The cold stone of the solitary quiet focus cell smelled of damp moss and old animal fat.
It was eight paces square, carved out of the solid dark rock bedrock seventy feet below the citadel’s backup castle wall. No windows. No vents. Only a single iron door heavy with bronze crushing weight studs, locked from the inside with three heavy draw-bolts.
Lin Ke sat cross-legged on a bare granite stone base in the center of the chamber.
The room was freezing, but a thin sheen of grease-sweat covered his collarbones. It soaked into the coarse linen of his tunic. His bandaged left arm rested flat on his knee, the dull throbbing of Gu’s bone-dagger gash synchronizing with the slow, deliberate rhythm of his pulse.
Seventy-two hours.
That was the maximum time the castle had before Vanguard Commander Chi Lian’s full demonic column reached the outer edge.
Standard Mid-Foundation techniques were utterly obsolete. Chi Lian’s vanguard troops didn’t wear traditional layered-scale armor. Their outer flesh was bonded to corrupted bone-iron back shells, grown from leech-like marrow that absorbed physical impacts and scattered elemental fire like water poured over grease.
To pierce a back shell with a conventional flying sword needed sustained, high-intensity spiritual drilling. Three to five seconds of uninterrupted channel output. In close-quarters combat against demonic shock troops moving at forty paces a second, five seconds was an eternity.
