The world dissolved into screaming glass and dying light. Shards of the crystalline orb ricocheted off stone walls. In the sudden, absolute blackness, Junior Wen yelped in pain.
Senior Brother Feng's snarl was pure venom. "You insect!"
Li Wei was already moving. He shoved the dull artifact into his belt and grabbed Huang's arm. "Run!" He dragged the stumbling old man deeper into the dead garden, toward the far wall where fossilized trees stood thickest. Their only advantage was the darkness; they were children of this dead world. These cultivators were not.
"You think darkness can save you?" Feng's voice echoed, cold and precise. A new light flared—a pale, phosphorescent glow from a talisman. It illuminated his face, a mask of cold fury. "I can smell your fear. I can hear your mortal heart."
A whistling sound cut the air. Li Wei ducked, pulling Huang down. Something sharp and fast sliced through the space where his head had been, embedding itself in a petrified tree trunk with a thunk. A throwing dagger, humming with energy.
They were being hunted.
"The door we came in," Huang wheezed, his voice tight with terror. "It's behind them!"
Trapped. The only exit was past their hunters.
The Seed in Li Wei's core churned, not with fear, but with a frantic, calculating energy. It was scanning, searching. It remembered.
An image flashed in Li Wei's mind: the far wall, not as a barrier, but as a façade. A memory of a service corridor behind it, accessed by a crumbling section near a lightning-blasted tree. A memory that wasn't his.
"This way!" he hissed, changing direction.
"There is nothing there!" Huang protested.
"Trust the Seed!"
Feng's laughter was short and ugly. "Running in circles. How entertaining."
Another dagger whistled past, nicking Li Wei's ear. A line of fire seared his skin. Feng was playing with them.
Li Wei reached the wall. It looked solid, seamless. But the Seed screamed here. He ran his hands over the cold stone. Nothing.
"Looking for a way out, little rat?" Feng's voice was closer now. He was strolling through the garden of death. "There is none."
Think! Li Wei begged the Seed. Show me!
The image shifted. Not the wall, but the ground at its base. A specific, loose-looking floor tile.
He dropped to his knees, clawing at the edges of a large, square stone. It shifted. Huang, seeing his desperation, joined him.
With a grating sound, they pried the tile up. Beneath it was a dark, narrow chute—a disposal shaft. It smelled of decay and age. It was barely wide enough for a man.
A vertical drop into unknown blackness.
"Down there!" Li Wei said.
Huang peered into the abyss, pale. "It could be a hundred-foot drop!"
"It's that or him!" Li Wei nodded toward the approaching light.
A third dagger struck the wall inches from his head, showering them with stone chips. Feng was done playing.
The decision was made.
"Go!" Li Wei urged.
Huang went first, lowering himself into the shaft and letting go. A scraping sound, a short cry, and a thud that sounded… not fatal. A few seconds later, his voice echoed up, shaky but alive. "It's a slide! It's steep, but it's a slide!"
Li Wei moved to follow just as Feng's light fell over him.
"Enough," Feng said, his voice flat and final. He was ten paces away, his hand raised. Spiritual energy coalesced around his fingers, crackling with pale blue light. This was meant to obliterate.
No time. Li Wei grabbed the loose floor tile—a heavy slab of stone—and held it in front of him like a shield as he backed toward the chute.
Feng's lips curled. "A rock."
He flicked his wrist.
A bolt of condensed spiritual energy, sharp and cold, shot across the room. It struck the stone shield with a concussive CRACK.
The slab shattered. The impact threw Li Wei backward. The world spun. A searing coldness sliced across his chest, followed by a warm, wet bloom of pain.
He was falling.
The black maw of the chute swallowed him. He tumbled into darkness, end over end, bouncing off the smooth, hard sides. The pain was a white-hot brand.
Above, Feng's furious roar echoed. "Wen! After them! Now!"
Then, only the rushing wind of his fall and the brutal cacophony of his body crashing against stone.
The slide was a punishing descent into the guts of the dead world. He lost all sense of direction. Only the fall, the pain, and the Seed's frantic thrum, trying to knit together the gash on his chest.
The shaft shallowed abruptly. He was shot out of the end, landing in a crumpled heap on a pile of soft, dry mulch—an ancient compost heap.
He lay gasping, stars in his vision. Every breath was a knife twist.
"Boy! Li Wei!" Huang's hands found him, checking him over. "You're alive."
"He… he…" Li Wei tried, the words ragged gasps.
"I know. I heard." Huang's hands trembled. "We must go. He will send the other."
Using the wall, they stumbled up. Li Wei's headlamp was gone. They were in an earthen tunnel that smelled of decay.
The Seed pulsed weakly, its energy focused on sealing his chest wound. The warmth was a dim flicker. He had spent too much.
But it gave him one last thing. A final image. This tunnel. A path to the left. A way up. To the surface.
"Left," Li Wei choked out, leaning on Huang. "It leads out."
They hobbled into the darkness. Behind them, from deep within the shaft, came a faint, hesitant scraping.
Junior Wen was coming.
Ahead, after a long, painful climb where moonlight filtered through cracks, they saw it.
A sliver of the sickly, familiar orange sky.
They burst from a ground-level vent behind rusted machinery, collapsing onto the dust. Miles from the bunker. Free. For now.
Li Wei lay on his back, staring at the hazy, dead moon. The cut on his chest had stopped bleeding, sealed by the Seed's last dregs, leaving an angry red scar.
He had faced a cultivator. He had been utterly powerless. His defiance had been a gnat buzzing at a titan.
A single resolve solidified in his heart, as hard and cold as the stone that had shattered in his hands.
Never again.