Thirty miles north of the Clear Sky Sect, beneath a bruised sky of stagnant crimson clouds, lay the blighted swamp known as the Blood Wolf Marsh.
It was a foul, rotting expanse where pools of black water belched sulfurous corpse gas into the chill air. Gnarled ghost-willows rose from the mire like skeletal claws draped in poisonous grey moss. Dead center in the wasteland loomed a fortress carved from the petrified ribcage of a leviathan—the fortified den of the demonic Blood Wolf Sect.
In the darkened inner sanctum, perched on a throne of nine hundred bleached human skulls, sat Patriarch Nether-Ghost.
He was a nightmare in scarlet silk. Phantom faces wept and writhed across the heavy folds of his robes, trapped in eternal torment. His skin was the color of dry grave parchment, pulled tight over razor-sharp cheekbones. In his sunken sockets burned twin coals of sickly green corpse fire. As a Half-Step Nascent Soul tyrant, his shallow breathing froze the moisture in the room, coating the flagstones in needles of black frost.
Kneeling on the bone floor was Commander Xue Sha, head of the Ghost Wolf Shadow Squad.
Xue Sha was wrapped in shadow-weave cloth that drank the torchlight, blurring his outline into the damp gloom. At his hips hung twin hook swords forged from abyssal blood-iron. Tucked in his leather vambraces were nine poisoned Soul-Piercing Needles steeped in centipede venom.
"Patriarch," Xue Sha whispered, his voice like dead leaves scraping across concrete. "The Clear Sky Sect's grand defensive formation is formidable. If our armada mounts a direct frontal strike against the main valley, their Nine-Peaks Mountain Barrier could stall our vanguard for three days. That would give the surrounding orthodox sects time to flank us."
Nether-Ghost’s black-taloned finger drummed the skull armrest.
*Tack. Tack. Tack.*
"Speak your alternative, Xue Sha," the patriarch hissed, green fire flaring in his sockets. "You know what happens to subordinates who waste my meditation hours."
"Our scouts spent three months probing their perimeter wards," Xue Sha said, rolling out a yellowed sheepskin map illuminated by a green spirit-lamp. "Every primary peak is locked down with Foundation sentries, patrolling spirit beasts, and bronze alarm bells. Except for one."
Xue Sha tapped the western ridge with a claw.
"Sunset Peak."
Nether-Ghost tilted his skull, his cold brow knotting. "Sunset Peak? Isn't that the weed-choked dump where the Clear Sky Sect sends its useless outer cripples to die?"
"Exactly!" Xue Sha sneered, a cruel grin spreading beneath his mask. "Internal intelligence confirms the sector has zero defensive arrays, zero elder patrols, and is guarded by a single mortal named Chu Yuan—a wretch whose spiritual roots were certified as dead pig iron three years ago. The sect leadership threw him up there to starve in the winter frost!"
Xue Sha leaned in, his raspy whisper trembling with predatory confidence:
"Tonight is the New Moon. Pitch black across the western cliffs. My Ghost Wolf Shadow Squad—seven elite Late Foundation killers trained in silent throat-slitting—will scale the three-thousand-foot vertical rock face. We slip into the compound, take the cripple's head before he can squeak, plant the **Nine-Nether Blood Anchor** in his courtyard, and rip open a spatial void gate behind their mountain barrier. By dawn, our dreadnoughts will descend straight into their inner sanctuaries, slaughtering their elders in their beds!"
Nether-Ghost threw back his head and laughed—a grating rumble like iron millstones grinding bone.
"Magnificent!" the patriarch snarled, slamming his fist down onto the skull armrest. "A mortal cripple left to guard the back door of four provinces! Go, Xue Sha! Paint that desolate ridge in his blood! Tonight, the Clear Sky Sect burns!"
"By your decree!"
Xue Sha bowed, melted into a slick pool of liquid shadow, and slid through the floorboards like spilled ink.
***
Meanwhile, on Sunset Peak, Austin was having a field day with civil engineering.
He had unlocked `[Thermonuclear Earth-Melter (Trench Mode)]` an hour after lunch, and he had zero intention of letting daylight burn while his perimeter was wide open.
First came the site layout.
Austin drove cedar stakes at twenty-foot intervals, snapping a chalk line made from braided hemp twine rubbed with soot. He checked his setbacks with a critical tradesman eye. You couldn't dig too close to the cabin footings; undermine the soil's angle of repose, and the first heavy monsoon would wash the load-bearing subsoil right out from under the corner posts, dropping the whole roof into the ditch. He gave the foundation an eight-foot buffer, routing the line in a clean, crisp perimeter around the timber lodge, the obsidian plaza, and the chicken run.
Then he set his boots, took a two-handed grip on his iron farming hoe, and toggled the skill.
Deep in his dantian, the thirteen-thousand-Kelvin micro-plasma spark shifted gears.
A thin, blinding ribbon of violet-white plasma surged down Austin's forearms, humming along the ash-wood handle and concentrating into the dull iron blade of the hoe. The metal didn't melt. Held in a magnetic bottle of compressed kinetic force, the tool began to emit a high-frequency, ultrasonic whine that made the hair on Austin's arms stand straight up.
He drove the blade into the granite bedrock.
*ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT.*
There was no brutal crunch of steel striking stone. No jarring recoil in his wrists.
The superheated plasma ribbon flash-boiled the cold granite on contact. Dense quartz and feldspar liquefied into glowing, white-hot slag that bubbled and hissed like boiling molasses, parting before the hoe blade like a hot wire sliding through chilled butter. Iridescent plumes of vaporized silica puffed upward, carrying the sharp, dry reek of superheated mineral vapor and ozone.
Austin walked backward at a steady, measured pace, dragging the tool through the crust.
He didn't just gouge a shallow trench. He carved a four-meter-deep, three-meter-wide dry perimeter moat.
As the hoe sliced through the rock, the extreme thermal radiant heat did something magnificent to the trench walls. The liquid stone slumped, spread flat, and flash-cooled against the cold subterranean bedrock, vitrifying into vertical slabs of jet-black volcanic obsidian. The surfaces set up laser-straight and mirror-smooth—so slick and frictionless that not even an ant could find mechanical purchase to climb out.
Austin finished the circuit where he started, wiping a smear of soot and sweat from his temple with the back of his wrist.
He leaned over the edge, squinting down into the four-meter drop.
The walls were glassy, plumb to ninety degrees. The floor was dead-level, graded with a subtle pitch toward the western gully for drainage run-off.
"Clean vitrification," Austin muttered, nodding in deep tradesman approval. "No trench collapse, zero need for timber shoring boxes, and completely impervious to frost heave. That saves three weeks of pickaxe labor and forty loads of riprap."
Now came the active defense.
Austin hauled out five massive coils of heavy, bare, uninsulated copper wire salvaged from the old storage shed. He jumped down into the ditch, unspooling the heavy metal along the vitrified floor in five parallel runs, spaced eight inches apart. He anchored the wires with copper masonry staples driven into the basalt seams, then tied the feeder leads to a heavy copper busbar running straight through the sub-floor to the grounding spike of his core hearth.
Austin climbed back up the cedar ladder, pulling it out of the trench behind him.
"Simple drop-pit geometry," he said, dusting off his hemp knees. "Hostile mobs path toward the cabin in the dark. They don't see the ditch, they take a twelve-foot drop, hit the glass floor, and complete the circuit across the live copper lines. The electrical tick farms them automatically while the glass walls prevent them from hopping back out. An AFK mob grinder."
He gave the site one last look, grabbed his tools, and headed for the porch.
Li Xiaoyao had finished his evening chores. The boy sat cross-legged on the cedar boards, his bamboo broom resting across his lap, breathing in slow, meditative rhythms as twilight settled over the peaks.
Austin stepped through his cabin door and shut it tight. The latch seated with a clean, airtight click.
Inside, the heavy Celestial Dragon-Silk curtains swallowed the fading daylight, bathing the room in a cool, peaceful violet twilight. Austin kicked off his straw sandals, stretched until his vertebrae popped like dry kindling, and climbed into his pine bed.
A warm amber interface appeared:
"Hit yes," Austin mumbled, pulling the linen quilt up to his chin. "Wake me when the loot is ready in the morning."
Deep in his chest, the micro-plasma spark settled into a steady idle hum, radiating just enough thermal energy through the floorboards to hold the room at an even seventy-two degrees against the biting mountain freeze.
Austin was out cold in thirty seconds.
***
Midnight arrived without a moon.
Heavy storm clouds choked the sky, blotting out the stars and draping the Southern Cloud Mountains in pitch-black gloom. The wind howled through the narrow ravines of Sunset Peak, carrying the bitter bite of incoming frost.
At the base of the western cliffs, three thousand feet below the compound, seven shadows melted out of the darkness.
Commander Xue Sha looked up the sheer rock face, his eyes gleaming with toxic green fire through the eye slits of his mask.
"Shadow cloaks engaged," Xue Sha signaled, his fingers cutting through the air in sharp, silent hand code. "Total qi suppression. Zero noise. Zero tracks. The mortal cur is asleep in his wooden hovel. We scale the cliff, slit his throat, plant the Blood Anchor, and crack the sect's spine."
The six assassins nodded in absolute silence. Their gecko-sap climbing boots gripped the stone without a whisper.
Like seven giant phantom spiders, the killers ran up the vertical cliff face with unnatural speed, eating three thousand feet of vertical granite in under two minutes.
They vaulted over the rim, landing on the dark plateau in feather-light crouches without clicking a single stone.
Xue Sha grinned behind his cloth mask. Fifty yards ahead, through the whistling gloom, stood the dim silhouette of the timber cabin.
"Pathetic," Xue Sha sneered inwardly, drawing his dual abyssal hook swords. The cold steel made no sound. "No sentries. No warding runes. No watchdogs. The Clear Sky fools have served us their province on an iron platter."
He raised his right blade, pointing it straight at the cabin door.
"Charge. Butcher him where he sleeps."
Moving with savage, disciplined precision, all seven elite Foundation assassins surged forward in a tight wedge—sprinting at sixty miles per hour across the dark grass, straight toward the unlit, four-meter-deep, supercharged vitrified trench waiting in the dark.