Chương 116: Before the Bridge Burns (1/3)

It was a beautiful, flawlessly clean execution of a plan, but the soldier in him immediately rejected the amateur, instinctual logic of greed.

Coordinates are not an infiltration route, Shi Yan concluded, his eyes flicking toward the scarred woman and the mirror she held. The greenish corpse-light reflected off the obsidian slab's surface, casting pale distortions across her scarred jaw.

The System had given him satellite imagery. It had told him the exact longitude and latitude of the enemy base, confirming the macro-level target. But it didn't give him the security blueprint. It didn't tell him which Daoist arrays triggered lethal traps in the miasma labyrinth, nor did it explain how to disarm a spiritual lock forged by ancient cultivators whose bones had long since turned to dust.

If a soldier parachuted into a heavily fortified bunker knowing only its address, he would die to the first landmine—tripwire hidden beneath innocent soil, pressure plate concealed under a shadow, his body reduced to shredded meat before his boots even touched solid ground.

Furthermore, approaching the Cloud-Mirror blockade required breaching an actively defended military perimeter—walls manned by cultivators whose spiritual senses could detect heartbeats from a hundred paces, whose sword intent could cleave through iron like wet parchment.

The scarred woman perhaps possessed some mid-range Yin-sword arts capable of freezing Qi-flow? Essential suppressing fire to shatter spiritual barriers while he closed the distance. Her hands, though scarred and trembling slightly from strain, had moved with practiced precision when handling the mirror—muscle memory that spoke of years spent wielding more than just reflective glass.

Shi Yan's eyes narrowed slightly behind the iron slits of his mask, the metal edges cutting his field of vision into narrow bands of sight. Not to mention her master's past experiences; she possessed secondhand knowledge of actually visiting that place before her master was betrayed. She knew the patrol blind spots—which watchtowers went unmanned during shift changes, where the formation arrays thinned near natural blind curves.

She knew the elemental makeup of the poisonous fog—whether it corroded metal or flesh first, whether it rose or sank in cold air. She knew the behavior of the native beasts—their feeding patterns, their territorial boundaries, the scent that drove them into frenzy and the sound that made them flee.

So, in short, a commander doesn't fire their only bomb-defusal expert just because they found out where the terrorist hid the bomb. She was still the scalpel—precise, specialized, capable of cuts he couldn't make. He was still the hammer—blunt, overwhelming, capable of breaking what couldn't be finessed.

Keeping her was mathematically superior to operating entirely blind in a realm governed by magic he couldn't natively cast, where every rock might hide a formation trigger and every shadow might conceal a guardian beast.

At that exact moment—

"I have the complete route to the Celestial Domain!" the scarred woman suddenly shouted from the perimeter in a hushed, elated tone, her voice cracking slightly on the final word. With a sharp, echoing snap that rang across the obsidian plaza like a bone breaking, she wrapped the obsidian mirror shut. The heavy cloth bundle folded over the reflective surface with a dull thump, muffling the Stele's distorted image.

The sudden sound broke Shi Yan's interface connection. He pulled his unarmored hand away from the stone, the rough, gritty texture dragging against his calloused palm one last time. The warmth of the feverish monument still clung to his skin as cold air immediately bit at the exposed flesh of his forearm.

Looking back at the scarred woman, he saw a rare, genuine smile of relief cutting through the chronic tension on her face—lips pulled back from teeth that had seen too many hungry nights, eyes crinkling at the corners in a way that looked almost foreign on features so accustomed to wariness. For the first time since they met, she looked like someone who actually believed she could save the only family she had left. Her shoulders, previously hunched with the weight of impossible odds, straightened fractionally.

Her breath came in visible white puffs, quick and shallow with hope rather than fear.

Shi Yan remained entirely silent, his posture unreadable behind the iron mask, betraying none of the colossal data shifts that had just occurred inside his mind. His armored frame stood still as a statue, the pitted iron catching faint glimmers of crimson light from the Stele's dying glow.

But then, the moment physical contact was severed, a catastrophic shift rippled through the architecture of the Midnight Ghost Market.

The pulsating red Yin-light illuminating the entire monolith suddenly flickered, dimming by a noticeable percentage—like a lantern starved of oil, its flame guttering low—as if the Stele's internal battery had been abruptly drained. The crimson characters that had blazed with malevolent brilliance now dulled to the color of old, dried blood.

The ambient temperature of the expansive obsidian plaza plunged. It was an unnatural, soul-biting cold that went beyond mere winter chill—a cold that seemed to leech warmth not from the air but from living essence itself, as if the realm was inhaling heat and exhaling death. The nearby puddles of accumulated sulfur-water flash-froze into jagged, dark ice with sounds like glass splintering, cracking under the sudden thermal shock.

Frost spread in crystalline patterns across the obsidian stone, racing outward from the Stele's base in spiderweb formations.

The dozen rogue cultivators sitting in the safe zone—who had been deeply entrenched in comprehending the monument's weapon intents, their consciousnesses adrift in seas of ancient killing techniques—were violently hurled out of their trances as the Stele's connection to them was abruptly, painfully severed. It was like invisible chains snapping taut before breaking, the psychic backlash slamming into their Seas of Consciousness with the force of sledgehammers.

"Gah—!" A cultivator in grey robes violently pitched forward, vomiting a mouthful of black, foul-smelling blood onto the obsidian paving, the liquid steaming as it hit the frozen stone. His entire body convulsed as his meridians went into shock, spiritual energy backfiring through channels suddenly emptied of guidance. His fingers clawed uselessly at the ground, nails scraping against slick obsidian. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"My mind! The intent—it shattered!" another screamed, clutching his temples as blood wept freely from his tear ducts, crimson trails cutting down his waxen cheeks. He rolled on the ground, tearing at his own scalp with desperate fingers, unable to process the abrupt vacuum left in his Sea of Consciousness—a hollowness where moments before there had been the weight of ancient comprehension pressing down like mountain stone.

"The Stele! It's gone dark!" A terrified, trembling voice echoed across the open space as a Tier-2 expert stumbled backward, pointing a shaking finger at the monolith, his arm wavering like a reed in storm wind.

"The connection is gone! Who broke the resonance?!" Spittle flew from his lips as panic cracked his voice into a high, reedy pitch.

Panic seized the plaza like wildfire catching dry grass. Weapons were drawn in blind fear—the sharp ring of steel leaving scabbards, the hiss of talismans igniting with desperate spiritual power. A paranoid sword cultivator slashed wildly into the fog, his blade cutting nothing but poisoned air, convinced an invisible enemy had just severed his Daoist foundation. The whistle of his strikes echoed hollowly.

Cultivators who had been peaceful only moments ago—united in silent meditation, bound by the shared pursuit of enlightenment—now eyed each other with savage distrust, pupils dilating in the dim light, hands tightening on weapon grips until knuckles went white. The tension skyrocketed toward an immediate bloodbath, the metallic scent of fear-sweat mixing with the ever-present sulfur and rot.

Shi Yan didn't spare them a second glance. His head didn't turn, his stance didn't shift. The Ghost Market was an autonomous, supernatural entity, and his System had just forcefully copied a piece of its divine memory without paying a toll—a theft so brazen, so absolute, that the realm itself registered the violation like a wound.

The netherworld didn't know who did it, but it knew it had been robbed. And the Yellow Springs did not forgive debts unpaid.

And slowly, from the distant shoreline of the black river—that lightless expanse where the waters of the dead lapped against bone-pale sand—the heavy, metallic sound of giant iron chains being dragged across wet bone began to echo through the fog. The sound carried a weight that transcended mere noise; it resonated in the chest cavity, vibrating against ribs, setting teeth on edge.

Then, an agonizingly slow, grinding sound echoed directly from the distant Sump—that unfathomable depth where the Market's darkest secrets festered.

Clank... shhhk... clank...

It was the sound of massive, rusted iron anchors being dragged across wet cobblestone, so heavy it caused the ground to vibrate beneath the soles of Shi Yan's boots. The tremors traveled up through iron-shod heels, through greaves and cuisses, settling into his bones with each rhythmic impact. Dust and frost shivered loose from the Stele's surface, drifting down like ash.

The scarred woman's face lost all color. The scar on her jaw stood out in stark white relief against her suddenly ashen skin, a livid line of old trauma made fresh by terror. She knew the folklore of the Yellow Springs better than anyone in Skycloud City—had heard the whispered warnings passed from master to disciple, the cautionary tales recited in sect halls when disciples grew too bold, too greedy.

"The Stele's resonance just dropped," the scarred woman whispered, her voice tightening with primal dread, each word forced through a throat gone suddenly dry. She looked wildly at Shi Yan, pupils contracting to pinpricks despite the dim light, whites visible all around her dark irises.

He had already drawn his Demonic Heavy Saber in a blur of motion, retrieving the one-hundred-and-fifty-pound black blade from his pouch with practiced efficiency—the dimensional storage rippling briefly as the weapon emerged—and angling his body toward the approaching sound. His shoulders squared, weight shifting to the balls of his feet, knees bending slightly into a combat stance honed by a thousand battles.

The saber's edge, even in the greenish corpse-light, seemed to drink the surrounding shadows, its presence a gravity well of sharpened malice.

"You stole something from the netherworld," the scarred woman realized, her eyes wide with terror as she backed away toward the alley they had come from, boots scraping against frozen obsidian with each retreating step. Her scarred hands trembled, mirror bundle clutched against her chest like a shield.

"The Chain-Bearers are waking up. They are coming to balance the ledger." The final words came out barely above a breath, as if speaking them too loudly might hasten the approach of what now hunted them.

Behind the unreadable Iron-Yaksha mask, Shi Yan's mind raced through a rapid series of tactical calculations, variables sorting themselves into threat matrices and probability curves with the cold efficiency of a machine.

Chain-Bearers…?

He had no prior intelligence regarding such entities. The inherited memories of his lowly outer-disciple host were useless—filled with nothing but menial chores, humiliation, and the backs of heads belonging to those who never looked his way. And Su Yin had never mentioned them, not in any of their brief exchanges in the sect. However, he didn't need to know the local folklore to understand the mechanics of the situation.

If the dimension itself is spawning entities in response to a missing data payload, this is not an enemy patrol. This is an automated environmental immune response. Like anti-virus software detecting corrupted files, like white blood cells swarming toward infection.

Shi Yan evaluated the heavy, vibrating sounds echoing through the fog, measuring the intervals between impacts, calculating mass and velocity from tremor intensity alone.

The sheer mass required to create those tremors suggested entities completely outside his current weight class—things whose footfalls registered like artillery impacts, whose physical presence alone could crush bone and pulp flesh.

Trying to fight the manifestation of a supernatural dimension's defense system was mathematically suicidal—a zero-sum equation where his death was the only constant. Not to mention these Chain-Bearers are keepers—unlike those merchants who are just users, temporary visitors paying tolls to walk these cursed streets, these Chain-Bearers are basically the half-admins of this spatial realm. Immune to its hazards, empowered by its authority, extensions of the Ghost Market's will made manifest.

Thus, Shi Yan didn't even bother asking her for their cultivation tier, their weaknesses, or their attack patterns. There was no time, and more critically, there was no point.

The terror in the woman's eyes was more than enough data—a survival instinct refined by years navigating this world's dangers, speaking louder than any tactical briefing ever could. And now Shi Yan's internal clock flashed violently. It was nearing 4: 45 AM. The Hour of the Tiger was closing—he had been counting from before, tracking the passage of time with the precision of a man who knew that seconds meant survival and minutes meant death.

"The Ghost Market is about to close," Shi Yan said, shifting his stance as his gaze fell upon the scarred woman. His voice, filtered through the iron mask, carried no inflection—a statement of fact, not alarm. The heavy saber remained angled downward, tip toward the ground but ready to rise in an instant.

The scarred woman gave a curt nod at once, the motion sharp and decisive despite the fear still etched into every line of her face. Shi Yan saw her eyes flick toward the green corpse-lanterns hanging above on their invisible tethers, watching the waning of the flames—those ghostly lights that marked the Market's breath, its pulse, its remaining lifespan for the night. The fires had shrunk to mere flickers, barely larger than candle flames now, guttering low as if starved for air.

Her lips moved faintly, as though reckoning the time in silence, forming soundless syllables—calculations passed down from her master, measurements of flame-height to remaining duration that only those versed in netherworld lore could interpret.

Even with the uncanny realm on the verge of collapse, even with the Chain-Bearers dragging their anchors ever closer through the poisoned fog, she had not wholly given way to panic; she was still forcing herself to judge how long remained, still clinging to discipline when instinct screamed to simply run blind.

"There is not even a quarter of an hour left," the scarred woman said decisively, her judgment exactly matching Shi Yan's own—two different methods of calculation arriving at the same inescapable conclusion. She swiftly fastened the heavy cloth bundle containing the obsidian mirror to her back, fingers working with practiced speed despite the tremor in her right leg.

The straps pulled tight across her shoulders with muted sounds of fabric under tension, redistributing the weight until the mirror sat securely against her spine. Her acid-burned cloak settled over it, partially concealing the bulk.

"When the Hour of the Rabbit arrives, the pontoon bridge will turn to ash and scatter. We must hurry." Her breath came faster now, white mist puffing rapidly from her lips as adrenaline flooded her system.

"But once we return to Skycloud City, we cannot walk the same road."