Flint's heart pounded as she raced down the mountain path, barely registering Dawn Everleaf's startled expression behind her. Her fingers trembled as they clutched her jade tablet, sending a desperate message to Seedling: "Where are you?"
The tablet's surface remained eerily still, its smooth jade face reflecting nothing but Flint's increasingly desperate eyes. She stared at it so intently that her breath left small clouds of condensation on its cold surface, but no response came.
If Sage Mortius Crane built a secret prison, where would he hide it? The thought raced through her mind as she scanned the landscape. The forest at the mountain's base seemed the obvious choice – dense enough to conceal secrets, far enough from prying eyes.
But as soon as she entered the pine forest, despair began to creep in. The trees loomed around her like silent sentinels, their branches creating a maze of shadows that seemed to shift and change with each step. The more frantically she searched, the more her thoughts scattered like leaves in the wind.
Flint forced herself to stop, pressing her palm against rough bark as she caught her breath. Early spring snow still clung to the ground in patches, and – her eyes widened with sudden realization. Footprints. I need to find their tracks.
Sweat trickled down her back despite the cold as she began methodically scanning the ground. The towering pines stretched endlessly upward, making her feel like an insect scurrying between giants' feet. Finally, her persistence paid off – there in a patch of undisturbed snow, she spotted Seedling's distinctive footprints. Her friend hadn't taken her fox form today.
But the trail ended all too soon, disappearing where the snow gave way to bare earth. Flint found herself compulsively checking her jade tablet again and again, but its surface remained stubbornly silent. Looking back, she realized just how deep into the forest she'd ventured. The familiar peaks of the sect were barely visible through the dense canopy above.
As she turned in a slow circle, something caught her eye – a clearing to her left, where the pines had been systematically removed. The space felt wrong somehow, too precisely empty in this otherwise untamed forest. Every instinct she possessed screamed that this had to be it.
Her jade tablet remained silent as she approached the clearing, its weight in her pocket a constant reminder of Seedling's unanswered cry for help.
Flint's footsteps echoed through the forest as she raced toward the clearing. But when she arrived, her heart sank – there was no door, no entrance, nothing but bare earth.
Yet something felt off. Unlike the surrounding forest floor, this patch was completely clear of snow, unnaturally clean. Studying it more carefully, Flint noticed faint lines in the soil forming an almost perfect square – the outline of what had to be a concealed entrance.
But how to open it? Her eyes darted desperately around the clearing until they landed on something unusual:
A single pine sapling caught Flint's attention, standing alone at the clearing's edge. Unlike the towering giants surrounding it, this young tree was barely taller than she was. More importantly, it seemed oddly out of place – too perfectly positioned, its trunk unnaturally straight.
But how to open the door? Her eyes fixed on the small pine tree - barely her height, conspicuously out of place among its towering brethren. Something about its stunted growth nagged at her instincts. Drawing closer, Flint's fingers traced over the bark, finding what she'd hoped for: runes etched in concentric circles, similar to those she'd seen on the service puppets in the dining hall.
If they work the same way... She bit her lip, studying the intricate pattern. The runes were arranged in circles connected by directional arrows, forming what she'd heard called "functions" during her brief exposure to runic studies. Though she'd thought learning runes as impractical at the time, she now cursed her lack of knowledge.
Still, this configuration seemed simpler than most. The arrows created a clear flow, like a river system feeding into increasingly larger streams. Her eyes followed the pattern to its source - a single circle with no arrows pointing toward it.
Worth a try. Holding her breath, Flint channeled a thin stream of natural aura into that initial circle. For a heart-stopping moment, nothing happened. Then the runes began to glow, first faintly, then with increasing brightness that spread through the connected circles like falling dominoes.
A grinding sound drew her attention to the ground. The perfectly square patch of earth she'd noticed earlier was shifting, revealing stone steps descending into darkness. As the entrance fully opened, a wave of stale air rushed up from below, carrying the faint tang of blood.
Flint's throat tightened. The darkness below seemed to pulse with malevolent purpose, and the faint scent of blood made her stomach churn. But somewhere down there, Seedling needed her. Taking a deep breath of the clean forest air, she steeled herself and took her first step down into the shadows.
The stone was cold beneath her feet, and each step seemed to take her further from the world she knew into something mysterious and wrong. Hold on, Seedling, she thought. I'm coming.
"Flint, is that you?" Seedling's familiar voice echoed up the stairwell.
"I'm here!" Flint raced down the remaining steps, her footfalls echoing against cold stone. As she reached the bottom, the darkness gave way to an otherworldly scene that made her blood run cold.
The underground chamber was illuminated by an eerie brownish-red glow emanating from multiple human shapes. In this haunting light, Seedling's white hair took on a crimson sheen, her purple eyes gleaming like ghost lights in the darkness. A dark stain spread across her leg where she'd been wounded, the fabric of her robes torn and bloody.
Seeing Flint, Seedling dragged herself forward with trembling arms. "Flint," she gasped, "my leg... I think it was a sword. I can't walk."
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But Flint could barely hear her friend's words. Her mind went blank as she registered the true source of the red light - resentment force, swirling around dozens of caged cultivators like angry storm clouds. And now, like a gathering tempest, that resentment force seemed to sense her presence.
Time itself seemed to freeze. The brownish-red light began to move with terrible purpose, streaming toward her from every direction. The resentment force poured forth in torrents of raw emotion - centuries of pain, grief, and rage given physical form. They wailed a chorus of ten thousand sorrows, reaching for her like desperate hands finally finding their long-lost salvation.
The sheer intensity of their collective anguish was overwhelming. The air itself seemed to vibrate with their ethereal screams as waves of resentment force crashed against each other in their rush to reach her, creating a terrible aurora that filled the chamber with its bloody light. In that moment, Flint stood at the eye of an emotional hurricane, as the hundreds of resentful souls entwining around these dozens of cultivators recognized something in her that called to them like a beacon in an endless night, and they galloped over at top speed.
This is very, very bad, was her last coherent thought before the tide of resentment force crashed over her like a tsunami of pure agony.
The weight of a thousand sorrows drove Flint to her knees, her mind drowning in an overwhelming flood of memories that weren't her own. These weren't just villagers from nearby – she saw faces from distant towns and cities, their lives flashing before her eyes in brutal clarity. Children playing in sunlit courtyards, young lovers stealing kisses beneath cherry blossoms, elderly grandparents telling stories by candlelight. All of them, every single one, had their souls violently torn from still-breathing bodies, leaving behind only these churning clouds of resentment that now wrapped around their killers like vengeful shrouds.
The memories came faster, more intense, each one carved with the razor-sharp edge of final moments:
A wife's gentle smile as she straightened her husband's collar, her fingers lingering just a moment longer than necessary. "Be safe today," she'd said every morning for twenty years, never knowing that ordinary Tuesday would be their last goodbye.
A father waiting by the door each evening, arms already opening for his daily embrace. "Tell me about your adventures today," he'd always say, his eyes crinkling with genuine interest in even the smallest details of his child's world.
A grandmother's wrinkled hands carefully folding dumplings, teaching her granddaughter the exact way to pinch the edges. "This is how my mother taught me," she'd explained, passing down not just a recipe but generations of love.
The resentment force surged around her in frenzied waves, desperate to share these precious memories – not as mere images, but as raw emotional experiences that burned themselves into Flint's consciousness. Their collective cry echoed through her mind with such force it threatened to shatter her very being:
Why did they kill us? We had families! Dreams! Lives! What gave them the right to tear our souls away? WHY?
The intensity of their desperation clawed at her throat, making it impossible to breathe. Their pain became her pain, their loss her loss, until she could no longer tell where their anguish ended and her own began.
I... I don't know... Flint managed to think through the maelstrom of shared agony, her own helplessness merging with theirs. The weight of their combined suffering pressed down on her like a physical force, threatening to crush her beneath the impossible burden of thousands of truncated lives, each one demanding answers she couldn't give.
The endless torrent of agony tore through Flint's mind like shards of broken glass. She lost all sense of her surroundings as her body's natural aura went into chaos. Light and Shadow natural aura collided violently within her, ripping through her internal channels like warring storms. Blood vessels burst in her throat, while her eyes wept a horrifying mixture of blood and tears that traced crimson trails down her cheeks. Each breath felt like swallowing razor blades, and her limbs trembled uncontrollably as the conflicting energies threatened to tear her apart from the inside.
"Hnngh... cough... COUGH!" A violent spasm wracked her body as she vomited a dark splash of blood onto the stone floor, her trembling arms barely supporting her weight as she hunched on all fours.
"Flint, what's happening to you?" Seedling dragged herself closer, ignoring the pain in her injured leg. She could only watch helplessly as her friend was consumed by the swirling resentment force. The energy wrapped around Flint like a terrible inferno, but unlike normal flames that spread outward, this fire burned inward, consuming only its host with merciless intensity.
"Is this jade tablet yours?" A male voice cut through the darkness, causing Seedling's fox ears to perk up instantly.
"Who's there?" Her purple eyes scanned the shadows, her enhanced night vision searching for the source of the voice. Despite her injury, every muscle in her body tensed, ready to defend her vulnerable friend.
Around them, the cultivators in their cages were slowly regaining their senses, confusion evident in their muttered questions and disoriented movements. The resentment force that had clouded their minds now swirled exclusively around Flint, who had become a unwitting lightning rod for their collective suffering.
The memory crashed over her like a tidal wave – Obsidian's words echoing through time: "I can't survive this." As if summoned by that thought, the phrase began repeating through the swirling mass of resentment force memories, each iteration bringing sharper focus to the scene. There, through the haze of centuries, she saw him – Blaze Mighty, his form so achingly similar to Spark's. He turned at the sound of those fateful words, his sword still dripping crimson droplets that seemed to hang suspended in the ancient memory.
Is this how I die too? The thought brought with it a crushing wave of melancholy, a deep sadness for all the cycles of suffering that seemed to have no end.
In that moment, her consciousness split – part of her remained in the underground chamber, while another part plunged into an infinite abyss of dark water. Looking up, she saw nothing but blackness above, while all around her swirled that terrible brownish-red light of countless resentment forces, accumulated over centuries of human suffering.
Both her present and past selves reached out simultaneously, fingers stretching toward the swirling mass of resentment force. If I die like this, I'm just repeating another cycle of sorrow.
Her inner voice rose in frustration and anguish: Throughout both reincarnations, I've listened to these cries of anguish, but I've never been able to do anything! The mortal realm keeps shattering, and I bear witness to all this pain, yet I remain powerless to stop it!
The rage and helplessness in her mental cry echoed through both past and present, a bridge across lifetimes of accumulated suffering.
Flint tilted her head back, her vision oscillating between the dim ceiling of the underground chamber and the endless dark waters of her memory. A fresh rivulet of blood traced its way down her cheek, falling to the stone floor with an almost imperceptible pat. When she closed her eyes, more blood-tinged tears were forced out, leaving new crimson tracks on her face.
Though her mind still reeled from the crushing weight of thousands of memories, some part of her consciousness seemed to detach itself from earthly concerns, rising above the tempest of suffering. She faced forward, palms pressed against the cold stone, then brought her forehead down in a deep, decisive kowtow that connected with the ground with significant force.
"I hear you."
Her voice carried an otherworldly resonance, steady yet ethereal, like the voice of a deity speaking across dimensions. The words seemed to ripple through the swirling mass of resentment force. One of the resentful souls, as if finally acknowledged after lifelong of sorrow into the void, began to fade. Its brownish-red light gradually diminished, like mist dissipating in morning sunlight, until it vanished completely into peaceful nothingness.
With each kowtow, blood from Flint's scraped forehead mingled with the dried tracks already marking her face like ritual paint. Yet even as her physical form bore the marks of suffering, something in her soul seemed to grow more complete, more transcendent. Her eyes remained closed, but a gentle smile graced her blood-stained features – the serene expression of a deity receiving the prayers of the faithful.
Under the astonished gazes of Seedling and the imprisoned cultivators, Flint turned on her knees. She began a solemn procession toward the entrance, moving forward one agonizing kowtow at a time. Each deliberate movement was accompanied by those same words, spoken with ethereal gravity:
"I hear you."
The hundreds of resentment forces followed her like a procession of spectral mourners, their brownish-red light creating an otherworldly aurora that danced around her form. As she approached the shaft of natural light streaming down from above, her robes wore through at the knees, leaving her bare skin to scrape against the rough stone floor. Still, she continued her ritual crawl, marking her path with droplets of blood like sacred offerings upon an altar.
Each time her forehead touched the ground, it carried the weight of countless interrupted lives. Her movement was both a penance and a promise, each kowtow acknowledging another soul's worth of suffering. The very air seemed to vibrate with the profound significance of this mysterious ceremony, as if the boundaries between the mortal and divine realms had momentarily blurred in this underground chamber.
Behind her, she left not just a trail of blood, but a path of gradually fading resentment forces, each soul finding peace in her recognition of their pain, each "I hear you" releasing another spirit from its bonds of suffering.
As Flint raised her bloodied head once more, a shadow suddenly eclipsed the shaft of sunlight streaming down from above. Dawn Everleaf's silhouette appeared at the entrance, flanked by several Adept disciples whose robes rustled in the chill spring breeze.
"That's her!" Dawn's accusatory finger stabbed downward, her usually composed features twisted with alarm at the otherworldly scene below. The brownish-red light of the resentment force created a haunting aurora around Flint's kneeling form, making her appear both terrifying and tragic – a blood-stained supplicant wrapped in the ethereal glow of ten thousand sorrows.