Deep within the underground roots of the southern ridge, three hundred feet beneath the crushed pine needles and mossy flat stone slabs, the silence of the earth was corrupted by a sickening, rhythmic pulse.
THUMP... THUMP... THUMP.
It sounded like an underground heart forged from clotted blood and rusted iron, beating once every three seconds. With each heavy pulse, crimson sound ripples came through the solid granite, shaking along the underground quartz veins and broadcasting a painful deep ring into the minds of every wild creature within fifty miles.
In a natural limestone cave hung with stalactites, four senior ritualists of the Blood Sea Sect stood surrounding a three-sided stone platform.
The air within the chamber was suffocatingly hot. It smelled of copper shavings, rancid animal fat, and charred hair. In the center of the platform rested the core of their siege array. A carved monolith of jagged blood-crystal three and a half meters tall. The crystal was semi-clear and deep carmine, faceted like an unpolished garnet. Within its dense stone core writhed the trapped spiritual imprints of ten thousand slaughtered wild beasts. Blackened copper cables, thick as pythons, ran from the base of the monolith into the bedrock, channeling the tortured deep ring directly into the mountain’s underground leylines.
“Chant louder!” the lead ritualist commanded, his skin painted with bone-ash runes that peeled under the unnatural heat. “The vanguard boars have stalled, and the surface pyromancers have ceased signaling! We must overdrive the blood-crystal! Drive the horned bears, the shadow vipers, and the mountain rhinos into total berserk fury!”
The four ritualists threw their hands forward, spewing mouthfuls of consecrated blood onto the base of the crystal. The blood sizzled on contact, absorbed greedily by the carmine stone. The monolith began to hum at a shrill, ear-splitting pitch. It glowed with blinding crimson light that cast ugly, writhing shadows across the cave walls.
High above them, near the damp ceiling of the cave, a hair-thin crack in the solid granite ceiling began to cry.
It didn’t cry water.
From the narrow fissure oozed a thin, thick, sticky thread of glowing sapphire jelly. The fluid flowed without a whisper of sound, fully zero-drag, dripping down a dangling stalactite like melted blue glass. Upon reaching the narrowed tip of the limestone spire, the thread piled up into a plump, floating sphere roughly forty inches across.
Lin Xiao hung suspended by a tiny tendril of water’s skin, observing the chanting cultists below.
“Spiritual hum confirmed, Host,” the Dao Spirit’s voice rang crisply within his mindscape, cool and impeccably deadpan. “This underground node is broadcasting a high-wave height neural feedback loop. It simulates severe living starvation and territorial madness in ninety-four distinct beast species. If the crystal is allowed to reach heat runaway, thirty thousand wild beasts on the southern flats will suffer permanent brain heavy bleeding within twelve minutes.”
“That sounds terribly uncomfortable for the beasts,” Lin Xiao noted silently. “And looking at that crystal... It honestly looks like a giant strawberry rock candy. Does it have dangerous curses on it?”
“Affirmative. The matrix contains ten thousand old family beast-slaughter curses designed to infect anyone who strikes it with physical weapons or metal flying swords. Touching it with normal flesh causes instant rotting crystal-forming of the blood vessels.”
Lin Xiao’s crescent white eyes curled into happy arcs. “Good thing I don’t have blood vessels. Let’s have an early snack.”
Releasing his surface hold on the ceiling, Lin Xiao dropped.
He fell through the darkness with zero air pushback, wind-cutting as a raindrop. As he plummeted toward the glowing platform, he allowed his stretchy mass to expand. The forty-inch sapphire ball broadened into a huge, semi-clear azure parachute, then inverted itself into a vast, swirling cavernous maw of pure Primordial Chaos.
The lead ritualist, his eyes rolled back in thrilled trance as he channeled the blood-curse, suddenly felt the surrounding heat in the cave plummet from boiling swelter to a pleasant spring afternoon.
“Huh?” the ritualist muttered, blinking his watery old eyes. “Why did the air get so fresh? Is that... Crushed cucumber and mint?”
“Excuse me, friends,” a friendly, melodic deep echoed from directly above their heads. “Do you mind if I borrow your decoration? It looks like it would go wonderfully with a cup of chilled tea.”
The four ritualists jerked their heads upward all at once.
Their eyes nearly bulged out of their skulls. Dropping upon them was not a flying sword, a roaring magic charm, or an avenging martial elder. It was a huge dome of glowing sapphire jelly ten meters wide, rotating with a swirling vortex of deep indigo starlight at its center.
“AN ENEMY AMBUSH—!” the lead ritualist shrieked, reaching for his bone bell.
He was far too slow.
SCHWUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMP!
With the resounding, elastic sound of a rubber boot pulling free from deep river mud, Lin Xiao’s void maw dropped directly over the three-and-a-half-meter blood-crystal monolith.
The thick copper cables snapped like dry twigs under the sheer gravity pull of his internal dantian. In less than one and a half seconds, the entire jagged carmine spire, the three-sided mounting stone base, and forty gallons of offering blood-oil vanished smoothly down Lin Xiao’s throat.
The cave went instantly pitch-black, save for the soft, surrounding azure glow streaming from Lin Xiao’s ball-shaped belly.
The four ritualists stood frozen, their hands still raised in mid-chant. They stared at the fully bare, polished floor where their sect’s master offering altar had stood half a second earlier. Not even a speck of red dust remained.
“Where... Where did the altar go?” a younger ritualist whispered, his voice cracking into high soprano. “Where is the old family blood-crystal?!”
In the center of the cleared space, Lin Xiao bounced twice on the flat stone slabs with a soft, rubbery gloop. He had condensed back into his comfortable melon-sized ball-shaped form. Even so, his azure surface was temporarily streaked with bright ruby veins that spun around his central core like peppermint stripes.
BUUUUURP.
A tiny, musical bubble of violet-tinted gas popped at his crest. He smelled faintly of roasted sugar and wild cherries.
Inside Lin Xiao’s Primordial Chaos dantian, a potion-made marvel was taking place.
The jagged crystal, capable of melting the spirit veins of a Golden Core grandmaster, collided with the boundless, unformed void at the center of his soul. The moment the ten thousand painful curses touched the Primordial Chaos, they didn’t corrupt him. Instead, the ancient malice was unraveled at the foundational spiritual level.
The cries of the slaughtered beasts dissolved into a warm, gentle hum of pure thanks, their trapped spirits freed from eternal bondage and released into the cycle of rebirth. The dense carmine stone itself crumbled like sugar in hot tea. It melted into eight hundred and fifty thousand units of clean, unaligned yin-essence that settled peacefully into Lin Xiao’s internal qi ocean.
“Ooh,” Lin Xiao sighed in deep internal satisfaction, rippling from crest to base. “A bit high on iron and sulfur, very much like a sour cherry lozenge with a strong stone finish, but surprisingly crunchy. High calorie count, too. That will keep me full until lunch.”
The lead ritualist finally snapped out of his stupor. His face twisted with frantic rage, blood trickling from his nose as the severing of the array backlashed into his sea of mind.
“You blue devil!” he screamed, drawing a jagged ritual dagger carved from human bone. “You swallowed our sect’s heart! Spill your guts or die!”
The four ritualists lunged forward, thrusting four cursed bone blades straight into Lin Xiao’s semi-clear blue dome.
SQUISH.
The daggers sank into the azure jelly up to their handles. But they didn’t pierce flesh or draw blood.
The non-Newtonian water’s skin of Lin Xiao’s body right away adapted, transforming from yielding gelatin into dense, hyper-elastic fluid. The striking force of their lunges was instantly absorbed and redirected. Before the ritualists could pull their hands back, Lin Xiao gave a gentle, rhythmic flex of his core.
THWIP-THWIP!
The four daggers were cleanly sucked out of their grips and drawn into his void dantian. It dissolved into three grams of refined calcium powder and five drops of clean spiritual iron.
At the same time, Lin Xiao sprouted four slender, whip-like azure tentacles from his sides. With blinding speed, the tentacles tapped each ritualist lightly on the center of their foreheads, injecting a micro-current of tranquilizing water-qi directly into their central nervous systems.
“Nap time, gentlemen,” Lin Xiao said pleasantly. “Chanting in a damp basement all night is terribly bad for your complexion.”
The four fighters didn’t even have time to gasp. Their eyes rolled back, their knees went limp. They collapsed onto the cave floor in a neat row, snoring deeply in timed together harmony.
Lin Xiao wrapped a single broad slime arm around the four sleeping men, bundled them together like a stack of firewood. Then they tossed them lightly into a low, moss-lined natural recess where they would stay dry and unharmed until the badger cleanup crews arrived.
He hopped over to the fractured stone base where the dark copper cables still jutted from the bedrock. Placing a flat jelly pad over the fractured channel, he felt the mountain’s natural energy lines.
The sickening, thumping pulse had fully vanished.
In its place, the pure, clean water-qi brought down by Xiao Long’s deluge was already seeping through the granite fissures, washing away the stale blood-scent and replacing it with the calm, steady heartbeat of the living earth.
“Signal broadcast ended,” the Dao Spirit reported. “Neural crushing weight over the one hundred thousand wild beasts has ceased. Heart rates dropping across all sectors. The horde is coming to a complete halt.”
“Splendid,” Lin Xiao said. He turned toward an upright air-flow shaft that led up to the southern orchards. “Now let’s get back upstairs. If I know Ling’er, she’s already firing up the big outdoor soup kettles. I wouldn’t want the porridge to get cold.”
Compressing his body into a slender ribbon, Lin Xiao surged upward through the stone chimney. That left the quiet cave at peace.