The blood-stone map on the dining table of the [Lv.3 Flying Courtyard Carriage] pulsed like an exposed vein.
Outside the porch windows, the night wind over Sky-Border Pass carried the faint scent of spearmint tea and woodsmoke from the ten civic stalls below. Inside the warm oak-paneled dining room, however, nobody was talking.
Gu Changsheng stood at the head of the table with his sleeves rolled to his elbows. Around him stood ten-year-aged Gu Nian, eleven-year-aged Ye Xiao, eight-year-old Su Nuannuan, Auntie Qin, Grandpa Fu, Grandpa Yao, Saintess Lin Qing, and Guard Captain Liu Yan.
Above the crimson grooves of the blood-stone map. A three-dimensional projection from [Dad’s Plot-Spoiler Notebook] hovered in the air—translated through a spirit-mirror prism so the whole household could see the dungeon chamber three thousand feet beneath Supreme Sword Mountain.
It wasn’t a cell built for a human being.
It was a hollowed-out sulfur slag pit carved directly into the bleeding underside of the Supreme Sword Sect’s primary spirit vein. Thick chains of black Cold-Marrow Steel ran from four iron pillars into the center of a spiked cage no larger than a dog kennel.
Curled inside that cage was a girl who looked barely five years old, even though the system dossier listed her age as seven.
