Zhenwu and Maro hit the stone floor with a thunderous crash. For a breathless second the cavern swallowed sound; then the room's scale returned to them. Monoliths rose in savage geometry all around, like a bone forest. At the far end, dwarfing everything, the gryphon statue crouched—fifteen meters tall, twenty-five long—lightning etched into its carapace as if the rock itself breathed current.
Zhenwu's grin was teeth and hunger. He dropped to his knees and pounded the ground with clenched fists until the echo answered him. "SHANDIAN! I HAVE COME TO DO MY PART OF THE DEAL PROMISED BY ME DECADES AGO. I HAVE BROUGHT WHAT COULD SET YOU FREE!" His voice cracked the air.
The stone mouth of the gryphon rearranged, as if the statue flexed after a long sleep. A hollow, many-toned voice answered from the granite itself, slow and ravenous: "FINALLY. YOU'VE KEPT YOUR SIDE OF THE DEAL, BOY. HURRY—FREE ME. MY WINGS WILL CREATE A HURRICANE THAT WILL RAVAGE THESE LANDS. MY SCREECH WILL SHATTER MOUNTAINS AND MY LIGHTNING WILL SCORCH THOSE WHO IMPRISONED ME AND DARED DEFY ME."
Maro's face shut into sudden suspicion. He had never bargained to awaken a guardian. He had bargained for access to treasure, not to hand the key to an Awakened beast. The thought hardened him. He lunged before Zhenwu could finish setting the ritual—dark spirals unfurled from his palms.
"Zhenwu," Maro barked as he attacked, "I will not allow you to reach him unless you promise you will not betray me and that you will not kill me afterwards. Do not take me for a fool."
Zhenwu only laughed, cold and quick. "YOU'RE DYING HERE, OLD MAN," he spat, and the ground answered as a coil of lightning shoved Maro back. Maro skidded, sprayed venom spirals, and cursed.
From the portal the other group spilled: Tianhun, Lu Chenhao, and Lian Yue. They saw Maro and Zhenwu locked in a deadly, furious ballet and understood instantly the stakes when Maro screamed, "HE'S TRYING TO FREE THAT AWAKENED BEAST—STOP HIM!"
No one wasted breath evem though they didn't trust they knew stopping Zhenwu was always for the better. Each moved with the speed of men who had already decided the price. Chenhao's voice cut the cavern like a steel string: "EMBERWAKE PATH SOURCE TECHNIQUE: SHOOTING STARS!" Arrows, each a bright falling comet, tore from his bow.
Lian Yue's reply was a blade of motion: "EMBERWAKE PATH SOURCE TECHNIQUE: ACCELERATING RUSH!" She blurred, closing space at impossible angles.
Tianhun's gauntleted fist gathered light and meaning: "EMBERWAKE PATH SOURCE TECHNIQUE: HAMMER OF JUSTICE." The air contracted around his strike.
They struck in synchrony. Light and motion braided into an assault aimed straight for Zhenwu.
Zhenwu ran with Han Lei cradled in one arm. He moved like a man with nothing left to lose. Lian Yue hooked and danced past him to close the gap; he sidestepped the kick just in time, feeling the breath of the technique across his ribs. A star-fall of arrows detonated across his path—each one meant to shred bone. One slammed into his shoulder; his defensive shell took most of it, but the blow burned and his arm went dead. He locked it to his chest and kept sprinting, pain birthing a new rhythm.
The closer he drew to the gryphon, the fiercer the barrage became. An arrow bit his leg; he staggered. For a heartbeat that felt like forever, Tianhun ghosted behind him, fist rising into a comet of lightning—the Hammer of Justice compressing into the afterimage of a hammer poised to strike.
Then the cavern itself answered. The gryphon let out a sound, low and bone-shiving. Lightning ripped outward from its carved eyes. The scream struck the room with the force of a struck bell; Tianhun's balance skewed, his gauntlet wobbling. The thunder lashed the air, but Zhenwu—close enough to the statue to be kissed by static—felt nothing; the gryphon's voice did not burn its chosen accomplice. Zhenwu limped the final meters.
"HURRY! I WILL NOT ALLOW THEM TO REACH—YOU MUST FREE ME NOW! THE OTHER GUARDIAN WILL ARRIVE SOON!" the statue shrieked.
Zhenwu's hands became a dozen tools at once. He drew from his spatial ring with practiced hunger: beast cores the size of fists, acid vials, preserved formation ink, brittle runes, and finally—a core wrapped in scavenged bindings so massive it made his shoulders bow. The beast's "core" shimmered like coals with trapped storms; it was practically life.
"YES—ANOTHER AWAKENED BEAST'S CORE!" the statue urged. "THE HEART OF THIS OPERATION—HANDLE IT CAREFULLY OR IT WILL UNSTABLE YOU. THAT ALONE WILL KILL YOU IF MISUSED!"
Zhenwu didn't slow. He set formation seals, poured aether and blood into grooves he had carved, fed the shrine the bitter pills and elixirs that would prime transfer conduits. Tianhun slammed a black gauntlet into the floor to strike from a distance; the gryphon lashed lightning to block, ripping a gust through the elder's balance. Lian Yue's blades tried to slice the bindings, Chenhao's Shooting Stars hammered the air. Each attack hammered the circle Zhenwu was drawing, and each time Zhenwu's hands moved faster.
When the last knot of ritual was tied, Zhenwu handed the core into the receptacle with hands that were steady despite the burn. He wedged wards; he chanted in a low, broken voice. The beast's stone flanks vibrated like a caged thing breathing hard.
"NOW—START IT!" the statue bellowed.
Zhenwu cracked the core.
For a single insane second the world collapsed into light. The core ruptured with a sound like the sea boiling; a storm of raw, unfiltered energy blasted upward. It struck Zhenwu first. He dropped to his knees as the current slammed into him, a thousand knives of heat and static. He curled his body like a shield around Han Lei, taking the worst of it himself.
Around them the monoliths screamed: wards overloaded, runes burning white. The core's carcass shattered into a billion glittering pieces that danced outward—and the formation devoured them. Light unmade itself into nothing, a vacuum of hungry aether that drank everything the core had bled. The energy that had burst out was peeled away, plucked by the gryphon's lattice and poured into the sleeping stone like oil into a thirsty engine.
Tianhun and the others were thrown back in a tornado of forced wind and aether backlash. Snow from the cavern ceiling shredded like confetti. Maro's venom spirals dissolved in the surge. Lian Yue tasted the edge of collapse but found footing. Chenhao's bow sang a last note of defiance before the storm stripped arrows to raw shafts.
When the surge died, when the last of the core's shimmer was slurped into the gryphon's throat, silence hit like a closing lid. Zhenwu lay on his knees, body trembling, singed to the bone. Han Lei whimpered in the crook of his arm, alive, saved by a shield of broken, costly strength.
The gryphon's carved beak closed slowly. Its stone eyes lit with a ferocious new blue, veins of lightning knitting through the statue like healed scars. The monoliths hummed in answer.
Zhenwu—blood on his lips, a madness thinned to a dangerous focus—looked up at the statue that now thrummed as if waking. Around the chamber the other cultivators crawled to their feet, breaths ragged with exertion and the aftertaste of a power none of them fully understood.
For a second, every face in that room was a question mark of fear and greed. Then, beneath the grinding of the stones and the distant rumble of the mountain, the gryphon's voice returned—no longer hollow, but a roaring promise of release.
"MY SLUMBER HAS COME TO AN END," it said, and the air itself took a step to the edge of a hurricane.
The stone fissures spiderwebbed outward. With a dry, grinding sound the gryphon's carved hide split, plates peeling back like old bark. Lightning writhed beneath exposed seams; the statue flexed, wings unfolding after a sleep that had etched dust into every joint. Rocks tumbled away and the cavern filled with a cry that was half thunder, half animal. The gryphon's beak opened wide in something like laughter.
"HAHAHAHAHA—FINALLY. FINALLY!" the beast crowed, each word shaking the monoliths.
Zhenwu rose slowly, dirt and blood on his face, and met the awakened stone's stare without flinching. The gryphon regarded him with a ravenous, grateful light. "I KNEW YOU WERE THE PERFECT CHOICE. BUT I MUST ADMIT—it TOOK YOU LONGER THAN I EXPECTED TO COME HERE."
Zhenwu's mouth curled. "Well. I had to take it slow. Otherwise I would've been found out long before I finished the preparations."
The gryphon's eyes sharpened. Lightning braided through its wings like living script. It cocked its head, listening—then brightened as if hearing a name it had longed for. "SHE'S HERE."
Everything shifted as if the world had been a stage and the curtain had been yanked aside. The cavern, the monoliths, even the light, dissolved into an empty white void—a perfect, unmarked nothing. Zhenwu, Maro, Lian Yue, Chenhao, Tianhun, and the still-unconscious Zhennan were hauled into that void as if dragged on strings. The sky itself seemed to reconverge into a single, burning point above them; the point grew and the point became a sphere of flame. From that sphere a great pair of wings unfurled, feathered in solar fire, and the imperial Phoenix bled down into being—wings folding, eyes like molten bronze.
As the Phoenix settled above them it fixed on Zhenwu and its voice rolled out, a furnace in human speech. "YOU—YOU'RE THE DEMONIC CULTIVATOR I KICKED OFF THE TRIALS DECADES AGO. I SEE YOU DID CHANGE YOUR WAYS. IN FACT YOU HAVE EVEN GONE HIGHER AND BETRAYED YOUR ANCESTOR AND FREED THAT CRIMINAL."
Zhenwu said nothing. He let the gryphon—Shandian—fill the space between them with its carved joy. He let the Phoenix speak.
"LIEYAN," the Phoenix continued, its tone folding into contempt, "THE ONLY TRAITOR IN THIS PLACE IS NONE OTHER THAN YOU AND THAT WHITE-FURRED MONKEY. YOU'RE BOTH TRAITORS THAT WILL DIE TODAY, AND YOU'LL FOLLOW THAT WEAK MASTER OF YOURS AND WILL DIE LIKE HIM—LIKE A PATHETIC DOG."
The arc of the accusation hung in the blank air. Whatever history had been between these guardians and the old line of heirs spat itself into the void: names, verdicts, ancient resentments flared loud and bright.
The Phoenix did not wait for Zhenwu's reply. With a battering caw it unfurled its wings and poured downward like a sunlet in motion. Flame feathers beat the emptiness; the wind itself thickened into heat. It dove at Shandian—at the newly awakened gryphon—and struck.
Shandian reared—lightning answering the Phoenix's flame. The two guardians collided in a blast of elemental fury that cleaved the white void into sparkling dust. Shandian's tail lashed outward with the force of a thunder-rod. The great, feathered limb smashed into Zhenwu's chest with an impact that threw him headlong across the nothing, sent him tumbling and spinning like a thrown log away from the battle.
He sailed away from the clash, body struck and winded, and the void rang with the sound of two ancient powers greeting each other in violence.