The door swung open, revealing a kitchen filled with gleaming surfaces and strange implements.
A single disciple stood at a preparation table.
She was older than the one who had wielded the guitar—or perhaps just further along her path, her features carrying the particular refinement that came with decades of cultivation. Her robes were simpler than the others Xīng Hé had seen, practical rather than decorative, marked with stains that spoke of long hours working with ingredients.
She held a kitchen knife.
A common kitchen knife, the kind used for chopping vegetables and preparing meat. The blade was perhaps eight inches long, slightly curved, honed to an edge that caught the light and held it.
She turned.
Her eyes met theirs.
And her face began to change.
---
The transformation was faster this time.
Or perhaps Xīng Hé was simply more attuned to the horror, more aware of the precise moment when humanity gave way to something else. The disciple's features warped. Her body twisted. The kitchen knife in her hand seemed to grow, to lengthen, to become something that was no longer a tool but an instrument of precision death.
She moved.
---
**The boy who had opened the door died first.**
The contaminated crossed the distance between them in a single step—movement that defied physics, that suggested she had somehow folded the space itself to bring her closer to her target.
Her knife flashed.
Not a wild swing. Not a desperate strike. A precise cut, executed with the same care she might have used when preparing choice ingredients.
The blade touched the boy's neck.
There was no resistance. The knife passed through flesh and bone and cartilage as if they were air, separating his head from his shoulders with a single perfect motion. The cut was so clean that for a moment, nothing happened—his head remained in place, his body still standing, the disconnect between parts not yet registered.
Then gravity remembered it existed.
His head toppled backward, hitting the kitchen floor with a wet sound that Xīng Hé would never be able to unhear. His body followed a moment later, golden blood fountaining from the stump of his neck in rhythmic pulses that matched the final beats of his dying heart.
The contaminated was already moving to her next target.
---
**The second death was a girl named Yun.**
She tried to activate her concept—Ice, her element, the power to freeze and slow and create barriers of crystallized water. Her hands came up, frost already forming on her fingertips, a defensive wall beginning to materialize between her and the contaminated.
The knife cut through the forming ice as if it wasn't there.
But the contaminated wasn't aiming for Yun's torso. Wasn't going for a killing blow to the chest or heart. This was the Dao of Cooking—the art of butchery, of breaking down living things into their component parts, of separating what was useful from what wasn't.
The knife found Yun's right shoulder.
The cut was surgical. Precise. The blade sliced through the joint with perfect knowledge of anatomy, severing tendons and ligaments and the ball-and-socket connection that held the arm to the body. Yun's entire right arm fell away, still trailing wisps of frost, still trying to manifest a barrier that would never form.
She screamed.
The contaminated's second cut removed the left arm.
Same precision. Same anatomical knowledge. The knife found the exact point where separation would be cleanest, and divided living flesh with the efficiency of a master butcher processing a carcass.
Yun collapsed, armless, her stumps pumping golden blood across the kitchen floor. She was still alive—still conscious, still aware, still screaming—when the third cut took her head.
That one was mercy.
The contaminated moved on.
---
**The third victim tried to run.**
Chen Yu had always been the fastest among them. Had survived four months in this nightmare place through speed and reflexes that bordered on supernatural. He turned and bolted for the storage room door, his feet already moving, his body low and streamlined for maximum velocity.
The contaminated's knife cut his legs out from under him.
Not a slash. A series of cuts, executed in rapid succession, each one targeting a specific point. The blade found the backs of his knees—both of them, in the space of a single heartbeat—and severed the tendons that allowed legs to bend and flex and carry weight.
Chen Yu went down hard, his momentum carrying him into a tumbling roll that ended with him sprawled face-first on the kitchen floor. His legs were still attached, still technically part of his body. But they would never carry him again.
He tried to crawl.
The contaminated knelt beside him with the practiced ease of someone who had done this ten thousand times before. Her knife found the base of his skull, slipped between vertebrae with perfect precision, and severed his spinal cord.
Chen Yu stopped moving.
The contaminated stood, her knife already seeking the next target.
---
**The fourth death was a boy who had frozen in terror.**
He stood against the wall, his back pressed to the gleaming surface, his eyes locked on the carnage unfolding before him. He wasn't even trying to run anymore. Wasn't trying to fight. Just standing there, paralyzed, waiting for death to claim him.
The contaminated obliged.
Her knife found his chest—not the heart, not the lungs, but the space between his ribs where the diaphragm connected to the thoracic cavity. The blade slipped through with the ease of someone who knew exactly where to cut, and with a twist of her wrist, the contaminated severed the muscle that allowed his lungs to expand.
He suffocated while his heart still beat.
Drowning in air he couldn't breathe, his body trying desperately to pull oxygen into lungs that could no longer function. It took almost thirty seconds for him to die—thirty seconds of thrashing and gasping and silent screaming while the contaminated simply stood and watched with empty eyes.
---
**The fifth death was a girl who fought back.**
Li Na had Strength as her concept—enhanced physical power, the ability to hit harder and move faster and endure more than her frame suggested she should. She launched herself at the contaminated with a roar, her fist pulled back for a punch that could shatter stone.
The contaminated's knife met her extended arm.
The blade didn't cut through the arm. It disassembled it.
Three cuts in rapid succession. The first separated her hand at the wrist. The second took her forearm at the elbow. The third removed her upper arm at the shoulder. Each cut was placed with perfect anatomical knowledge, each one finding the exact point where joints connected, where separation would be cleanest.
Li Na's arm came apart in segments, the pieces tumbling to the floor in a sequence that looked almost choreographed.
She stumbled, her balance disrupted, her momentum carrying her forward into the contaminated's waiting blade.
The knife entered her chest cavity from below.
Not stabbing upward into the heart. That would have been too quick. Instead, the blade found the soft tissue of her abdomen and sliced upward, opening her torso with the same precision that had opened Yun's, exposing organs that glistened gold in the kitchen's light.
Li Na looked down at her own intestines spilling out and had just enough time to register what she was seeing before shock claimed her.
---
**The sixth death was the boy who had been standing beside Xīng Hé.**
Zhao Wei. She remembered his name now—remembered his laugh, his bad jokes, the way he'd tried to keep spirits up even as teammates died around them. He'd been her friend, or as close to a friend as anyone could be in this place.
He died protecting her.
The contaminated had turned toward Xīng Hé, had begun moving in her direction, knife raised for another precise cut. Zhao Wei stepped between them, his arms spread wide, his body positioned to block.
"Run!" he shouted. "Just—"
The knife found his heart.
Not from the front. The contaminated had moved around him in a blur of motion, had positioned herself behind him, had slipped the blade between his ribs from the back with perfect knowledge of where his heart would be.
The steel entered his chest cavity and punctured his right ventricle.
Zhao Wei's body went rigid. Golden blood erupted from his mouth, from his nose, from the corners of his eyes. He tried to turn, tried to look at Xīng Hé one last time, tried to say something.
The contaminated withdrew the knife.
Zhao Wei collapsed without another word.
---
Six teammates.
Dead in less than a minute.
Xīng Hé's concept activated—or tried to. Restoration reached toward the nearest body, toward Zhao Wei's still-warm corpse, trying desperately to undo the damage, to restore the heart, to preserve the life that was draining away.
It was useless.
The cuts were too precise, too perfectly executed. The contaminated's Dao of Cooking had taken these bodies apart with the same care a master butcher might use when processing premium livestock. Every cut had been placed to maximize efficiency, to separate parts cleanly, to preserve what had value while destroying what didn't.
Restoration couldn't reassemble what had been so carefully disassembled.
The damage wasn't random. It was systematic. Scheduled. A series of precise actions executed in perfect order, each one building on the last, each one designed to reduce a living being to component parts.
Xīng Hé's concept touched the terrible precision of those cuts and recoiled, unable to find purchase, unable to restore what had been so deliberately unmade.
---
The contaminated turned toward her.
The kitchen knife in her hand was spotless. Not a drop of blood on the blade, despite the fact that it had just murdered six children. The Dao of Cooking kept the tool clean—maintained it, preserved it, honored it as the sacred implement it was.
The contaminated raised the knife.
Took a step toward Xīng Hé.
---
And then the kitchen erupted with motion.
The other disciples had heard the commotion—the screams, the sounds of bodies hitting the floor, the wet noises that accompanied violent death. They poured into the cooking pavilion, their weapons drawn, their faces twisted with the same righteous fury Xīng Hé had seen before.
"Another spy!"
"Two in two days!"
"The Devil Sect's infiltration is worse than we thought!"
They attacked.
The contaminated turned to face them, her kitchen knife rising to defend against a dozen practitioners whose Daos ranged from weapons to elements to esoteric paths Xīng Hé couldn't identify. She fought well—her precision serving her even in death, her cuts finding gaps in armor and weak points in defense.
But there were too many.
The contaminated fell under the combined assault, her body dissolving the moment it hit the ground, leaving behind only the kitchen knife that had killed so many.
The disciples didn't look at the corpses.
Didn't acknowledge the six children bleeding golden across their kitchen floor.
Just gathered around the knife, discussing security measures and increased patrols and the threat of infiltrators they couldn't see.
---
Xīng Hé ran.
The seven remaining survivors ran with her—fleeing through passages and corridors, their arms full of whatever food they'd managed to grab before everything went wrong. They didn't stop until they'd crossed back into the Core Sect district, back to the Main Hall, back to the only place that still felt even remotely safe.
They collapsed just inside the entrance.
The food they'd retrieved was scattered around them. Containers of preserved goods, packages of dried ingredients, enough to keep them alive for... she didn't know. Days, maybe. Weeks if they rationed carefully.
Six people had died for this food.
Six more rings to add to the pocket watch at her waist.
Xīng Hé sat against the wall, trembling, staring at nothing.
Thirteen had gone.
Seven had returned.
---
"We can't go back out there."
The words came from one of the survivors—one of the six who had returned with her from the cooking pavilion. His voice was hollow, his eyes fixed on nothing.
"We have to," someone else said. "The mission—"
"Fuck the mission."
Silence.
No one disagreed.
Xīng Hé closed her eyes, feeling the weight of everything pressing down on her. Twenty-seven dead now. Nine survivors including herself. Four months in this nightmare place, and they were no closer to completing their objective than they had been on day one.
*We need to escape. We need to—*
She felt it before she saw it.
A shift in the air. A pressure that hadn't been there before. Something settling into place around the Main Hall like a net drawing tight.
Her eyes snapped open.
The others were looking around, confusion replacing despair. They felt it too—the change in their environment, the subtle but unmistakable sense that something had altered.
One of them walked toward the door.
He made it three steps before stopping. His body went rigid, frozen in place, unable to advance further.
"I can't move," he said, his voice tight with fear. "Something's holding me. I can't—"
He strained against the invisible force, muscles trembling with effort, but it was useless. The barrier—because that's what it was, Xīng Hé realized, a barrier—held him as firmly as if he'd been encased in stone.
Others tried. Same result. They could move freely within the hall, but any attempt to approach the exits resulted in immediate paralysis.
They were trapped.
---
Preservation.
Xīng Hé's concept had activated without her conscious direction. Had sensed the danger that waited outside—the contaminated disciples who were now on high alert, who would transform the moment they saw intruders, who would kill anyone foolish enough to leave this hall.
And it had decided to keep them safe.
By keeping them imprisoned.
"The Sect's defenses," someone whispered. "They must have activated after the second attack. They're locking down—"
"No."
The word escaped before Xīng Hé could stop it.
Everyone looked at her.
She should explain. Should tell them the truth—that this barrier wasn't the Sect's doing, that it was her own concept acting without conscious direction. Preservation, recognizing the danger that waited outside, refusing to let her walk toward certain death.
But she couldn't.
If they knew her concept was doing this, they would demand she stop. Would insist she let them leave, let them try to complete the mission, let them walk back into a district that had killed eighteen of them in the space of days.
They would demand she let them die.
"It's probably temporary," she said instead. "A response to the disturbances. It'll fade."
Lies. All of it lies.
But the others accepted it. Wanted to believe it. Needed to believe that their imprisonment was external, circumstantial, something that would resolve itself without requiring them to take action.
Xīng Hé sat down against the wall, her hands trembling.
*The disciples are on alert now. Two "Devil Sect spies" in two days. They'll be watching. Waiting. Ready to transform the moment they see us.*
*If we go out there, we die.*
*But if we stay here...*
She looked at the food piled in the center of the hall. At the eight survivors—eight, not counting herself—who sat in varying states of shock and exhaustion.
*How long until it runs out?*
*How long until my concept can't hold anymore?*
*How long until the barrier falls and we have to face what's waiting for us?*
She had no answers.
Only the quiet certainty that the past four months had been leading to this—to a hall that was also a prison, to supplies that would eventually run dry, to a mission that had been designed to kill them from the start.
Xīng Hé pressed her hand against the pocket watch at her waist.
Twenty-seven rings.
Twenty-seven names she would carry with her, however this ended.
*I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.*
The barrier held.
The hall remained silent.
And outside, in the inner disciple residence, the contaminated went about their daily lives—unaware of the children trapped in their midst, unaware of their own corruption, unaware that they were all already dead.
Waiting for the moment when the monsters inside them would finally wake.
---
**End of Chapter 53**
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