They had waited for hours.
Xīng Hé sat near the entrance of the Main Hall, her eyes fixed on the space where the barrier had been. It hadn't returned. Her concept remained dormant, silent, offering no protection against whatever might come through that opening.
She wouldn't let anyone else leave.
The two who had gone to the outer area—they were either coming back or they weren't. Sending more people after them would only risk more lives. If they were trapped, the others couldn't help them. If they were dead, the others would join them.
So they waited.
And waited.
And then, finally, movement.
Two figures appeared in the entrance—the teammates who had left while she slept. They looked exhausted, their robes torn, their faces carrying the particular pallor of people who had pushed themselves past every reasonable limit.
But they weren't alone.
A third figure walked beside them.
Xīng Hé's breath caught in her throat.
"Yao," she muttered.
The woman looked exactly as she remembered—that profound disinterest radiating from every line of her posture, that beauty that seemed almost accidental, those eyes that saw everything and cared about nothing. She walked into the Main Hall as if she owned it, as if the months of terror and death that had occurred here were merely inconveniences she had deigned to notice.
"Hey," Yao said, her voice carrying that familiar edge of lazy amusement. "It's *mentor* to you."
Even in this moment—surrounded by the remnants of a massacre, standing in a place that had killed twenty-seven of her teammates—Xīng Hé recognized the danger in that casual tone. Yao was most dangerous when she seemed most relaxed. Most unpredictable when she appeared most bored.
"Thank you for saving us," Xīng Hé said, adjusting her response accordingly.
"Save you?" Yao's eyebrow arched slightly.
She looked around the hall, taking in the scattered survivors, the meager supplies, the hollow eyes and trembling hands. Her gaze moved across the grim tableau with clinical detachment—counting, assessing, cataloguing the damage without visible emotion.
Then something in her expression shifted.
Not softened, exactly. Just... acknowledged.
"Well," she said, her voice losing some of its edge. "How could I not. It's almost five months and my Xīng isn't back."
She coughed slightly, as if the words had escaped without permission.
"I'm guessing it was quite an adventure," Yao continued quickly, gesturing toward the two teammates who had found her. "From what these guys told me."
Xīng Hé nodded slowly. "Adventure" was one word for it. Nightmare was more accurate. But she didn't have the energy to argue semantics.
"How many have you retrieved so far?"
The question was matter-of-fact. Businesslike. As if they were discussing inventory rather than the spoils of a mission that had cost twenty-seven lives.
Xīng Hé reached into her robes and produced two objects.
The guitar came first—the weapon of the Dao of Music practitioner who had killed twelve of her teammates in seconds. It looked almost ordinary in the dim light of the Main Hall. Just an instrument. Just wood and strings and the residue of a lifetime's devotion.
Then the kitchen knife.
Smaller. Simpler. The tool of a practitioner who had mastered the Dao of Cooking, who had cut down six more of her people before the other disciples had ended her.
Two weapons.
Twenty-one dead.
Yao looked at them.
"You took down two?"
"No." Xīng Hé's voice was flat. "It was a misunderstanding on their own part."
"Meaning?"
"The other disciples killed them. They thought the contaminated were spies from something called the Devil Sect. They don't know they're all infected." She paused. "They killed our attackers thinking they were protecting themselves from traitors."
Yao was silent for a moment.
"Two," she said finally. "Well. That wasn't a mistake—that was luck. I should be impressed."
Her eyes swept across the survivors again. Counting. Nine faces, including Xīng Hé. Nine out of thirty.
"But I am not." Her voice carried no particular cruelty. Just observation. "You lost everyone and only got two so far."
The words landed without impact. Xīng Hé was too exhausted to feel their weight. Too worn down by months of failure and death to muster outrage at Yao's callousness.
It was simply true.
They had lost almost everyone.
And they had almost nothing to show for it.
"Well." Yao straightened, her posture shifting from observer to commander. "Let's get you out of here. I want to go back home."
Something sparked in Xīng Hé's chest. Hope, maybe. Or just the desperate relief of someone finally taking charge.
"Wait," she said. "I know the layout. There are different districts—the inner disciple residence, the elder quarters, possibly more. The contaminated get stronger the deeper you go. There's a hierarchy—"
"Hey."
Yao's voice cut through her explanation.
"I'm guessing you miss being in your home, correct?"
Xīng Hé fell silent.
The manor. Her room. The training mirror that had pushed her to exhaustion day after day. The crystalline walls and the servants and the particular loneliness of a cage that was also a sanctuary.
She missed it.
Despite everything—despite knowing it was still a prison, still part of the system that had drafted her, still controlled by beings who saw her as a resource rather than a person—she missed it.
"Then just do as I say," Yao finished.
"Which is?"
Yao smiled.
It was not a comforting expression.
"We charge in."
The surviving children stared at her.
Nine faces, all wearing variations of the same expression: disbelief. Horror. The particular look of people who had been pushed past their limits and were now being told to push further.
Yao glanced at them, noting their reactions with apparent indifference.
"Well," she murmured. "They're probably traumatized."
She turned and began walking toward the entrance of the Main Hall, toward the broken barrier that led to the inner disciple residence, toward the contaminated practitioners who had killed eighteen of their teammates without apparent effort.
"Follow me," she called over her shoulder. "Your jobs are to pick up their weapons."
She stepped through the entrance and disappeared from view.
The children looked at each other.
They looked at Xīng Hé.
She thought about the past four months. About the deaths. About the massacres. About the horror of watching teammates fall and knowing she couldn't stop it.
She thought about the woman walking ahead of them—the woman who had spent three years doing nothing in her manor, who had refused to train her, who had offered only cryptic warnings and veiled threats.
The others thought Yao was an elder. They had seen her relating to higher divine existences as equals, had witnessed her casual disregard for the hierarchies that governed their world. They assumed she held Domain stage power at minimum.
Xīng Hé knew something they didn't.
She didn't know Yao's true stage. Didn't know how powerful she really was, how high she had climbed, what capabilities she truly possessed. But she knew Yao's concept was related to pain—had known it since that first day, when Yao's touch had dulled the agony of her awakening, had pushed the hurt back without erasing it entirely.
A concept related to pain.
And Yao was walking into a building full of beings who could transform into monsters at the sight of intruders.
*Either she's confident she can handle them, or she doesn't care if she dies.*
Neither option was particularly comforting.
But they didn't have a choice.
Xīng Hé rose to her feet.
"Follow her," she said to the others. "Stay close. Pick up any weapons you see."
She walked toward the entrance.
Behind her, after a moment's hesitation, the others followed.
---
**End of Chapter 55**