Fan Yumei's sense felt the of aura cut the storm apart as she and Grimme descended over the jagged ruins of Egg Hatch City.
Maxius screeched, his spectral body dissolving and reforming in shards of phantom light, scanning with sharp precision.
Grimme's beast crouched low beside her, claws brushing cracked stone, eyes glowing as it extended its senses.
The ground still smoked where a building had collapsed inward. A black fissure yawned below, a hole ripped open into the depths, spilling dust and echoing with the last traces of falling stone.
Fan Yumei stilled mid-step. Her blindfold fluttered in the storm's updraft, and her breath caught.
There.
Two faint threads. Fragile. Flickering. Almost swallowed by the mass of qi distortion below, but unmistakable.
Jin Minhe. Min Zhao.
Alive. Barely.
She exhaled, trembling. For a second, her hand hovered at her chest, pressing against the ache in her heart. Then her voice broke out, low and urgent:
"…I found you."
Maxius lowered his wings, pressing closer, sharing her tension. Grimme laid her palm against the ground, her beast growling softly as its aura reached downward like roots into the cracks. Together, they probed the depth, confirming what Yumei already knew.
The auras were real. Min Zhao's was faint, like the last embers of a flame fighting the wind. Jin's was ragged, torn with pain, but still burning, still protecting.
Yumei clenched her fist. The threads trembled, but they were unbroken.
"We're going down," she said firmly, already drawing storm qi into her palm.
Lightning shivered through the rubble at her command, illuminating the jagged hole like daylight. Dust scattered, revealing the fractured edges of an old underground structure beneath the city, humming faintly with dead sigils.
But just as she prepared to leap, Mystic's distorted resonance echoed again in the distance. The sound rolled across the storm like a false whale-song, heavy and dissonant. Lufei's qi pulsed alongside it, uncertain, tangled, like two presences caught in a half-finished weave.
Grimme shifted uneasily. Her beast snapped its jaws toward the echo. "That's not right. That's not a normal call."
"I know." Fan Yumei's voice was tight, her storm aura flaring harder. "But Jin and Zhao come first."
Her blindfold shimmered with golden threads, aura expanding deeper, piercing through the broken lab below. She felt it more clearly now: Jin's arms wrapped around Min Zhao even in collapse, his panda standing guard despite its wounds. They had fallen hard, bones broken, blood scattered, but the bond between them was alive, holding the both of them together.
Tears stung the corners of her eyes, unseen beneath the blindfold.
"Just a little longer," she whispered. "I'm here."
Maxius screeched, wings spread wide, and the storm answered, lightning cracking across the ruined skyline as Fan Yumei and Grimme prepared to descend into the abyss.