The jade medallion felt unnaturally greasy in Lin Ke’s hand.
It carried a sickly sweet scent. The distinct stench of preserved blood-ink mixed with refined snake gall, used by high-ranking sect officials to seal office death warrants. Lin Ke rubbed his thumb across the carved crimson vulture emblem. Then, a faint, rhythmic pulse throbbed against his skin, like a tiny clockwork heartbeat buried inside the stone.
This was not a warrior’s credential.
It was an active, remote command screen.
Lin Ke leaned against the stone railing of Floor Four. His Band-Aid of frost-numbness held his chest spine together. Meanwhile, his six newly forged dantian vortexes hummed with steady, controlled power.
“Let me look at the carving set,” Lin Ke said, lifting his iron metal pen.
The gold filigree on the medallion dissolved in his vision, replaced by a chronological timeline of energetic commits scored into the jade’s crystal-clear matrix.
Commit 01: Three weeks ago. Inscribed by Inner Sect Elder Kuang’s private writing hall in the Cloud-Roost Peak. Core logic: Executive Administrative Clearance, Class Two.
Commit 02: Four days ago. Inscribed by Deacon Yan of the Inner Sect Punishment Registry. Blood-signed name linked to Iron-Fist Han.
Commit 03: Yesterday evening. A covert payload injected into the sub-routines: Array Trigger Override Code: Omega-Seven.
Lin Ke’s breath caught in his throat as he parsed the bytecode of the third commit.
The token was not designed to reward Han for killing Lin Ke.
It was a remote detonator.
Han reached Floor Five. Then, the token was programmed to transmit a spoofed failure packet to the Pagoda’s central core. That triggered an emergency holding seal on the lower four floors.
All gates would slam shut from the inside, trapping every backup laborer and outer student inside the lower tiers. Meanwhile, the upper formation diverted excess gravity load downward.
Every soul on Floors One through Four would be crushed into bone dust under a forty-fold purge field—cleaning up all witnesses to Grand Fortune’s illegal market maneuvers and framing it as an “unfortunate formation cascade failure.”
Han had been carrying his own execution warrant around his neck.
“They aren’t just cleaning out Ward Seven,” Lin Ke whispered. His eyes narrowing into was cold slits. “They’re purging the entire testing cohort.”
“Smash it,” Meng Shan growled, his massive fist clenching around his war hammer. “Smash the damned thing to powder.”
“Hold,” Lin Ke said.
The chamber froze. The dust falling from the ceiling hung stationary.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke modeled Meng Shan smashing the jade token with his war hammer.
Run 01: Hammer impacts token. The jade fractures. The sudden severing of the Deacon’s blood-signed name trips the Pagoda’s watchdog ward. The central array registers the token destruction as a hostile intrusion. High-pressure iron portcullises drop from the ceiling, slamming into the stairwell between Floors Four and Five with fifty tons of force. Trapped in the bottleneck. Purge set initiates forty minutes ahead of schedule.
Lin Ke blinked back to meatspace, his thumb already reaching for the iron metal pen.
He drove the needle point into his left thumb pad. He drew a fresh bead of dark blood to verify reality.
“Branch checked,” he murmured. “Main.”
He looked up at Meng Shan. “If we smash it, the tower registers a security breach and drops the iron drop-gate. We become rats in a sealed barrel.”
“Then what do we do with it?” Shen Yue asked, her hand resting on her leftover magic charms. “If we carry it forward, it could detonate.”
“We rewrite the header,” Lin Ke said.
He sat on a shattered stone step, balancing the jade medallion on his knee.
With the hardened tip of his iron metal pen, he began scraping away the vermilion blood-ink of Deacon Yan’s signed name, peeling away the layer of toxic snake gall with clean, steady care.
He didn’t destroy the jade channels.
Instead, he carved three precise, nested grounding arcs across the golden filigree, bridging the vulture’s claws directly into the central circular sky-slit.
He converted the remote command loop into an unassigned upkeep interrupt.
Scratch. Scratch. Click.
A soft, golden spark flared from the jade, followed by a faint whirring sound inside the stone.
The crimson vulture’s eyes faded from angry scarlet to a dull, neutral amber.
Lin Ke tucked the refactored token into his leather vest. “Now it’s an office override key. The stairwell drop-gate will treat us as repair crew.”
He stood up, testing his balance. His Ashen Iron skeleton held firm, the six vortexes in his dantian turning in smooth, uninterrupted synchrony.
Suddenly, an ear-splitting tremor shook the entire mountain.
The black dark rock walls of the Pagoda groaned like an iron hull buckling under thousands of deep-water lengths of ocean pressure. Deep inside the central stone pillar, a sound like tearing metal echoed through the stairwell.
BOOM.
High above them, a massive bronze bell struck nine times, the sonic reverberations rattling the flat stone slabs beneath their boots.
An amplified, clockwork voice boomed from the ceiling channels, cold and indifferent to human life:
“Floor Four cleared. Surviving testers: Seven. Climbing to Upper Tiers: Gravity pull doubling to Thirty-Fold.”
The air in the stairwell instantly turned fifty degrees colder.
Lin Ke looked up into the dark, spiraling deep pit of the upper tower, his hand resting on the handle of his metal pen.
“Thirty-fold,” he whispered into the rising wind. “Now the real test begins.”