System flared violently to life, swallowing his entire field of vision in a wash of brilliant azure light.

[Entity Recognized: Stele of the Sunken Celestials] [Cultivation Resonance: Unknown (Pre-Epoch / High-Density Conceptual Construct)] [Threat to Current Vessel: CONCEPTUAL / COGNITIVE BIO-HAZARD (Avoid Direct Optical Connection)] [Condition: Entities possessing a Spiritual Root or actively cycling an internal Dantian will suffer immediate, catastrophic soul-degradation upon extended exposure.] Once more, the earlier information regarding the Stele appeared before his eyes, each line of text sharp and clinical against the void. Yet only a moment later, fresh lines of text streamed rapidly across the blue interface, scrolling downward with mechanical precision.

[System Warning: Foreign Cognitive Matrix Overload Attempted.] [Targeting: Spiritual Root... NULL.] [Targeting: Reincarnation Tether... NULL.] [Anomaly: 10 → Quarantine Protocol Engaged. Threat Neutralized.] Excellent. As expected of the Anomaly stat.

Now he could confirm with certainty that his twofold conjecture had been correct. The heavens could not taint what was not there, and the System was an absolute barrier—an impenetrable firewall between his soul and the predatory world around him.

Thus, Shi Yan paid no heed to the warning before him.

Following the plan they had discussed, he extended his index finger and began to trace the deep grooves of the glowing crimson characters, his fingertip following the ancient lines carved into the stone. The surface was rough beneath his touch, gritty with centuries of accumulated corruption, and faintly warm—almost feverish. He moved smoothly from one jagged symbol to the next, each stroke deliberate and unhurried, guiding the sequence into motion for the scarred woman to decipher.

As his finger passed over each character, the crimson glow intensified, flaring brighter as though responding to living contact, then fading to a sullen ember once he moved on.

"I see it," the woman hissed from the boundary, her voice thin and urgent, edged with barely-restrained excitement. Her eyes darted frantically across the mirror as the reflected characters lit one after another in sequence, each symbol burning itself into her memory.

"I have the outer gate... now shifting to the miasma labyrinth... tracing the meridians of the dead god's valley..."

Her breathing quickened, shallow and rapid, misting in quick bursts before her face. Sweat beaded along her temples despite the freezing air, the strain of maintaining perfect focus written across every line of her scarred features.

What she was deciphering was one single route—an exceptionally intricate one, layered with false paths and deadly divergences.

Yet while Shi Yan remained vigilant, dividing his attention between the plaza—where the dying cultivators sat like grotesque statues—and the scarred woman, who might still turn on him at any moment with that hidden jade needle, the System was quietly doing something else beneath the surface.

A new translucent blue screen flashed before his eyes, overlaying the crimson script of the Stele.

[System Directive: Parsing Extracted Geographic Memory Matrix...] [Translating Pre-Epoch Spatial Topography...] A strange pressure suddenly gathered behind Shi Yan's eyes, building like water behind a dam. It did not hurt. Rather, it felt as though an immense torrent of digitized knowledge was being forcibly compressed into his flesh and blood, rewriting neural pathways, carving new channels through his consciousness.

His vision flickered once, twice, as data streamed directly into his brain—coordinates, distances, elevations, spiritual density readings—all of it flooding in at once.

[System Update: WORLD MAP UNLOCKED.] [Entity Recognized: Nine Fragments of the Shattered Dao Located.] [Local Tag Established: Cloud-Mirror Legacy Dungeon.] Shi Yan blinked.

For the briefest moment, the world before him vanished.

In its place, a vast and horrifying three-dimensional map seared itself into his vision with overwhelming clarity, lines of light sketching continents and oceans in stark detail. He saw the whole of the Heavenly Mandate sprawled before him like a corpse on a dissection table—its mountain ranges rendered as wireframe ridges, its rivers as glowing blue threads. He saw the Pale Sea, bleak and suffocating, separating the lands like a wound that refused to heal.

He saw far to the east the gilded, sprawling dystopia of the Central Zenith, its cities marked in cold white light, pulsing with concentrated spiritual density.

This is... the map? The Shattered Realm Su Yin spoke of?

And upon the bleeding, fractured edges of the world, he saw nine enormous crimson marks pulsing like hearts—each one a beacon of concentrated power, throbbing with malevolent vitality. Before he could fully grasp the scale of what lay before him, more lines of text flashed into view, overlaying the map with clinical precision.

[System Directive: Cartographical Matrix Updated.] [Geographic Anomalies Located: Nine Fragments of the Shattered Dao.] [Local Target Tagged: Cloud-Mirror Legacy Dungeon (Distance: 42 Miles North).] [Recommended Response: Infiltrate, Consume, Assimilate.] Consume and Assimilate? Shi Yan thought, his eyes narrowing behind his mask at the sheer audacity of the interface.

The System made it sound like picking fruit from a tree—simple, effortless, a matter of reaching out and plucking what you wanted. But he was a soldier. He had spent years reading tactical maps, identifying strategic objectives, and assessing cost-benefit ratios in blood and lives. He looked at the massive crimson blips pulsating across the continent and immediately understood the reality: these were not waypoints.

They were more like military strongholds. They were the centers of gravity for the world's apex predators, guarded by monsters, death-zones, and who knows what Tier-3 entities—cultivators who could level cities with a gesture, whose very presence warped reality.

To conquer even one of them would require a staggering amount of bloodshed, meticulous planning, overwhelming force, and more than a little luck. And the System wanted him to hunt all nine?

Hah. Let's think about that later. For now— So I have already bypassed her. I drew the coordinates out for myself.

This matter was of enormous consequence.

The Stele had not merely revealed to him the location of the Cloud-Mirror Secret Heritage—or Secret Realm, or as he privately named it, a legacy dungeon. It had handed him the greater map itself: the broad positions of every major anomaly upon the continent, every critical fragment of the shattered world laid bare like organs on an autopsy table.

If he wished, he could turn away this very moment, leave without another word, and seek out those fragments according to his own designs, at his own pace, free from entanglements and obligations.

Then the true question arose.

Do I still need her?

Shi Yan calmly weighed the matter, his mind shifting into the cold, analytical mode he had honed over years of command decisions.

He did not act rashly, nor did he cast aside reason for impulse. Such a matter naturally required him to consider gain and loss first—to strip away emotion and sentiment and evaluate the situation with ruthless clarity.

She holds the cipher. I hold the destination. If I cut off this alliance now, all spoils will fall into my hands alone, and I will also remove the danger of her betraying me later.