The Dragon Palace's crystalline spires pierced the abyssal gloom like frozen lightning, their prismatic surfaces refracting bioluminescent plankton into auroras that danced across Zhao Rui's face. Beside him, Dun Che's ursine nostrils flared, inhaling saltwater steeped in millennia of forgotten grandeur.
"By the Nine-Tailed Ancestor's whiskers!" The fox demon's claws scraped iridescent coral tiles as he spun in awe. "These halls could swallow Yellow Springs' vaults whole!"
Zhao Rui's fingers trailed along a wall inlaid with nacreous dragon scales, each larger than a war shield. "Stay alert. Where there's treasure..." His voice echoed through vaulted corridors where shadows pooled like spilled ink.
They found the first massacre at a crossroads guarded by petrified seahorses. Skeletons in barnacle-encrusted armor lay in mid-combat poses—a crustacean sentry's pincer still clamped around a human ribcage, its hollow eye sockets staring through epochs of decay.
Dun Che kicked a crab warrior's carapace, releasing a cloud of skeletal shrimp. "What slaughtered them? Time?"
"Something that laughs at time." Zhao Rui crouched, brushing silt from a conch-shell helmet. The pearl inlay depicted dragons fleeing upward—an evacuation record carved in panic. "These warriors died defending against..."
A golden glint interrupted him.
Hall of Celestial Treasures
The doors groaned open on hinges of enchanted whalebone, revealing avarice made manifest. Mountains of treasure cascaded from vaulted ceilings—rubies the size of infant skulls tumbled over jade obelisks; diamond-encrusted chalices overflowed with black pearls that hissed faint curses. At the chamber's heart, a throne of interlocked dragon teeth supported a skeleton clutching a scroll titled "Tax Records - Year of the Drowned Moon."
Dun Che's pupils dilated to saucers. "Brother! We'll need ten spatial rings! No, twenty!"
Zhao Rui pocketed a singing topaz that whispered market manipulation secrets. "Take only what you can carry without sinking."
The fox demon whined like a scolded pup but complied, stuffing his spatial pouch until the seams glowed. "This necklace for Yun Fang! These earrings for that grumpy Shi elder! This crown for—"
"For whom?" Zhao Rui arched an eyebrow as Dun Che jammed a diamond tiara over his left horn.
"Dun Che the Magnificent, obviously."
Their laughter died at the chamber's rear exit. Scorch marks radiated from a doorway shaped like a screaming merfolk's mouth.
"Visitors," Zhao Rui murmured, tracing claw grooves in the adamantine frame. "Hasty ones."
Armory of Forgotten Souls
The next chamber reeked of ozone and ambition. Weapons floated in anti-gravitic arrays—a halberd weeping liquid starlight crossed with a trident crackling with captive storms. At the far wall, an entire section lay gutted, its display cases shattered by someone prioritizing speed over discretion.
Dun Che whooped, snatching a gilded tube engraved with swirling Bagua trigrams. "Look! Fancy flute!"
"Don't—!"
The artifact activated with a celestial chime. Rotating trigrams aligned, vomiting seven phoenix-shaped flames that reduced a marble pillar to glowing slag.
Zhao Rui materialized behind a vibrating shield of golden motes, his spatial ring spitting out the God-Sealing Tome pages as improvised insulation. "That's the Twin Trigram Fire Eagle Scepter! Tenth-century relic that incinerated the Molten Citadel!"
Dun Che stared at the smoldering tube now fused to his claws. "...Meant to do that?"
"Precisely why we're leaving." Zhao Rui kicked open a side passage, revealing footprints glowing with residual qi. "These weapons are crumbs. The real feast lies deeper."
The Chase
They followed trails of greed:
A trail of discarded spirit stones leading to an amphitheater where shark-toothed glaives impaled thrice-cursed songsheets.The stench of burnt hair near an alchemy lab housing a still-bubbling cauldron of immortal-killing poison.Finally, blood—fresh and coppery—smeared across a moon bridge spanning an abyss where leviathan ribs curved like cathedral arches.
At the bridge's midpoint, they found the courier.
The young cultivator's legs dangled over oblivion, his torso nailed to the railing by a jade dagger humming with malicious intent. In his death-grip: a scroll case stamped with the Demon Sect's triple-serpent seal.
"Trap," Dun Che growled.
"Invitation," Zhao Rui corrected, prying the case open. The parchment inside bore three words in blood calligraphy:
*"Heaven's Breath Awaits."*
Above them, the water itself screamed.