Chương 121: The Bridge Was Bait (3/3)

Before anything else, Shi Yan lowered his gaze to the transparent screen hanging before his eyes, the faint luminescence casting no reflection in the darkness of the aqueduct tunnel.

[Vessel Status: STABLE] [Sieve Drain: 88% Stamina Depleted. Muscular micro-tears detected.] His eyelids twitched—a barely perceptible tremor beneath the iron mask's shadowed eye-slits—though he suppressed any further change in expression. The muscles around his jaw tightened fractionally, then went still.

Forcing the [Black-Iron Body Art] to its uttermost limit, then unleashing the explosive recoil of the [Blood-Ignition Flash Step] while carrying another person's dead weight had almost emptied him in a single breath.

His lungs still burned with the memory of that exertion, a dull ache radiating through his ribs with every shallow inhalation.

On a battlefield where life and death hung by a hair's breadth, such depletion was no different from having half a foot already planted in the Yellow Springs.

Eighty-eight percent in less than ten seconds.

Shi Yan let out a cold laugh inwardly, the sound never reaching his lips.

The cost was monstrous. The numbers alone were damning. Yet after a moment's cold calculation, it was not difficult to understand. Dragging this woman's limp, uncooperative body through the suffocating spatial pressure of a collapsing dimensional gate had not merely added weight—it had multiplied the burden on his flesh and blood severalfold. Every step had felt like wading through hardening cement, the air itself resisting his passage as reality and the ghost realm tore themselves apart around him.

The [Sieve Effect] was still his greatest hidden danger. To force out the peak destructive power of Tier-2 was to drive his Daoless body like a furnace stoked beyond its limits, with no means to temper the blaze. Heat still radiated from the gaps in his armor plating, wisps of steam curling upward into the sulfurous gloom of the tunnel. The metal itself was warm to the touch, conducting the excess energy that his mortal frame could not properly contain.

A four-hundred-percent drain meant the window in which he could erupt with his greatest killing power was pitifully short—a knife's edge of opportunity, sharp and unforgiving. If dragged into a prolonged struggle, he might not die beneath an enemy's blade at all, but be consumed alive by the exhaustion of his own body, collapsing from within like a structure whose supports had been hollowed out.

Spend 50 Dao Embers. Combustion Refuel.

[System Calculation Request: Confirmed.] [Combustion Refuel: -50 Dao Embers. Remaining Reserve: 29, 225 Dao Embers.] At once, a fierce current of manufactured heat rushed through his meridians and limbs—artificial, sterile, but brutally effective. It flooded through him like molten iron poured into a cast, filling every hollow space left by exhaustion. The burning soreness in his muscles rapidly faded, muscle fibers knitting back together under the System's forced reconstruction.

The deep, bone-deep weariness that had threatened to buckle his knees evaporated as the harvested energy was ruthlessly converted into fresh bodily fuel. He neither staggered nor gasped for breath; his armored frame merely settled, weight redistributing with a faint creak of leather straps, and the weariness vanished as abruptly as a snapped thread.

"Huff..."

After letting out a single measured breath—fog condensing briefly in the cold tunnel air before dissipating—Shi Yan narrowed his eyes behind the mask's hollow slits.

Fifty Dao Embers for a single replenishment—cheap enough for an emergency measure. Acceptable losses for immediate tactical recovery.

He flexed the gauntleted fingers of one hand, armored joints articulating smoothly as he tested the restored strength in his flesh. The response was immediate, crisp. No lag. No tremor. The power had returned as though it had never left.

But it was still only temporary support, not something to rely on. A patch, not a solution.

At present, his reserves were abundant enough—twenty-nine thousand remained, a considerable war chest. Yet if forced to repeatedly use this method during a prolonged confrontation with the Cloud-Mirror army, no matter how deep his foundation, it would be slowly carved away bit by bit. Death by a thousand cuts, each one purchased with his own stolen currency.

This only further confirmed the principle he had already set for himself: he could not afford to exchange blows head-on like those cultivators who trusted in deep reserves and steady foundations, who could weather prolonged engagements through sheer spiritual endurance. His battles had to end the instant they began—overwhelming force applied to a single critical point, then immediate disengagement.

Otherwise, if he fell into encirclement, surrounded and pressed from all sides, he would have no choice but to kill the weaker foes mid-battle, harvest their Dao Embers like grain before the scythe, and use them to sustain himself long enough to deal with the true threat. A brutal calculus of survival.

A few paces away, the scarred woman had finally steadied her breathing. Her chest no longer heaved with desperate gulps of air; the rhythm had slowed, deepened, become controlled once more. As the primal terror of the Ghost Market receded from her heart—that animal panic that came from touching the boundary between life and death—it was quickly replaced by the keen, calculating suspicion of a seasoned rogue cultivator. Her eyes, though still showing traces of bloodshot strain, had regained their sharpness.

She wiped the filthy water and bile from her chin with the back of one trembling hand, the acid-scarred fabric of her sleeve smearing the mess across her jaw. Then she looked back over her shoulder toward the place where the pontoon bridge had vanished, her brows drawing tightly together in a sharp furrow of concentration. The empty space where supernatural architecture had once stood now showed only darkness—mundane, unremarkable tunnel stretching backward into gloom. No trace remained of the spectral passage.

"It does not make sense," the woman muttered, her voice emerging hoarse and scraped raw, as though she had been screaming—though she had not. Still, strength was already returning to it, threading through the roughness like iron through silk. She pushed herself up from her hands and knees with visible effort, mud and cold water dripping from her palms.

"The Chain-Bearers are the Wardens of the Yellow Springs. They only stir when the balance of the ledger is broken—when cosmic debts remain unpaid, when the flow of souls and currency is disrupted." Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

Her fingers brushed unconsciously over the broadsword at her hip, as if seeking reassurance from its solid presence.

"A stolen soul. An unpaid toll. A violated taboo of the Market—these are the transgressions that rouse them from their vigil."

She turned toward Shi Yan, suspicion hardening the scarred planes of her face. Her eyes narrowed, searching his masked visage for any flicker of reaction.

"We took no physical object from the Stele. We merely drew upon what lay inscribed on its surface, as one might read from a scroll left open in a library. I used my mirror to reflect its intent, and you used your hand to sense its embedded will. In the past, others have also come seeking that Stele, hoping to comprehend weapon intents from the residual impressions left by ancient masters.

At most, they suffered a backlash of the mind—spiritual pressure that cracked their focus, intent that wounded their consciousness. Never did the Ghost Market rouse the Wardens to hunt them down like criminals who had defiled a sacred tomb."

Her hand tightened around the hilt of her broadsword until her knuckles turned pale, the scarred skin stretching white over bone. The leather wrapping creaked faintly under the pressure.

"To seal the dimension itself... to summon a Chain-Bearer and collapse the boundary between realms—" Her voice dropped lower, edged with the cold logic of someone piecing together a puzzle whose final shape frightened her.

"The Ghost Market did not react as though we had merely read the Stele's surface inscriptions. It reacted as though we had tried to uproot it from its very foundations, to tear away something fundamental that should never have been moved."

She took a half-step closer, mud squelching beneath her boot.

"Why?"

Behind the emotionless iron slits of the Yaksha mask, Shi Yan's gaze remained flat and still, revealing nothing. Not a flicker. Not a blink. The cold calculation behind his eyes was invisible, locked away beneath layers of discipline and the obscuring barrier of forged metal.

Of course.

Because it was me.

He had not merely read a surface layer of information, nor had he only comprehended a single weapon intent like some wandering swordsman seeking enlightenment from ancient carvings. The moment his bare hand touched that cursed black stone, his Daoless System had behaved like a bottomless abyss opening beneath still water.

It had bypassed the so-called outer layer—the accessible memories left for mortal comprehension—pierced through whatever false surface or protective veil the Stele's original architects had erected, reached directly into the ancient remnants of the dead immortals' fragmented memories, and seized the complete, localized totality of the world's geographical laws. Not a fragment. Not a reflection. The whole.

[WORLD MAP UNLOCKED.] That notification still rested quietly at the corner of his vision, unobtrusive but undeniable—a digital monument to theft on a cosmic scale.

To put it simply, he had not scooped up a cup of water from the river to quench his thirst—he had taken a perfect copy of the entire sea, draining its essence while leaving the shell intact. No wonder, then, that the autonomous laws governing the Ghost Market had sensed the violent disturbance in the Stele's conceptual weight, the sudden hemorrhaging of foundational information, and activated such an extreme sealing measure. The Market's own immune system, responding to an infection.

Naturally, Shi Yan was not foolish enough to admit any of this aloud.

Still, one matter continued to trouble him, gnawing at the edges of his tactical assessment like a rat at old rope.

The Nine Fragments of the Shattered Dao.

That was the name his System had given the anomalies marked on the World Map—nine distinct points of corrupted data, nine wounds in the fabric of reality itself. Yet among the uppermost, most easily accessible layers of the Stele's memory—conveniently enough for that woman's master to decipher a couple times ago, as she had mentioned—there just so happened to be a localized map leading to the Cloud-Mirror Sect's Legacy Dungeon. One of those very same Fragments.

Shi Yan's brow furrowed beneath the mask, a muscle twitching above his right eye.

Things that are too easy to find are rarely left there by accident.

Too much of a coincidence, he thought, turning the pieces over in his mind with the methodical precision of a soldier disassembling a trap.

Either someone deliberately placed it there—carved that specific map into the Stele's accessible surface like bait on a hook—or someone intentionally raised the topography of that particular Shattered Realm to the surface of the Stele's intent, knowing full well that rogue cultivators frequenting the Ghost Market would eventually detect it, drawn like moths to a flame they mistook for treasure.

It was bait. A deliberate lure.

The kind of trap that relied not on chains and locks, but on greed and ambition.

Shi Yan's hand moved, as if by habit born of countless battlefields, toward the massive dark-iron pommel of his newly forged Demonic Heavy Saber, still strapped diagonally across his back. The leather binding creaked faintly as his fingers brushed the wrapped hilt. His stance remained loose and unhurried, weight distributed evenly across both feet, posture suggesting nothing more than casual readiness.

Yet beneath the Stoneback Boar armor's overlapping plates, every sinew of his body was already wound tight as a crossbow string, ready to erupt into explosive motion at the first sign of betrayal.

His cold, machine-like gaze settled upon the scarred woman, analyzing her with the dispassionate focus of a surgeon studying anatomy. Micro-expressions. Breathing patterns. Hand positions. Weight distribution.

Is she part of this, or merely a fool who has wandered into waters far deeper than she understands?

The question was critical. Allies and tools could be useful. Co-conspirators and enemy agents had to be eliminated.

For a great sect—one willing even to use its outer disciples as expendable harvesters of spiritual roots, treating human lives as renewable resources—neither fools nor convenient coincidences would ever be lacking. Such things were commonplace in their ledgers, written off without a second thought. Collateral damage in the pursuit of immortal ascension.

And the Cloud-Mirror Sect was no small power scraping by on the margins of the cultivation world.

Those outer disciples alone, though they appeared merely to be "learning the foundations of cultivation" in the eyes of naive commoners, were enough to form a small army—hundreds strong, each one a weapon pointed outward. Added to that were their Peak Tier-2 Elders, masters whose sword intent could cleave mountains, and above them all, a Patriarch striving toward the legendary Tier-4 realm, grasping at the threshold of true immortality.

If, as Su Yin had said during their brief exchange before his execution, the Sect had long guarded that forbidden back-mountain and made deliberate use of that cursed place—harvesting its resources, studying its secrets—then if a map leading directly to it truly existed inscribed on a rock in the Ghost Market, accessible to any rogue cultivator with enough coin and desperation, why had they allowed it to remain?

With the strength they possessed, they could easily have sent a strike force into the Sump decades ago, sealed off the Stele through overwhelming spiritual pressure, and destroyed it outright to protect their secrets. Ground it to dust. Scattered the fragments. Erased the knowledge from existence.

Even if doing so meant violating the sacred neutrality laws of the Market—laws older than most sects—at worst they would only need to throw away a few expendable pawns, outer disciples whose deaths could be blamed on "training accidents" or "demonic beast attacks." The Ghost Market's retribution would be satisfied with blood, as it always was, and the Sect's core would remain untouched.

But they had not done so.

They had left it there, untouched and accessible, year after year.

Why?

Perhaps because the Stele itself is a sieve, Shi Yan thought, his mind spinning out the scheme with cold clarity, assembling the pieces into a picture of calculated cruelty. What is obvious bait used for, if not to draw in prey? And once the prey takes the bait, you need not chase them—they come to you willingly, throats bared.

And the Shattered Realm beneath the Cloud-Mirror Sect's back-mountain was an unmapped killing ground—a labyrinth of death that even the Sect itself did not fully understand.

The Cloud-Mirror Sect did not know the exact lay of the Legacy Dungeon beneath their own mountain. Ancient records had been lost, burned in sect wars or simply eroded by time's passage.

They knew only that the entrance existed, hidden in the forbidden zone, while the interior was choked with Yin-miasma thick enough to corrode spiritual sense, dead immortals whose remnant wills still hungered for living essence, and ancient trap arrays laid down by cultivators whose understanding of formations had been lost to the modern era. A tomb of treasures wrapped in layers of lethal mystery.

If they sent their own elite disciples to probe the way, forcing their precious inner sect talents to map those death-filled corridors, the losses would be too severe—unacceptable hemorrhaging of resources that took decades to cultivate.

Then what would a ruthless, domineering faction do? What would a sect that had already demonstrated its willingness to sacrifice human lives for advancement choose?

They would let the map "leak" into the black market, like blood dripping into water to attract sharks.

They would allow arrogant rogue cultivators to decipher it, to believe themselves clever for finding what was meant to be found.

Those rogues, believing they had stolen a heaven-sent opportunity, drunk on visions of ancient treasures and lost techniques, would sneak past the Sect's outer territories under cover of darkness and descend eagerly into the Shattered Realm.

The rogues would trigger the ancient traps—pressure plates and formation arrays that had waited centuries for fresh victims.

The rogues would die beneath the claws of mutated beasts—creatures warped by Yin-miasma into something no longer quite animal, no longer quite demon.

The rogues would clear the road, their corpses marking safe passages and their deaths revealing hidden dangers.