Chương 101: The Ambush

The tunnel beneath the Celestial Wall had been built to deceive. It was narrow enough to force single file, its walls damp with condensation that glittered in the faint glow of Lian's formation lamp. The air tasted of old stone and something metallic—the residue of recent human occupancy. He stopped. Lian, walking ahead with her lamp raised, paused and looked back. Her face, half-lit, showed the question before she spoke it.

"It's wrong," Wei Chen said quietly. The legacy had taught him to trust the gap between observation and conclusion. The tunnel was too straight, its floor too free of debris for a passage supposedly used by smugglers. The dust had been disturbed in patterns that suggested regular traffic—not refugees, but patrols. And the qi. The ambient spiritual energy of the imperial heartland should have pressed against the far side of the wall like water against a dam. Instead, the tunnel felt hollow, artificially emptied.

"A trap," Lian said. Not a guess. She had seen it too.

"Yes." Wei Chen's hand moved to his sword, then away. In this confined space, a blade would be a liability.

"They let Old Gou's route live so they could watch it. We're not the first to walk through here."

"Then we're not the first they've caught."

"No." They stood in silence and listened. At first there was only the drip of water and the soft hum of Lian's lamp. Then Wei Chen heard it: the absence of sound where sound should have been. No insects. No rats. No small lives that should have colonized any neglected passage. The tunnel had been cleaned.

"How many?" Lian asked.

"Twelve. Maybe more." He could feel them now, human qi signatures arranged in a semicircle ahead. Their cultivation was disciplined, uniform, compressed into patterns designed for coordination.

"They're not conventional cultivators. Their qi is... bound."

"Crimson Guard," Lian said. The name landed between them like a stone. The legacy's historical fragments knew them: soldiers trained not to surpass cultivators, but to nullify them. They suppressed meridian flow, disrupted dantian resonance, severed body from spiritual energy. Against conventional cultivation, they were devastating. Wei Chen was not conventional.

"They'll come from the front first," he said.

"To pin us. Then from behind, once we're committed."

"The entrance is sealed."

"Guarded," Wei Chen corrected.

"There's a difference."

"Your distinctions are going to get us killed."

"Or keep us alive. Stay behind me. When I tell you, work on the ceiling."

"The ceiling?"

"The support formations. If we can't go forward and we can't go back, we go through." She understood. Her lamp dimmed as she shifted her qi toward the stone above them, searching for structural seams. They came then, as Wei Chen had predicted—from the front first. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Twelve figures in crimson scale armor emerged from the darkness with the smooth coordination of a single organism. They carried no blades.

Their weapons were their hands, sheathed in formation-inscribed gauntlets that pulsed with anti-qi resonance. The lead soldier raised one hand, and the air itself seemed to thicken, pressing against Wei Chen's meridians like a vise. He felt the suppressive field settle over him. A modern cultivator would have panicked. The field was designed to induce exactly that: the sudden inability to draw qi, the drowning sensation of power stripped away. Wei Chen let it slide over his dantian and find nothing it recognized.

The Primordial Sage cultivation did not store qi in the same way modern techniques did. The Golden Seed in his spiritual pool did not pulse outward for the Guard's suppressors to grip. It turned inward, dense and self-contained. The Crimson Guard leader hesitated. Wei Chen moved. Ghost Step carried him across the distance in a single flowing motion, each step placed where the suppressive field's pressure was weakest. He struck once, palm to chest plate, and the soldier flew backward into his comrades.

The formation etched into the gauntlets flickered, disrupted by qi compressed beyond its design parameters. Here, in a tunnel where numbers could flank and crush, his first priority was time.

"Lian."

"Working." The Crimson Guard recovered with inhuman discipline. Two flanked left, two right, the rest advancing in a wedge designed to deny him space to maneuver. Their gauntlets glowed brighter, and the suppressive field intensified, pressing so hard that the stone walls began to sweat dust. Wei Chen exhaled slowly. The Thousandfold Palm required room to sequence compressed strikes. In this tunnel, he had no such room, so he used its essence rather than its form.

A single palm, driven by the rotation of his dantian, met the lead Guard's gauntlet. The compressed qi traveled through the formation inscription, following the channels of the Guard's own weapon, and found the resonance point where suppression became vulnerability. The gauntlet shattered. The next exchange was a blur of compressed motion. He moved through the wedge like water through a sieve, never committing to a strike that would leave him overextended. Each palm disrupted a formation.

Each disrupted formation bought Lian time. Something hit him from behind. He had forgotten the second wave. The blow caught him between the shoulder blades—a suppressive spike driven through his armor and into the meridian cluster beneath his left lung. Modern cultivation would have collapsed under it. His Golden Seed absorbed the spike and converted it into fuel for the next strike. He spun, palm extended, and the Guard who had struck him folded around the impact. The crimson armor held.

The man inside it spat blood.

"Lian."

"Almost—" Her voice was strained, her fingers tracing complex patterns in the air as she worked the stone with formation theory.

"I need ten seconds." He did not have ten seconds. The Guards had recovered their formation, and this time they came not to capture but to kill. He could not win this fight. Twelve Crimson Guard in an open field might have been manageable; twelve in a tunnel was a death sentence. But he did not need to win. He needed to not lose for ten more seconds. The first blow he took on his forearm, letting the impact carry him backward. The second he deflected with a palm strike that shattered another gauntlet.

The third caught him in the ribs, and he felt something give—not bone, but Diamond Flesh compressing under forces it had never been meant to withstand. Pain was information. He filed it away.

"Now!" Lian shouted. Wei Chen did not look up. He grabbed the nearest Guard by the wrist, using the man's own momentum to hurl him into the advancing wedge, and then he ran—not forward, not backward, but sideways, toward the wall where Lian stood with her lamp raised high and her other hand pressed flat against the stone. She had found the seam. The ceiling above the Crimson Guard groaned. Then it fell.

Not all at once, but with the terrible precision of a formation undone: first a single block, then a chain reaction as the load-bearing qi channels Lian had severed released their burden. Tons of stone and earth crashed down upon the soldiers, filling the tunnel with dust and thunder. Wei Chen threw himself over Lian, his refined body taking the impact of smaller debris. Something heavy struck his back. He held his position and waited for the roar to end. When silence returned, it was the silence of burial.

The tunnel behind them was blocked. The tunnel ahead was buried. Dust hung in the air, thick enough to taste.

"Did we get them all?" Lian asked, her voice muffled against his shoulder.

"No." Wei Chen pushed himself up, checking his body with detached efficiency. Ribs tender but intact. Back bruised. Left knee complaining.

"Some survived. But they won't dig through that quickly."

"Then we go through." She pointed to a new gap in the ceiling, created by the collapse, where pale light filtered down from somewhere above. It was not the clean exit Old Gou had promised. It was better. Wei Chen looked at the rubble one last time. Beneath it, he could feel survivors stirring. The Crimson Guard had been trained to fight cultivators. They had not been trained to fight what he was.

"Up," he said.

"Before they remember they have shovels." Lian climbed. Wei Chen followed, pulling himself into the uncertain light, leaving the tunnel and its soldiers behind in the dark.