Chương 119: The Bridge Was Bait (1/3)

Yeah, I know. No need to repeat that, Miss Obvious.

Naturally, Shi Yan kept such words to himself, the unspoken retort pressed flat behind his lips. His breath remained long and even, steady as a temple pendulum, each measured inhalation and exhalation cycling through his lungs with mechanical precision. The frigid air stung the back of his throat, but he gave it no more attention than he would the hum of distant wind.

Rather than squander effort on alarm, he casually changed the matter at hand, blood surging through his limbs in a deliberate flood as he gathered the tremendous force needed to drive his heavy armor through the last stretch of the path. His iron-shod boots pressed harder into the bone pavers beneath him, each step calculated, deliberate—a controlled acceleration that sent faint tremors up through his calves and thighs.

"Less than one li remains," Shi Yan said in a low voice, muffled beneath the iron-Yaksha mask. The sound was hollow, distorted by the metal pressing against his jaw and cheekbones.

"Quicken your pace."

The two of them burst through the final veil of dense, illusory fog.

At last, the clinging mist parted like torn silk. The shore of the underground cavern revealed itself, along with the black waters of the true Sump, still as a demon-forged mirror. The surface of that dark expanse reflected nothing—no light, no movement, only an unbroken void that seemed to swallow even the faint phosphorescence leaking from the cavern walls. The air here was different: heavier, laden with the stench of stagnant water and decay, thick enough to coat the tongue.

Across that dark expanse stretched the rotting pontoon bridge, its warped planks slick with moisture and greenish mold, lit by the last few wavering green corpse-lanterns that had not yet burst apart. Each lantern swayed gently despite the absence of wind, casting sickly halos that danced across the water's surface like drowned will-o'-wisps.

At the very center of the narrow wooden bridge stood the faceless, seven-foot-tall Gatekeeper, barring the only path of retreat. Its robes hung motionless, as if carved from stone rather than fabric, and the dimensional portal behind it pulsed faintly with a rhythm that mimicked a slow, dying heartbeat.

Yet at this moment, the Gatekeeper was no longer their greatest peril.

Before they could set foot upon the planks, the air along the shore turned deathly cold, as though all warmth had been extinguished from the world in a single breath. The temperature plummeted so violently that the moisture clinging to Shi Yan's mask crystallized instantly, forming delicate fractal patterns across the iron surface. His exhaled breath no longer merely misted—it froze mid-air into glittering shards that tinkled faintly as they fell to the stone.

The space behind them did not merely darken; it seemed to collapse inward upon itself, the very fabric of the cavern folding like crumpled parchment. From the seething mist emerged a corporeal form, though it was no human shape. It was a gigantic manifestation, nearly ten zhang high, composed of tattered ancient burial shrouds wrapped about a core of overwhelming, crushing force. The shrouds were gray and rotted, trailing loose threads that writhed like serpents in an unseen current.

Each layer was stitched with archaic characters that pulsed with a dim, malevolent crimson light—sutras of judgment, condemnation, karmic binding.

Within its shapeless "hands," it hefted a rusted iron anchor as large as a carriage, with chains as thick as mooring cables trailing beneath it. The links of those chains were corroded and pitted, each one inscribed with names—thousands upon thousands of names, carved in scripts both ancient and foreign.

The weight of the anchor alone seemed to warp the space around it, bending the air like heat shimmer, and where the chains dragged across the stone they left deep furrows that smoked faintly, as though the very ground recoiled from their touch.

This... was the Chain-Bearer?

At once, a transparent blue screen overlaid Shi Yan's sight, the familiar cold interface materializing with clinical precision.

[Entity Recognized: Netherworld Warden (Chain-Bearer)] [Cultivation Resonance: Unknown (Realm/Law Manifestation)] [Threat to Current Vessel: FATAL (Evasion Mandatory)] [Estimated Yield: 0 Dao Embers (Incompatible Environmental Construct)] Shi Yan's cold mind digested the information in an instant, parsing each line with the same detached efficiency he'd once used to assess enemy artillery positions. His pupils contracted further behind the mask's eye-slits, focusing with predatory sharpness.

Zero yield. Not a living creature, but a response of the realm itself. There was no sense in meeting it head-on. Even with his newly forged hundred-and-fifty-pound saber, trying to strike this thing would be like slashing at a tempest or hacking at a tidal surge. It had no meridians to rupture, no blood to taint, no throat to crush. To fight it would only waste strength and invite certain death. His only objective was escape.

Beside him, the woman was utterly pinned down by the oppressive might of the Chain-Bearer's presence.

Her knees gave way beneath that immense Yin-pressure, buckling as though invisible chains had been draped across her shoulders. The bones in her legs trembled, and her boots scraped against the stone as her body tried and failed to remain upright. It was the sort of suppression that seemed to command all living souls to bow their heads, an authority so absolute it bypassed conscious will and struck directly at the instinctive core of life itself. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve.

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"So this is where the road ends..." she gasped, her voice trembling, each word escaping in fractured bursts between ragged breaths. Her fingers had gone numb; she could not even lift the hilt of her broadsword. The weapon's weight, which she had carried for years without strain, now felt impossibly distant, as though her arm had been severed from her body and cast into some unreachable void.

Her Dantian was wholly suppressed, and the sea of Qi within it rippled violently like a storm-tossed wave, crashing against the walls of her spiritual core with bruising force. Yet the Qi in her meridians had stiffened like frozen water beneath the mere nearness of a Netherworld Warden—she could not even channel it. Every pathway, every conduit of spiritual energy, had been locked shut by an invisible hand. The sensation was suffocating, maddening, as though she were drowning on dry land.

A bitter laugh rose in her throat and died there, strangled by the tightness in her chest. Master... I have failed. I found the cipher, yet the Yellow Springs refuses to let me depart.

She lifted her eyes, expecting to see this young master crushed to the stone beside her, his body prostrate and broken beneath the same karmic weight.

Instead, her breath caught.

Shi Yan still stood upright, straight as a spear, his silhouette unbroken against the oppressive presence looming behind them. His shoulders were squared, his posture unwavering, and though frost gathered along the edges of his armor and his breath came in crystalline clouds, he did not bow. He did not even sway.

How? The woman's thoughts churned wildly, colliding with all she knew of the cultivation world, each principle she had been taught shattering like brittle clay. The spiritual suppression of a Netherworld Warden should be enough to press even a Tier-3 Shattered-Halo expert flat to the ground, to reduce their will to ash and their bones to powder. Could he be carrying the might of Sovereign-grade void artifacts? A Heavenly-tier array token?

Just what kind of monstrous and ancient backing does this man possess, to disregard even the laws of the netherworld?

Her thoughts broke off at once.

"Move," Shi Yan barked, his voice flat and devoid of sympathy.

But she could not. Her body refused to obey, locked in place by forces beyond mortal comprehension.

Shi Yan felt that pressure as well: a heavy, icy weight pressing against his flesh, seeping through the gaps in his armor to claw at his skin. It was like standing beneath a waterfall of frozen lead, every square inch of his body subjected to relentless, crushing force. Yet because he was an anomaly, wholly Daoless, that spiritual suppression found no foothold within him. There was no Dantian to crush, no meridians to freeze, no spiritual root to sever.

To a cultivator, it was the crushing burden of karmic authority, the judgment of ten thousand lifetimes pressing down upon a single soul; to Shi Yan, it was no more than forcing his way against a fierce gale. He was not immobilized.

Clank.

Hovering above them, the Chain-Bearer slowly raised its massive anchor, the rusted iron groaning as it rose. The chains trailing from it shifted with a sound like grinding tombstones, each link scraping against the next in a cacophony of metallic agony. As the chains shifted, hollow and ancient voices spilled from the burial shrouds, like a thousand dead monks pronouncing an ancient judgment.

The sound was layered, dissonant, each voice speaking in a different dialect, a different era, yet all converging into a single, terrible proclamation.

"The ledger of Heaven is carved in bone..." the voices moaned, shaking even the stones beneath them. The vibration traveled up through Shi Yan's boots, rattling his teeth and humming in his ribs.

"The living pay in breath. The dead pay in ash. The thief pays in Void..."

The Chain-Bearer lifted the anchor still higher, until it hung directly overhead, blotting out the faint light from the corpse-lanterns. The surrounding space seemed to wail beneath that concentrated weight, the air itself warping and buckling like thin ice over deep water. It was preparing to hurl the iron mass straight down the shoreline, an attack that would smash both them and the bridge into ruin, reducing everything to splinters and dust.

Shi Yan did not waste even the span of half a breath on despair. Despair was a luxury afforded only to those who believed they had something left to lose. With his unarmored right hand, he seized the thick collar of the woman's acid-burned cloak and nearly hauled the frozen Yin-Hunter off the ground, his fingers digging into the coarse fabric with bruising force.

"Steady yourself," he ordered, his voice clipped and devoid of negotiation.

He drove his cardiovascular overdrive into motion, feeling the familiar surge as his heart rate spiked, his pulse hammering against his ribs like a war drum. The [Black-Iron Body Art] blazed alive within his veins, flooding his muscles with oxygen and igniting every nerve ending in his body.

Dangling from his grasp, the woman's eyes widened in utter disbelief, the whites visible even in the dim light. She had expected a blazing eruption of Qi, a heaven-shaking display of spiritual force—something that would explain how he defied the Warden's authority.

W-what is this? Instead, she sensed nothing of the sort. There was no Qi, no resonance, no spiritual manifestation whatsoever. Only raw and terrifying heat, the suffocating compression of mortal flesh pushed beyond all ordinary limits. It was as though his body had become a furnace, his blood the fuel, and his will the bellows.

The fibers of Shi Yan's muscles tightened like forged steel cords, each bundle contracting with such intensity that they strained against his skin. Beneath the iron-Yaksha armor, his body heat surged wildly, climbing to levels that would have burned an ordinary man from the inside out. A vast cloud of hissing steam burst from him into the freezing Yin air, like a furnace on the verge of exploding, wreathing his form in a ghostly white shroud that obscured his outline.

Then he poured all of that force into his legs, every ounce of accumulated power channeled downward through his hips, his thighs, his calves, and into the soles of his iron-shod boots.

He activated the [Blood-Ignition Flash Step].

Not to attack.

To flee.

With a thunderous blast that shattered the frozen surface of the bone pavers beneath him, he shot forward, the fog around him bursting apart as he dragged the woman along by sheer force. Her body whipped behind him like a banner caught in a gale, her feet skimming the ground as he accelerated. In less than the time it took a spark to fly from flint, he crossed more than twenty zhang, his form little more than a blur of black iron and white steam.

To the naked eye, he was no more than a streak—an afterimage burned into the retina—and the sound of his passage was a single, sharp crack that echoed across the cavern like a breaking bone.

CRASH—!

The gigantic iron anchor smashed into the stone where they had stood a moment before.

The impact was apocalyptic. A crater nearly ten zhang deep erupted outward, the stone shattering into jagged fragments that sprayed in every direction. The bone pavement splintered like brittle wood, and chunks of black mire were flung through the air like hidden weapons, whistling past Shi Yan's head and embedding themselves into the cavern walls with dull, wet thuds.

The shockwave struck Shi Yan squarely in the back, a wall of compressed air that slammed into his spine with enough force to snap a lesser man in half. But his dense [55 Physique] endured the blow, his bones and muscles absorbing the impact without breaking, while his newly forged armor bore most of the force, the iron plates ringing like struck bells.

Like an arrow loosed from a divine bow, he shot along the pontoon bridge, his boots hammering against the rotting planks with rapid, staccato strikes. Each footfall sent splinters flying and caused the entire structure to sway dangerously, the mooring ropes groaning in protest. The corpse-lanterns swung wildly on their hooks, casting disorienting shadows that danced across the black water below. He closed upon the Gatekeeper in a breath, the distance collapsing with terrifying speed.

But as the distance collapsed to a mere ten paces, Shi Yan's instincts—honed on countless earth-bound battlefields, sharpened by years of surviving impossible odds—screamed a silent warning, a primal alarm that needed no words.

The faceless being did not brace for impact. It did not raise its lantern in a panic, nor did it shift its stance to aggressively bar the narrow path. It simply stood there, utterly composed, its robes hanging motionless as though carved from stone. The dimensional portal behind it continued to slowly contract, its edges folding inward with the smooth, inevitable motion of a closing iris. The Gatekeeper's posture was relaxed, even serene, as though it had been expecting this exact outcome all along.

An unbothered enemy is a prepared enemy... tsk.