The air within the mine shaft was trembling. It was a physical oscillation, a ripple caused by high-frequency movements that pushed the stagnant oxygen to its breaking point.
Gu Hanzhou's silhouette was a blur of lethal motion, darting through the narrow rock galleries. He had never been taught a formal footwork system, but his every step was calculated with a precision that bordered on the obsessive. Loose shale, jutting crags, and even the piled carcasses of the Shadow-Crawlers served as fulcrums for his momentum. He didn't just move; he flowed through the chaos.
As the slaughter continued, the sensation of the blade in his hand underwent a qualitative metamorphosis. This rusted Tang Dao no longer felt like a dead instrument of cold steel; it felt like a living extension of his own nervous system. Every time the long blade parted flesh and drank the boiling, corrupted blood of a monster, the Order Sigil on his chest resonated in symphony. It fed back a stream of pure, scorching heat into his limbs, cauterizing the micro-tears in his muscles and knitting together his fresh battle-scars.
"Thirteen."
Gu Hanzhou kept the tally in the cold basement of his mind. His breathing remained eerily steady, his gaze as frigid as an accountant calculating a ledger of death.
Suddenly, the remaining four Shadow-Crawlers halted their frantic charge. They hissed in unison, their spindly bodies trembling as if they had received a high-frequency command from a superior predator. They backed away slowly, flanking the entrance to the lightless abyss at the end of the tunnel.
From that absolute darkness, a pressure as heavy as molten lead began to emerge, step by rhythmic step.
The creature stood nearly three meters tall, a towering monument to biological horror. Its body was no longer composed of mere flesh; it was a half-crystalline entity. Jagged, dark-purple crystal clusters had erupted from its spine, piercing through the skin like a row of serrated dorsal fins. Its right arm had mutated into a massive, chitinous bone-blade, the edge shimmering with a pulsating, violet light that made the air hum with dread.
Dark Order Elite: The Vein-Breaker.
This was a monster that touched the threshold of the "Blood-Ignition Realm."
Gu Hanzhou's grip tightened on the hilt of the Tang Dao. The webbing between his thumb and forefinger throbbed from the sheer aura radiating from the beast. Having just stabilized his "Awakening Phase," he was—by any logical standard—completely outmatched. But in the law of the deep mines, when you encounter a natural predator, running only ensures you die exhausted. The only path to survival was to be more vicious than the thing trying to eat you.
ROAR!
The Vein-Breaker unleashed a thunderous, guttural howl that rattled Gu Hanzhou's very marrow. Its massive bone-blade dragged across the floor, carving a trail of sparks through the rock as it launched into a mountain-shattering charge.
With every footfall of the Vein-Breaker, the bedrock splintered. As the bone-blade swept toward him in a devastating horizontal arc, Gu Hanzhou didn't dare to parry. To meet that force head-on would be like a moth trying to stop a falling star. He lunged forward, his body nearly skimming the acidic sludge on the floor. He used the lowest possible center of gravity to let that gargantuan blade whistle just an inch above his scalp.
The violent wake of the swing was so powerful it stung his skin, shearing away a few stray locks of his hair.
As they crossed paths, a fierce, murderous light erupted in Gu Hanzhou's eyes. He slammed one hand into the ground to stabilize his pivot, and the Tang Dao in his right hand lashed out in a wicked upward trajectory. He aimed for the narrow gap in the creature's armor—the vulnerable ligament cluster behind the knee.
CLANG!
A sharp, metallic ring echoed through the cavern. The flesh there was as hard as reinforced alloy. The Tang Dao only managed to bite an inch deep before the momentum was halted by the creature's dense internal structure.
Feeling the sting, the Vein-Breaker let out a hiss of fury. It spun with surprising agility, throwing a heavy-fisted backhand that sent a shockwave through the toxic mist. Gu Hanzhou managed to bring his blade up in a desperate guard, but the sheer, overwhelming impact sent him flying like a stone from a catapult. He slammed into the rock wall, his body hollowing out a shallow crater in the stone.
"Cough..."
A coppery sweetness filled his mouth. Gu Hanzhou spat out a mouthful of congested blood directly onto the blade.
The moment the weapon tasted its master's Order Blood, something miraculous happened. The black, stubborn rust on the steel seemed to melt as if exposed to a forge-fire. It peeled away in large, scorched flakes. The revealed edge wasn't the silver of a normal sword; it was a deep, bottomless obsidian-black. The dark-gold sigil running along the spine of the blade ignited with a blinding brilliance.
A thirst for slaughter surged from the hilt into Gu Hanzhou's mind, and a web of fine, red capillaries began to crawl across his irises.
He stopped looking for a single weak point. Instead, he utilized the Tang Dao's now-impossible sharpness to initiate a flurry of high-frequency, overlapping strikes.
The Vein-Breaker's defense was legendary, but it was not infinite. Gu Hanzhou moved like a vengeful ghost, circling the monster with erratic, flickering steps. In the span of a few seconds, he delivered nine consecutive strikes to the exact same spot on the monster's left leg. Every cut landed with surgical precision in the groove of the one before it.
On the ninth strike, the crystalline carapace finally hit its breaking point. It shattered with a sound like a collapsing glacier.
SHLICK!
The obsidian blade buried itself to the hilt through the shattered gap.
The Vein-Breaker let out an earth-shaking shriek of agony, its massive frame tilting as it collapsed to one knee. Gu Hanzhou didn't pause for a breath. He scrambled up the monster's spine, his left hand locking into the crystal dorsal fins for leverage. His right hand swung the blade in a wide, dark-red arc.
"SHATTER!"
Gu Hanzhou roared, funneling every drop of his internal Order energy into the tip of the blade. The steel vibrated so intensely it let out a piercing, high-pitched scream.
The long blade plunged downward, piercing the crown of the Vein-Breaker's skull and driving straight into its neural core.
As the monster's massive body went rigid and then slumped into the dirt, Gu Hanzhou wrenched the blade out and leaped back, landing in a low crouch. He gasped for air, his lungs feeling like they were filled with broken glass. Around him, the remaining Shadow-Crawlers let out whimpering cries of terror, vanishing into the cracks of the cave like smoke.
Silence returned to the mine.
Gu Hanzhou looked down at the weapon in his hand. Most of the rust had fallen away. Though the blade was still chipped in places, its true, solemn, and lethal form had been revealed. At the junction where the guard met the blade, he finally saw two ancient, bold characters etched into the steel.
[BLACK ORDER]
He stood up, his body aching but fueled by a strange, dark adrenaline. He walked over to the carcass, sliced open the Vein-Breaker's skull, and retrieved a fist-sized crystal core that shimmered with dark-purple light.
He turned his gaze toward the deepest part of the tunnel—the "Rift" Lin Xiu had spoken of. He knew that Black Order was still hungry, and his path through the long night had only just begun to see its first drop of blood.