Lin Yu woke to screaming.
Not human screaming. Something worse. A high thin sound from underground, like metal scraping bone, and the floor under his blanket shuddered twice.
He was on his feet before he was fully awake. Tremor sense flared outward. The tunnel network beneath the temple was alive with movement. Dozens of small vibration signatures, cold and fast, pouring through the eastern tunnel like water through a cracked pipe.
Difu. The underworld rats.
"East wall!" he shouted. "They're coming through the east wall!"
The shelter erupted. People scrambled away from the eastern side. A mother grabbed two kids and dragged them toward the main altar. The high school students moved surprisingly fast, herding elderly survivors behind the prayer hall columns.
Three figures pushed against the current, heading toward the wall instead of away. The combat Bearers. Lin Yu had learned their names over the past few hours. Fatty Chen, who had some kind of stone-skin seal that made his forearms look like granite. A woman called Sister Hao with wind blades she could throw from her fingers. And a kid, couldn't be older than nineteen, who went by Dex and whose seal let him move at about twice normal speed.
They were brave. They were also about to get flanked.
"They're splitting," Lin Yu called out. "Main group through the east breach. But there's a second tunnel, comes up under the courtyard fountain. Maybe thirty seconds behind the first wave."
Fatty Chen looked back at him. "How do you know that?"
"I can feel them in the ground. Trust me or don't, but you've got thirty seconds."
Chen looked at Sister Hao. She nodded once. Dex was already repositioning toward the fountain without being told. Fast kid. Smart too.
The east wall broke open.
They came through in a wave. Difu were about the size of house cats, but wrong in every way cats weren't. Six legs instead of four, hairless grey skin, mouths too wide for their heads. They didn't have eyes. They navigated by vibration, same as Lin Yu's tremor sense but cruder, instinctive.
Which meant he could feel exactly what they felt. And more importantly, he could feel where they were going.
"Chen, three of them going low on your left. Hao, there's a big one hanging back behind the pack, twice the size. Dex, your group comes up in ten seconds."
He didn't think about why he was doing this. Directing a battle he had no business being part of. He'd come here for shelter. For seventy-two hours of not dying. That's it.
His mouth kept talking anyway.
Chen smashed the three flankers with a stone-skinned fist. Hao's wind blades found the big one in the back, opened it up from throat to belly. Dex intercepted the fountain group before they could reach the civilians, his speed turning him into a blur of kicks that scattered the rats like bowling pins.
It was over in about four minutes. Felt like an hour.
Twenty-six dead difu lay on the courtyard stones, grey bodies twisted in the torchlight. Some still twitched. Their six-legged forms were uglier in death than in life, skin splitting where the wind blades had cut, stone-crushed skulls leaking something that wasn't quite blood. The smell hit a few seconds later. Rotten and chemical, like expired medicine mixed with wet garbage. Several civilians vomited. Lin Yu's stomach rolled but held.
No human casualties. Chen had a bite on his calf that his stone skin had mostly stopped. Hao was winded. Dex looked like he wanted to throw up but was trying very hard not to.
Weilin appeared from the triage area, already glowing green. She went to Chen first, healed the bite in seconds, then checked the others. Calm. Efficient. Like this was Tuesday.
"That was coordinated," she said, looking at Lin Yu. Not a question.
"I could feel where they were moving. Seemed stupid not to say anything."
"You called out positions in real-time. For three separate groups." She was watching him with those too-perceptive eyes again. "That's not just sensing vibrations."
He shrugged. It kind of was, though. Tremor sense gave him the data. His brain sorted it. He'd always been good at pattern recognition. It's why he'd liked history. You read enough about how people moved and fought and organized, you start seeing the shapes.
"Thank you," she said. Simply. Then went back to the triage area.
[Karma Shift: Others +2]
He stared at the notification. Plus two for helping fight off rats. The system really did track everything.
Later, when the excitement died down and people settled back into their blankets, Lin Yu sat by the east wall with his tremor sense spread thin across the tunnel network. Monitoring. The rats wouldn't come back tonight. Their vibration signatures had retreated deep, past where his range could follow. But he watched anyway.
It gave him something to do besides think about golden threads.
Sister Hao brought him a bottle of water and a pack of cream crackers. "You did good," she said. "Most people with sensing abilities just tell you something's coming. You told us where, how many, which direction. That's different."
"I read a lot of battle histories."
She laughed. Tired laugh, but genuine. "History major saving the world with exam knowledge. There's a joke in there."
She left. He ate the crackers and drank the water and spread his tremor sense wider.
That's when he noticed it.
One of the auras in the shelter was wrong.
He'd been using soul sight passively, letting it run in the background like a second overlay on his normal vision. Most of the auras in the temple were what you'd expect. Grey, pale yellow, the occasional blue of someone with a conscience. Weilin's blazing green. The meditating old man's fading white.
But one aura, in the far corner of the prayer hall, was black.
Not dark grey. Not charcoal. Black. Like a hole cut in the fabric of the light. Someone sitting among the survivors with a karma alignment so deep into the negative that their aura consumed the light around it.
Lin Yu's stomach dropped.
He looked over as casually as he could. The corner was dim. A figure sat against the wall, knees drawn up, hood from a raincoat pulled over their head. Could have been anyone. Just another survivor trying to sleep.
Except their aura was the color of murder.
He checked the other Bearers. Chen was flat on his back, snoring with the conviction of a man who could turn his skin to granite and therefore didn't worry much about dying in his sleep. Hao was on the far side of the courtyard doing a perimeter walk, but she didn't have soul sight, she'd walk right past a black aura without knowing. Dex was in the courtyard doing pushups because apparently nineteen-year-olds dealt with near-death experiences through exercise. Good for him.
Weilin was in the triage area with her back turned. Her green aura pulsed with the slow rhythm of someone focused on work, not scanning.
Nobody else could see what he was seeing. Not one person in this entire shelter had the ability to detect that a black-karma entity was sitting thirty meters from where children were sleeping.
The black aura shifted. The figure's head tilted, just slightly, toward Lin Yu. Like they'd felt him looking.
He looked away. Kept his breathing even. Kept his tremor sense focused on the tunnels like nothing had changed.
His heart was hammering.
[Correction Tribulation: 54:17:33]
Fifty-four hours until the system came for him. And now, sitting thirty meters away in a shelter full of sleeping civilians, something else that might come for him first.
He ate another cracker. Didn't taste it.
It was going to be a long night.