The stranger's pickaxe struck the cavern wall in a steady rhythm, stone chips cascading across the floor like metallic rain. Luminous crystals filled the vast expanse bathing everything in a warm glow. He'd chosen this spot carefully—close enough to appear diligent, far enough from the overseers to avoid unwanted attention.
Something felt wrong.
The unease had first stirred during breakfast, when his bowl of gruel grew cold as he stared into its depths. A nameless dread rose from the stones beneath his feet, different from the usual emotional echoes his awakened upper dantian detected. Where normally he caught only wisps—fragments of terror here, threads of despair there—now something darker pulsed through the rock. The usual ghostly patina of suffering, laid down by countless souls over years of endless toil, had taken on a new and threatening resonance.
Now, as morning stretched toward midday, that unease had grown into something he could no longer ignore. Every few minutes, he found himself pausing mid-swing, head tilted toward some sound beyond hearing, while the mines' familiar spiritual vibrations played like a song slightly out of key.
The first ripple of foreign spiritual energy brushed against his consciousness like ice water down his spine. Deep below, something moved—no, many things moved. Their spirits felt like ink spreading through clear water, dark and strange and wrong. He could feel every twist and turn they made through the tunnels below, sense their massive forms sliding through passages he'd never seen but somehow knew existed. The power radiating from them was unlike anything he'd encountered in his time at the mines—ancient, hungry, and impossibly vast.
His hands trembled on the pickaxe handle. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the cavern's cool air. The darkness below seemed to writhe with malevolent purpose now, and he could feel them drawing closer—an army of nightmares surging upward through the earth.
Then came the killing intent.
It hit him like a physical blow, a wave of such concentrated malice that his knees nearly buckled. This was no mere beast hunger or territorial aggression—this was pure, focused hatred, the desire to rend and tear and destroy everything in its path. His spiritual sense became a curse as it laid bare the full horror of what approached.
The warning gong's deep resonance was almost an afterthought when it finally came, its rhythm spelling out a message every slave knew by heart: surge-surge-surge. It was almost a relief—a confirmation he wasn't going mad. The stranger's pickaxe stopped mid-swing as yelling erupted from the deeper tunnels. Around him, other slaves dropped their tools and began running toward the main passages.
A new sensation thrummed through him then—a deep vibration that made his bones ache, like standing too close to a massive drum. The pressure built until his teeth rattled, reminiscent of a bowstring pulled to its breaking point. Something massive was coming. Something that made the earlier creatures feel like mere scouts.
"Move! Everyone move!" Overseer Jihun's voice carried over the chaos. "Back to the compound! Now!" The overseer's usual arrogance had vanished, replaced by sharp, professional commands. That, more than anything, told the stranger how serious this was.
"Chen! Li! We hold this cavern until the rest get back!" Jihun barked at two cultivators who materialized beside him. "Whatever's coming is massive—I've never felt anything like it. Power up the secondary formations. We can't let them reach the compound." His fingers traced complex patterns in the air as he spoke. He turned to a third cultivator who appeared. "I'll get the barrier up!"
The stranger slowed to a walk as defensive formations crackled to life overhead. The cultivators rushed past, their eyes blazing with inner light as qi flowed through the surrounding caverns in intricate webs. The formations were impressive, yet something whispered they were simple—almost rudimentary—like the main gate formations he'd studied long ago. Still, they should be effective enough for their purpose.
The three cultivators moved in practiced formation—two with hands weaving complex patterns that left trails of luminescent energy in the air, while Jihun traced golden sigils with his fingers, power gathering at his fingertips. He could finally gauge their strength—two middle stage core cultivators and Jihun being late stage. Qi rippled around them in powerful waves as they cycled energy through their meridians, their movements precise and efficient, like they'd done this countless times before.
The air solidified around them as the barrier matrices took shape, each sigil connecting to form complex geometric patterns. The stranger felt the hum of contained energy, recognizing the patterns instinctively—and their weaknesses.
Before he could ponder that thought, a roar shook loose stones from the ceiling. Not a simple beast's cry—this was something ancient and hungry. The slaves' exodus became a panicked stampede.
Wei appeared at his side, breathing heavily. "Keep moving! The formations won't hold them for—"
Another roar, closer now. The tunnel wall to their left exploded inward. Through the dust and debris, the stranger glimpsed chitinous limbs and gleaming eyes. A cultivator's fire technique illuminated the horror—a creature like a massive centipede, but wrong. Its segments were asymmetrical, covered in pulsing growths that leaked black ichor. Where the liquid touched the stone floor, it sizzled and smoked. The thing's mandibles clicked and chattered, dripping with a viscous substance that glowed with an unnatural purple light. Each segment of its body writhed independently, as if hosting something alive beneath its twisted carapace.
Not just a beast surge. A demonic beast surge!
The cultivators engaged it immediately. "Push it back! Hold the line!" Fire and lightning struck the monster. It screamed, thrashing against the barrier formations. The air crackled with ozone as Chen unleashed another lightning strike, while Li's flames wreathed the creature's head in a blazing corona. Jihun's golden sigils transformed into chains of light that tried to bind the beast's segments.
But for every wound they inflicted, more horrors poured through the breach. Smaller creatures—like spiders made of twisted shadow—skittered across the ceiling. A mass of writhing tentacles probed the edges of the barrier formations, testing for weaknesses. The stranger caught glimpses of other battles through the dust and chaos—more cultivators engaging monstrosities in the side tunnels, their techniques casting strange shadows on the cavern walls.
Other slaves streamed into the main cavern, abandoned tools scattered in their wake. Their terror rose above even the sounds of combat, a palpable wave that swept the stranger toward the exit in its tide. Through gaps in the surging crowd, he saw the centipede-thing rear back, its ichor-dripping mandibles snapping at the barrier while more of its kind emerged from the darkness beyond.
The wave of slaves burst from the mine entrance into the wider tunnel leading to the compound, their footsteps echoing off the stone walls. The sounds of battle grew fainter behind them—the crash of energy techniques, the roars of monsters, the shouted commands of cultivators. The stranger felt his racing heart begin to slow as they put distance between themselves and the horror in the depths. He could feel the vibrations of the defensive formations activating in sequence, sealing the path behind them. They might actually make it.
A familiar shout of defiance pierced the chaos—a voice followed by a distinctive surge of qi rippling through the mayhem like a mountain stream carving through stone. The stranger's head snapped toward a side passage, his heart lurching at her power signature, as unmistakable to him as a fingerprint.
Yuechuang.
Ancient muscle memory seized control before conscious thought could intervene. He broke from the group, deaf to Wei's desperate "What are you doing? Stop!" as he charged against the tide of fleeing slaves.
Foreign qi signatures pulsed through the tunnels ahead—twisted, wrong, like ink bleeding through parchment. The life force within them was even more disturbing—an aberration that felt like a void in the natural cycle itself, as if something had torn holes in the fabric of existence and stuffed them with writhing darkness. Their consciousness patterns sparked with alien madness, more chaos than cognition. But he pushed forward, drawn by that familiar mountain stream amidst the darkness. The acrid taste of demonic essence filled the air, battle tremors vibrated through the stone beneath his feet, and underneath it all, the steady pulse of Yuechuang's power remained his anchor to sanity.
Fear for Yuechuang drove him forward, his heart hammering against his ribs. He passed through one of the barrier formations, feeling its energy wash over him like cool water before letting him through. The yelling had stopped, which was worse than if it had continued.
He rounded the corner and skidded to a stop, his mind struggling to process the impossible scene before him.
Yuechuang was pressed against the rough stone wall, but she wasn't alone. A massive deep delver—his Deep Delver, the one he'd fought before—stood between her and something that belonged in nightmares. The creature was a mass of writhing tentacles extending from a central body that pulsed with sickly bioluminescence. Each pulse sent waves of wrongness through his spiritual sense, like the thing was somehow offending reality itself.
More deep delvers prowled through the shadowed passages, moving with lethal grace as they engaged the horror-things that slithered and chittered in the darkness. One pair flanked a twisted beast with spider-like limbs, the larger delver roaring and slashing to draw its attention while its partner circled behind to strike at exposed joints. Another duo herded a writhing mass of shadows away from a tunnel entrance, their claws flashing in perfect synchronization.
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They're protecting their territory, he realized, watching them move with coordinated effort. This isn't random—they're defending their home against invaders.
Time fractured as a massive tentacle whipped toward the deep delver guarding Yuechuang. The appendage coiled around the creature's torso like a striking serpent, hoisting it skyward before slamming it against the cavern wall. The impact shook loose an avalanche of stone. The deep delver's razor-sharp claws tore desperately at its captor, carving deep furrows that wept black ichor. But more tentacles lashed out, wrapping around limbs and chest in a crushing embrace. A sound like splintering bamboo echoed through the chamber as the pressure mounted, followed by the deep delver's agonized shriek.
"You void-spawned bastard!" Yuechuang's curse pierced the chaos as rock and dust rained down around her.
"Nooooo. Not again." Remembering Yuzhe's determined eyes before being buried in rock.
Something ancient stirred within the stranger—like a sleeping dragon unfurling its wings after a thousand-year slumber. Time stretched like honey as knowledge from countless lifetimes flooded through him: powerful bloodline techniques, mystical arts lost to the ages, sacred cultivation methods that had crumbled to dust with their last practitioners. His body moved with inherited grace, muscle memory older than the mountains themselves guiding his movements.
Thunder crackled overhead as dark clouds materialized, swirling with unnatural speed. Heaven and earth themselves seemed to hold their breath, recognizing what was awakening below.
He circulated jing, shen, and qi in intricate patterns through his meridians, touching the twisted souls of the horror-things with an understanding that transcended mortal knowledge. His hands traced forbidden sigils through the air with perfect precision, each gesture awakening something primal in his blood and bone. Mana and tri-fold power merged around nodes scattered throughout his body, ancient energies responding to arts not seen since the first dawn.
The air around him crystallized with an energy that was neither magic nor spiritual force, but something far more primordial. A web of quicksilver appeared above Yuechuang keeping the ceiling from collapsing. As he positioned himself between the deep delver and the horror, the air rippled and distorted around him like waves of heat rising from sun-baked stone. Threads of pure light, like strands of starfire, cascaded from his chest and then—
Slash. The tentacles holding the deep delver separated from their host in clean cuts, along with three more that had whipped toward the stranger. The severed appendages thrashed on the ground as their owner recoiled, spraying ichor. Where the light had touched them, the tentacles blackened and withered and smoked.
Other threads wrapped around every abomination in a three hundred meter radius centered on the stranger, extending like a web of divine judgment. The light pierced through corrupted flesh and twisted bone, wrapping around their cores and ripping them from their spirit. Not merely killing them—but removing the higher evolved ones from the cosmic cycle. The essence rushed back into the stranger and into his own cores. He let out a scream of agony as the tainted energy filled him. His power surged and he felt a transformative wave crash through his body, pain emanating from all three of his dantians.
The effort sent the stranger to his knees, darkness crowding the edges of his vision. Through the haze, he watched as the remaining horror-things retreated into the depths, their chittering fading to echoes.
Thunder cracked overhead in three sharp bursts. Divine lightning pierced the cavern, bathing everything in searing white. The stranger's body twisted as celestial fire coursed through his veins like molten steel. His scream shattered against stone walls while the tribulation lightning burned through him, resonating with something ancient in his cores. The clash felt like warring gods trying to tear him apart from within.
The stranger lay sprawled on the stone, his body a symphony of pain. Through swimming vision, he watched the deep delvers' consciousness patterns swirl and dance—complex, structured, nothing like the chaotic signatures of mindless beasts—as he met the wounded deep delver's gaze. The creature rumbled—a vibration answered by its companions in an unmistakable exchange of spirit and sound. The remaining Deep Delvers moved with surprising gentleness, carefully lifting their fallen companion. One of them—smaller, with distinctive scarring—turned to look at him directly. There was intelligence in that gaze, and the gratitude in its mental signature was unmistakable.
A presence suddenly filled the cavern—vast, powerful, curious. The words formed directly in his mind, each syllable resonating with power: They were right. You were running around the mines this whole time. But, I finally found you. The mental voice held equal parts wonder and threat.
The stranger felt it then—a brutal attack aimed directly at his soul. For a moment, there was sensation all throughout his spirit, like grabbing an electric fence. But then...something else. Something ancient and vast within him responded. A terrible wrenching sensation tore through the invading spirit, followed by a shrill scream that cut off into absolute silence.
Cool hands touched his face. Yuechuang knelt before him, her sky-blue eyes wide with concern—and fear? "You need to go," she whispered urgently. "Now. Get back to the compound before they notice you're missing." Her fingers squeezed his shoulder. "Thank you. But..." She glanced at where the light had emanated from his chest. "What was that? And why did it call down a tribulation?"
He tried to speak, but exhaustion dragged at him like chains. She was right—questions would have to wait. The surge wasn't over, and being found away from the group would mean death. With effort, he forced himself to his feet and began staggering back toward the main tunnel.
Behind him, Yuechuang's whisper barely reached his ears: "What are you?"
He wished he knew the answer. But one thing was becoming clear—none of this should have been possible.
The stranger stumbled back toward the sounds of battle, his mind racing. What was that power? What was that presence? And why were the deep delvers helping him?
Angry roars echoed from the chasm, the sound chasing him like hungry shadows through the tunnels.
* * *
The stranger stumbled into view of the compound gate where two guards stood watch, their faces carved from stone. The taller one—close-cropped black hair and dead eyes—stepped forward, fingers already caressing the controller at his wrist.
"Look what we have here." His lips twisted into something that might have been a smile on a human face. "A stray dog that can't heel."
The stranger sagged against the rough wall, lungs still burning. Despite the exhaustion dragging at his muscles, he forced his spine straight. "Got separated during the surge—"
"Separated?" The guard's voice held the sweetness of poisoned honey. He prowled around the stranger, boots scraping stone with each deliberate step. "Or plotting something while everyone ran?" A pause, heavy with threat. "You know what happens to slaves who think they're clever."
The second guard—shorter, with a weathered face—shifted impatiently. "We don't have time for this, Zhang Wei. The surge—"
"We always have time to teach proper respect," Zhang Wei snapped, his eyes never leaving the stranger. "These dogs need to learn their place, or they start getting ideas." His thumb hovered over the controller with anticipation. "Besides, I've been itching to try out the new calibrations on these Leashes."
Time fractured as Zhang Wei's thumb pressed down. The stranger's muscles tensed, anticipating the familiar searing agony of Leash activation. But instead of white-hot pain, only a gentle pulse rippled through his body.
Horror pierced his confusion—react wrong, and he was dead. In the split second before anyone could notice his lack of response, the stranger let his legs buckle. As he fell, his mind raced through every detail he'd witnessed during the slave's torture in the mine: the way the man's back had arched at an impossible angle, how his fingers had curled into rigid claws, the particular pitch of his screams that had started deep before rising to something inhuman.
He collapsed to the ground, forcing his back into that same agonized arch. A scream tore from his throat—starting low, then climbing to that remembered pitch of desperation. Every muscle tensed as he thrashed against the stone floor, each movement a calculated mirror of remembered suffering. He noticed Zhang Wei's eyes narrow slightly and immediately twisted his face into a more tortured expression, letting foam gather at the corners of his mouth where he'd bitten down hard on his cheek.
"That's right," Zhang Wei said, satisfaction thick in his voice. "Scream for me, dog."
The stranger's mind raced beneath his performance. Another memory flashed—a woman losing control of her bladder during a Leash punishment. Would they notice if he didn't? His thoughts scattered as he forced another scream, this one broken by desperate gasping. He let his eyes roll back, remembering how the slave's gaze had gone unfocused, showing mainly whites.
Zhang Wei leaned closer, and the stranger caught a flicker of something in the guard's consciousness—doubt? His heart nearly stopped, but he channeled the fresh surge of terror into his performance, letting his limbs jerk in the distinctive staccato rhythm he'd observed so many times. Blood from his bitten cheek helped sell the illusion, trickling from the corner of his mouth as he continued to convulse.
"Enough." The second guard's voice cut through the stranger's screams. "The surge is still active. We need him inside so we can go help with containment."
The stranger faced a new challenge—no one simply stopped convulsing after a Leash activation. He let his screams taper into choked whimpers, his muscles still twitching arhythmically as though electricity still coursed through them.
"Get up." Zhang Wei's voice crackled with suppressed rage at having his entertainment cut short. "Unless you'd like another demonstration?"
The stranger forced his trembling limbs to move, making each motion appear excruciating. His hands shook—now from genuine reaction to the near disaster—as he pushed himself up. The taste of blood filled his mouth, metallic and grounding. He swayed on his feet, letting drool and blood drip down his chin, remembering how long it had taken others to regain their balance after a Leash punishment.
"Inside." Zhang Wei ordered, shoving him roughly through the gate. "And dog? Next time won't be so gentle."
The compound's shadows swallowed him as he staggered forward, shaking from more than just his act. Behind him, he heard the second guard's urgent voice: "Come on, Wei. They'll need every cultivator they can get if those things breached the lower chambers."
The heavy gate slid shut with a resonant boom. The stranger stayed hunched and trembling until he was certain the guards had gone. Only then did he let his shoulders straighten slightly, though the shaking didn't stop. His mind raced with questions: Why hadn't the Leash worked properly? He clearly remembered the pain from implantation—he still had nightmares about it. Why was he so different? And why was this the worst day ever?