The air inside the side-hall seemed to have been ignited by a silent flame. Lin Xiu was curled in a pool of blood beneath his marble throne, the Inquisitor's collar at the base of his neck emitting sharp, violent electrical sparks. Due to the catastrophic failure of his Pseudo-Inscription, the left side of his face had sprouted dense, violet scales—the grotesque hallmark of a terminal aberration.
Gu Hanzhou's heavy boot pinned Lin Xiu's trembling right hand to the floor. The tip of [Black Order] hovered mere millimeters above the man's twitching eyeball, the dark steel drinking in the frantic heat of the room.
"My father..." Gu Hanzhou's voice was a low, guttural rasp, vibrating with a coldness that had been suppressed for a decade. "He was sent to the Night-War Legions. What was the final entry in his classified file? Where did he go?"
Lin Xiu let out a distorted, gurgling cackle, his mouth filled with a frothy mixture of blood and bile. "You... you will never... find him. He was sent to... the Pool of Purgatory..."
Just as Gu Hanzhou prepared to pry the truth from Lin Xiu's skull, the temperature in the Sanctum plummeted to an absolute, bone-chilling zero.
The frantic red emergency lights flickered once and died. They were replaced by a heavy, suffocating grey mist that seemed to possess its own weight. It wasn't just shadows; it was a corrupt, ancient aura that seemed to freeze the very flow of Order Energy in the air.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Heavy, measured footsteps echoed from behind the massive, gold-veined doors at the far end of the hall. With every step, the marble floor cracked into intricate, spider-web patterns—but instead of magma, a thick, ink-like miasma seeped from the fissures.
"Useless waste."
An aged, rasping voice cut through the silence. It wasn't loud, yet the sound struck Gu Hanzhou's sea of consciousness like a physical blow. The dark-gold sigil on his chest, for the first time in his life, began to shiver and contract in instinctive terror, as if it had met its natural predator.
Gu Hanzhou snapped his head toward the source. A man draped in a deep-purple ceremonial robe emerged from the gloom. He was hairless, his skin like dried orange peel stretched tight over a skeletal frame. But his eyes, recessed deep into his skull, glowed with a suffocating, crimson luminescence.
Duke Mordent. Vice-Arbitrator of the High Inquisition.
A true master of the Suppression Phase (Town-Blood Phase).
In the hierarchy of Order, the Suppression Phase meant the ability to dominate the laws of physics within a localized area. Where Duke Mordent stood, the world became his private "Dead Zone."
"My... My Lord..." Lin Xiu groaned, reaching out with a mutated claw, desperate to grasp the hem of Mordent's robe as if it were a lifeline.
Mordent looked down at Lin Xiu. There was no anger in his gaze—only the cold, sterile indifference one might show a piece of broken glass. He gave a casual flick of his withered finger. A grey streak of light flashed through the air.
Pfft.
A perfect, hollow hole appeared in the center of Lin Xiu's forehead. The man who had once terrorized the Furnace District didn't even have the chance to scream. In a heartbeat, his life-force was siphoned away, his body shriveling into a desiccated husk before he even hit the floor.
Gu Hanzhou's heart hammered against his ribs at a lethal velocity. Lin Xiu, a Peak Blood-Ignition expert, hadn't been able to offer even a fraction of a second of resistance.
"Dark-gold bloodline... the embers of the Ancient Court..." Mordent turned his crimson gaze toward Gu Hanzhou, a cruel, thin smile playing on his lips. "I never imagined that in the filth of the lower mines, something so defiant of Order could actually take root."
Gu Hanzhou didn't waste his breath on words. He knew that in front of such a monster, words were a commodity he couldn't afford.
He pushed his dark-gold Order Blood into an extreme overdrive. The spiral vortex within his veins rotated so fast it began to generate a hum that resonated through his bones. [Black Order] sensed the unprecedented crisis; its dark-gold veins erupted with a blinding, defiant light, attempting to tear through the grey Dead Zone surrounding them.
"Impressive, little one. But the chasm between our realms is not something a broken blade can bridge."
Mordent slowly raised his right hand, his fingers clawing at the empty air.
Gu Hanzhou felt the air around him solidify into something as hard as cast iron, pinning him in place. His bones groaned under the pressure, emitting sickening, grinding noises as the absolute rules of the Suppression Phase bore down upon him.
"Come," Mordent whispered.
Gu Hanzhou's body began to drift toward the Duke, pulled by an invisible, inexorable force. But even on the brink of death, there was no despair in the boy's eyes—only a feral, near-suicidal ferocity.
If the power was unequal, he would trade his life for a wound.
When he was less than three meters from Mordent, Gu Hanzhou's chest swelled, and he spat out a concentrated bolt of Imperial Gold blood!
This blood-arrow contained nearly a third of his total source-energy—the hardest, most refined fragments of the Ancient Court's laws.
Mordent's eyebrows twitched. He hadn't expected the ant to harbor such a desperate, "jade-shattering" trump card. He pulled his hand back, manifesting a grey circular shield in front of him.
BOOM!
The golden blood-arrow collided with the grey shield, creating a violent explosion that momentarily shredded the fabric of the Dead Zone.
In that one-second window, a pale-white silhouette lunged from the shadows behind a pillar, grabbing Gu Hanzhou by his collar.
"Run!"
It was Su Qingyue. Her face was transparently pale, her hands clutching the Stealth-Stone, which was now riddled with cracks. She was forcibly burning her very essence to trigger a forbidden Primal-Blood technique.
The two silhouettes transformed into a faint violet spark, slipping through the rift in the Dead Zone just as it began to close. They vanished into the labyrinthine shadows of the Sanctum's ventilation system.
Duke Mordent stood alone in the empty hall. He looked at the jagged notch that had been scorched into his grey shield, and a flicker of dark annoyance crossed his features.
"A Primal-Blood forbidden art... interesting."
He walked to Lin Xiu's husk and crushed the skull beneath his heel with a sickening crunch.
"Issue a Tier-One bounty across the Emerald District," Mordent commanded the shadows, his voice echoing like falling dust. "I want them found. Dead or alive."
The Duke turned, the grey mist receding into the darkness with him like a retreating tide.
"The night in this Iron City... needs a thorough cleansing."