The air inside the mine was a palpable weight, thick with the cloying sweetness of corrupted spirit energy and the dry, chitinous scent of the Mantis. The walls, which should have glowed with the pure light of spirit stones, were instead veined with pulsating black corruption, like diseased arteries. The only illumination came from the faint, sickly phosphorescence of the tainted crystals and the rhythmic, dull throb of the Mantis's core at the center of the cavern.
Kang, Ling, and Tie moved with predatory silence, their eyes wide with a mixture of terror and naked avarice. They ignored the smaller, blackened stones, their gazes locked on the larger, partially corrupted crystals that still held flickers of their original power. Using specialized tools that minimized spiritual disturbance, they began prying them from the walls, stuffing them into spatial pouches with frantic haste.
Li Yao did not join them. He remained near the breach, his perception stretched to its limit, his focus entirely on the slumbering Soul-Devourer Mantis. It was a creature of nightmare, its body the color of oil-slick obsidian, its folded scythes longer than a man was tall. Each slow, rhythmic breath it took sucked a visible wave of spiritual energy from the surrounding stones, feeding its evolution.
"Target Analysis: Soul-Devourer Mantis. State: Metamorphic Dormancy. Cultivation Base: Peak Core Formation, approaching Nascent Soul breakthrough. Spiritual Signature: 99% Corrupted. Primary Weakness: The 'Soul-Anchor Crystal' at the base of its thorax, currently exposed and vulnerable during dormancy. A precise, high-yield spiritual attack to this point has a 3% chance of causing a fatal core feedback loop."
Three percent. Those were not odds. That was a death wish.
His attention was pulled away by a sharp intake of breath from Ling. She had found a cluster of stones that were almost completely pure, shielded from the corruption by a fold in the rock. They glowed with an intense, silvery-white light—the untainted heart of the vein.
"Senior Brother!" she whispered, her voice trembling with excitement.
Kang was at her side in an instant, his eyes blazing. "At last! The true prize!" He worked faster, his movements becoming less careful. A tool scraped against the rock, letting out a faint, high-pitched screech.
In the center of the cavern, the Mantis twitched.
A single, multifaceted eye, the size of a dinner plate, flickered with a dim, malevolent light. The rhythm of its breathing hitched.
Everyone froze.
The eye scanned the cavern slowly, lazily. It passed over the cowering disciples, over the piles of harvested stones, and then… it stopped on Li Yao.
It wasn't his physical form it fixed on. It was his spatial arm. The limb woven from nothingness, the artifact of a higher law, was a glaring anomaly in this realm of crude matter and corrupt energy. To the Mantis's primordial senses, it was a beacon.
The eye focused, the dim light within it intensifying. A low, chittering hum vibrated through the cavern, a sound that grated on the soul. The Mantis was not fully awake, but its predatory instinct was now fixated.
"Alert: Host has been targeted by the entity's primal awareness. The spatial prosthesis is identified as a high-priority anomalous object. Hostile action is imminent."
"Kang," Li Yao said, his voice low and urgent. "We need to leave. Now."
"Just a few more!" Kang hissed, desperately prying at a large, pure stone. "We're so close!"
The Mantis shifted. One of its colossal scythes unfolded with a sound like grinding stone, the tip pointing directly at Li Yao.
It was a standoff. Li Yao knew that if he moved, he would trigger the attack. If he stayed, he was a target. The greed of his companions had doomed them all.
He made a decision. It was not noble; it was survival.
He focused his will, not on the Mantis, but on the corrupted Spirit Stone heart he had seen—the core of the demonic seal. The connection he had severed was still raw, unstable.
He gathered the last dregs of his spiritual power, the energy he had been using to stabilize his own wounds. He formed it into a needle, a single, concentrated spike of intent, and sent it flying back through the microscopic spatial tunnel he had used to breach the seal.
He didn't aim for the Mantis. He aimed for the corrupted heart.
His spiritual needle struck the throbbing black crystal.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the heart pulsed erratically, like a misfiring engine. The demonic seal, already weakened by the breach, went haywire. The iridescent barrier at the entrance flickered and died completely. The flow of corrupt energy sustaining the Mantis's dormancy stuttered.
The Mantis let out a shriek that was pure psychic violence. It was a sound of rage and disrupted evolution. It was fully, violently awake.
Its scythe lashed out, not at Li Yao, but at the source of the disruption—the now-unstable corrupted heart. The blow shattered the crystal into a thousand pieces.
The backlash was instantaneous. A wave of uncontrolled entropy exploded outwards.
Ling, who was closest to a cluster of corrupted stones, screamed as the stones detonated, the decay energy consuming her in seconds, turning her to dust.
Tie roared, throwing up a wall of earth to shield himself and Kang, but the entropy ate through it like paper, corroding his stony flesh. He collapsed, his body crumbling.
Kang, shielded by Tie's sacrifice, was sent flying back towards the entrance, his spatial pouch bursting, stolen spirit stones scattering around him like worthless pebbles.
The Mantis, enraged and its evolution ruined, turned its fury on the only remaining source of stable, pure energy it could sense: the scattered, glowing spirit stones from the pure cluster.
Li Yao didn't wait. He turned and ran, his [Shadow-Water Tread] pushed to its absolute limit. He burst out of the mine entrance and didn't look back, the enraged shrieks of the beast and the sound of collapsing rock echoing behind him.
He didn't stop until he was miles away, collapsing behind a ridge, his body shaking with adrenaline and spiritual exhaustion.
He had survived. He had used the Mantis's own power and Kang's greed to create a diversion. He had saved himself by sacrificing the others.
A figure stumbled into the clearing. It was Kang, his robes torn, his face a mask of soot and terror. He saw Li Yao, and his fear turned to venom.
"You!" he spat, pointing a trembling finger. "You did this! You triggered it!"
Li Yao looked at him, his expression empty. "You scraped your tool. You woke it. I simply gave it a more interesting target than us."
Kang's face twisted. He knew it was the truth, but he needed a villain. "I'll report this! I'll tell the elders you conspired with demonic forces! That your heresy doomed the mission!"
"Tell them whatever you want," Li Yao said, his voice flat. "But remember, Senior Brother. You're the only one who came back. With no loot. And a story about a beast I, a 'cripple,' somehow managed to escape while your entire team died. Who will they believe?"
The fight went out of Kang. He stood there, defeated and broken. The leverage he thought he had was worthless. They were bound together now by a shared, shameful secret.
Li Yao looked back towards the Serpent's Spine. The mine was lost, sealed once more by the collapsing mountain and the enraged beast within. He had gained nothing in terms of material resources.
But he had gained something else. A brutal, firsthand lesson in the consequences of power and ambition. And the cold, unshakeable knowledge that on the Eternal Ascension Path, survival was not a team sport. He had advanced another step, not in realm, but in resolve. The path was paved with the bones of the greedy and the weak, and he was determined to be neither.