The spiral stairs wound upward, a stone corkscrew drilled into the mountain's spine. The air grew dry. The humidity of the sewer vanished, replaced by the scent of cured leather and ancient dust.
Yang Yi pushed the wooden panel above his head. It shifted with the groan of dry timber.
He climbed out.
Lin followed, shivering. The temperature here was controlled, cool and crisp, sucking the moisture from their damp clothes.
They stood in a canyon of paper. Rows of towering shelves stretched into the darkness, packed with rotting scrolls and cracked jade slips. Dust motes danced in the shafts of moonlight filtering through high, barred windows.
"The Scripture Pavilion." Lin brushed a cobweb from her face. Her voice dropped to a hush. "But this isn't the public section. The layout is wrong."
"It's the graveyard." Yang Yi picked up a scroll from a nearby table. The bamboo slats crumbled in his hand. "Where they put the techniques that kill the student."
He dropped the debris. He walked down the aisle, his boots leaving muddy prints on the pristine floor.
The Dragon Transformation Token at his hip pulsed. It wasn't the frantic heat of the combat trials; it was a steady, rhythmic thrum. A compass needle seeking North.
It pulled him deeper into the stacks.
"We shouldn't be here, Yang. The penalty for stealing scriptures is the flaying of the soul."
"We're already dead if we go back down. Might as well die rich."
Yang Yi stopped in front of a shelf made of black ironwood. It was empty save for a single, thin book bound in gray skin. No title. No author.
The token burned.
Yang Yi reached out.
"Don't touches it."
Lin grabbed his wrist. Her fingers were cold. "Look at the binding. That's human skin. A Skinner's manual. Forbidden arts."
Yang Yi shook her off. "Power has no morality. Only weight."
He grabbed the book.
It was warm. The skin felt like it was still alive. He flipped it open. The pages weren't paper; they were pressed gold leaf, etched with microscopic characters that seemed to writhe under his gaze.
The Myriad Beast Assimilation Record.
He scanned the first page. It wasn't a cultivation technique for gathering qi. It was a surgical manual. How to graft beast meridians into a human body. How to consume cores without exploding. How to become a monster to kill monsters.
It was exactly what he needed to stabilize the Refined Wolf Blood and whatever else he shoved down his throat.
He shoved the book into his tunic.
"We have what we came for."
A heavy thud echoed from the other side of the library. The main doors unbarred.
Lin froze. She extinguished the faint light of her aura instantly.
"Patrol."
"Hide."
Yang Yi didn't run. Running made noise. He pulled Lin into the narrow gap between two bookshelves. They pressed their backs against the dusty spines of rejected histories.
Footsteps approached. Soft. Deliberate. Silk brushing against the floor.
A lantern floated around the corner, suspended by invisible qi threads. Its pale light washed over the aisle where they had just stood.
A figure followed the light.
He was old, hunched over, wearing the purple robes of an Inner Sect Elder. He didn't look like a warrior. He looked like a corpse that had forgotten to lie down. His skin was parchment-thin, stretched over a skull that seemed too large for his face.
He stopped at the ironwood shelf.
The Elder stared at the empty space where the gray book had been.
He inhaled deeply. A rattling, wet sound.
"Rats in the grain silo."
The Elder didn't shout. He turned his head slowly, scanning the shadows. His eyes were milky white, blind, but he wasn't looking with eyes.
"I smell sewer muck. And fear."
Lin trembled. Her heartbeat spiked.
Yang Yi pressed a hand over her mouth. He flared his killing intent—not outward, but inward. He used the mental pressure to suppress his own heartbeat, forcing his body into a state of near-hibernation. The Tortoise Breath. A hunter's trick.
The Elder raised a withered hand. The shadows in the room elongated. They detached from the shelves, forming jagged, two-dimensional spikes.
"Come out. I might leave enough of you to identify."
The shadow spikes shot forward.
They didn't aim for the hiding spot. They struck the muddy boot prints Yang Yi had left in the aisle.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
The floorboards splintered.
"Mud," the Elder mused. "Fresh."
He turned toward their row.
Yang Yi looked at the window high above the shelves. Thirty feet up. Barred with star-steel.
He looked at Lin. She was paralyzed.
He looked at the shelf next to them. It was heavy, laden with thousands of scrolls.
Yang Yi braced his back against the wall and his feet against the shelf.
He pushed.
The shelf groaned. It tipped.
"Gravity," Yang Yi whispered.
The massive shelf crashed into the next one. Dominoes.
The library erupted in thunder. Shelves collapsed in a cascading wave of wood and paper, burying the aisle in a chaotic avalanche of knowledge.
The Elder roared, a blast of qi knocking the falling debris aside, but the dust cloud was instant and blinding.
"Move!"
Yang Yi didn't go for the window. He went for the ventilation grate near the floor.
He kicked the grate. It flew inward.
He shoved Lin into the duct. He squeezed in after her, the gray book pressing against his ribs.
Behind them, the library tore itself apart as the Elder unleashed a storm of wind blades, shredding the shelves to splinters in a blind rage.
"Find them!" the old man shrieked. " seal the mountain!"
They scrambled through the tight metal tunnel. The air rushed past them, carrying the screams of the Elder.
"Where does this go?" Lin gasped, crawling on her elbows.
"Down," Yang Yi said. "It's an air intake. It leads back to the furnaces."
"We just escaped the heat!"
"The fire is better than the Skinner."
The tunnel angled sharply. They slid, tumbling into darkness, picking up speed until the metal vanished beneath them.
They fell.
They landed on a pile of coal. Black dust exploded around them.
The heat was instantaneous. Intense. They were in the fuel hopper of the main boiler room.
Yang Yi rolled off the coal pile. He slapped the dust from his chest. He felt the book. Still there.
"We need to blend in."
He grabbed a handful of coal dust and smeared it over his face, masking his features. He did the same to Lin.
"You look like a miner."
Lin wiped her eyes. "I hate this sect."
The heavy iron doors of the boiler room opened. A massive overseer with a whip walked in, scanning the room.
"Shift change! Get the coal moving, you lazy dogs!"
He cracked the whip.
Yang Yi grabbed a shovel from the rack. He tossed one to Lin.
"Start digging."
He shoveled coal into the furnace, his head down, blending perfectly with the soot-stained slaves fueling the Dragon Transformation Palace.
He was in the belly of the beast. And now, he had the manual on how to eat it.