Volume 2, Chapter 51 (Part 2): The Weight of the Blade, Choke Point, and the Heart of the Mine
The six hounds didn't bark. They just uncoiled from the shadows with a wet, clicking sound. In the narrow junction of the mine, the air felt like it was being squeezed by a giant, invisible hand. The smell of wet earth and rot was so thick I could almost taste it on the back of my tongue.
"Form up!" Bei Bei shouted.
His black lightning flared, illuminating the cramped space. The hounds were fast—blurring streaks of muscle and glass that ignored the laws of physics, running along the ceiling and walls with equal ease.
"They are hungry, Yuhao," Bai Xue's voice drifted through my mind like a cool current. "But their hunger is a vacuum. Do not let it touch your friends."
I remembered finding her three years ago in the shifting tides of the Extreme North. She wasn't a monster then; she was a dying Ice Jade Swan, her songs fading into the snow. Professor Lakas had watched from the shore, kicking a piece of ice. He didn't tell me what to do. He just said, "Some things are worth saving, and some things are worth becoming." I chose to let her become a part of me.
"Bai Xue, now!" I whispered.
I raised my right arm. The soul bone within pulsed with a deep, icy blue. A sphere of translucent frost and shimmering white light erupted from my body, expanding until it pushed against the jagged stone walls of the tunnel. It wasn't just ice; it was a spiritual barrier, thick and heavy with the calm, unyielding weight of a frozen mountain lake.
The first hound lunged, its needle-teeth snapping. It hit the water and slowed down instantly, its momentum swallowed by the high-pressure liquid. It flailed, its movements becoming sluggish as if it were fighting at the bottom of a trench.
"Clear shot!" I yelled.
Xiaotao didn't waste a second. She stepped through the inner edge of my barrier and thrust her hand forward. A concentrated spear of Phoenix fire pierced through the water — which I parted for her with a thought — and punched a hole right through the hound's chest. The creature didn't bleed. It just turned into black ash and vanished.
"Nice work, kid," Xiao Xiong grumbled in the back of my head. The Ice Bear King was restless. He hated being underground. He missed the open tundra and the biting wind of the North. I'd met him when the Snow Empress gave him a choice: stay in the snow and fade, or follow the boy who carried the fate of the world. He chose the boy, though he complained about the heat every single day.
"Can we leave yet?" he asked. "This cave smells like a wet dog."
Not yet, Xiao Xiong, I replied, stepping back as Bei Bei decapitated another hound with a whip of lightning.
The remaining four hounds realized the junction was a death trap. Instead of retreating, they lunged all at once, aiming for the gaps in our formation.
"Tang Ya, stay down!" Bei Bei roared.
I felt the barrier rattle. The Abyssal energy from the hounds was trying to corrode the water, turning the clear blue into a muddy, toxic gray. My spiritual core throbbed. The effort of holding the barrier against four Abyssal entities was like trying to hold back a landslide with a plywood board.
"We don't have time for a brawl!" I shouted over the hiss of steam and the crackle of electricity. "The shaft! We have to go down now!"
"Jump!" Bei Bei ordered.
He didn't wait for an answer. He grabbed Tang Ya by the waist and threw himself into the dark haulage shaft in the center of the room. Xiaotao followed him, her flames flickering like a dying candle in the heavy smog.
I was the last one. I looked at the three hounds scrambling toward me. I felt the bite of the cold coming from Ba Jiao in my right leg.
"Sorry about the mess," I muttered.
I slammed my foot down. The Eight-Cornered Mysterious Ice Grass didn't just grow; it shattered the floor. Massive, razor-sharp stalks of ice erupted from the stone, impaling two of the hounds instantly. The third one jumped, but I was already falling into the dark.
The fall wasn't a clean drop. The shaft was a vertical tunnel of jagged rock, old wooden supports, and hanging iron chains. It felt like falling down a giant's throat.
"Stay together!" Xiaotao's voice echoed from below. She had ignited her wings, but the fire was dim, casting long, dancing shadows against the walls.
The air rushed past my ears, but it didn't sound like wind. It sounded like whispering. Thousands of tiny, overlapping voices were calling my name, telling me to just stop fighting and let the dark take me.
"Ignore them, Yuhao," Ba Jiao's calm, plant-like consciousness centered me. "They are just echoes of a marking that has no meaning."
Suddenly, something wet hit my cheek.
I wiped it away and looked at my glove. It was black slime. I looked up and felt my stomach drop.
The walls of the shaft were alive. Hundreds of Abyssal leeches — long, pale things with no eyes and rib-like segments — were dropping from the ceiling. They didn't fall; they glided through the air on thin, translucent membranes.
"Leeches!" I yelled, drawing the Life Guardian Blade.
One of them landed on my shoulder. It felt heavy and cold, like a bag of wet meat. I felt a sharp, stinging pain as it tried to latch onto my soul power. It wasn't just drinking energy; it was trying to inject the draining force into my veins.
"Get off!" I snarled.
I channeled the Life Guardian Blade's resonance. The green wood glowed with a fierce, stubborn vitality. The leech shriveled up as if I'd poured salt on it, falling away into the abyss.
But there were too many of them. They were swarmers. They covered the walls, the chains, and now they were covering us.
"I can't see!" Tang Ya screamed. Two leeches had latched onto her face.
Bei Bei was trying to pull them off, but his lightning was too dangerous to use so close to her head. Xiaotao was spinning in mid-air, a whirlwind of fire, but the leeches kept coming, seemingly drawn to the heat.
"Xiao Xiong! Blow them away!" I commanded.
I didn't care about the fall anymore. I let my soul power explode. A massive, circular blast of freezing wind erupted from my body. It wasn't a focused attack; it was a desperate burst of cold.
The leeches were flash-frozen in mid-air. They turned into tiny, brittle stones and shattered against the walls of the shaft. The blast also slowed our fall, the air pressure acting like a temporary parachute.
We hit the bottom with a heavy thud.
The ground wasn't stone. It was soft, like walking on a giant tongue.
I stood up, my knees shaking. I looked around.
We were in a massive, vaulted cavern at the very bottom of the mine. It was easily the size of a cathedral. The walls weren't made of rock anymore; they were coated in thick, pulsating veins of black and purple meat. It looked like the inside of a living organ.
And in the center of the room, suspended by thousands of black cords, was the Anchor.
It wasn't a statue or a machine. It was a giant, beating heart. It was twelve feet tall, translucent and glowing with a sickly, rhythmic light. Inside the heart, I could see them — the souls of the miners and the border guards. They were pressed together, their faces frozen in a silent scream, their spirits compressed into a single, dense core of pure misery.
"Oh, gods," Tang Ya whispered, falling to her knees. "They're still in there. I can feel them."
"That's the tether," I said, my voice barely a breath. The Gaze of Openings was burning. The black cord I'd been following led directly into the center of that heart. "It's not just a door. It's a battery. Chen Feng is using their suffering to keep the hole in the sky open."
The heart gave a heavy, wet thump. The gray smog in the room thickened, swirling around us like a physical weight.
"We have to break it," Bei Bei said, drawing his sword.
"You can't," I said, stopping him. "If you hit it with physical force, the souls inside will shatter. You'll just kill everyone Chen Feng stole. I have to go inside."
"Inside?" Xiaotao asked, her eyes wide. "Yuhao, that's suicide. Your mind will be shredded."
"I have Bai Xue," I said, looking at the beating heart. "And I have the Spiritual Core. I can enter a trance and sever the connections from the inside. I can untie the knot without breaking the string."
"And what about us?" Bei Bei asked, looking at the walls.
The black meat on the walls began to ripple. A massive shape was pushing through the surface — a Gatekeeper. It was a hulking, four-armed titan made of bone and Abyssal glass. It didn't have a head, just a massive, vertical mouth in the center of its chest that let out a low, vibrating hum.
"You keep that thing away from me," I said, sitting down cross-legged in the dirt. I didn't wait for an answer. I couldn't. The smog was already eating our time.
I closed my eyes.
"Bai Xue, take me down," I thought.
The world of sound and heat vanished. I felt myself slipping into a cold, quiet ocean. I wasn't in the mine anymore. I was standing in a white void, staring at a massive, tangled ball of black yarn.
Every thread in that ball was a person. Every knot was a scream.
"Be careful, Yuhao," Bai Xue whispered, her spirit manifestation appearing beside me. "If you pull the wrong thread, you will lose yourself in their pain."
I know, I thought. But I'm an Arbitrator. This is what I'm for.
I reached out and touched the first black thread.
Outside, in the physical world, my body went limp. My breathing slowed until it almost stopped.
"He's in!" Xiaotao yelled. She turned toward the Gatekeeper, her Phoenix wings flaring to their full width. "Bei Bei! Left side! Tang Ya, keep the leeches off him!"
The Gatekeeper roared — a sound that vibrated the very air in our lungs — and lunged toward my defenseless body.
End of Volume 2, Chapter 51