The darkness was alive. Li Tian landed on a surface that was not stone, but a great lamellar bone plate that shifted under his weight with a wet, grinding sound. The air was thick with a metallic-sweet scent, the smell of ancient blood and ozone. The cavern was a cathedral of ossified anatomy—vast rib arches soared overhead, connected by taut, glistening tendon-bridges. In the center, embedded in the chest wall, pulsed an immense, half-fossilized heart: a sphere of muscle and crystal. With each beat, a sub-audible THUMP rolled out, a physical pressure that compressed the very air.
This was not the colossus's breath. This was its heartbeat. A three-phase pulse: crushing systole, a brief, precarious hold, and a powerful diastole that pulled scarlet mist from vents with a sound like a dying man's gasp.
Match the beat, not the light.
He tested the cadence—stepped on the systole—and the plate tilted violently, almost pitching him into a chasm of shadow. A lash of pressure burned his meridians. He spiral-bled it instantly, the cost a sharp ache in his teeth. He adjusted, finding the rhythm: Vein Step on the hold, Star Lung exhale on the diastole.
Hazards were everywhere. On the diastole, blood-mist surged from the vents; a wisp touched his face and his skin prickled with a corrosive burn. He tore a strip of robe, wet it with condensation, tied it over his mouth and nose. When a cluster of thin, tendon-like chord-leeches dropped from above, writhing for Qi, he didn't fight; he slid aside and let the diastole suck them back into a vent. A cluster of white, crystalline marrow-salt nodules crunched under his fingers—he powdered them, drying a slick patch and muting his scent. Small tools. Small mercy.
A simian shadow moved on a high tendon bridge. An ape runner, lean and fast, tracked him. On the hold it threw a bone shard. Li Tian didn't break cadence. He leaned—let the shard whistle past—feet already setting for the next beat.
Mistiming a landing, his hand brushed a railing of condensed light. It flared. From a glyph-rimmed valve, a Starlight Warden reconstituted, its form humming in perfect sync with the heart. Faster here, its strikes timed to systole, it drove him toward a precipice. On a kill-or-die beat it punched—a blow to shatter bone. He met it with a pinpoint devour.
Backlash: frozen fire in his knuckles. Pins-and-needles flared; a metallic cough stung his throat. But he had shaved a sliver of time. In the fleeting hold that followed he saw the opening. He didn't have the strength for a long fight.
Hollow Spiral Palm — First Form.
His palm struck the core not with noise but with quiet, drilling pressure—emptiness inside force. The air didn't roar; it hummed. A spiral frost-bloom unfurled across the Warden's chest; its center simply hollowed and fell in, the construct collapsing into inert, frozen motes. The cooldown hit hard: deep numbness through his palm, meridians shrieking in protest. He spiral-bled, but the hollow ledger remained. He would not loose it again within the next dozen breaths without paying in flesh.
As his hand fell, his palm brushed a heart-line glyph. The ring pulsed, and a whisper thin as a scalpel cut into his mind: marrow furnace… star-era suture… Not power. Permission. He found a protruding star-metal filament rib and, when a second backlash swelled, pressed his palm to it—the filament glowed dully, siphoning the worst of the shock at the cost of its own integrity. A one-time grounding rod.
His eyes found the exit: the Aorta Ramp, a sloped conduit that glowed faintly, opening only during the diastole—five breaths, no more. He mapped the route: tilting plates, a narrow tendon, one drifting hazard. He rehearsed Star Lung · Empty Cup—a brief still-point breath-hold between systole and diastole—to slip past it. Dizziness washed him; a sharp ache bloomed beneath his sternum. It worked. Twice at most.
He poised for the sprint, syncing breath to the heart's iron cadence. The next diastole was his window.
"Timing is everything."
The polite voice was a ghost in the cavern. From the shadows, a talisman-spear flickered—aimed not at Li Tian, but at the heart-glow.
It struck.
The heart shuddered. Rhythm shattered into a violent, arrhythmic double-beat.
The world inverted. The planned diastole became a brutal, sucking systole. Li Tian was already mid-leap for the ramp.
The pulse hammered him sideways—toward the grinding teeth of an opening valve maw.
The ring answered with a single, steady pulse—warning, not rescue.