Team Nemean spent two days moving through the Obsidian Canyon before the next ruin appeared.
Two days in the canyon meant two days of black glass underfoot, reflected light in the wrong places, and the constant pressure of things watching from cracks. The route east of Fort Erymanthian had been marked by Great Burrow mice, but the mice had also marked it with enough warning symbols that even Jake stopped making jokes by the end of the first afternoon.
Spiders came from above.
Cockroaches came from below.
Once, something soft and translucent shifted inside a ravine shadow and the entire team wordlessly changed course rather than test whether it was another Cannoneer Slug, or worse, a herd of them. No one had fond memories of human organs floating in clear flesh or petrified heads fired like artillery.
But they were stronger now.
Team Nemean moved with the hard confidence of people who had survived worse here and learned from it. Dominic held the forward line with Eyeless Heaven, the shield's strange presence making even the canyon feel slightly more reluctant to challenge him head-on. Alex moved beside him, alerted and psychic constructs floating around her like the one-woman army she often found herself to be. Jack tested the Yeak's left leg bone in small controlled bursts, learning how much mana the Elemental Requiems wanted from him before allowing fire or cold to answer. Emma kept the vajra wrapped but close, still wary of using a tooth of the Sky Emperor without understanding its temperament. Joanne's revolver stayed loaded with stored elemental bullets. Séline and Camille walked like twin blades. Jake scouted short lanes and returned before the canyon could swallow him.
By the second evening, the ruin showed itself.
At first, it looked like a moon had fallen badly.
A circular metallic megastructure lay lodged halfway into the obsidian, tilted at an angle, its outer rim buried deep in black reflective stone. The shape was too smooth to be natural, too wide to be ordinary architecture, and too complete despite its burial to be dismissed as wreckage. It resembled a flying saucer, though none of them said that immediately because the phrase felt too silly for something that old and dead.
The surface had lost most of its shine, but not all. Beneath layers of dust and black grit, the metal still held a faint dull luster. Symbols ran along the exposed rim in bands, half-scraped away where obsidian had swallowed them. They did not look like the clean technological markings of the cryo-tomb, nor like the hand-painted sorrow of the Yeak cave. These were closer to seals, formation marks. Characters and diagram lines melted into metal so naturally and seamlessly one could thought they were always there.
And from the center rose a structure that pierced the obsidian like a chimney from another world.
It looked like an eastern furnace.
Tall, rounded, and solemn, with a bulbous belly narrowing toward a capped top. Rings of metal curled around it in layers, three clawed legs dug into the surrounding structure. Its surface was etched with faded patterns of clouds, flames, and stars. The resemblance was immediate enough that Alex and Séline looked at it at the same time.
"Pill furnace," Séline said softly.
"Or something close," Alex agreed.
Emma glanced between them. "Pill as in medicine?"
"As in cultivation novels," Jake said, with the confidence of a man who had absorbed too much fiction by being around Séline and her "Mo Dao Zu Shi". "Old masters throw herbs into a magic furnace, sit for seven days, create one pill, and then someone eats it to become problematic."
"That is not wrong," Alex said.
Jake looked pleased and alarmed by the validation.
It took them no time to find the entrance.
A ladder descended from the lower exposed side of the saucer structure, metal rungs extending from a circular hatch that had been forced open long ago or never properly closed. The ladder was wide enough for armored bodies and strangely unworn despite the age of the ruin. Dust clung to it in thin grey layers. When Dominic tested the first rung with one hand, it did not creak.
"Of course the ancient death saucer has a ladder," Joanne muttered.
Dominic looked up the hatch. No immediate movement, smell of rot, or sound except a faint hollow wind.
He climbed first.
The others followed.
The ascent was shorter than expected and longer than it should have been.
That was the first sign. From the outside, the buried saucer seemed huge, yes, but not impossibly so. Yet the ladder kept going up past where the outer shell should have ended. Each rung carried them through dim metal, then through a narrow throat lined with seal marks, then into a space that opened abruptly above them.
They emerged into a square.
An open square under a false sky.
The team stopped.
No one spoke for several seconds.
They had entered a circular metallic structure buried in obsidian, but inside was an entire courtyard. Stone paths winding between a lake and training grounds. Fenced-off furnace areas in front of pavilions. Dormitory-like buildings half-collapsed along the far side. The light overhead came from no sun but from a pale dome so high above them it made the outside dimensions impossible.
Spatial anomaly.
The square itself told them.
To the left stood a fenced portion filled with furnaces of different sizes. Some were small enough for personal use, metal-bellied and soot-marked. Others were taller than humans, built on stone platforms with vents shaped like beast mouths. Broken jars lay everywhere, many still sealed with wax long since fossilized. Herbal drying racks had collapsed into grey powder. A few furnaces were cracked open, their interiors glittering with crystalline residue where pills or elixirs had failed, boiled over, or exploded.
Across from that was a training ground.
Weapon racks stood empty or broken. Stone dummies lined the yard, many cut, burned, or shattered. Some dummies had human-shaped marks scorched into them, as if someone had practiced palm strikes with enough heat to leave shadows. Others had been carved by sword-light so fine the stone had split in clean lines without crumbling. The ground bore circles within circles, formations half-erased by age and violence.
Near the lake stood a gazebo.
It should have been peaceful.
That made it worse.
Drawing stands remained beneath it. Brushes lay dried and brittle in their rests. Sheets of strange paper, preserved by some lingering formation, had yellowed but not rotted. One had a half-finished ink painting of the lake and tree beyond it. Another showed a child's clumsy attempt at a crane. A third was blank except for a single black stroke, interrupted halfway through by whatever calamity had arrived.
On the opposite side of the lake stood a banyan tree.
It must have been majestic back when it was alive given the height of it.
Its roots hung like ropes from branches that no longer carried leaves. Aerial roots had reached down to the ground and hardened into pillars, forming a natural temple of dead wood. Under it rested the corpse of a giant beast. Time had reduced much of it to hide, bone, and old scale, but it was still massive enough that Bruno would have seemed like a toy beside its skull. Its eyes had been gouged out long ago.
Alex looked at the layout.
"This looks like a cultivation sect," she said.
Séline nodded slowly. "Yes."
Joanne glanced at the dead tree. "I hate that I know enough now to understand why that is bad."
They moved carefully.
The first crystallized body appeared near the training ground.
It had been human, or close enough that calling it otherwise would have been cowardice. A young man, perhaps, though the crystal growth made age hard to read. He stood in a fighting stance, one hand extended, two fingers pointed like a sword. His face was frozen in concentration. Clear crystal had grown over and through him, preserving cloth, hair, skin, and expression in a single glassy shell. Within the crystal, faint veins of gold and black ran like trapped lightning.
The second body was near the furnace yard, half-turned as if trying to run. The crystal had caught one foot lifted from the ground. A jar had slipped from their hand and remained suspended beside the fingers, crystallized mid-fall.
The third knelt beside a stone path, hands raised in pleading.
After that, there were too many to count easily.
The deeper Team Nemean walked, the more the sect revealed its last moments.
Some had run.
Servants, maybe. Children too. Apprentices carrying bundles, talismans, pill bottles, or nothing at all. Their crystalline faces stretched in terror, mouths open in screams that the ruin had swallowed centuries or worlds ago.
Some had begged.
They knelt in clusters near doorways, hands pressed together, foreheads lowered, not toward an altar but toward the direction from which death had come. One old woman had both arms wrapped around a smaller crystallized body, shielding them from something that had not cared.
But most had fought.
That was the melancholy heart of it.
The majority of the bodies were not fleeing. They were fixed forever in martial forms. Swords drawn, palms raised, talismans mid-cast, spears lowered. Backs to one another in circles around injured disciples. Some had gathered in formation lines so disciplined even death had not disordered them. A dozen crystallized cultivators stood before the path to the inner halls, blades pointed outward, every face calm or furious or afraid, but no feet turned back.
A last stand.
Against something unseen. There were no enemy bodies, or corpses of monsters. No skeletons of invaders, either.
Only the sect of defenders preserved in crystal while whatever destroyed them had left no visible dead behind.
Dominic's expression hardened as they passed a group of four who had clearly died protecting a doorway. Behind them, through the cracked frame, were smaller bodies. Children or very young apprentices, frozen together beneath a fallen shelf.
"No enemy remains," he said.
"No," Emma replied.
Her voice was low.
She had been studying the space as they walked, eyes moving between hall width, distance, and impossible geometry.
"This hall is wrong."
Jake looked around. "In the 'haunted dead sect' way or the 'physics hate us' way?"
"Both." Emma touched one wall lightly, then looked back toward where they had entered. "It is much wider than the exterior permits. The entire structure is larger inside than outside."
"Spatial anomaly," Janet finally said the word out loud.
Emma nodded. "Some formation masters on Earth have started unlocking condensed space formations, but only in theory or on very small scales. Storage rooms. Folded compartments. Emergency bunkers that can hold more than dimensions suggest. The required materials are bizarre."
"How bizarre?" Joanne asked.
"I cannot pronounce most of them, and I had the Tannenbaum intel network."
"That bad?"
"Yes." Emma looked toward the false sky. "Whatever this sect was, it had one on a massive scale."
They kept going.
A notice board stood beside a cracked hall, jade-like slips still pinned beneath weathered frames. Séline could not read the script, but the dungeon's translation pressed meaning against her mind in fragments: morning sword practice, furnace duty rotation, inner disciple selection, quiet hours near the banyan lake, offerings for the guardian beast.
A place of routine before it was broken.
Farther in, footprints had scorched into stone. Bare feet, dozens of them, each pressed so hot or so mana-charged that they left dark marks leading toward the central gate. Blood had crystallized along the edges of the path in red-clear shards.
In one courtyard, a group of bodies knelt around a shattered formation plate. Their hands were still pressed to the ground, mana channels carved into the stone beneath them. They had probably held the sect's spatial formation together during the attack.
In another hall, a woman in elder robes had been crystallized with both palms outward, her sleeves shredded backward by force. Behind her, three disciples sat in lotus posture, eyes closed, faces peaceful. Perhaps she had bought them enough time to end their own life with peace.
Walking through the ruin was like taking a stroll back in time, where every crystalized bodies seemed to tell an unfinished story. A story of bravery, of melancholic desperation, of cowardice and betrayal alike.
Here was the elder who held the hall. Here were the disciples who formed a sword array until crystal swallowed their wrists. Here was the furnace master who died still turning the heat valve, perhaps trying to complete one last pill. There was the painter who never finished the lake. There was the guardian beast beneath the banyan, eyes stolen, body abandoned, still positioned as if it had crawled to die facing the gate.
Everywhere, the same message:
They had known they would lose. They had fought anyway.
After ten minutes, they reached a circular gate.
Unlike the rougher outer halls, this gate was elegant. Two curved stone halves framed the path ahead, forming a perfect moon. Cloud patterns were carved into the rim. At its base, two stone lions sat cracked and eyeless, their mouths open in silent roars.
Dominic raised one hand.
The team stopped.
From beyond came no sound or movement, only the faint scent of old flowers.
They passed through.
The sight changed.
A garden opened before them.
It was smaller than the outer square but more carefully made. Stone paths wound between low flowering bushes, though most had gone pale or brittle with age. A shallow stream circled the garden in a ring before disappearing beneath a pavilion floor. Wind bells hung from dead branches and chimed despite no wind touching them.
And they were not alone.
Yue Ting stood near the center of the garden.
She wore Taoist robes travel-stained by the canyon, one sleeve torn near the wrist, dark hair tied high but loosened by battle. Dust and insect ichor marked the hem of her robe. Her breathing was steady now, but the traces of the journey showed. Scratches along one cheek, a burn on her forearm, a bandage wrapped under her outer layer. The canyon had made even her pay.
Her eyes moved over Team Nemean.
The dungeon's strange mercy settled between them, and understanding came without foreign language. Not English, not Chinese. Meaning itself.
Yue Ting's face remained composed.
But Team Nemean knew wariness when they saw it.
She had not brought her team, because of course that was the case. The canyon would have eaten them. Even she, level 45 and carrying a copy of one of the Nine Secrets—qián, the art of foreseeing, probability, and impossible timing—had likely fought tooth and nail to reach this place.
And now Team Nemean had arrived with every member standing.
That could not have been pleasant for her.
On their side, surprise sharpened into calculation.
They had reached this place because of Phong. Not just his plants, though those mattered. His fort, his maps, the mice, the foods, his infrastructure spreading through the canyon like roots through stone. Without that support, even Team Nemean would have bled harder to get here.
Yue Ting had done it alone.
Alex regarded her with open focus.
It was assessment.
Beating the Yeak had made Team Nemean the highest active-level team in the public diver scene. Dominic sat at 46. The others close behind. Alex, though lower by level because of Bai Hu's title burden, remained the most dangerous duelist among them.
But Yue Ting carried qián. That meant she punched above level, above class, above normal logic. In a one-on-one fight, she could handle Dominic or Alex. Maybe not easily, maybe not without cost, but she could.
Not all of Team Nemean together, though.
Yue Ting knew that. Team Nemean knew she knew.
For a long moment, neither side moved.
The garden bells chimed again. Somewhere behind them, a crystallized sect still held its final stance against an unseen enemy.
Finally, Yue Ting spoke.
"I propose an agreement of honor."
Dominic did not lower his shield.
Emma did not move her hand away from the wrapped vajra.
Alex did not blink.
Yue Ting continued, calm and precise.
"We investigate this ruin together. Whoever finds something first keeps it. No ambush. No theft after claim. No attack unless attacked."
Joanne's eyes narrowed. "Convenient."
"Yes," Yue Ting said plainly. "For both of us."
That honesty helped.
A little.
Yue Ting looked toward the moon gate behind them.
"I cannot deal with all of you at once. You cannot kill me cleanly without suffering consequences you do not want."
That was also true.
Attacking to kill Yue Ting would not be simple, politically or practically. China would not ignore it. The diver world would not ignore it. And with qián, there was no guarantee any attempt would unfold the way Team Nemean intended.
Emma looked at Dominic.
Dominic looked at Alex.
Alex kept watching Yue Ting.
Then she said, "Better where we can see her."
Yue Ting's mouth twitched faintly, as if she appreciated the insult for its practicality.
Dominic nodded once.
"Agreed."
Yue Ting inclined her head.
"Agreed."
The tension did not vanish.
It became structured.
A temporary bridge made of suspicion, honor, and mutual inconvenience.
Team Nemean stepped into the garden fully. Yue Ting remained where she was, alone beneath the wind bells of a dead sect, while around them the ruin waited with its crystallized disciples, its pill furnaces, its dead banyan, its eyeless beast, and the silent story of a people who had made their last stand against something no one had yet dared name.