The drumbeat rolled through the mountain, low and relentless. Thoom… thoom… Every pulse made the corridor's dust jump like fine ash shaken from bone. Torchlight wavered, casting grotesque faces across the carved walls. The runes seemed to pulse with the rhythm, breathing in time with the unseen drum.
"Keep formation. Ten steps—mark."Captain Lei's words were clipped, his tone carrying the weight of command. He pressed chalk into a seam of stone, blade in his other hand steady as iron.
Behind him, Old Yu cursed under his breath. "Ancestor luck. Should've let me blow the damn dais apart. Now we're marching deeper like rats in a coffin." He fiddled with a half-crumpled cigarette, then shoved it back into his pocket under Lei's glare. "Fine. But when we're all corpses, don't say I didn't warn you."
Zhou Zhan hunched over his notebook, lips moving as he wrote and muttered: "Runic strata layered into stone… some lines fractured, others resealed… the surface tension of—no, no, they're breathing. They're actually…" His voice thinned to a whisper as sweat fogged his glasses.
Li Muye heard it too. Since the runes had carved themselves into his blood, he felt them resonate. Each drumbeat landed in his chest like a mallet striking the bell-etched rune branded beneath his skin. It throbbed in answer, not painfully but insistently, as if it too marched in this subterranean procession.
At the rear, A-Chuang twirled his short blade in his calloused palm. The rasp of metal against skin was barely audible, but his eyes stayed fixed on the back of Muye's neck. Cold, measuring, like a wolf testing the air before a strike.
The passage narrowed. Air thickened, sharp with a metallic tang. The floor shifted beneath their boots: fitted octagonal bricks, four corners high, four corners low. Muye crouched, squinting at the uneven pattern.
"Pressure plates," he warned. "High edges only. Shift your weight—cat steps."
He demonstrated, gliding lightly over the raised corners. Lei nodded once, silently ordering the rest to follow.
Old Yu scoffed but copied the stance. His heel scuffed the edge of a sunken tile. A sharp click answered. From the wall, three darts spat outward with a hiss. They buried themselves in the opposite stone with a thock, quivering like angry wasps.
Everyone froze.
"Ha… little toys," Old Yu muttered, forcing a laugh, though his forehead gleamed with sudden sweat.
They pressed on with greater care. The drum grew louder, vibrating the marrow of their bones. Ahead, the darkness shifted. A faint sound reached them—metal on stone, armor plates rasping together. Then the drag of something heavy across the floor.
Zhou Zhan stiffened. "That's… not echo. Something's moving."
From the black ahead, two pale-blue flames flared, then four, then six. They floated like will-o'-wisps, but soon the torchlight revealed what housed them.
Bronze helmets corroded to the bone. Breastplates fused to ribcages. Armored figures stepped forward, halberds and rusted blades gripped in skeletal fists. The blue fire burned in their hollow sockets, flickering with a hunger older than speech.
"Corpse soldiers," Zhou whispered, terror and awe colliding in his voice. "Preserved for ritual war. The texts never—"
"Shut it," Lei growled. His blade angled low. "No noise. No gunfire unless ordered."
Old Yu's finger twitched on his trigger. "You blind? They're walking corpses! I'll drop them—"
"Stand down." Lei's stare was lethal. "You fire, the whole mountain knows."
The first corpse soldier lurched forward, halberd rising in jerks, as if pulled by threads. Another joined, shields grinding, blue eyes flaring brighter.
Muye's breath caught. His rune blazed hot under his sternum, answering the drum, answering the hunger in those flames. He felt the bell inside him swell with pressure. His fists clenched—no training, no plan, only instinct. He thrust his palm out.
The Rune of Suppression ignited.
Light erupted in a dome, pale and solid as glass. It rang without sound, a vibration that thrummed through teeth and bone. Dust rose in concentric rings.
The leading corpse soldier struck the barrier. Its halberd jarred back as if against iron, sparks leaping. The blue fire in its skull flared, stuttered, then blinked out. The husk collapsed with a hollow crash.
Another staggered, weapon trembling mid-swing. The rune's pressure chained its joints. It convulsed once, twice, then fell in pieces, bronze plates shattering across the stone.
The dome flickered, fractures running through its glow. Muye gasped, blood spilling from his nose. His knees nearly buckled. He forced the rune to dim, sucking it back into his veins before it consumed him.
The corridor fell silent. Only their ragged breathing remained. The fallen corpses smoldered, empty armor clinking as it cooled.
For a heartbeat, none of them moved.
Then Old Yu laughed—a sharp, ugly sound. "Ha! You all saw that, didn't you? The boy's a damn treasure chest walking on legs! With him we could raid a hundred tombs—hell, a thousand. Runes like that… we'd be kings!" His eyes gleamed feverishly, hands twitching on the rifle grip.
Zhou Zhan's reaction was the opposite. He dropped to his knees, notebook clutched like scripture. Tears blurred his ink. "Living rune inscription… suppression manifest… this is the missing link! Proof of cultivation systems before recorded dynasties! With this we could—no, humanity itself could—" His words tripped over awe.
Captain Lei's gaze was harder than stone. "Some powers never leave the mountain." He sheathed his chalk, blade steady in his hand. His warning was not for Muye, but for all of them.
It was A-Chuang's voice, however, that chilled Muye to the bone. A whisper, almost admiring: "Just as I thought. It's in you."
Muye's stomach tightened. The tone wasn't respect. It was recognition—a hunter finding his quarry.
And still the drumbeat thudded, deeper now, rattling dust from the ceiling. From far ahead, shadows stirred, promising worse to come.
They moved again, slower now, the corridor bending like a rib carved from the mountain's heart. The air tasted metallic and old. With every dozen steps, Captain Lei marked the stone with a chalk slash and a number; with every drumbeat, dust sprang on the floor like pale fleas.
Zhou Zhan's voice trailed the light like a shadow. "These sigil strokes—see the spurs? They're repair work. Someone… maintained this place." He swallowed. "For a long time."
"Great," Old Yu muttered. "Means the owner might still be home."
A-Chuang said nothing. He walked loose-limbed and quiet, blade in his palm, eyes on Li Muye's back the way a hawk keeps a vole in the center of its sight. It wasn't the look of a guardian.
The corridor widened without warning, and there it was—A gate like a cliff, fused from a single slab of black-green stone. In its center, as if grown there, was a bronze mask the size of a door. Its surface had bloomed with verdigris and hammered scars. The face it showed wasn't human: the cheekbones were too ridged, the lips cut too thin and wide, the brow carved with sigil-lattices that caught the torchlight and threw it back in broken rigs.
The mask's mouth was slightly open, as though it were remembering a smile.
"F-facial architecture is non-human," Zhou whispered, breath fogging his lenses. "It's a ritual effigy, probably an interface—"
"Save it," Lei said, gaze fixed on the thing's hollow eye sockets. "Watch the shadows."
The torches guttered. The drumbeat rolled. Thoom.A thin blue flame woke in each eye.
Muye's chest rune went hot, then hotter, as if a hand had pressed a brand against his sternum. The bell-runed tone climbed up his spine. He dragged air into his lungs and felt the rune tug back—like a tide grabbing his ankles.
The mask breathed.
It wasn't sound. It was pressure. The air compressed, the ground flexed. The mask's mouth widened by the width of a fingernail and closed again.
"Don't shoot," Lei said without looking at Old Yu. "You'll kill us faster than it will."
"Say the word," Old Yu whispered anyway, knuckles bone-white. "I'll put a hole right through its grin."
"It's not smiling," A-Chuang said. "It's tasting."
That made them all hold a second breath too long.
A seam crept through the rock around the mask, lines so fine they might've been hair. Sigils along the frame woke one by one, spilling pale light like frost. The mask's eyes fixed—no, chose—Muye.
"Successor," a voice said, not loud and not soft, but precise. "Step forward."
Old Yu took a half step back. "Yeah, right. It says you, kid."
Zhou Zhan looked torn between terror and ecstasy. His pencil quivered. "If it's an interface, you might… you might be able to negotiate terms—"
"Enough." Lei's tone brokered no argument. "Muye. With care."
Muye wiped blood from under his nose and found his hand shaking. He forced it still. He didn't have a plan. He had a pulse—his—and a larger one under it, the tomb's, hammering lazy and primeval. He walked until he could feel the mask radiate cold.
The runes at its brow were different—sharper, like knives laid edge to edge. He recognized none, and knew them anyway. Orders, stacked three deep.
"Don't touch," Lei said, so quietly Muye almost missed it.
Muye inclined his head an inch. He didn't need the reminder. His finger traced the air a breath from the bronze, following a stroke, then another, drawing nothing and everything. The mask's mouth parted two more hairs' breadth. The breath-pressure shifted again.
"Left to right, then down," Zhou murmured, unable to stop himself. "As if… as if reading intent… Oh God."
The torch at Old Yu's shoulder popped sap in the pitch. The sound was small and wickedly loud. The mask's eyes flared, blue sharpening to white for a heartbeat. Beneath the floor, something ticked.
"Don't move," Lei snapped, and for once even Old Yu froze like a child under a teacher's cane.
A-Chuang drifted closer to Muye's rear flank—careless, casual, predatory. "Breathe out," he said, so soft it might have been inside Muye's head. "Not in. It likes submission, not challenge."
Muye didn't ask how he knew. He exhaled, slow, and let the rune at his chest sink. The bell's sound was not a sound. The mask's eyes dimmed to a gentler blue.
"Path," the voice said. "Or perish."
The seam around the mask widened. It didn't open like a door. It peeled like a scab coming off old skin. Behind it waited a slot of black.
"Captain," Muye whispered. "There's a channel—like the shadow gate before. It feeds on… posture."
"On will," A-Chuang said.
"On both," Zhou offered, helplessly academic even as his knees knocked together.
A tremor ran under their boots. The drumbeat accelerated. Thoom. Thoom. Thoom-thoom.
In the blue-white flare that followed, Muye saw more than bronze and rock. He saw a liking—a preference—reaching for him the way a snake tastes the air. It wanted him to step through. It wanted him to kneel on the other side. It wanted him changed.
He had no reason to trust it. He also had no way to turn back.
"On me," Lei said. "We go as one. If it seals, we cut stone until our arms fall off." He didn't look back to see if the others agreed. He simply stepped so that Muye was at his shoulder and let his blade hang just so—a guard for the living and a promise to the dead.
"Big talk," Old Yu muttered, but he moved into place. The muzzle of his rifle drifted, as if magnetized, toward Muye's ribs and away again. "You start glowing, I'm running."
Zhou Zhan didn't seem to notice anything but the mask's rim, where tiny notches formed a pattern like a breath caught in teeth. "This is… this is the turning of a civilization. We're standing on the hinge."
A-Chuang's smile showed two millimeters more tooth. "Hinges break."
"Move," Lei said.
They crossed the threshold in a staggered line. The pressure inside the channel closed like a throat, cool and dense, squeezing the breath from their lungs. The torchlight thinned, color leached out of stone, sound dulled. For three slow steps, Muye felt like a figure on a lacquer panel—flat, motion painted into him by some other hand.
Then they were through.
The corridor beyond was lower, wider, its air moving with patient certainty. The drummer in the mountain hit once, twice—and then a third time so deep the stone under their feet flexed a measurable fraction.
The bronze mask behind them laughed without sound. They all felt it as a tickle under the skin.
"Keep eyes," Lei said. "Keep breaths small."
They moved. The walls here were smoother, the runes fewer but deeper, gouged as if with something that hated as much as it cut. The light from the torches came back with colors the mountain had swallowed—green on old copper, red on dried mineral stains that might have been iron and might have been something else.
"Captain," Muye said, not raising his voice, "if I fail to—"
"You won't," Lei said.
"—then leave me," Muye finished anyway.
Old Yu snorted. "Heard that one. Hero lines never end well."
A-Chuang's knife spun and stilled, point downward, a coin falling onto a drum. "He's not a hero," he said. "He's a key."
They turned the last curve and the mountain's voice came up from under their soles.
THOOM.
The passage opened—not into a chamber but into a mouth. Four bronze drums stood at the corners of a square so large the torchlight made islands in the dark. Their skins were split and welded, scarred and polished. Cracks leaked light like ink reversed—black that glowed.
The drums beat again—**THOOM—THOOM—**and the air compressed. The floor quivered. Under the drums, stone grated.
Figures pulled themselves out from beneath the plinths, armor scraping rock, blue fire walking into their empty skulls.
"Back!" Lei's blade swept low. "Form two!"
Old Yu's rifle rose, breath ragged. "Permission to—"
"Not yet."
Zhou Zhan's pencil clattered to the floor. "Oh god. We're in the painting."
The first corpse-soldier straightened to its full height, halberd lifting. Its skull turned toward Muye. The blue within its sockets brightened—not like anger. Like recognition.
A-Chuang's whisper slid along Muye's ear. "It smells you."
Muye's bell-rune heated to pain. He lifted his hand and felt the pressure of a hundred unasked questions pushing against his palm. He didn't have answers. He had a beat, a breath, a bell.
He let the Suppression rune ring.
Light rippled. The nearest corpse stuttered, joints locking an instant too long.
Then all four drums struck at once.
THOOM.
The blow wasn't on the air. It was on him. The rune inverted, the bell's tone thrown back into his chest. He staggered, breath punched from his lungs. The corpse-soldiers surged forward as if the drums had unhooked them from gravity.
"Now!" Lei barked.
Old Yu's gun spoke in hot, stuttering syllables. Zhou Zhan screamed and didn't stop writing. A-Chuang moved, finally, and the space he moved into was the space behind Muye's shoulder—the one a knife would choose if it wanted the fastest path to a heart.
The drums gathered breath for another strike. The mask behind them hummed with satisfaction. The corridor's runes lit in patterns that promised instructions no one had time left to read.
The mountain hit the drum again.
THOOM.
The light jumped; the floor shivered. Somewhere far below, stone began to split.
And the chapter ended there—not with an answer, but with the promise of something large enough to swallow men and names alike.