The heat from the twin flaming sabers singed the rough fibers of Lin Ke’s grey collar.
Four feet above the mud, the two masked flankers were dropping like birds of prey, the orange fire roaring along their curved blades with hungry, crackling fury. The downward speed was thirty meters per second. In less than a tenth of a second, the steel would cleave flesh to bone.
Lin Ke didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t move his feet.
“Shen Yue,” Lin Ke spoke, his voice quiet, conversational, and fully empty of panic. “Mark.”
Shen Yue didn’t scream. She didn’t close her eyes.
Her fingers slid from the wide sleeves of her apprentice robes, flicking six yellow slips of moon-mulberry paper into the freezing mountain air.
Inhale.
Her dual soul threads engaged in perfect, safety lock-locked exact timing.
* * *
For two years, the elders had cursed her split mind as a crippling deformity. Now, under the rigid execution pipeline Lin Ke had hammered into her instincts, her two warring halves operated as a twin-core parallel processing array.
Thread A: Ground Interruption Protocol.
The left half of her mind seized control of three yellow slips inscribed with brown red stone runes—the Earth-Grip Magic charms.
She didn’t aim at the falling men. She targeted their projected landing zone on the mud-slicked track.
SNAP.
The three magic charms struck the granite roadbed beneath the falling flankers and dissolved into blinding ochre light.
The solid, rain-soaked stone didn’t merely crack. Its atom-deep holding power collapsed under a sudden, intense sound liquefaction field. The hard granite turned instantly into a two-foot-deep pit of bubbling, boiling, ultra-thick, sticky adhesive mud.
Thread B: Atmospheric Nullification Protocol.
Concurrent with the ground strike—running in the exact same heartbeat through her isolated second soul thread—the right half of her mind blew up three blue-inked slips: the Gale-Bend Magic charms.
FWHUMP.
The three magic charms ignited three feet above her head, collapsing inward rather than exploding.
A nearby sky empty pocket envelope formed in the airspace directly surrounding the falling swordsmen. The rushing air was wildly sucked away. That created an instant negative-pressure pocket that starved the environment of oxygen.
The reaction was immediate and total.
The roaring orange flames coating the twin sabers were snuffed out in a fraction of a split second, suffocated by the sudden empty pocket.
The two guards gasped, their lungs hitching as the air was torn from their throats, their internal Qi flow stumbling under the sudden pressure drop.
Their boots hit the ground.
Instead of landing cleanly on hard rock to execute their follow-through slash, their boots sank eighteen inches into boiling, adhesive granite slurry.
The violent shift from end-post aerial speed to instant, sticky stall produced thirty gees of decelerative shear.
CRACK.
Both guards groaned as the sudden stop wrenched their ankles and knees.
Their curved sabers—stripped of flame and driving force—slashed through empty air, biting uselessly into the mud two feet short of Lin Ke’s grey hems.
Crushing weight achieved: one hundred percent, Lin Ke noted clinically. Target mobility throttled to zero.
* * *
The two flankers struggled wildly in the adhesive morass, their swords flailing as the quicksand-like rock hardened back into solid stone around their shins, trapping them to the knees.
But behind them, the lead guard had recovered.
The scarred swordsman snatched his stunned flying sword from the air with his left hand, his face purple with murderous, unhinged fury.
He didn’t look at Meng Shan’s unbending shield. He didn’t look at the trapped flankers.
His bloodshot eyes locked entirely onto Shen Yue. The fragile nineteen-year-old girl with soot on her cheeks whose magic charms had just dismantled their three-man formation.
“Die, scribbling bitch!” the lead guard howled.
He reached into the lining of his mail coif with his teeth. It spat an ancient, three-inch bone needle into his right palm.
It was a forbidden Blood-Rot Soul Needle. A unsafe demonic ancient object carved from the thigh bone of a dead Foundation Establishment elder, soaked in toxic corpse-grease and bound with offering blood runes.
The needle ignited with an oily, sickening crimson glow that smelled of rotting meat, cemetery soil, and scorched pig fat. The air heat plummeted around the projectile, frosted with a rotting foul fog that made the skin prickle with nauseating dread.
Back in Ward Seven, Apothecary He had warned Lin Ke about such demonic contraband during late-night bone-setting sessions: “If corpse-grease penetrates your flesh, boy, throw away the arm. The marrow rots into black soup in ten breaths. No herbal bath can scrub it out. No spirit salve can reverse the liquefaction.”
Shen Yue’s pupils dilated in raw living terror. The bitter cold of the needle’s wake raised goosebumps across her slender throat, her breath catching as the poisonous aura threatened to freeze the blood in her neck-vein.
Lin Ke saw the flight path before the steel left the guard’s fingers. Deep within his chest, his Vitreous Glass Spirit veins (Bing-Mai) thrummed with cold, rigid excitement. The pre-compiled Crimson Yang packet cached inside his Chong spirit vein buffer strained against its holding seals. It sent a sharp, crystal-clear ache through his chest bone like crushed glass held under huge deep water pressure.
The lead guard channeled the entirety of his Qi Gathering Stage 3 Peak training into his right arm, lunging past the edge of Meng Shan’s iron shield with suicidal speed.
His arm snapped forward.
The blood needle whistled through the twilight mist, a streak of rotting red light aimed straight for Shen Yue’s unprotected, slender throat.
Shen Yue’s hands were empty. Her defensive barriers were on a two-second recharge cycle.
The needle was sixty split seconds from her flesh.