The narrow carved out passage was a stranger to him. The stone looked the same as the rest of the labyrinthic cavern, the same gray veins and tool marks, yet no one had ever sent Giovanni through these northern corridors.
Radeon took the left turn and found only a dead end. The wall rose before him in a sheer incline that opened toward the upper floors.
Its slight tilt betrayed its purpose. It was meant for gilded core, so they could spend less strength when shaping footholds into the stone with their qi.
"Disappear."
Radeon slipped from sight and began to climb. The smooth stone offered nothing to the hand, so he drew thin needles and drove them into hairline gaps in the wall, one after another.
Somewhere above, despairing wails brushed his ears. The sound was faint, as if dragged through a long tunnel, yet it gnawed at his bones.
If a mortal heard that, or any cultivator with a weak heart, he would fold and weep where he stood.
He reached a narrow throat in the stone where water curtain fell. Radeon stepped through the first veil without stirring a ripple, qi wrapped around him like a second skin.
The stench of blood thickened at once. The first dozen curtains felt as if he walked through veins, each sheet heavy with the tang of iron.
The second dozen made it worse, as though he waded waist deep in a pool of old blood.
By the third layer he felt like blood himself, drowned in the scent. The water grew redder with every step.
He understood then. The curtains were there to strain the reek.
Ahead waited a final fall. A broad sheet of water poured in a dark crimson rush, yet Radeon felt no life in it at all.
Voices met him as he stepped through. Thin and frayed.
"You're a demon, witch! Hellspawn!"
"Burn her! Burn him! Down to hell with you all!"
Their pleas tangled together in his ears, every note begging to be freed from some unseen array. The despair in them was a weight of its own.
The great hall stretched out as wide as the largest gladiator coliseum he had seen, a hollow carved for slaughter and worship both.
Nearly a hundred gilded core cultists sat in wide spacing from one another, each body wrapped in a haze of blood tinged qi. Their eyes were all shut, faces slack, lost in cultivation.
Between them, Radeon picked out skeletons seated cross legged. Some still wore scraps of robe. Some still had rings on finger bones. No flesh. No eyes.
That was not what made his stomach tighten.
At the heart of the hall, three men knelt in a tight circle, each wearing a steel collar as a mark of rank.
Nascent embryo strength burned in their auras, yet their heads stayed bowed like servants.
Lips moved in a low, unbroken murmur, a mystic chant that seeped across the stone and clung there.
Above them an orb the size of a human head turned slowly. Faces swam across its surface, one after another, each feature carved in despair.
Their mouths opened in silent protests, as if the orb swallowed each scream before it could be born.
'Blood Orb. But...'
Radeon had seen blood cores before. Most were raised as a foundation for those who meant to step into gilded core, a brutal shortcut that swelled a cultivator's vitality in great ugly leaps.
With one, the body hardened faster, wounds knit quicker, and a man could outlast his peers by years that should have belonged to the grave.
The price came due elsewhere. Their qi turned stubborn in the meridians, less nimble, less refined, and for a body cultivator that was often a bargain worth making.
This one was wrong.
A true blood core should swell toward the size of a fist as it ripened.
The orb above the chanting men had grown past what was normal, and worse, it wore faces.
Resentment clung to it like soot. Those shifting features were not illusion, not a trick of light on wet stone.
They were trapped. They were aware. Souls, swallowed by an array that toyed with life and death.
Radeon's breath stayed steady, but his pulse betrayed him. He was certain now. This was the treasure even the Skyflight Court had been coveting.
'But what are the righteous sects after in a cursed artifact like this? Either they're rotten inside, or there's more here than it shows.'
Radeon knew he could not probe the orb. Not here. Not with three nascent embryo eyes half open behind that chanting.
One wrong brush of qi and they would peel him alive, slow, for daring to look too closely.
So he did what he came to do. He hunted for something he could take in an instant.
The dead had been left on purpose. He crouched by a skeleton seated among the living and ran his gaze over the bones.
Fine drag lines scored the ribs and skull, marks like wind erosion, only wind did not creep in straight pulls like that.
The orb itself had done it. Drinking them in the middle of cultivation deviation, when the wailing in their minds tipped them into madness and their bodies became fuel.
Radeon kept his face blank and his hands quick. He rummaged through the dead for anything that would not scream its absence.
One corpse yielded middle grade spirit stones, another a stoppered vial of high grade blood pills, another a pouch of mixed poisons that stung his nose even through cloth.
He stashed it all into the hidden pockets of his cloak, weight settling against his ribs like quiet profit.
Radeon moved fast. He combed the circle on hands and knees and never once let qi leak from him.
Nimble fingers were the only tool that would not betray him, not with the stealth of his cloak pressed tight around his shoulders.
Every scrape of bone and soft clink of stone went into cloth before it could sing on the floor.
When he paused to count, the haul made his throat go dry. Twenty seven middle grade spirit stones, and several bottles of blood pills.
The number inside each bottle was still a guess, but it was not a small guess. Dozens at least.
He eased his weight back and started to withdraw toward the large water curtain, satisfied with what he had hauled.
Then the hair along his arms lifted. An ominous feeling crawled up his spine, cold and certain, as if the hall itself had turned its face toward him.