The truth was a weight. The heartbeat behind the door was a clock, counting down. Lin Feng could not afford ignorance. While his body cultivated passively with the Grave Cycling Art, his mind worked.
He sent his skeletons back into the clan, not to the library, but to the dusty, lower archives where records too old to be useful but too historic to discard were kept. They were his silent scholars, unrolling scrolls with bony fingers, their sightless eyes scanning pages by the light of his cold palm-glow.
The information came in fragments, pieced together by the System.
Silver-Iron. A sacred alloy smelted with purified moonlight and refined earth-core metals. Resistant to all known spiritual corrosion. Primary historical use: Containment.
The next scroll was older, its language more archaic.
During the War of Heavenly Falling, the Verdant Dragon Ancestors fought not just rival clans, but the Corruption-Tainted—beings whose souls fused with aberrant energies from beyond the heavens. To slay them was to risk contagion. To imprison them was the only peace.
Silver-Iron chains bind soul and flesh. They suppress unnatural energy. They grant eternal sleep, not death.
The final fragment was a schematic, a diagram of a circular prison with twelve chambers. A label, faded almost to nothing: Tomb of the Twelve Guardians. Keepers of the Seal. May they never wake.
Lin Feng stood before the sealed door, the ancient parchment copied crudely onto a stone slab. Twelve coffins. One heartbeat. One set of broken chains.
The System calculated, its prompts colder than usual.
[Analysis: Silver-Iron is anti-death, anti-corruption. It is a polarity. To dissolve it requires its opposite: Concentrated Death Essence, combined with a Blood Sacrifice to bridge the spiritual and physical planes.]
[Proposed Ritual Components:]
1. Ghost Moss (catalyst for soul-energy transfer)
2. Blood of a Shadow-Touched Beast (carrier of aligned darkness)
3. Blood of the Summoner (binding agent and focus of will)
He had the shadow-panther. He had himself. The ghost moss grew in the darkest corners of the dishonored cemetery.
The choice was no choice at all. Letting Lin Tao and Elder Hong open this door was unthinkable. They would use whatever was inside as a weapon. He had to get there first. He had to… negotiate.
I am already a demon in their eyes, he thought, looking at his skeletal retinue. What is one more pact with the dark?
He gathered the components with a grim focus. The ghost moss was a slimy, phosphorescent lichen that wept a cold liquid when plucked. The blood was more direct. He commanded the shadow-panther to extend a forelimb. With a careful slice from a sharp stone, he drew a line of thick, black, tar-like blood into a clay bowl. The panther did not flinch. Then, he cut his own palm. His blood, still red, still human, dripped in, mixing into a swirling, ink-like substance that seemed to swallow the light.
The message from Han Wei, delivered in a rushed whisper by the stream, sealed his resolve.
"Lin Tao went to your father," Han Wei breathed, his eyes darting. "Formal request. Cited 'disturbances,' 'restless spirits' in the old catacombs. Asked for permission to lead a purification rite, to cleanse the 'dishonored energy' for the clan's safety."
"My father's answer?"
"He refused. Said the dishonored were still clan. Their rest was not to be disturbed by ambition." Han Wei's voice held a note of respect for the Clan Head. "But Lin Tao was furious. He said… he said, 'Tradition will be the death of us.' He and Elder Hong are making other plans. They are impatient."
Time had run out.
At the deepest hour of midnight, when even the spirits were said to sleep, Lin Feng stood before the silver-iron chains. The mixture in the bowl pulsed with a slow, malevolent rhythm of its own.
He dipped his fingers into the cold, viscous fluid. It stung his cut palm, a sharp, soul-deep bite.
He began to paint it onto the chains.
Where the black mixture touched the holy metal, it did not drip. It clung and burned. A sound like a thousand dying whispers filled the chamber. Thin plumes of acrid, silver smoke rose. The chains began to dissolve, not melting like metal in heat, but unraveling like threads of light being eaten by shadow. It was agonizingly slow. Hour after hour, link by link, the glow faded, the metal thinned, and turned to dust.
His skeletons stood guard, weapons ready. The shadow-panther paced, a low growl vibrating in its bony chest.
Finally, with a sound like a sigh held for centuries, the last chain fell away. The massive padlock cracked in two and hit the stone floor with a dull clang.
The door was no longer sealed. Only closed.
Lin Feng pushed.
Stone grated on stone, a deep, protesting groan that shook dust from the ceiling. The door swung inward on unseen hinges, revealing impenetrable darkness that even his Death Sense struggled to penetrate. A wave of air, stale beyond imagining, yet charged with a potent, slumbering power, washed over him.
He stepped inside, his pale light revealing a circular chamber. And there they were. Twelve massive stone coffins, arranged in a circle like the teeth of a giant. Each was bound in heavy, normal iron chains, crusted with age.
Eleven were sealed shut.
The twelfth, directly across from the entrance, had its chains snapped. The heavy stone lid was shifted, opened by a hand's breadth.
From that dark slit, a faint, sickly green light emanated.
A figure sat up.
It unfolded itself from the coffin with the creaking sound of stone on stone, but it was not stone. It was bone, clad in armor of a design lost to time—overlapping plates of tarnished bronze and dull iron. It was taller than any man, its skeleton robust, its skull elongated. In its eye sockets, two pinpricks of virulent green fire blazed to life.
It stepped out of its coffin, moving with a stately, deliberate grace that spoke of immense age and power. It turned its head, those green fires fixing on Lin Feng.
The voice that spoke was not a sound carried by air. It was etched directly into Lin Feng's mind, the words archaic, the tone like grinding continental plates.
WHO DISTURBS THE SLUMBER OF THE TOMB GUARDIANS? WHO BREAKS THE SILVER SEAL?
The pressure in the chamber spiked. Lin Feng's skeletons clattered, their bones vibrating. The shadow-panther crouched, whining silently. This was not a mere skeleton soldier. This was a relic. A sentinel from an age of wars against heaven.
Lin Feng stood his ground, the cold of the catacomb in his veins meeting the ancient, green-tinged death before him. He had opened the door. He had woken the guardian.
Now, he had to speak. And he had to convince it he was not the enemy.
He met its gaze, the green fires reflecting in his own dark eyes.
"One who was sealed away himself," Lin Feng said, his voice steady, echoing in the silent chamber. "And one who seeks to prevent the true enemy from claiming what you guard."