“Boss, I’m going.” His voice skipped like a pebble across black water.

No tearful speech, no banner to raise. Lin, half-turned Monster, vaulted into the shaft like a blade dropping into night. The dark churned up from below like a greedy tide, climbing to swallow every soft thing, every struggle.

He fell along the elevator’s spine, straight down toward the underground city, a wolf-howl of wind peeling past. He knew the rot wasn’t rooted there; it pulsed in the labs on floors two and three.

His ears were honed, sanded smooth by habit. Day after day he’d listened to the Earth Dragon Heart thump like war drums under stone. There was no doubt—the heartbeat draping the whole district came from that Heart. End the Earth Dragon Heart, and the Abyss would break like ice.

He caught the metal lip of the second floor, palms biting cold steel, and vaulted up. His feet kissed the deck. Before he could plant himself, something long and whip-thin snapped out from the dark and caressed him like a venomous ribbon.

“Enemy.” The word dropped like a shard of ice.

Abyssal Aura bled off the thing in waves; it felt born from the Abyss, a moth from a black flame. It struck first, so Lin called it what it was. He cracked open the metal wall with a grunt, tore free a pipe like uprooting a sapling. This place was drowned in the Abyss; even if he broke things, Yin Tianchen wouldn’t blame him.

No light. Just a smothered night, heavy as wet wool. Lin’s sharpened ears and eyes mapped the thing’s footsteps and its next strike like threads stitched across a drum. The Monster wasn’t simple; it kept him at arm’s length, and it seemed to see through the dark as well. The clash hung at a stalemate, two predators circling in a cave.

After a long breath, patience curdled. He couldn’t waste time tangling. His goal was to break the Earth Dragon Heart, crack the Abyss, and walk out, not brawl with an unknown shadow for pride.

He could crush it in a heartbeat, sure as thunder. But if it was only a vanguard, burning that strength was throwing good steel into a bog.

“No thanks. I’m not sticking around.” He hurled the words into the dark like a flare, then turned without a glance. One path blocked, choose another; muscle for days, but the mind stayed sharp like a whetstone.

The shadow stilled at his voice, then drifted forward, shedding darkness like mist. He glanced at the torn tentacle on the floor and let out a breath, half amused, half helpless.

It was Doctor, escaped from the lab. They’d just spent all that time trading blows only to find they were on the same side. He’d never seen Lin in this shape, so the mistake was human.

He had wanted to ask Lin to help crush the Earth Dragon Heart, but Lin ran like a gust through reeds. No chance to speak. The silence closed like a door.

Doctor had not expected the Heart to be so thorny. He saw it bloom toward the image of a human, born as a woman with Chu Qing’s face—an echo in gold.

He knew she wasn’t Chu Qing. She wore scales bright as hammered gold, and a lingering supremacy clung to her shoulders like incense smoke. Her eyes were cold pools, with none of Chu Qing’s clumsy, borrowed wisdom in them.

She worked a method like Spirit Threads, tugging at the people drawn to her like moths to lantern-light. To handle them better, she aggregated the threads into a special heart, a false moon cored in silk.

Their faces were full of pain at first, like stones grinding under a river. After they accepted the woven heart, their gazes turned worshipful, washed clean of themselves. They became her puppets, bodies on strings.

Doctor didn’t know whether they lived or died. The false heart and the Abyssal hearts were both unknown doors, both rooms without light. She had numbers, a small army hooked through flesh. And the Chu Qing-shaped thing was no weak child; alone, Doctor was outmatched.

If help was needed, this underground city held one good hand. They had worked together before; their rhythm was clean, like two blades crossing without nick.

He thought of Night Frost. The name rose like moonlight, then sank.

He shook his head. Night Frost didn’t need more battles. He’d laid a deep enough foundation, a trench cut into bedrock. There was no need to drag ordinary people against a Magic Maiden and the entire Order Keeper. Facing the Twelfth District—and all the Order Keeper—was a road of bones.

Night Frost could still turn back. Let the sins chain to him. Let Night Frost return to being a person under sunlight, and live.

Fear pricked first; strategy followed. Night Frost seemed unable to protect herself right now. If the Earth Dragon Heart couldn’t be solved today, then he would regroup with Night Frost. Night Frost must not die here.

He started to leave. As he turned, a man stood behind him, not tall, smile pinned like a mask, eyes glazed like frost on glass.

He had appeared without sound, a ghost behind a door. It startled Doctor, shook him like a bell. He’d seen the man among those captured by the Heart. If this one stood here, then it meant—

Gold hair brushed his nose like dry wheat. Gold irises flicked with light in the dark, twin coins in night water. Her scales flashed dull gold, stealing the gaze like a predator’s lure.

Spirit Threads and thin, capillary-like vessels coiled around Doctor’s forearm, trying to burrow toward his heart like roots seeking water. A voice gnawed bone, whispering in his ear:

“Join us… for our lord’s glory.”

Without the sight of the deepest heart in the Abyss, he would’ve been hooked like a fish. Having seen it, he knew its gaze could stain the mind.

In that flicker, paired with the earlier heart, understanding clicked like gears. Her method was Spirit Threads and those blood vessels. The vessels controlled parts of the body; the threads touched the mind.

Her mind wasn’t as strong as he’d feared. Spirit power mostly comes from the brain; mana runs to the brain and calls out the inner Spirit Threads like rain waking roots.

The “Chu Qing” before him couldn’t do that.

She linked a single Spirit Thread to the heart woven from threads and vessels inside each victim. That heart was her relay, the speaking drum that carried her orders.

Because her spirit couldn’t reach far, she made hearts out of her own threads and vessels, planted them, and ruled from within. It was a clever parasite masquerading as a crown.

Think of it like a chip inside a machine, with a fixed program etched like runes. To change the program, she only needed to attach one Spirit Thread and nudge the code.

Why a heart would carry Spirit Threads, he didn’t know. Maybe the heart stayed the body’s core, the hearth fire around which everything gathered.

Doctor’s body was crafted after birth, rewritten gene by gene. To counter the Rouge Rabbit’s dirty tricks, and because death had stripped him of piles of data and memories, he’d learned the hard way: sometimes a human brain is a swamp.

So he designed his brain with a built-in flaw. It existed, but barely touched the body. Daily thought lived in his left Eye Orb like a lantern. Paired with his tough heart, this “Chu Qing” found little purchase on him.

But the heart in the Abyss exceeded his map. A look into it, and madness flooded like spring melt, dragging him down into honeyed fantasies.

Chu Qing’s memories told her this was the best bait for human men, a snare baited with beauty. Yet the man before her did not fall in love with faces. His body was strange metal and meat; her tricks slipped off like rain on oiled stone.

Her memories also warned: plans always birth outliers and variables. Remove the variable first, and danger breaks like thread.

Her slender hand thickened into Earth Dragon limbs, knotted muscle like roots. She struck first, a hammer-blow through air. The crowd swarmed up like a hive, teeth scraping, gnawing at Doctor’s skin.

Against enemies, use every dirty trick—Chu Qing had taught her that like a catechism.

Tentacles sprouted from Doctor’s back, slick cords with suction cups. They slapped onto the wall and hauled him upward like a spider scaling stone. He shed the mob the way a tree sheds leaves, and faced only her.

Clang!

He looked down too late. A rune-etched spike had already punched through his chest, clean as a needle through silk.

Arcane sigils sprouted from “Chu Qing’s” fingertips, and nearby metal bent to her will like reeds in wind. That was Chu Qing’s power, wasn’t it? But the girl before him was not Chu Qing—she was an unknown made around an Earth Dragon Heart.

No time to think. “Chu Qing” closed in, claws keen as sickles. She was about to crush Doctor, pinned to the wall like an insect.

Just the Eye Orb again, then. The thought tasted of iron and ash.

His body bloomed into fire. Flames spilled outward like a red tide, and the thick Abyssal Aura from the burn drifted into “Chu Qing” like smoke into lungs.

“Let’s go. We’ll find her. She’s a threat.” Her voice was a bell in fog.

She saw the corpse emptied of life and flicked fire to the remaining limbs, cinders lifting like fireflies. She scanned the hall, then strode down the passage to the broken elevator mouth and leapt like a hawk into the shaft.

An ordinary Eye Orb rolled onto the floor, a small dull moon. It bounced softly twice and rolled into a shadowed corner.

“Find who? Who is she?” The Eye Orb spoke with a familiar mechanical timbre, a wind-up clock under glass. The lab hadn’t cracked, but outside a rift had opened. Now only one rift remained; either the rifts merged, or someone sealed the Abyss.

A single Chapter Two couldn’t seal a rift mid-birth. Chu Qing was dead; Lin didn’t have that tech; Night Frost’s mana was sealed. That meant a Chapter Three had acted.

Doctor had crossed blades with “Chu Qing.” Her strength hadn’t reached Chapter Three; she was still at Chapter Two, but her toolkit was broad. A strong body, an Earth Dragon Heart, half-spirit domination of people, Chu Qing’s metal mana, and likely a few hidden tricks.

Put together, those gifts gave her the grit to stand against a Chapter Three. What she feared, without question, was unsealed power. Only a Chapter Three with their limits broken could kill her cleanly.

To seal the rift, that Chapter Three must have spent a river of mana, a reservoir poured out.

If she killed that Chapter Three, the aftermath would be a storm without shelter.

Night Frost would have to wait. The Eye Orb stilled, and the corner felt colder.