Chương 33: Chapter 17 Part 3

The anti-magic dampening field generated by the thirty Abyssal Death-Knights rolled over Ming Xuan Ji like a suffocating, invisible tide. To a royal cleric or a grand-mage from the towering spires of Elyndria, this field was an immediate death sentence. It was designed to violently disrupt the flow of external mana, turning devastating elemental spells into harmless, fizzling sparks.

It forced intruders to fight the towering, heavily armored undead in pure, grueling melee combat, a scenario the Death-Knights were expressly built to win. But Ming Xuan Ji was not a mage. She did not rely on the ambient mana of the world to fight her battles. Her power was entirely internal, born from the dense, compressed cosmic engine of her Dantian and the indestructible tempering of her physical body. A dampening field meant absolutely nothing to the Heavenly Demon.

The vanguard of the Death-Knight battalion charged. They moved in perfect, terrifying synchronization, their heavy sabatons cracking the obsidian floor. The three lead knights raised their rusted, massive greatswords, the blades dripping with highly corrosive dark magic, and brought them down in a coordinated, inescapable sweeping strike designed to cleave her into pieces. Xuan Ji didn't dodge. She didn't retreat. She stepped directly into the lethal intersection of the three blades.

She raised her bare right hand, her skin glowing with a faint, crimson hue as she condensed her Qi into her flesh. CLANG. The sound of metal striking her open palm echoed through the cavern like a church bell. The three massive greatswords stopped dead in their tracks, entirely halted by the grip of her slender fingers.

The dark-elemental magic coating the blades violently hissed and sparked against her skin, desperately trying to corrode her flesh, but the [Heavenly Demon Raiment] and her tempered body completely rejected the decay. Behind his great helm, the amethyst light of the lead Death-Knight flickered in what could only be described as confusion. Xuan Ji smiled. It was a cold, utterly blood-chilling expression. She tightened her grip.

The three massive, enchanted greatswords shattered like brittle glass, sending shards of dark steel raining onto the floor. Before the knights could even process the destruction of their weapons, Xuan Ji moved. [Heavenly Demon Footwork: Phantom Step]. She blurred, completely bypassing their heavy shields, and appeared directly inside the vanguard's guard. She drove a palm strike into the center of the lead knight's rusted breastplate. BOOM. The force of the strike was astronomical.

The heavy armor didn't just dent; it caved inward, completely imploding. The Death-Knight was launched backward as if fired from a dwarven siege cannon, smashing through three of its comrades before violently colliding with an obsidian pillar. The pillar cracked, and the four undead were reduced to a pile of twisted metal and fading amethyst light. The remaining twenty-six Death-Knights broke formation, their combat instincts recognizing that they were no longer the apex predators in the room. They swarmed her.

It was a mistake. They were simply offering themselves to the meat grinder. Xuan Ji became a localized typhoon of martial violence. She fought entirely barehanded, her movements a mesmerizing, terrifying dance of brutal efficiency. She ducked under a horizontal slash, pivoted on her heel, and delivered a spinning back-kick that completely decapitated a knight, sending its heavy helm flying into the necrotic river.

She caught a spear thrust with her left hand, yanked the undead forward, and shattered its helm with a devastating right elbow. Every strike she threw carried the weight of a falling mountain. She didn't need long-range Qi blasts. She dismantled the mythical battalion piece by piece, turning their superior armor into shrapnel. From the darkness behind a jagged rock formation, the halfling Lynx watched the massacre unfold.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. He had his hands clamped over his mouth to muffle his own terrified breathing. As a rogue, he was used to studying the flow of combat, analyzing the weaknesses of monsters and men alike. But there was no flow here. There was no back-and-forth struggle. It was just a one-sided slaughter.

He watched as the woman casually parried a strike that would have cut a standard royal knight in half, only to follow up by driving her fist straight through an undead's reinforced steel shield and out the other side. In less than sixty seconds, the cavern fell completely silent once more. Thirty Abyssal Death-Knights lay in ruins, their bodies scattered across the black stone, their dark magic rapidly dissipating into the heavy air. Standing in the center of the carnage, Ming Xuan Ji slowly lowered her hands.

She exhaled a single, controlled breath, her internal Qi settling back into its calm, perpetual rhythm. She hadn't even broken a sweat. Without missing a beat, she raised her hand and activated the [Invisible Hand of the Void]. Invisible tendrils of spiritual energy swept over the battlefield. With surgical precision, they plucked the glowing, amethyst cores from the destroyed chests of the undead. These were A-tier undead cores, materials that dark mages and alchemists on the surface would start literal wars over.

Dozens of them zipped through the air and vanished into the spatial tear of her void storage ring.

"Halfling," Xuan Ji called out, her voice calm and even in the cavernous silence.

"We are moving." Lynx slowly detached himself from the shadow of the pillar, his small legs trembling slightly as he picked his way through the decimated armor and glowing dust. He looked up at her, his eyes wide with a mixture of reverence and stark terror.

"You fought them in melee," Lynx whispered, his voice cracking.

"In an anti-magic field. You just... you just punched thirty Death-Knights to death."

"Armor is only as strong as the threshold it can withstand," Xuan Ji replied casually, as if she were discussing the weather. She reached down and grabbed the collar of his patchwork coat with her left hand.

"Floor 16. Point the way." Lynx didn't argue. He didn't even complain when she lifted him off the ground. He simply pointed a trembling finger toward a massive, jagged archway at the far end of the cavern. Xuan Ji pushed off, and the blurring, violent descent resumed. Floor 16. Floor 17. Floor 18. As they plunged deeper into the Abyss, the very nature of the environment became aggressively hostile. The ambient mana was no longer just thick; it was toxic.

The air temperature plummeted exponentially with every floor they conquered, shifting from a damp chill to a biting, lethal frost. The monsters they encountered were fewer in number, but exponentially more terrifying. On Floor 17, she had to drop Lynx for ten entire minutes to engage a multi-headed Abyssal Hydra, a beast that regenerated its heads faster than standard magic could burn them.

Xuan Ji bypassed the regeneration entirely by using a concentrated palm strike to physically rip the central heart from its massive chest cavity. By the time they breached Floor 19, the environment had become a frozen wasteland. The walls were coated in thick, black ice that absorbed the light. The glowing moss was completely gone.

Every breath Lynx took plumed in the air as a thick white cloud, and despite the aerodynamic Qi shield Xuan Ji had wrapped around him, the halfling was shivering violently, his teeth chattering like castanets.

"L-Lady Ming," Lynx stuttered, his small hands hugging himself tight.

"I c-can't... the cold..." Xuan Ji slowed her pace, her boots finally crunching against the frost-covered stone rather than blurring over it. She funneled a stream of pure, Yang-aligned heat into the Qi bubble surrounding the halfling, acting as a localized furnace to keep his blood from freezing in his veins.

"Hold on, Lynx. We are here." The sprawling tunnel of Floor 19 narrowed, leading them onto a massive, natural bridge made of solid, dark-blue ice. At the end of the bridge stood the gateway. It wasn't a tunnel. It wasn't a stairwell. It was a colossal, free-standing archway constructed from pale, bone-white stone. Inside the archway swirled a vortex of pure frost energy. The boundary line between the explored Abyss and the unknown. The Twilight Zone. Floor 20.

Xuan Ji set Lynx down near a massive stalagmite just before the bridge. The halfling collapsed against the stone, gasping for the slightly warmed air inside his Qi bubble.

"I can't maintain your heat shield if I cross that threshold," Xuan Ji said, looking down at the shivering rogue.

"The ambient Yin energy on the other side will instantly strip it away. If you follow me through that gate, your blood will crystallize in seconds." Lynx nodded frantically, pulling his leather coat tighter around his small frame.

"I-I know. This is as far as my ability goes. B-beyond that gate is the realm of the Legendary Chaos Wyrms." Xuan Ji reached into her void ring. She didn't pull out weapons or armor. She pulled out the three pitch-black Shadow Aspect Cores she had promised him. She tossed them onto the frozen stone at his feet. Lynx stared at the mythic-tier catalysts, his eyes wide.

"You're paying me now? But... the contract was to get you back to the surface."

"The contract was to get me the fastest route to Floor 20," Xuan Ji corrected, turning her gaze toward the swirling vortex of the gateway.

"You fulfilled your end. Stay here. Use the cores. Cultivate your shadows to stay warm. Stay and witness my battle, I'm sure you can still use your sharp senses from here."

"Lady Ming..." Lynx hesitated, his rogue instincts warring with a strange, unfamiliar sense of loyalty to the terrifying woman who had carried him through hell.

"The beasts on the other side... they are yin incarnate, absolutely cold to the core." Xuan Ji didn't look back. She raised her bare hands, the sleeves of her black-and-crimson hanfu fluttering in the freezing wind generated by the gate.

"Good," Ming Xuan Ji whispered, her eyes burning with a cold, unrelenting fire.

"I was starting to get bored." She stepped off the ice bridge and walked directly into the howling vortex of Floor 20.