The Banker's high-value storage warehouse was not impressive from the outside. It was a sturdy, squat building of grey stone, designed to look like a glorified depot. But Huan Lin, moving like a whisper of smoke through the midnight fog, knew better. This was where the Gold Weave kept its secrets, guarded by layers of paranoia, not pomp.
Huan Lin moved with the disciplined shuffle he had perfected in the abandoned watchtower—the weary, anonymous gait of a man who belonged everywhere and nowhere. He wore the standard dark-gray work tunic of a low-level Gold Weave hireling, a perfect canvas of invisibility.
The perimeter was protected by three seasoned Azure Dragon Sect guards, minor masters renowned for their sense of awareness. They patrolled predictable, overlapping routes.
Huan Lin didn't engage them. The Sanguine Thorn Art demanded blood; he demanded silence.
He waited for the precise moment when the three guards' attention was naturally divided—one checking the lock, one adjusting his uniform, one yawning at the full moon. He moved past them, low and fast, his presence masked by the sheer mediocrity of his cultivated aura. He felt the familiar, restless hunger of the STA, screaming at him to turn and drain them, to eliminate the threat violently. He crushed the urge, his mind screaming back: Silence. We do not kill for convenience.
The internal suppression was a hot spike driven through his skull, but he held the line.
The true barrier was the internal security, crafted by Elder Han himself. The artisan, obsessed with mechanical purity, had laced the warehouse interior with subtle Qi-sensing tripwires and pressure plates. Huan Lin had spent weeks memorizing the patterns of the Banker's finances, and now he had to translate that cold logic into movement.
He navigated the maze of pressure plates, stepping only where the structural integrity of the floor was too thick to register his minimal weight. He bypassed the Qi-sensors by actively forcing his own energy signature to mimic the dull, ambient hum of the building's power source—a painful, demanding application of the STA's control feature, which required him to project a false stillness.
He found Elder Han in a makeshift workshop deep within the warehouse. The old man was indeed working late, sweat plastering his thinning hair to his forehead as he meticulously fine-tuned a complex Qi-siphoning array—the very mechanism that had killed Huan Lin's Master. The sight of the humming brass and silver triggered a savage lurch in the Sanguine Thorn Art, threatening to break free and turn the room into a slaughterhouse.
Huan Lin fought the urge, closing his eyes for a crucial half-second to regain control.
Huan Lin stepped into the light. Elder Han, startled, looked up, his eyes wide.
"You're not on the roster, boy. How did you get in here?" the artisan rasped, reaching for a small, concealed hammer—a surprisingly lethal weapon in the hands of a master forger.
"The roster is irrelevant, Elder," Huan Lin replied, his voice low, flat, and entirely devoid of emotion. "I am here to collect a different kind of debt."
Before Han could even finish raising the hammer, Huan Lin was on him. Not with a martial strike, but with a terrifying precision of contact. His palm clamped over Han's mouth, silencing the alarm, while his index and middle fingers of his other hand settled precisely onto the two major Qi-convergence points at the back of the Elder's neck.
"Do not fight," Huan Lin whispered against the man's ear. "I am not here to take your life force, only your mind. If you move, the Sanguine Thorn Art will ensure your last minutes are a century of fear."
He unleashed the controlled thorn.
Instead of the full, brutal surge, Huan Lin channeled the crimson Qi like a hypodermic needle—a thin, freezing stream that bypassed Han's protective Qi and locked directly onto his sensory and nervous systems.
Elder Han did not scream; the paralysis was instant and complete. But his eyes, staring wide at Huan Lin, filled with a horror that transcended physical pain.
Huan Lin began the extraction. He didn't ask questions. He didn't need words. He commanded the STA to extract the sensation of certain, final terror, the precise emotional debt owed by those who helped finance his sect's demise.
Elder Han experienced the full, unfiltered agony that Huan Lin himself had refined in the watchtower. He felt his blood boiling, his bones grinding to dust, and his mind being torn apart by phantoms, all while being perfectly conscious and unable to move or utter a sound.
Huan Lin focused on specific pockets of memory. Where are the financial records kept? What is the Banker's primary fear?
The resistance was fierce. Han's mind fought to protect its core secrets, but the Sanguine Thorn Art was relentless. It wasn't torture for information; it was terror for compliance.
Finally, the memory broke loose, flooding Huan Lin's mind.
It wasn't a vault in the city. The Banker kept his most damning, secret ledgers—the records of the massacre, the stolen Qi profits, and the names of every accomplice—in a concealed manor miles outside Xianzhou, a place he called The Quiet Retreat. The ledgers were not protected by Martial Masters, but by a powerful, static Sound Suppression Formation that would instantly deafen and confuse any intruder.
Crucially, the Elder's extracted knowledge revealed the formation's single, critical weakness: it had to be calibrated by human hearing, and only two people—Patriarch Qin and his chief steward—knew the specific sound frequency needed to trigger the bypass.
Huan Lin pulled the Sanguine Thorn Art back, retracting the crimson Qi to his Dantian. The entire extraction lasted less than a minute.
Elder Han slumped, alive, but utterly vacant. His mind was a shattered window, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, his sanity entirely extracted by the controlled thorn. He was left a breathing husk, a perfect distraction for when the Alliance inevitably investigated the subsequent collapse of the Gold Weave.
Huan Lin stood over the broken artisan, a chilling satisfaction settling in the pit of his stomach. The dark art worked, and the cost was paid—not in the life of his victim, but in the final, cold certainty of his own monstrous capability.
He quietly slipped out of the warehouse, melting back into the darkness. The infiltration had succeeded. The Banker's true sanctuary, The Quiet Retreat, was now mapped in his mind, and the final, fatal trap was set.