---
The next day, they left the Main Hall.
The inner district waited beyond a barrier that had once separated the core disciples from those who had proven themselves worthy of advancement. Xīng Hé could see the shimmer of it in the distance—or rather, the absence of shimmer. The barrier was broken. Shattered, perhaps, by whatever catastrophe had befallen this place. Its remnants hung in the air like torn silk, fragments of protection that no longer protected anything.
They moved in formation, the twenty-six survivors arranged around her in patterns they had developed over four months of shared danger. No one spoke. No one needed to. They had learned to communicate through gesture and glance, through the subtle shifts of weight that preceded movement.
The buildings of the inner district rose before them as they passed through the broken barrier.
They were grander than the outer structures—taller, more ornate, their surfaces carved with patterns that seemed to move when viewed from the corner of the eye. A sign marked the entrance to the first complex: "Inner Disciple Residence."
And there were people.
Xīng Hé's heart stuttered in her chest.
Not contaminated. Not the twisted, wrong creatures they had fought in the outer district. These were people—human-shaped, human-faced, dressed in robes that suggested rank and purpose. They walked between buildings, gathered in small groups, engaged in conversations that carried across the courtyard in a language Xīng Hé could almost understand.
They were living their lives.
Going about daily routines as if nothing had happened. As if the outer district wasn't filled with monsters. As if the world beyond their barriers hadn't ended.
Her team froze, uncertain.
"We try to talk first," Xīng Hé whispered. "Peaceful contact. Maybe they can help us—tell us what happened, show us what we need to find."
Nods around her. Desperate hope flickering in hollow eyes.
They stepped into the courtyard.
One of the disciples noticed them.
He was young—or appeared young, with features that might have been handsome before they started to shift. His eyes met Xīng Hé's across the distance of the courtyard, and for a moment, nothing happened. Just two beings looking at each other, separated by culture and language and whatever gulf existed between their species.
Then his face began to change.
The transformation was instantaneous.
One moment he was a person. The next, he was something else—flesh rippling, bones cracking, features warping into configurations that shouldn't have been possible. The contamination that had been dormant within him erupted outward, consuming the human form and replacing it with something monstrous.
A guitar materialized in his hands.
Not summoned—simply there, as if it had always been there, waiting. The wood gleamed with a luster that spoke of centuries of care. The strings hummed with potential even before he touched them.
He moved before Xīng Hé could draw breath to scream.
---
*The first string.*
The contaminated's hand swept across the guitar in a motion too fast to track. His fingers struck the lowest string with brutal force, and the sound that emerged was wrong—not music, but noise. A discordant shriek that stabbed into Xīng Hé's ears like needles.
Lin Mei stood closest to the contaminated.
The boy—barely thirteen, with a laugh that had once reminded Xīng Hé of wind chimes—opened his mouth to shout a warning. The sound never emerged.
The noise from the guitar hit him like a physical blow.
Xīng Hé saw his chest cave inward—not crushed, exactly, but compressed. As if the air itself had become solid and slammed into him with the force of a hammer striking an anvil. His ribs crumpled. His sternum shattered. The force traveled through his torso and erupted from his back in a spray of golden blood that painted the ancient stones behind him.
His body hit the ground before the note faded.
Move, Xīng Hé's mind screamed. Do something. Save them.
But her body wouldn't respond. The speed of it—the sheer, impossible speed—had locked her muscles in place, frozen her in the terrible space between recognition and reaction.
---
*The second string.*
The contaminated's hand moved again. Higher string this time. Higher pitch. The noise that emerged was sharper, more focused—a lance of sound rather than a hammer.
Wei Jun tried to run.
The girl had always been fast—had survived the outer district through speed and reflexes that bordered on supernatural. She turned and bolted in the same instant the second note rang out, her feet already moving, her body twisting away from the threat.
The sound caught her mid-stride.
It hit her head with surgical precision. Xīng Hé saw Wei's skull snap backward, saw her neck bend at an angle that bones weren't meant to achieve, saw the terrible moment when her momentum carried her forward while her head remained fixed in place.
Her body crumpled like a puppet with cut strings, tumbling across the courtyard in a graceless sprawl that ended with her face pressed against stone, eyes open and unseeing.
Two.
Two teammates dead in the space of two heartbeats.
---
*The third string.*
Zhao Lin had his concept active before the note even sounded.
Illusion, his ability—the power to create false images, to deceive the senses, to make enemies strike at phantoms while the real target fled. He split himself into three versions, each one moving in a different direction, hoping to confuse the contaminated long enough to escape.
The guitar's noise hit all three simultaneously.
Because it wasn't targeting images. It was targeting the source—the origin point where all the illusions emerged. The sound found Zhao Lin's real body with the certainty of a hunting dog following scent, and struck him in the center of his chest.
The force pulverized his heart.
Xīng Hé saw the moment of terrible clarity in his eyes—the realization that his concept had failed, that his illusions meant nothing against an attack that didn't rely on sight. Then his eyes glazed, his knees buckled, and he joined the growing pile of corpses bleeding golden across ancient stone.
Three.
---
*The fourth string.*
Su Yan was screaming now.
Not words—just raw sound, terror given voice, the cry of someone who understood they were about to die and could do nothing to prevent it. She raised her hands as if to ward off the attack, as if flesh and bone could somehow deflect what was coming.
The noise hit her raised arms first.
Both limbs shattered simultaneously—radius, ulna, humerus, all of them reduced to fragments that tore through skin and muscle on their way out. Her arms became things that hung wrong, bent in directions that made Xīng Hé's stomach lurch.
But the force didn't stop at her arms.
It traveled through her shoulders, into her chest, found her lungs and compressed them until they burst. Su Yan's scream cut off mid-breath as blood filled the spaces where air should have been. She fell forward, still technically alive, drowning in her own fluids while her ruined arms twitched uselessly at her sides.
Four.
---
*The fifth string.*
Chen Bao had been trying to activate his concept since the first death.
Fire, his element—the power to create and control flame, to burn away threats, to fight back against what was killing them. He'd spent four months training it, refining it, learning to manifest heat that could melt stone.
None of it mattered.
The string sang its discordant note before his flames could catch. The sound hit him like a battering ram to the skull. His head didn't just snap back—it detonated.
Bone became shrapnel. Brain matter became spray. The force that should have been distributed across his entire body concentrated itself in a single point, and that point couldn't withstand the pressure.
What remained of Chen Bao collapsed in a heap, identifiable only by the robes he wore.
Five.
---
*The sixth string.*
Mei Ling had always been quiet.
Even now, facing death, she didn't scream. Didn't cry out. Just stood frozen as the contaminated's hand swept across another string, generating another spike of lethal noise.
This one caught her in the throat.
The force crushed her windpipe, shattered her larynx, severed the arteries that carried blood to her brain. She reached up with trembling hands, touching her ruined neck as if she couldn't quite believe what had happened to her.
Then the blood loss claimed her, and she crumpled with the same quiet grace she'd carried through four months of survival.
Six.
---
*The seventh string.*
Tang Wei was the closest to Xīng Hé.
She'd been standing just behind her, slightly to the left—a position they'd adopted during countless battles in the outer district. Close enough to support. Close enough to retreat together if necessary.
Close enough that when the seventh note rang out, Xīng Hé felt the displacement of air as the sound passed within inches of her own head.
It caught Tang Wei in the center of her face.
Her features collapsed inward—nose, cheekbones, orbital bones, all of them driven backward into the soft tissue of her brain. What emerged from the back of her skull was a horror that Xīng Hé would never be able to unsee, a spray of gold and grey and red that defied the idea that a human head could contain so much liquid.
Tang Wei's body stood upright for a moment, swaying slightly, before gravity remembered it existed and pulled her down.
Seven.
---
*The eighth string.*
Li Jun threw himself to the ground, trying to make himself a smaller target. His concept—Earth, the power to manipulate stone and soil—erupted around him in a desperate shield of compressed dirt.
The noise shattered his barrier and found him anyway.
The force hit him in the spine, right between his shoulder blades. Xīng Hé heard the crack as vertebrae fractured, saw his back arch at an impossible angle, saw his limbs go suddenly limp as the spinal cord severed.
He didn't die immediately. Lay there paralyzed, his eyes wide with terror, still breathing, still conscious, still aware that he was dying.
The contaminated's next note ended it.
Eight.
---
*The ninth string.*
Yun Shu had been crying since the second death.
Tears streaming down her face, sobs choking her throat, her whole body trembling with the absolute certainty of her impending death. She didn't try to run. Didn't try to fight. Just stood there, weeping, waiting.
The contaminated's mercy was swift.
The note hit her chest dead-center, stopping her heart instantly. She was dead before her body registered pain, before her mind could process what had happened.
Small comfort, perhaps.
But more than most had received.
Nine.
---
*The tenth string.*
Rong Fei tried to negotiate.
Shouted words in the contaminated's language, hands raised in surrender, voice breaking with desperation. Begging for his life in syllables that Xīng Hé's concept translated imperfectly—please, mercy, mistake, spare me.
The contaminated didn't seem to hear.
Or perhaps he heard and didn't care.
The note struck Rong Fei in the stomach, tore through his abdomen, ruptured his intestines and liver and spleen. He collapsed clutching his midsection, golden blood leaking between his fingers, dying slowly from internal bleeding that no healing could stop.
Ten.
---
*The eleventh string.*
Jing Hua had her eyes closed.
Couldn't watch anymore. Couldn't bear to see another teammate die. Just stood there with her eyes squeezed shut, tears leaking from beneath her lids, waiting for the sound that would end her.
It came.
Struck her in the side of the head, caved in her temple, sent fragments of skull into the delicate tissue of her brain. She fell sideways, dead before she hit the ground, her eyes still closed.
Never saw it coming.
Perhaps that was its own kind of mercy.
Eleven.
---
*The twelfth string.*
Han Yi was the last.
The contaminated's hand hovered over the strings, preparing the final note. Han Yi locked eyes with Xīng Hé across the distance between them—a moment of connection, of recognition, of terrible understanding that they had both survived four months only to die here, now, in a courtyard that didn't care about their struggles.
He smiled.
It was a sad smile. Resigned. Almost peaceful.
Then the final note rang out.
It hit him in the chest, directly over his heart. The force didn't pulverize the organ like it had with Zhao Lin. Didn't shatter bones like it had with the others.
It simply stopped his heart from beating.
Han Yi's smile faded as his life did, his body folding gently to the ground as if he'd simply decided to lie down and rest.
Twelve.
Twelve teammates.
Twelve people who had survived four months in this nightmare place.
Dead in twelve seconds.
---