The forward base was established in a defensible canyon a mile from the mine entrance, the air still thick with the psychic residue of the Void-Spawn's demise. The mood was somber. One disciple was dead, his body consumed by the corruption. The others were wounded, their spirits shaken. They had trained to fight beasts and rival cultivators, not phantoms that ignored the laws of reality.
Li Yao sat apart, cycling the [Breath of the Primordial Awakening] to stabilize his frayed core and repair the micro-fractures in his spatial arm. The feedback from nullifying the Void-Spawn had been profound. It was a type of damage his enhanced regeneration couldn't easily fix—a wound on his connection to the laws he was trying to manipulate.
"Spiritual Cohesion at 83%. [Law of Energetic Nullification] comprehension stabilized at 0.02%. Warning: Repeated use at current level will result in permanent spiritual degradation."
The cost of power was always steeper than it appeared.
Senior Brother Kang approached, his earlier camaraderie replaced by a businesslike intensity. "The mine entrance is sealed by a formation. Not a sect formation. Something older. Weaker, but… stranger." He tossed a recording jade to Li Yao. "You have a unique perspective. See what you make of it."
Li Yao caught the jade and pressed his spiritual sense into it. The recording showed the mine entrance: a gaping maw in the mountainside, blocked by a shimmering, iridescent barrier. It didn't radiate power like a sect's defensive array. Instead, it seemed to absorb energy, a subtle drain that made the very light around it dim. Symbols flickered across its surface—not the elegant, flowing scripts of human cultivators, but jagged, angular runes that hurt to look at.
"Analysis: Demonic Warding Seal. Primitive but effective. Functions by creating a localized entropy field, accelerating decay in all energy that contacts it. Standard brute-force methods will fail, only feeding the seal."
"The scouts couldn't breach it," Kang said, watching Li Yao's face. "Their strongest attacks were simply… consumed. We need a key. Or a lockpick." His meaning was clear. He believed Li Yao, with his "unique perspective," was the lockpick.
Li Yao stood. "I'll need to see it directly."
He, Kang, and Ling approached the mine entrance. The sense of wrongness was palpable. The air was dead here, devoid of the wild Qi that saturated the rest of the mountains. It was a pocket of absolute stillness, a spiritual vacuum.
Up close, the demonic seal was even more unsettling. The jagged runes seemed to writhe, promising dissolution. Li Yao extended his perception, not towards the seal's power, but towards its structure, its pattern. He ignored the terrifying whole and focused on the tiny spaces between the runes, the connections that held the entropy field together.
With his law-enhanced sight, he could see them—faint, spider-web thin lines of force, the "threads" of the formation. They were incredibly complex, but they had a rhythm, a flow of corrupt energy that powered them.
"This isn't a lock," Li Yao murmured, more to himself than the others. "It's a heart. It has a pulse." He could feel it, a slow, malevolent beat that sourced from deep within the mine, pumping corruption through these threads.
"A heart?" Ling asked, her voice hushed.
"Every formation has a core, a source of power," Li Yao explained, his mind racing alongside the System's analysis. "This one is being powered from the inside. We can't break the seal from here. It's drawing energy from the spirit stone vein itself, converting pure Qi into entropy. The more we attack it, the stronger it gets."
"Then we're stuck," Kang said, frustration edging his voice.
"Not necessarily," Li Yao said. "We can't break it. But we can… bypass it." He pointed to the threads he could see. "The formation is perfect against force. But it's designed to keep things out. Its integrity against something coming from the inside might be weaker. And these threads… they're a two-way conduit."
Understanding dawned on Kang's face, followed by sharp apprehension. "You want to send something through the seal? That's suicide. Anything that touches it will decay."
"Not if it doesn't recognize it as a threat," Li Yao said. He looked at his spatial hand. "Not if it's not really… anything at all."
The plan was insane. He proposed using his minute control over spatial law to "thread a needle." He would create an infinitesimally small, stable tunnel through one of the formation's own energy conduits, a tunnel so small and spiritually inert it would be virtually invisible to the seal. Then, he would send a wisp of his spiritual sense through it to sever the connection from the inside.
The risk was catastrophic. If his control slipped, the entropy field would instantly unmake his spiritual sense, causing a backlash that could shatter his core or erase his mind.
He sat cross-legged before the shimmering barrier, ignoring the anxious looks of Kang and Ling. He closed his eyes, shutting out the world. His entire being focused on his spatial hand, on the [Law of Spatial Anchoring], on the delicate, terrifying task ahead.
He reached out with his will, not to push, but to part. Like gently separating two strands of a spider's web without breaking them. The strain was immense. Sweat beaded on his forehead, his one real hand trembling. He could feel the hungry void of the entropy field just nanometers from his consciousness.
Slowly, painstakingly, a tunnel no wider than a human hair formed in the fabric of the formation. He held it open, a feat of mental and spiritual endurance that felt like holding up a collapsing mountain with a single finger.
Then, he sent a single, hair-thin strand of his own spiritual sense down the tunnel.
It was like sending a part of his soul into a blender. The corrupt energy on the other side was a suffocating miasma. He could feel his consciousness fraying at the edges. He had seconds.
His spiritual sense snaked through the conduit, following the flow of corruption back to its source. And then he saw it.
The heart of the mine was not just a spirit stone vein. It was a nest.
In a vast cavern, pulsing with the sickly light of corrupted spirit stones, lay a massive, chitinous form—a Soul-Devourer Mantis, a High Core Formation demonic beast. It was dormant, its scythe-like limbs folded, its multifaceted eyes dark. The demonic seal was its doing, a protective cocoon woven from its own corrupt energy as it digested the spiritual power of the vein and prepared to evolve.
And wrapped around the base of the beast, pulsing with the same malevolent rhythm, was the true core of the formation—a corrupted Spirit Stone the size of a human head, now a black, throbbing heart of entropy.
There was no time for awe or fear. Li Yao's spiritual sense, fading fast, lunged for the connection between the heart and the rest of the formation. He didn't have the power to destroy the heart. But he could make a single, precise cut.
With the last of his strength, he severed one single, critical thread.
The effect was instantaneous.
On the outside, the iridescent barrier flickered violently. The dead air suddenly rushed with life as wild Qi flooded back into the vacuum. The seal didn't collapse, but a section of it large enough for a person to pass through simply… dissolved, like a soap bubble popping.
Li Yao's spiritual sense snapped back into his body. He gasped, slumping forward, blood trickling from his nose. He felt hollowed out, his mind scraped raw.
But he had done it.
Kang and Ling stared at the newly opened passage, then at Li Yao with a mixture of terror and reverence. They had just witnessed a miracle of heresy.
"The seal is breached," Li Yao rasped, wiping the blood from his lip. "But it's not gone. And the mine… it's not empty. There's a Soul-Devourer Mantis inside. Dormant, for now."
Kang's eyes widened in genuine shock, then narrowed with avarice. A High Core Formation beast, dormant, guarding a virgin spirit stone vein? This was a fortune beyond imagining. The risk was astronomical, but the reward…
"Then we move now," Kang decided, his voice giddy with greed. "While it sleeps. We harvest what we can and get out."
They slipped through the breach, leaving Li Yao to recover. He leaned against the cold stone, his body trembling, his mind echoing with the image of the slumbering monstrosity.
He had unlocked the door. But he had a terrible feeling he had just let the wolf into the henhouse. Kang's ambition, now unleashed upon such a prize, was a danger as great as any demonic beast. The real trial within the Serpent's Spine was just beginning, and it wasn't against the Mantis, but against the greed of men.