They moved at the same time.
Dominic surged from Alex's left, Eyeless Heaven already lifted, his other hand reaching not to shield but to seize. Emma's vajra flashed into her grip, white lightning crawling along its surface as it vanished and reappeared a half-step closer to Alex's spine. Joanne's revolver rose, barrel burning with stored spell-light. Jake blurred low and fast, daggers angled for the back of Alex's knee. Jack's hand struck toward the floor, stone answering with a jagged rise beneath her feet. Janet's wings flared. Séline air-stepped, fist drawing a clean killing line toward Alex's neck. Camille moved beside her, poison blades out. Alexei's shield came forward like a wall meant to trap, not protect.
Yue Ting moved too.
Her robes snapped once, qián bending around her in invisible threads as if she had seen the opening a heartbeat before everyone else and chose the best path to Alex's blind spot.
For half a breath, Alex did not understand.
Her teammates were charging at her back.
At Bīng.
At the floating character changing before her.
Then the mummified corpse on the altar stood.
The temple hall cracked under the pressure of his movement.
Dust fell from the rafters. Bronze lamps rang against stone. Broken banners stirred though there was no wind. The corpse of Thiên Võ Chân Vương, the True King of Heavenly Martial, rose from his cross-legged posture with the slow fury of a mountain remembering it had once been a god.
His empty eye sockets burned with gold.
"Insolent fools!"
The words struck the hall like an imperial sentence.
Everyone but Alex crashed to their knees.
Dominic hit the stone hard enough to crack it. Emma gasped as the vajra dropped from her hand and clattered against the floor. Joanne's revolver jerked downward before she could fire. Jake slammed shoulder-first into the ground, teeth bared. Jack's stone spike froze halfway out of the floor, then crumbled under the pressure. Séline and Camille both groaned, forced down by something too heavy for muscle and mana alike. Alexei braced with his shield and still fell. Janet's wings folded violently under the weight.
Yue Ting lasted longest.
Only a fraction longer.
Then she too dropped to one knee, face pale with strain, fingers digging into the stone as if qián itself had no route around the dead king's command.
They all scowled.
That was what made Alex's stomach go cold.
Dominic's gentle features were twisted with greed. Emma's sharp eyes shone with hunger so naked it looked alien on her. Joanne's lips curled as she stared past Alex toward Bīng. Jake's usual humor was gone, replaced by a feral resentment. Janet looked ashamed and furious and still unable to look away. Séline's composure had cracked into desire. Camille's blades trembled in her hands. Jack's quiet steadiness was drowned beneath need. Alexei's jaw clenched around something that was almost a snarl.
Yue Ting, too.
The Taoist master's face held the same greed, controlled but not absent.
The true Secret of Bīng hung before Alex, changing and shining.
Weapon, soldier, army, blade, command, edge, spear, war.
The mummified True King descended from the altar.
His armor whispered with dust. Ancient metal plates rasped against one another. Each step carried the echo of the seven-colored road, the serpent beneath his left foot, the tortoise beneath his right, the fall from imperial ascension, and the obsession that had survived even death.
He came to stand beside Alex.
Then, with one dry finger, pushed Bīng toward her.
The character drifted closer.
"Come, my child," the True King said.
His voice was no longer booming. It was almost gentle.
That made it worse.
"Take what is rightfully yours."
Alex did not reach for it.
She turned instead.
Her gaze went to Dominic first.
"Why?"
Dominic lifted his head against the pressure, lips pulling into a harsh smile that did not belong on his face.
"You know why."
"No," Alex said. "I don't."
He scoffed.
"If it was a copy, we would be happy for you." His eyes flicked to bīng, and the hunger in them sharpened. "But a true secret? The true bīng? That is too much to give up."
The words landed like a knife because the voice was his.
Dominic's voice.
The man who had shielded Joanne from the vajra. The man who had taken lightning meant to erase the team. The man who had refused relic greed so many times it had become a running joke.
He looked at her and spoke like greed was simple arithmetic.
Alex looked at the others.
Emma gave a strained laugh from the floor. "Do not look so betrayed. We are being rational."
"Rational," Joanne echoed, breathless and vicious. "You getting everything again is not team strategy."
Jake's grin twitched. "Come on, Alex. Share the main character loot."
Séline's eyes were fixed on Bīng. "A true secret changes nations."
Camille's poison blades scraped against stone. "And survival."
Yue Ting said nothing.
That silence was perhaps the most honest answer.
The True King placed a hand lightly on Alex's shoulder.
"You see?" he said. "You need no one."
His fingers were dry and cold even through her armor.
"Comrades envy. Lovers weaken. Allies bargain. Nations consume. Only power that you own will not betray you."
Alex stared at her teammates.
At Dominic on his knees. At Emma reaching for the vajra.
Joanne breathing too hard. Janet trembling under the pressure.
All of them contorted by greed.
Then she nodded.
"Yes," she said softly.
The True King's hand tightened in approval. Bīng floated closer.
Alex turned toward it. The character shone, triumphant.
Changing, inviting, and offering ownership, it promised command over weapons and over war, over the difference between being armed and being helpless,. It was the kind of power that could bend battlefields, nations, and perhaps even the entire diver scene.
Alex lifted her hand.
The True King smiled with a mummified mouth.
Then Alex unleashed The Ballad of Blades, Symphony I — Uprising Against Nine Heavens.
Not at Dominic. Not at Emma. Or at any of her teammates. Not even at Yue Ting.
Her target was none other than... bīng. The true secret of weapons itself.
The temple hall exploded with songless force.
Her Mindblade mana became a blade of memory and rebellion, translucent and terrible, carrying the echo of a blood-soaked flag worn as a cape, a sea of voices answering yes, and the first Emperor of Humanity pointing a plain sword at heaven. Faint images flared around Alex's strike—not fully formed lake or mountain or kingdom, but their principles sharpened through her own heart.
Trust betrayed yet not abandoned. Freedom from imposed hunger. The refusal to kneel to any power merely because it called itself rightful.
Instead of rang or cracked, the character bīng shrieked.
The sound was wet, high, and full of panic.
The changing strokes twisted violently, folding inward on themselves. The golden lines split. Black veins pulsed beneath the surface. The clean symbol of weapon, army, command, and war convulsed like flesh wearing calligraphy as camouflage.
The illusion tore.
Bīng opened its eye, a parasite stared back.
It was one of them.
Not identical to the eyes that had infested Yeak, but unmistakably kin. A writhing parasitic eyeball, slick and pale-veined, its pupil stretched into a vertical slit that widened with agony. Tiny tendrils whipped from its sides. The character strokes had been its disguise, bent around its body like a mask made of meaning.
Alex's Ballad cut through it.
The eye screamed again.
The mummified True King behind her distorted, his golden sockets warping into black hollows full of twitching filaments.
"Insolent—"
Alex drove the skill deeper.
The echo of the first Emperor's rebellion slammed into the false bīng.
The eye ruptured. Mana splashed outward in sickly gold and grey-white threads. The temple hall shattered.
The illusion broke with it.
The kneeling teammates blinked.
Dominic gasped and shoved himself upright, eyes clearing from confusion. Emma's hand was not reaching for the vajra; it was hovering midair as though she had been tracing the structure of the poem. Joanne's revolver was still holstered. Jake was standing where he had been before, frowning at empty air. Janet's wings had never opened. Séline and Camille had not moved.
Yue Ting's eyes snapped open.
For a heartbeat, none of them understood why Alex stood with Mindblade mana fading from her hand and the air before her full of dying parasitic threads.
They had never attacked. They had been trapped in their own attempts to recreate the first Emperor's skill all this time.
Alex alone had seen the trap play out.
Dominic looked around once, sharply.
"What happened?"
The words were his again, gentle underneath the alarm.
Alex let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.
"Bīng was fake."
Emma's gaze snapped to the dissolving grey threads. "Fake?"
"A parasite," Alex said. "Like the eyes in Yeak."
That turned the hall colder than any canyon wind.
Joanne swore.
Jake looked faintly sick. "Please tell me I did not do anything humiliating in that fucking parasite vision."
"You tried to kill me."
He stared.
"Okay. That is worse than humiliating."
Dominic's face went still.
"I what?"
"Illusion," Alex said before his horror could root too deep. "Not real. No hard feelings."
His hand clenched anyway.
Emma looked at Alex, reading her expression with painful speed.
"It used us?"
"It showed me you attacking me for the true Secret," Alex said.
Silence spread.
Janet's face tightened with disgust. "That thing wanted you isolated."
"Yes."
Yue Ting stood slowly, eyes narrowed toward the altar. "And it chose the correct temptation."
No one argued.
Before anyone could say more, the mummified body of Thiên Võ Chân Vương began to disintegrate.
This time there was no false movement. No system notification appeared, or voice pretending gentleness. The corpse on the altar softened at the edges, armor collapsing inward as the flesh beneath turned to light. Mana particles rose from him in slow streams, gold, black, and pale blue, each mote carrying the density of memory. They drifted toward Alex.
Dominic moved as if to step between them.
Alex raised one hand.
"It's all right."
She did not know how she knew, but she did.
The particles entered her.
Mana carried memory. The temple vanished behind her eyes, and she saw the sect back when it was alive.
Zhen Wu Pavilion.
That was its name.
Not from words carved on a sign, but from the pride that lived in thousands of footsteps across its courtyards. A sect of martial cultivators, formation masters, pill refiners, artists, beast tamers, sword children, furnace elders, lake painters, and stubborn disciples who believed that training beneath the dead-still gaze of the banyan guardian could temper the spirit.
She saw the True King of Heavenly Martial return from the Road of Imperial Ascension marked by defeat.
The first Emperor of Humanity had knocked him from the seven-colored road, and the wound she left in him was not merely physical, it was philosophical. He had commanded weapons through bīng and lost to a sword that carried no ornament, no divine craft, no obvious power—only the dream of mankind standing upright.
He became obsessed with a hunger to understand the thing that had beaten him.
Then the enemy came.
From a place called the Land of the Giants.
The memory named it with dread. Its emissary called itself the Emperor Eye - the progenitor of the True Irises.
A race of parasitic eyeballs.
The same lineage that had puppeted Yeak. The same kind of thing that had disguised itself as bīng before Alex.
The Emperor Eye wanted Thiên Võ Chân Vương's body as its host.
A True King bearing one of the Nine would have been a vessel beyond horror.
Those knew what they were doing did not use the word "emperor" lightly in the dungeon. And this one - Emperor Eye - was no exception. The True King knew this, and so did the Eye.
Its first attempt failed.
Alex saw the True King in the central temple, bleeding from seven wounds, laughing through cracked teeth as a colossal eye pushed tendrils through the air toward his brow. Around him, his elders fell, his disciples screamed, his guardian beast roared beneath the banyan.
Then he did something impossible.
He cracked his true Secret of bīng.
The character above him split into four blazing fragments, each containing a part of the whole, each tearing free with the violence of a star breaking its own name. The energy released by wounding one of the Nine blasted through the temple and struck the Emperor Eye head-on.
The colossal parasite recoiled, its outer membrane split. Divine-gold fluid burned across the floor.
It fled, wounded badly but not destroyed.
Then came the siege.
True Irises poured into Zhen Wu Pavilion.
Eyes in the air.
Eyes in flesh.
Eyes crawling through cracks, attaching to bodies, seeking hosts among disciples, elders, servants, beasts.
The pavilion made its choice.
Alex saw them gather.
Formation masters activated arrays. Pill masters burned their furnaces dry. Sword disciples stood in lines. Children clutched one another. The guardian beast lowered its great head beneath the banyan, eyes bright and doomed.
One by one, they turned themselves to crystal, preserving their honor with one final act of glistening suicide.
Better crystal than host. Better eternal stillness than becoming puppets for the True Irises.
That was why there had been no enemy corpses.
Why so many died in fighting stances. Why some knelt, some ran, some begged, and most fought.
They had not all chosen at the same moment. Some panicked. Some tried to flee. Some held lines until the crystal arrays reached them. Some turned themselves too late. Some protected children through the process. Some sealed their own bodies while still mid-strike.
A sect choosing not to be worn.
The True King prepared the final trap. He used himself and one of the four fragments of bīng as bait.
A grand sealing formation formed around the temple hall, layer upon layer of spatial lock, weapon command, life crystallization, and corpse-bound oath. He meant to lure the Emperor Eye inside, trap it with him, and hold it until both died.
The Emperor Eye anticipated him.
It sent a duplicate. A seed of itself wearing enough of its aura to trigger the trap, enough intelligence to persist, enough hunger to wait.
The formation sealed.
The True King died.
The duplicate survived in the shape of temptation.
Wearing in the image of bīng.
Waiting for someone worthy enough to recreate the first Emperor's attack, yet vulnerable enough to reach for the false Secret afterward.
Alex opened her eyes.
The temple hall returned. The others were staring at her.
Yue Ting most of all.
Alex said nothing about the Land of the Giants, about the Emperor Eye. Nothing about the True Irises, or about bīng being cracked into four.
Not while Yue Ting stood there, too sharp and too connected to a nation that already held qián.
Yue Ting looked at Alex for a long, unreadable moment. Then shrugged.
"There are other buildings in this ruin."
Joanne blinked. "That's it?"
Yue Ting's mouth curved faintly. "The agreement remains. Whoever finds something first keeps it."
She turned toward the temple exit.
In truth, Alex saw the wariness in her shoulders. Qián had told her something. Not the details, perhaps, but enough. Alex was different now. Fighting her here, now, after whatever had just happened, would end badly.
Yue Ting left decisively.
Her steps faded into the hall beyond.
Team Nemean watched her go, puzzled by the clean retreat.
Only after the Taoist master's presence had fully withdrawn did Dominic turn back to Alex.
"What did you get?"
Alex looked at the space where the mummified True King had sat. Then she lifted her hand.
A character appeared above her palm.
Not the full terrible radiance that had hung above Thiên Võ Chân Vương on the seven-colored road. Not the false parasite's perfect disguise either.
This one was smaller, incomplete in a way that still made the air bow around it. Changing through meanings of weapon, soldier, blade, command, and war.
A copy.
One of four fragments broken from the original when the True King had cracked Bīng to drive away the Emperor Eye.
Alex looked at her team.
Then showed them what the mummified True King had passed down.
Bīng.