Chương 30: Chapter 16 Part 4

The heavy gates of the Vael estate closed behind Ming Xuan Ji, leaving the fortified courtyard to Durgan and his men. She stood on the cobblestones for a fraction of a second, breathing in the cool evening air. The sun had finally completely set beneath the sprawling skyline of the Royal Capital, blanketing Elyndria in the deep, starry velvet of night.

Across the upper districts, thousands of magical streetlamps flared to life in unison, painting the sweeping cerulean roofs and polished white stone in a warm, golden glow. To the untrained eye, it was a city of unparalleled beauty and peace. But as Xuan Ji turned away from the noble district, all she saw was a sprawling, multi-tiered obstacle course standing between her and the abyss. She pulled the hood of her coat up, shadowing her striking features, and moved. Her footwork was a ghost's whisper.

Using the absolute pinnacle of [Qinggong], she didn't just walk; she bypassed the friction of the physical world entirely. She wove through the crowded evening markets and the heavy patrols of the King's knights with supernatural fluidity, completely undetected. As she descended from the upper rings of the city toward the lower fringe of the Adventurer's Ward, the pristine marble beneath her feet gave way to cracked, uneven cobblestones.

The ambient light of the streetlamps grew dim and inconsistent, flickering like dying stars. The air here didn't smell of lavender or expensive incense. It smelled of cheap, fermented ale, roasting meat, and the metallic, ozone tang of raw, unrefined mana leaking from the dungeon's perimeter. This was the fringe. The lawless boundary where the black-market appraisers, rogue elements, and desperate scavengers made their living just out of sight of the King's tax collectors.

Tucked into a suffocatingly narrow, shadow-drenched alleyway sat a sprawling, multi-story structure built from dark, reclaimed timber. There was no swinging wooden sign to announce its presence, only a massive, jagged disk of pure black obsidian embedded into the stone above a reinforced iron door. The Obsidian Coin. Xuan Ji didn't pause. She pushed the heavy iron door open and stepped over the threshold. The tavern was a cavernous, smoke-filled den of iniquity.

It was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with the kind of people who preferred to operate in the dark. There were cloaked figures exchanging pouches of illicit monster parts in the corners, rogue mages smoking long-stemmed pipes filled with narcotic herbs, and veteran divers showing off grisly scars over mugs of dark stout. A hulking bouncer, a man with the jutting tusks and green-tinted skin of a half-orc, moved to block her path.

He raised a massive, calloused hand to demand a cover charge, sneering down at her slender, cloaked figure. Xuan Ji didn't stop walking. She simply snapped her dark eyes to his. She let a microscopic sliver of her [Heavenly Demon] aura bleed into the air directly in front of him. The half-orc froze mid-step. The sneer melted off his face, his pupils constricting to pinpricks. His primal instincts screamed at him that the cloaked woman walking toward him was not human. She was a waking calamity.

The blood drained from his green skin, and he forcefully plastered himself against the wooden wall, clearing a wide path for her without uttering a single, terrified syllable. Xuan Ji moved deeper into the tavern, her footsteps entirely silent against the sticky floorboards. She ignored the stares and the hushed, wary whispers that trailed in her wake. She scanned the booths lining the far wall, areas shrouded in heavy shadow away from the light of the central hearth.

In the darkest booth at the very back of the room sat a figure shuffling a deck of razor-sharp, iron-plated cards. To the untrained eye, he looked like a ragged street urchin. He was barely four feet tall, dressed in a patchwork coat of dark, supple leather that seemed too large for his small frame. But Xuan Ji knew better. Durgan had warned her. This was Lynx, the halfling.

And while his physical stature mirrored that of a young human boy, the eyes looking out from beneath his messy brown hair were ancient, sharp, and filled with a century of cutthroat cunning. Xuan Ji slid into the booth opposite him. Lynx's small hands stopped instantly. The iron cards vanished up his sleeves with a metallic clack. He leaned back against the wooden bench, his calculating eyes darting over her cloaked figure.

He was a shadow-walker, a rogue class explicitly designed to sense danger and exploit weaknesses. But looking at the woman sitting across from him, his danger sense wasn't just tingling; it was blaring like a war horn.

"Booth's taken, lady," Lynx said. His voice didn't have the high pitch of a child, but rather a smooth, gravelly drawl that desperately tried to hide the sudden spike of adrenaline in his chest.

"Unless you're looking to fence some unregistered loot, I suggest you find another table before things get unpleasant." Xuan Ji reached up and pulled her hood back. The dim tavern light illuminated the flawless, porcelain beauty of her face and the cold, bottomless abyss of her dark eyes.

"Vice Guild Master Durgan sent me," she said, her voice a low, perfectly even murmur that somehow cut cleanly through the raucous noise of the tavern.

"He said you were the only halfling in the capital with a one-way ticket to hell." If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Lynx blinked, his practiced, arrogant smile faltering for a fraction of a second. Durgan was a hardline, by-the-book half-orc who despised rogues. If the Vice Guild Master of the Warrior Guild was sending a client directly to the Obsidian Coin, it meant standard protocols had been completely abandoned.

Lynx leaned forward, lowering his voice, his eyes darting left and right to ensure no one was eavesdropping.

"Durgan sent you? What's the play? You looking to bypass a toll gate? Need a map of the hidden smuggler routes on Floor 10?"

"I need the fastest, most direct route to the Twilight Zone," Xuan Ji stated.

"Floor 20." The ambient noise of the tavern seemed to momentarily mute. Lynx stared at her, utterly paralyzed, as if she had just asked him for directions to the center of the sun. Then, he let out a short, incredulous laugh, shaking his head.

"Right. Okay. Good joke, lady. For a second there, I thought you were actually crazy. Floor 20. That's cute. Now, seriously, what do you need?"

"I am not making a joke, Halfling," Xuan Ji said, her voice dropping a fraction of an octave. The temperature in the booth plummeted. The half-empty mug of ale sitting near Lynx's elbow instantly frosted over, the liquid inside freezing solid with a sharp crack. Lynx violently flinched backward, his hand instinctively flying to the hidden dagger strapped to his thigh. He stared at the frozen ale, then up at the woman, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.

"You're serious," the halfling breathed, all trace of amusement evaporating into sheer terror.

"You're actually insane. Floor 20 isn't a destination, lady. It's an execution! It's the Abyssal depths. The ambient mana down there is so thick it crushes human lungs like wet paper. The aberrations that roam the Twilight Zone have names only because of an old Myth; no one actually lives long enough to write them down. It requires at least forty-man elite raid party just to secure the stairwell!"

"I am aware of the requirements for mortals," Xuan Ji interrupted smoothly.

"I am not looking for an escort. I am not looking for a raid party to fight my battles. I am looking for a guide. You know the shadows. You know the bypasses. You will show me the doors, and I will walk through them."

"No," Lynx said flatly, standing up on the bench to look her in the eye.

"Absolutely not. I am a rogue, not a martyr. I like my blood inside my body thank you. There isn't enough gold in the entire Zareth Kingdom to make me walk down to the twentieth floor."

"I know," Xuan Ji said. She didn't reach for gold. She didn't reach for standard weapons. She reached directly into the spatial tear of her void storage ring. With a flick of her wrist, Xuan Ji placed three objects onto the center of the wooden table. They were monster cores, but they were entirely unlike the violently glowing stones she had given Durgan. These three cores were perfectly spherical and pitch-black. They did not emit light; they devoured it.

The shadows in the tavern booth physically stretched and warped toward the stones, pulled by a magnetic, terrifying gravity. The air around them hummed with pure, unadulterated darkness. They were A-rank Shadow Aspect Cores, harvested from the apex stalkers of the Zel'Mora forest. Lynx stopped dead in his tracks. His ancient eyes locked onto the three black spheres, his pupils dilating until they nearly swallowed his irises. As a shadow-walker, his progression was inherently bottlenecked.

To reach the next stage of power, to evolve his class and truly master the domain of shadows, he needed a catalyst. He needed a source of pure darkness so potent it could fundamentally alter his Qi. He had been stuck at his current level for three decades because finding even one high-tier Shadow Aspect Core was nearly impossible. And this terrifying woman had just casually dropped three of them onto the table.

"I have twenty-nine days," Xuan Ji said, her dark eyes pinning the halfling to the spot.

"Twenty-nine days to descend, retrieve the Abyssal Frost Marrow, and return to the surface before the person I took care of burns from the inside out. You get me to Floor 20, and these catalysts are yours. You can finally break through your bottleneck. Refuse me, and I will assume you are useless, and I will take my frustrations out on you before I find someone else." It was the ultimate carrot and the ultimate stick. Lynx stared at the cores, a bead of cold sweat rolling down his temple.

He knew it was a death sentence. He knew that following this unfathomable woman into the deepest reaches of the Grand Abyss was the most astronomically stupid thing he could ever do. But he was a rogue. And the greed inside his heart was a living, breathing thing. Slowly, his small hand trembling slightly, Lynx reached out and hovered his fingers over the black spheres.

The moment he felt the ambient aura of the cores, a rush of intoxicating, absolute power surged up his arm, wrapping around his Qi like a second skin. He swallowed hard and looked up at Ming Xuan Ji.

"The main toll gates are heavily guarded by the King's military," Lynx said, his voice raspy and tight.

"They check guild registries, party compositions, and sanction writs. We can't go through the front door." Xuan Ji smiled. It was a small, chilling curve of her lips that contained zero warmth.

"Lead the way," she commanded.

Not long after they made their preparation to delve into the Grand Abyss Dungeon, the two of them stood at the precipice of madness. They had bypassed the sprawling, militarized checkpoints of the upper ward entirely, utilizing a series of hidden smuggling tunnels that Lynx had mapped out over the decades. They emerged on a sheer, rocky overlook that protruded over the massive, yawning chasm in the exact center of the Royal Capital. This was the true entrance to the Grand Abyss Dungeon.

It was a colossal, perfectly circular sinkhole plunging straight down into the crust of the earth, so massive that entire castles could have been dropped into it without touching the sides. Thick, unnatural fog rolled out of the depths, glowing with a sickly, bioluminescent hue that shifted between deep purple and necrotic green.

The sound of the Abyss was a constant, low, vibrating roar, the collective breathing of millions of monsters, the grinding of ancient tectonic plates, and the raw friction of violent, condensed mana. Standing on the edge of the overlook, the heavy, frigid wind whipping her black-and-crimson hanfu around her legs, Ming Xuan Ji looked down into the darkness. She didn't feel fear. She didn't feel hesitation.

For the first time since she had been pulled from the rubble of her old world, she felt the burning, undeniable thrill of a genuine challenge. But this time, it wasn't for a high score. It wasn't for a stream highlight or the applause of millions of digital viewers. It was for the life of the girl sleeping in the Vael estate. It was for Evanthe.

"The smuggler's path connects directly to Floor 5, bypassing the upper grottos," Lynx yelled over the roaring wind, his small hands quickly securing a heavily enchanted, dark-iron grappling hook to a stalagmite.

"From there, it's a straight drop into the lethal zones. If you're going to back out, Lady Ming, this is the time!"

"How cute, this is nothing compared to the deep part of Zel'Mora forest."

"Twenty-nine days," Xuan Ji whispered to the Abyss, her voice a vow that pierced through the roaring wind. She stepped off the ledge, plummeting straight down into the darkness with the halfling in hand.