The emerald toxic mist had transformed the floor into a viscous, bubbling swamp that now reached the ankles of the survivors. From the darkness beyond the power-supply room, the mutated convicts—no longer human in shape or sound—let out bone-chilling roars as they slammed their bloated, scaly bodies against the final blast door. The metal shrieked under their unnatural strength, the hinges groaning with every impact.
"One minute... that's all I need!"
Su Qingyue gritted her teeth so hard that blood seeped from her gums. Her violet eyes were a chaotic map of ruptured capillaries, glowing with a desperate intensity. Her slender fingers moved like a phantom weaver above the twelve high-purity Order Crystals. Droplets of her Primal Blood fell onto the crystalline surfaces, acting as a catalyst for the forbidden runes she was drawing in the air.
As a Primal Blood scion, her sensitivity to Order energy reached its absolute zenith in this moment of life and death. She wasn't just activating the crystals; she was forcefully rewiring their core output logic—overriding their stability protocols to turn a steady power source into a localized singularity of destructive collapse.
"It's ready! Get back!"
With a final, agonizing push of her willpower, Su Qingyue shoved the crate, now glowing with a lattice of blood-red veins, directly beneath the vertical ventilation shaft.
Gu Hanzhou did not retreat. Instead, he took a heavy step forward. He secured the chains holding his father, Gu Qingshan, to his back with a jerk of his shoulder and clamped his left hand onto Su Qingyue's shoulder like a hydraulic vice.
"Close your eyes," he commanded, his voice a low vibration that seemed to settle the frantic air around them.
Without a moment's hesitation, he drove the blade of [Black Order] directly into the heart of the crystalline core.
VROOOOM—!
In an instant, the laws of physics in the subterranean chamber seemed to invert. A vacuum-like suction force erupted, dragging the surrounding green mist and debris into the center of the crate. The once-blue crystals flickered to a blinding, incandescent white.
Then, the world turned white.
BOOM!!
A terrifying storm of intertwined dark-gold and pure-white energy exploded upward. The shockwave was a physical wall of heat and force. The primary target was the two-meter-thick layer of light-absorbing alloy plating that formed the ceiling of the base. This barrier, designed to withstand a direct bombardment from heavy siege cannons, stood no chance against the directed collapse of twelve high-purity cores. Like a red-hot needle passing through a block of ice, the alloy was vaporized, leaving a massive, molten-edged gaping hole that led to the upper levels.
Amidst the white-hot flash and the roar of the collapsing structure, the bloodstained scroll tucked against Gu Hanzhou's chest seemed to catch fire. It wasn't a physical flame, but a spiritual ignition.
A heavy, ancient will—hidden within the dried, centuries-old blood on the parchment—seized the moment of chaotic energy to force its way into Gu Hanzhou's subconscious.
In a microsecond of frozen time, he was no longer in the ruins. He was standing on a battlefield where the very concept of light had been devoured.
In this vision, Gu Hanzhou saw a magnificent city floating above a sea of clouds—the legendary Ancient Court. Its spires reached for the heavens, made of a material that reflected the stars. But the city was being dragged down. Colossal grey chains, thick as mountains and pulsing with necrotic energy, were pulling the floating citadel from the apex of the sky into a yawning abyss of darkness.
He saw thousands of warriors clad in dark-gold armor. Their blood was literally burning in the air, transforming into arcs of blade-light capable of severing the very laws of the universe. Yet, even their divine fury seemed small and flickering against the infinite, suffocating grey tide of death that rose to meet them.
In the center of this cosmic carnage, a blurred, titanic figure stood with his back to the stars. He held a long blade that hummed with the heartbeat of a world.
"...As long as the Order-Blood flows, the Ancient Court shall never fade."
The voice didn't come from his ears; it exploded in the depths of his soul, echoing with the weight of five thousand years of sorrow and defiance. The figure slowly turned his head. Behind the veil of mist that obscured his features, only one thing was clear: a pair of dark-gold pupils that were identical to Gu Hanzhou's.
Then, the vision shattered.
The sight of the falling Ancient Court was buried under the intrusion of grey, jagged chains—the "New Order." In the final, forbidden image of the vision, Gu Hanzhou saw the symbol of the traitors who had handed the chains to the darkness. It was a blurred, primitive version of a crest he knew all too well: the earliest, original insignia of the Inquisition.
"Hanzhou! Move!!"
Gu Qingshan's roar shattered the trance, dragging Gu Hanzhou back to the reality of fire and stone.
The energy aftermath of the explosion was beginning to dissipate, and through the jagged, smoking hole in the ceiling, the cold, clinical steel structures of the Black Prison's upper sectors were finally visible.
"Mordent..."
Gu Hanzhou's pupils had transformed into solid, liquid gold. The images in his mind had made one thing clear: the suffering he had endured, the ten years of slavery, and his father's torment were not accidents of fate. They were part of a blood debt that had lasted for millennia.
He slammed his feet against the ground, his leg muscles coiling like high-tension springs. He launched himself upward like an arrow from a heavy bow, carrying the weight of two people. Using the rising thermal currents from the explosion, he streaked toward the molten "skylight" he had just created.
Behind them, the base of the ruins finally reached its structural limit. A chain reaction of explosions followed the collapse of the space-time barrier, burying the mutated ghouls and the emerald gas under a mountain of iron.
High above in his surveillance bunker, Duke Mordent would never have expected this. He thought he was watching a rat drown in a pipe.
He didn't realize that a single ember from the Ancient Court had just been fanned into a wildfire. And that ember was now rising from the deepest pit of hell, carrying a vengeance that would burn the Iron City to its foundations.