Chương 12: Checkmate (1/3)

It felt like violently breaking the surface of water after nearly drowning—the sudden, desperate gasp of a man snatched back from the edge of suffocation. The moment Shi Yan stepped out of the Corrupted Zone, the smothering, unnatural gravity vanished like a lifted curse.

The freezing, sulfur-laced air of the abyss outside rushed into his lungs—sharp, biting, cleaner than anything he'd tasted since waking in this wretched hell. Each breath scraped against his throat like chilled razors, but it was honest air, untainted by demonic corruption.

He blinked hard, eyelids sticky with dried grime, then exhaled in a long, controlled stream that misted white in the cold. His scarred fingers tugged the straw cloak tighter around his shoulders, the coarse fiber scratching against his grime-caked neck and the still-tender flesh beneath. The straw smelled of mildew and old blood.

He glanced back over his shoulder.

His pupils narrowed.

The dense crimson miasma was already dissolving—unraveling in slow, dying spirals like blood diluting in water, losing cohesion, losing malice. The red tendrils writhed weakly, clawing at empty air before collapsing into wispy nothingness.

It seems, without the pitch-black pill anchoring it to the altar of skulls, the twisted, fleshy trees had begun to wither. Their bark—if it could even be called that—sagged like rotting meat, peeling away in long strips that slapped wetly against the mud. Their weeping sap hardened into brittle, amber-like crusts that cracked audibly in the silence, sharp little pops echoing faintly through the dying grove.

The floating talismans—those paper-thin scraps that had hovered with eerie stillness, defying wind and gravity alike—simply lost their buoyancy. They fluttered down into the mud with soft, wet slaps, one after another, their faintly glowing runes fading to ash-gray as they sank into the muck.

So the black pill and the array—which I still cannot find.

His dead, expressionless eyes narrowed a fraction further, the corners tightening with cold calculation.

Consume the core, break the array. Simple logic, yet...

Just thinking about the pill made his stomach tighten involuntarily, a reflexive clench of nausea. The chalky, suffocating texture of it still clung to the back of his throat like powdered stone, dry and gritty, coating his tongue with the ghost of corruption. His jaw worked unconsciously, trying to summon saliva to wash it away.

He had just swallowed that dangerous relic—the very thing capable of producing the red mist, the source of this zone's lethality.

But he shook off the thought with a sharp exhale through his nose, flexing his newly forged fingers. Tendons rolled over obsidian-dense bone with a faint creak of stretched leather. The sound was quiet, but sharp in the stillness—a small, visceral reminder of what he'd become. His knuckles popped softly as he curled his hand into a fist, then released it.

It was worth the risk.

He turned away from the dying anomaly and marched down the final stretch of the gorge, his boots crunching over brittle bone fragments and waterlogged gravel. The straw cloak swished faintly behind him, trailing through the mud.

The narrow, claustrophobic walls of the corpse-choked ravine suddenly fell away, opening up into a colossal, echoing underground cavern. The scale of it hit him like a physical blow—the sheer vastness swallowing sound, swallowing light.

The ceiling here was lost in thick, smog-filled darkness, but massive stalactites hung down like the jagged teeth of some ancient leviathan frozen mid-bite. Each one was easily ten, twenty feet long—stone fangs dripping with cold moisture that plinked faintly into unseen pools far below. The air here was colder still—damp and mineral-heavy, carrying the faint metallic tang of deep earth, iron, and old blood.

At the far end of the cavern was the exit.

The scavengers had called it a "lift," but that was a mortal's crude term for it—a pathetic simplification of what he now beheld.

It was an awe-inspiring, terrifying relic of ancient Daoist array-craft—a colossal, circular slab of smooth black bedrock, easily fifty yards across, hovering three feet above the cavern floor in absolute defiance of gravity. The stone was flawlessly polished, reflecting the faint golden glow like a pool of ink. No chains. No supports. No visible mechanism. Just stillness and weight suspended in empty air, humming faintly with restrained power.

Its edges were intricately carved with dense, glowing levitation runes—ancient script that pulsed in slow, rhythmic waves like a heartbeat. Faint, ethereal golden light bled from the base of the floating monolith, illuminating the massive vertical shaft that stretched straight up into the darkness toward Skycloud City. The light painted the cavern walls in shifting amber hues, casting long, distorted shadows.

The entire cavern floor before the floating stone was a flattened expanse of smoothly trampled bone-ash and crushed weapons—fragments of broken blades, shattered spear hafts, and rusted helms half-buried in the pale powder. The ash had been packed down by countless boots, countless struggles, countless deaths. It bore the texture of a killing floor, worn smooth by violence.

A textbook boss arena.

Shi Yan's gaze swept the perimeter with cold precision, cataloging exits, cover, angles. His eyes skipped past the floating platform and locked instead onto the monolithic figure patrolling the ground in front of the activation dais.

And there he is—the Abyssal Overseer.

He slowed his breathing instantly, each inhale shallow and silent, dropping his center of gravity into a combat crouch. His boots ground softly into the ash, distributing his weight evenly. His hand drifted instinctively toward the hilt of his chipped jian, thumb resting lightly against the guard.

The beast was easily nine feet tall—a hulking abomination of muscle and fused metal, a perversion of both flesh and iron. Its skin was completely gray, bloodless, corpse-pale and stretched taut over grotesquely swollen muscle, confirming it had reached the peak of the Ash-Marrow realm.

The Overseer didn't just wear armor; the heavy, rusted black-iron lamellar had literally fused to its flesh through who knew how long of demonic mutation. Plates of corroded metal jutted from its shoulders and ribs like calcified growths, the edges sharp and ragged, some pieces still bearing the remnants of military insignia—long-dead legions, forgotten wars. Rust flaked off with every movement, drifting down like bloody snow.

Its face was hidden behind a cracked bronze executioner's mask, the surface etched with peeling crimson script that had long since lost meaning. But two pinpricks of burning, dead light glowed from the eye-slits—sickly yellow, unblinking, predatory. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Most terrifying of all was the weapon it dragged in its right hand: a rusted guan dao—a crescent halberd built for execution, not combat. The pole was as thick as a tree trunk, bound in iron rings that clinked faintly with each movement, a slow, rhythmic death-knell. The massive, notched blade was stained deep brown, the blood resting on its edge so old it had become part of the steel itself, oxidized into permanence.

Every time the Overseer took a step, the cavern vibrated. Faint tremors rippled through the bone-ash beneath Shi Yan's boots, disturbing the powder in slow, concentric waves. Tiny fragments of stone rained silently from the stalactites overhead.

Damn. That's just pure abomination.

His lips pressed into a thin line, jaw tightening beneath the grime-streaked skin.

Is that even considered human? Or perhaps a demonic cultivator who practiced the wrong method?

His dead eyes tracked the creature's slow, rhythmic patrol with the detached focus of a marksman measuring windage. Left. Right. Pivot. Repeat. The beast moved with mechanical precision, dragging the halberd behind it in lazy arcs that left deep furrows in the ash.

Also, at this point, he didn't even care how those grave robbers had supposedly managed to sneak past this thing. Whatever trick they'd used was irrelevant now.

The problem was, if he tried to tiptoe onto that loud, creaking wooden elevator—no, that ancient levitation platform—the creature would cut him in half before he could even pull the lever.

He didn't rush in. Even though his new [35 Physique] and [35 Agility] theoretically put him on a level playing field with a Tier-1 Boss, a veteran soldier never engaged a physically larger hostile without a force multiplier. Basic doctrine.

Mass equals force. In a blade-lock, it would simply crush me into the dirt.

Using the darkness as cover, he scaled the cavern wall with terrifying, frictionless speed—his new muscles coiling and releasing perfectly, each leap calculated, silent. Fingers dug into jagged rock with obsidian-hard nails, boots found purchase on narrow ledges barely wide enough for his toes, and within moments he perched motionlessly in the high shadows of a massive stalactite overhead. The cold stone pressed against his chest, seeping chill through the straw cloak.

Condensation dripped slowly onto the back of his neck. His breathing slowed to nothing.

He settled into a sniper's crouch, weight balanced on the balls of his feet, knees bent, spine aligned.

And he waited.

In the military, ninety percent of combat was waiting. You sat in the mud, ignored the cold, and watched. Patience killed more enemies than bullets.

An hour passed. Then two.

From his vantage point, Shi Yan meticulously mapped the cavern floor with the cold efficiency of a tactician drafting a battlefield. He noted the slick patches of rotting human fat where bodies had been dragged—dark, greasy stains that reflected the faint golden glow like oil slicks, marking places where footing would fail. He noted the stable bedrock hidden beneath the ash, the sections where the bone-powder was thinner, safer to step, where sound would be muffled.

He watched the Overseer's patrol route with unblinking focus, committing every step to memory.

It was a simple figure-eight pattern. Predictable. Exploitable.

The beast didn't move continuously. It would patrol for hours, dragging the halberd in lazy arcs that left furrows in the ash, and then stop near a mound of Iron-Blood soldier corpses—twisted, rusted armor piled carelessly like discarded scrap—to leisurely snap their femurs and suck out the marrow. The wet crunch of splitting bone echoed faintly across the cavern each time, a sickening crack followed by the slurp of marrow being drawn from hollow shafts.

The creature's jaw worked methodically beneath the bronze mask, slurping and grinding, occasionally pausing to snap a rib or crush a skull for variety.

Alright. I know its route. Now, let's test the aggro radius.

With a flick of his wrist, Shi Yan tossed a small pebble. It arced through the dark in a perfect parabola and clattered sharply against a rusted siege shield twenty yards to the Overseer's left.

The reaction was instantaneous.

The Overseer didn't just casually look over. Its massive head snapped toward the noise—smooth, mechanical, predatory, like a turret locking onto a target. The beast pivoted its entire nine-foot frame with shocking speed, hoisting the impossibly heavy guan dao into a one-handed guard with a single, fluid motion. The iron rings on the haft clinked once, sharp and clear, echoing across the cavern.

It marched over to the shield with purpose, its heavy boots shaking the floor with each step—thud, thud, thud—and swept the immediate area with its glowing eyes, head swiveling left, then right.

It stared into the dark for a full ten seconds, utterly still except for the faint rise and fall of its chest. Then it let out a low, bass-heavy growl that rattled Shi Yan's ribs even from his perch high above, a sound so deep it felt like pressure against his sternum. The sound rolled through the cavern like distant thunder, reverberating off the walls.

Finally, the Overseer lowered its weapon with deliberate slowness and returned to its patrol, boots crunching slowly through the ash, dragging the halberd once more.

Not a mindless zombie. It has a high perception radius, and it investigates anomalies aggressively.

Yet despite this—or perhaps because of it—Shi Yan's hands trembled, not from fear, but excitement. A faint tremor ran through his scarred fingers, adrenaline beginning its slow crawl into his bloodstream. His dead eyes gleamed faintly in the darkness, pupils dilating. His pulse quickened, thrumming steadily in his ears. The Overseer's reaction, this environment, the perfect containment of the arena—it all surged through him like voltage, like the electric anticipation before breaching a kill-house.

His fingers flexed once against the cold stone, tendons pulling taut.

This is it.

Yet despite that surge of anticipation, he waited another twenty minutes, letting the Boss reset. His breathing remained shallow, controlled, each exhale measured. He watched the creature settle back into its rhythmic patrol, dragging the halberd lazily behind it, iron rings clinking softly in the silence.

Then, he dropped a heavier, jagged bone shard directly behind a stone pillar, about thirty yards to the Overseer's right.

Clack.

This time, the Overseer spun with lethal intent. It didn't investigate cautiously—it bounded toward the pillar, taking massive, ground-eating strides that shook the entire cavern floor, bone-ash exploding upward in clouds with each thunderous step.