The figure in white, Yun Zhao, was a splinter of ice in the Wastes' fever-dream. Her every footfall seemed to reject the ground, her pristine robes a stark declaration of war against the pervasive decay. The sword of light, Shard of Celestial Purity, hovered at her shoulder, its hum a vibration that made the very rust particles in the air tremble. Her winter-sky eyes scanned the canyon, not with the frantic search of a scavenger, but with the cold, analytical gaze of a surgeon assessing a diseased body.
Lin Feng, his back pressed against the cold, corrugated metal of a fallen freighter wall within the dampening field, held his breath. Through the neural-link, he saw what she saw, filtered through the Mantis's sensors and his own Azure Pupil. Her spiritual sense was a visible force to him now—a fine, silvery net being cast out, washing over the terrain. It slid over their dampening field, and for a heart-stopping moment, it hesitated, the silver threads coiling like a serpent sensing a warmth under cold earth. Then, it moved on, dismissed as a minor anomaly, a natural qi-sink.
She hadn't found them. Not yet.
But she was close. Uncomfortably close. She stood at the entrance to the main canyon, the very throat of the Rust-Fang Wastes.
*[Target Analysis: Qi Signature - Purity Grade 8. Threat Level: Catastrophic. Recommended Action: Evasion. Probability of Successful Evasion: 12.7%.]* The data streamed from the Mantis, clinical and bleak.
Evasion was impossible. She was faster, her perception sharper. Their only chance was the Mantis's proposed gambit: not to flee from the hunter, but to use the hunter's own strength against her, to make the very environment their weapon.
Plan: Lure. Trap. Bury. The Mantis projected a series of rapid-fire images: a specific, unstable cliff face laced with volatile earth-qi veins; a narrow defile filled with highly combustible fungal spores; the ancient, precariously balanced skeleton of a starship's engine housing.
It was a symphony of destruction, and Lin Feng was to be the conductor. His role was twofold: to be the bait, and to use his Azure Pupil to identify the precise weak points, the catalytic fractures that would trigger the chain reaction.
"On your mark," Lin Feng whispered, his voice tight.
He felt the Mantis's acknowledgment, a shift in the link from analysis to action. The resonance between them held at a straining 41%, a wire pulled taut, thrumming with shared intent.
Yun Zhao took another step forward, her brow furrowing slightly. The heresy was here. She could feel it like a splinter in her mind. The compass in her hand vibrated, its needle trembling. The dissonance was… layered. It wasn't just one source. It was a pattern.
Suddenly, a flicker of movement. A boy, emerging from behind a rusted outcrop a hundred yards ahead. He was dressed in scavenger's rags, his face smudged with grime, but his eyes… his eyes held a strange, luminous quality, a hint of azure that was utterly unnatural. And his qi signature—it was weak, pathetically so, a flickering candle in the Body Tempering realm. But it was wrong. It wasn't pure. It was braided, intertwined with the metallic tang of the Wastes and something else, something stellar. It was the source of the heresy.
"Heretic," she said, her voice cutting through the low wind, devoid of anger, filled only with a glacial disappointment. "You have corrupted the sacred vessel of your body. Cease this folly. Submit to purification, and your spirit may yet find mercy."
Lin Feng stood his ground, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He forced his voice to steadiness. "My path is my own. This 'corruption' is understanding. It's harmony."
"Harmony?" Yun Zhao almost smiled, a cold, brittle thing. "You call this blight, this fusion of flesh and profane machine, harmony? It is a sickness. I am the cure."
The Shard of Celestial Purity angled itself towards him. The air grew cold. Lin Feng didn't need the Mantis's sensors to feel the killing intent condensing around the blade's tip.
Now! The command wasn't spoken, but screamed through the link.
The Rust-Steel Mantis exploded from its hiding place not behind Lin Feng, but from a crevice above and behind Yun Zhao. It moved not with the silent stealth of before, but with a deafening, deliberate roar of straining hydraulics and clattering chitin. It was a distraction. A massive, obvious threat designed to draw her ire and her attack.
Yun Zhao's head twitched, a minute gesture of surprise. Her silver net of spiritual sense had missed it, its bio-mechanical signature too well-masked by the ambient chaos. Perfect. The Mantis was playing the role of the obvious monster, so Lin Feng could be the hidden architect.
The sword of light flashed, not at Lin Feng, but at the descending Mantis. A crescent of pure, solidified moonlight shot forth, silent and deadly fast.
The Mantis, anticipating this, twisted in mid-air. The crescent sheared through one of its secondary limbs, the alloy parting with a shriek of tortured metal. The severed limb clattered to the ground, sparking. But the main body was unharmed. It landed between Yun Zhao and Lin Feng, its amber eyes blazing, issuing a challenging shriek.
Yun Zhao's focus was now fully on the abomination before her. "A fitting partner for a heretic. A beast of slag and sin. Be erased."
This was the moment. While her attention was locked on the Mantis, Lin Feng's Azure Pupil flared to life, consuming the last dregs of the stable, woven qi in his Dantian. The world dissolved into a tapestry of energy. He ignored the brilliant, almost painful purity of Yun Zhao's aura and the raging, complex fusion of the Mantis. He looked past them, to the canyon walls.
He saw the veins of volatile earth-qi, pulsing with a unstable yellow light. He saw the weak points in the geology, the fault lines stressed by millennia of tectonic shifts and stellar impacts. He saw the cluster of fungal pods in the defile to the left, their bio-energy a hyper-reactive green, waiting for a spark.
"The left wall! Fifty feet up! The crystalline fissure!" Lin Feng shouted, not with his voice, but through the link, projecting the exact image.
The Mantis, still facing Yun Zhao, didn't turn. But its tail, a powerful, bladed appendage, whipped backwards. A compressed burst of plasma, scavenged and stored from the environment, fired from a hidden vent at the tip. It wasn't aimed at Yun Zhao. It was a precise, surgical shot, crossing the distance in a blink and striking the exact, glittering fissure Lin Feng had identified.
The result was instantaneous.
The fissure, packed with unstable crystalline formations that acted as a capacitor for earth-qi, detonated. The explosion wasn't large, but it was perfectly placed. It triggered a chain reaction down the vein of volatile energy. The cliff face shuddered, then groaned. A massive section of rock and rusted infrastructure, the size of a small house, sheared away from the wall and plummeted downwards.
It wasn't aimed directly at Yun Zhao either. That would have been too obvious, too easy for someone of her caliber to evade. It was aimed to herd her.
The collapsing wall crashed down between her and the canyon entrance, cutting off her most logical retreat and forcing her to move deeper in. The only clear path now was to her right—directly into the narrow defile filled with the combustible fungal spores.
Yun Zhao's eyes widened a fraction. This was not the mindless flailing of a beast and its desperate master. This was coordinated. Tactical.
She flowed to the right, a ghost of white, easily avoiding the main avalanche. But she was now in the defile. The air was thick with the spores, a shimmering, green dust.
"The spore cluster! At your feet, now!" Lin Feng projected, his vision beginning to blur from the strain.
The Mantis, ignoring the sparking stump of its limb, fired another plasma burst. This one was smaller, hotter. It struck the ground at the mouth of the defile, not at the spores themselves, but at a patch of mineral deposits that Lin Feng's Pupil had identified as highly flammable.
The minerals ignited with a whoomp, creating a wall of fire that instantly touched off the suspended spores. The entire defile erupted in a silent, flash-fire of emerald green flame. It wasn't a flame that burned hot; it was a chemical fire that released a neurotoxic smoke and, more importantly, consumed the ambient oxygen in a violent reaction.
Yun Zhao found herself trapped in a choking, toxic inferno. A lesser cultivator would have suffocated or been driven mad by the toxins in seconds. She merely frowned, a ripple of true annoyance crossing her features. She gestured, and a sphere of pure qi erupted from her, a bubble of perfect, self-contained atmosphere. The green fire raged around it, unable to touch her.
But the plan had worked. She was exactly where they wanted her: positioned directly beneath the final and most dangerous part of the trap—the precariously balanced starship engine housing.
It was a colossal thing, a relic of the Great Collision, wedged between two canyon walls high above. Centuries of erosion and shifting ground had left it balanced on a knife's edge. Lin Feng's Azure Pupil showed him the single, critical stress point—a fractured support beam—that was all that held the multi-ton mass in place.
"The central beam! The fracture!" he cried out, his nose now bleeding from the mental exertion, his Dantian screaming in protest.
The Mantis, sensing the endgame, put all its remaining power into one final shot. Its core hummed, diverting energy from non-essential systems. It fired its largest plasma burst yet, a searing lance of blue-white energy that crossed the smoky air and struck the fractured beam with pinpoint accuracy.
There was a sound like the world ending—a deep, metallic groan that shook the very foundations of the canyon. The fracture widened into a crack, then a rupture.
The engine housing shifted. Then, with a terrible, slow majesty, it fell.
It wasn't a mere rockfall. It was the deliberate collapse of a small mountain of ancient technology. It blotted out the bruised sky, a shadow of finality descending upon the trapped disciple.
Yun Zhao looked up. For the first time, a flicker of something other than cold certainty showed in her winter-sky eyes. It was not fear, but a sharp, calculating respect for the depth of the trap she'd been lured into. This was not heresy born of ignorance; it was heresy honed into a weapon.
She couldn't evade it. The sphere of her protective qi wouldn't hold against such kinetic force. She had one option.
She raised her hand, and the Shard of Celestial Purity flew to it. She didn't swing it. She held it point-up towards the falling doom. She closed her eyes, and her qi flared, not outwards, but inwards, condensing into a point of impossible density at the sword's tip.
"[Heavenly Spire Piercing the Cloud]," she intoned, her voice the calm at the eye of the storm.
A beam of pure white light, so intense it hurt to look at even through the Azure Pupil, lanced upwards from her sword. It didn't try to destroy the entire falling mass. That would be impossible. It did something far more precise, far more devastatingly intelligent.
It pierced through the center of the engine block, vaporizing a perfectly cylindrical tunnel directly through it. The beam wasn't wide, but it was unimaginably potent, chewing through alloy, circuitry, and inert fuel cells alike.
The multi-ton housing crashed down around her, the impact shaking the ground so violently that Lin Feng was thrown from his feet. A dust cloud of pulverized rock and metal bloomed outwards, engulfing the entire area.
Silence descended, broken only by the clatter of falling debris and the ragged sound of Lin Feng's breathing. He pushed himself up, his Azure Pupil guttering out, his vision swimming. He stared into the settling dust, his heart a frozen lump in his chest.
Had they done it? Had they buried the heavens under the weight of the fallen world?
The dust began to clear.
A figure stood in the center of the devastation. A column of white in a world of grey ruin. Yun Zhao stood within the cylindrical tunnel her technique had carved, untouched. The engine housing formed a perfect, circular wall around her, a grotesque monument to her power. She was breathing slightly heavily, a faint sheen of sweat on her brow. The execution of that technique had cost her a significant portion of her qi.
Her winter-sky eyes found Lin Feng's across the devastation. The cold certainty was back, but it was now edged with a sharp, unwavering fury. She had been forced to expend herself. She had been made to feel… challenged.
"A clever trick, Heretic," her voice rang out, clear and hard as diamond. "But tricks will not save you from judgment."
She took a step forward, out of her stone and metal prison. The Shard of Celestial Purity glowed in her hand, its light undimmed.
They were out of traps. Out of tricks. The Mantis was wounded, missing a limb, its energy reserves critically low. Lin Feng was spiritually bankrupt, his body pushed to its absolute limit.
They had thrown the entire cunning, treacherous heart of the canyon at her, and she had pierced through it.
As Yun Zhao began to walk towards him, each step measured and inevitable, Lin Feng knew with a cold, sinking certainty that the time for cunning was over. All that was left was the futile, desperate hope for a miracle.