After a few minutes of descent, the tunnel opened into another, smaller chamber. This one was perfectly circular, with a domed ceiling. In the center of the room, on a raised dais of pure white stone, floated a single, palm-sized crystal. It pulsed with a gentle, amber light.

Surrounding the dais were four guardians.

These were different. Smaller, denser. They were humanoid in shape, carved from obsidian so dark it seemed to drink the light. Violet energy crackled along their seams, and their movements as they turned were fluid, almost graceful. Each held a weapon shaped from solidified shadow—a sword, a spear, an axe, a halberd.

Smarter. Faster.

The golden path led directly to the floating crystal, then through the far wall.

"A key?" Su Lan whispered.

"A toll," Xueya answered.

The four obsidian guardians stepped off the dais in unison, forming a loose semi-circle between the trio and the crystal. They didn’t charge. They waited.

Lin Tian assessed them. The coordination was obvious. They were a unit.

We are too.

He didn’t give a signal. He just took a step forward.

The guardian with the shadow-spear lunged, its movement a blur of dark smoke and violet light. The spearpoint aimed for Lin Tian’s throat.

A sheet of ice, not in front of Lin Tian, but under the guardian’s leading foot, flashed into existence. It was perfectly timed. The creature’s foot hit the ice and shot out from under it. Its perfect lunge became a stumbling, off-balance sprawl.

Lin Tian didn’t break stride. He leaned to the side, letting the errant spear thrust pass harmlessly by his shoulder. As the guardian stumbled past him, Su Lan was there. Her hand, wreathed in harmless-looking golden flame, tapped the small of its back.

The flame didn’t burn. It vibrated. A high-frequency pulse of pure Yang energy shot through the obsidian. The guardian froze mid-stumble, then disintegrated into a shower of black sand and fading violet sparks.

The remaining three moved as one. The swordsman and axeman came at Lin Tian from both sides, while the halberdier hung back, preparing a sweeping strike.

Xueya’s voice was a soft command to the air itself. "Still."

The temperature in the chamber plummeted. The very moisture in the air crystallized, not into snow, but into billions of microscopic ice needles. They didn’t fall. They hung suspended, creating a field of intangible, razor-sharp friction.

The two advancing guardians hit the field. Their fluid movements became jerky, slow, as if wading through frozen syrup. The ice needles couldn’t pierce their obsidian shells, but they sapped their momentum, their kinetic energy bleeding away into the cold.

Lin Tian stepped between them. He didn’t throw a punch. He simply extended his arms, palms facing out. From his left palm, a wave of glacial cold, refined by Xueya’s resonance, washed over the swordsman. From his right, a wave of focused, searing heat, borrowed from Su Lan’s bond, washed over the axeman.

The opposing energies didn’t mix. They simultaneously assaulted the two guardians.

The obsidian of the swordsman frosted over, then contracted with a sharp crack, fissuring from the inside. The axeman’s shell glowed cherry-red, then white-hot at the seams, before liquefying and sloughing off in molten droplets.

Both collapsed into inert, broken piles.

The halberdier, seeing its companions dismantled in seconds, abandoned its defensive stance. It raised its weapon, gathering a vortex of swirling shadow and violent purple lightning. It was going for one massive, desperate attack.

Su Lan sighed, a sound of pure boredom. "Oh, just stop."

She clenched her fist. The golden fire around her hand didn’t flare. It imploded, collapsing into a tiny, brilliant point at the center of her palm. Then she flicked her wrist.

A mote of light, no bigger than a grain of rice, shot across the chamber. It didn’t travel in a straight line. It zig-zagged, a bolt of intelligent lightning, and passed directly through the gathering vortex of shadow-energy.

There was no explosion. The vortex, and the shadowy halberd it surrounded, simply ceased to exist. Vanished, as if deleted from reality. The mote of light winked out.

The halberdier stood there, weaponless, its arms still raised. It looked down at its empty hands.

Lin Tian walked up to the dais, reached out, and plucked the floating amber crystal from the air. It was warm to the touch, humming with a gentle, stable energy.

The final obsidian guardian lowered its arms. The violet light in its sockets faded. It turned, walked back to its original position by the wall, and became still, just another obsidian statue.

The chamber was quiet again.

Lin Tian pocketed the crystal. A notification flashed in his vision.

[NEXUS KEY ACQUIRED. PROCEED TO CENTRAL SHAFT.]

The far wall of the chamber shimmered, then dissolved, revealing a vertical shaft leading straight down into glowing, golden depths. A warm, inviting wind sighed up from below.

Su Lan walked over to the pile of black sand that was once the spearman and poked it with her boot. "You know, for ancient, terrifying rift guardians, these guys are kind of pushovers."

"They were designed for armies," Xueya said, joining Lin Tian at the edge of the new shaft. "For waves of lesser cultivators to break upon. They were not designed for a unit that moves and thinks as one entity."

Lin Tian looked down the shaft. The golden path spiraled along its walls, leading into the bright unknown. He felt the pull from the tower stronger than ever, a magnetic draw on his very core.

The first island was cleared. The toll was paid.

He glanced back at his partners. Xueya met his gaze, her silver eyes full of quiet certainty. Su Lan gave him a sharp, confident grin.

No words were needed.

Lin Tian stepped off the edge and into the light.

The tunnel sloped deeper into the warm, mineral-scented dark. Lin Tian kept half his attention on the System’s golden path, the other half on the subtle vibrations in the air around them. They were approaching the nexus point, a dense knot of spiritual energy his map marked as a potential treasure cache.

A different vibration hummed against his hip.

He stopped, his hand going to the small jade token tucked into his belt. It was the team resonance token, issued by Elder Shen. A simple communication device, meant to pulse if a teammate was in distress. It had been silent since they scattered.

Now, it was vibrating in a weak, irregular rhythm. Like a fading heartbeat.

"Trouble?" Su Lan asked, her voice low.

Lin Tian pulled the token out. It glowed with a faint, muddy yellow light—Lu Cang’s earth-aligned qi signature. The pulse wasn’t coming from the direction of the nexus. It was pulling them sideways, toward a jagged fissure in the tunnel wall he’d dismissed as a dead end.

"Lu Cang," Lin Tian said. "He’s hurt. And he’s not on our path."

Xueya moved to his side, her gaze cool and assessing. "The protocol prioritizes the core fragment."

"The protocol didn’t account for teammates being hunted," Lin Tian countered, already turning toward the fissure. The token’s pulse was getting weaker. "He’s part of the team. If we leave him, we lose a piece of our strength. And we tell every other sect that Azure Snow abandons its own."

He didn’t wait for agreement. He slid into the narrow crack in the rock. It was a tight squeeze, the black glass-like stone scraping against his shoulders. The air grew sharp and dry. After twenty feet, the fissure opened into a vast, vertical canyon.

The walls were made of that same obsidian glass, reflecting fractured images of the sky above. The floor was a river of shattered black shards. And in the center of it all, trapped in a circle of glowing red and violet runes, was Lu Cang.

He was on one knee, his heavy broadsword planted in the ground before him like a crutch. His left arm hung at a wrong angle, and a deep gash on his thigh seeped dark blood onto the glass. His face was pale, streaked with sweat and grit, but his eyes burned with a stubborn, furious light.

Around him, standing just outside the runic circle, were five disciples. Lin Tian recognized the styles instantly. Two from Crimson Sun Sect, their red robes like wounds against the black. Three from Void Whisper, their gray garments seeming to drink the light. They weren’t attacking. They were watching.

One of the Crimson Sun disciples, a woman with a cruel smile, held a complex array disk. Thin threads of red and violet energy pulsed from it, connecting to the runes on the ground. With every pulse, Lin Tian could see a visible wisp of earthy yellow qi being pulled from Lu Cang’s body. The runes glowed brighter. Lu Cang shuddered.

"Just tell us," the Crimson Sun woman said, her voice echoing in the canyon. "How does he do it? The ice and fire together. Is it a treasure? A technique scroll? What is the weakness?"

Lu Cang spat a glob of blood onto the glass. "Go cultivate your own damn path."

A Void Whisper disciple, a lean man with dead eyes, made a subtle gesture. The array pulsed again. Lu Cang grunted, his knuckles turning white on his sword’s hilt. The drain was slow, methodical. They weren’t trying to kill him quickly. They were siphoning his strength, using it to power the trap that held him, questioning him between waves of exhaustion.

"Stubborn earth-ox," the woman sighed. "You have no loyalty to him. He’s a jumped-up cripple from a backwater clan. He’ll leave you behind the moment you’re inconvenient. Tell us what we want to know, and we’ll release you. You can even keep your cultivation. Mostly."

Lu Cang lifted his head. He looked past them, as if seeing something they couldn’t. His voice, when it came, was rough but clear. "You don’t get it. It’s not about him."

He took a ragged breath, and Lin Tian saw his free hand curl into a fist against his stomach. A dangerous, familiar energy began to gather there—a deep, rumbling compression.

"He stood for the sect when the elders wanted to fold," Lu Cang growled. "He faced Mu Chen when the rest of us were told to kneel. That’s not a person you betray. That’s a standard you measure yourself against."

The gathering energy in his dantian spiked. The air around him grew heavy.

The Crimson Sun woman’s smile vanished. "He’s going to core-detonate! Suppress him!"

The array flared, the draining threads turning vicious, trying to suck the building power out of him before it could ignite.

Lin Tian, hidden in the shadow of the fissure, felt his own breath catch. Lu Cang wasn’t just holding out. He was choosing a messy, honorable death over giving them anything.

He’s going to blow himself to gravel to protect... my secrets?

The thought was so foreign it stalled him for a half-second. Then the System’s calm voice filtered through his shock.

End of Chapter 135