Darkness was an old friend to Li Ming, but this was a different kind of dark. This was a thick, wet, suffocating dark that pressed in from all sides. The stone of the drain channel was slimy and cold, scraping his back and shoulders. The air stank of rot, stagnant water, and a deeper, more chilling scent: despair.
He inched forward, pushing with his toes, pulling with his elbows. The scream was louder here, trapped and reverberating in the stone tunnels, transforming from a distant shriek into a deafening, metallic drone that vibrated in his bones and teeth. Meilin's herb blunted the emotional edge, but the physical vibration was inescapable. It felt like his skull was a bell being struck over and over.
"Do not try to block it!" The Silent Abbot's voice was a strain against the noise. "Let it pass through! Be the hollow bone, not the solid wall!"
Li Ming focused on the ironwood badger in his fist. Its simple, solid weight was a lifeline. This is real. This is quiet. He imagined the scream as a wind howling through a canyon. He was the canyon. He did not howl back.
He crawled for what felt like hours. The drain channel joined others, forming a larger, flowing trickle of foul water. He had to keep his face turned up to breathe, the icy, filthy stream soaking his clothes and chilling him to the marrow.
Finally, the channel ended in a vertical shaft. A rusty iron grate, half-rotted through, covered the opening below. The scream roared up from it, a focused geyser of agony. This was the source. Directly below.
He braced himself against the slimy walls and kicked at the grate. The old metal shrieked in protest, a physical sound swallowed by the spiritual one, and gave way with a crack. Pieces clattered down into emptiness.
He lowered himself through the hole, dangling for a terrifying moment before dropping. He landed in shallow, freezing water with a splash that echoed.
He was in a cell. Not a normal cell. This was a pit.
The room was circular, perhaps fifteen feet across. The walls were seamless blackstone, curving up into a dome high above. The only light was a sickly, greenish phosphorescence from patches of glowing fungus. In the center of the room, rising from the water, was a pillar of the same blackstone. And chained to that pillar was a man.
No, what was left of a man.
He was impossibly thin, draped in the tattered remains of what might have been a fine robe decades ago. His hair was a wild, matted grey mess. His arms were spread wide, secured to the pillar by thick manacles that were not just metal, but pulsing with faint, dull runes, qi-suppression seals. His head was bowed, chin on his chest.
But he was not still.
He trembled. A constant, fine vibration that shook his entire emaciated frame. It was the source of the scream. Not from his throat, his mouth was slack, but from his very spirit, from the martial style trapped within a body that could no longer express it, in a place that silenced all expression. It was a soul-shriek of perfect, perpetual frustration.
The style's echo in Li Ming's mind clarified, crystallized by proximity. It was called Still Iron Body Art. A defensive style of supreme, immovable resilience. To master it was to become an unbreakable statue, to weather any storm without a flinch. Its ultimate technique was to become so still, so dense, that one's own body became an impenetrable fortress.
And its last master had been imprisoned in a place that enforced absolute stillness, while his own soul screamed to express the power it had mastered. The irony was a torture device in itself.
Li Ming took a step forward, the water rippling around his shins. "Master?" he whispered.
The trembling stopped.
The man's head snapped up.
Li Ming's earth-sense couldn't show him eyes, but he felt the focus, two points of unbearable pressure and madness locking onto him. The scream in the air didn't change, but now it felt directed.
"Who…" The voice was a dry rustle, like stones grinding in a dry gully. It held no humanity, only a bewildered, ancient rage. "Who disturbs… the stillness?"
"I am Li Ming. I am the Keeper of the Azure Archives. I heard your style… calling."
"Keeper…" The prisoner repeated the word, tasting it. Then a sound escaped him, a cracked, horrible parody of a laugh. "A librarian? Come to catalogue my torment? To shelve my madness between 'Mountain-Crushing Fist' and 'Phantom Veil Dance'?" He thrashed against his chains, the runes flaring angrily, suppressing any real movement. "There is nothing to keep! The Still Iron Art is dead! It died the day they put me in this… this mockery of stillness!"
"It's not dead," Li Ming said, forcing his voice to stay low, to be the calm lake Wen had taught him to be. "It's trapped. Like you. It's screaming because it cannot be."
"AND WHAT WOULD YOU KNOW?" the prisoner roared, the spiritual scream spiking into a wave of force that slapped Li Ming backward. He stumbled, catching himself against the curved wall. "You come here with your soft hands and your quiet words! You have never been still! You have never known what it is to have your essence be unmoving, while your mind is torn apart by the need to move!"
"He is correct," Iron Saint Bai said, his tone heavy with a warrior's understanding. "His pain is unique. It is not the pain of loss, but of perversion. His art has been turned against him. You cannot soothe this with gentle listening, Keeper. You must offer an end."
"…offer him a drink… no, bad idea… very bad idea…"
"An end to the paradox," the Silent Abbot clarified. "The art wishes to express its perfect stillness. He wishes to be free of this false stillness. They are the same wish."
Li Ming pushed off the wall. He waded back toward the center, toward the trembling, emaciated figure radiating hopeless fury.
"You're right," Li Ming said, stopping just out of reach of any potential lunge. "I don't know your pain. I am just the listener. But the Archive doesn't judge. It only preserves. Your Still Iron Body Art… it was the pinnacle of defensive power, wasn't it? To stand, unyielding, against the world."
A shudder, different from the trembling, went through the prisoner. A memory of pride. "Yes," he hissed. "I was the Wall of the West. Armies broke upon me. Blades shattered. I. Did. Not. Move."
"And now you are forced to not move," Li Ming said. "But it's a lie. A prison's stillness, not a master's. Your art hates this lie. It is screaming to perform its true purpose one last time. Not to be a prisoner, but to be a fortress."
The mad eyes bored into him. "What are you saying, boy?"
"I am saying," Li Ming took a final step forward, his heart hammering against his ribs, "let me take the scream. Let me carry the true Still Iron Body Art to the Archives. Give it the honorable end it deserves, recorded not as a prisoner's madness, but as a warrior's ultimate technique. And give yourself… peace."
He held out his hand, not to touch the man, but as an offering.
The prisoner stared at the offered hand. The scream in the chamber lessened, not in volume, but in chaos. It became a focused, questioning hum.
"Peace," the prisoner whispered. The word was foreign on his tongue. He looked down at his chained, skeletal hands. "They broke my body. They broke my mind. But they could not break the Art. It is still in here… pure. It deserves… a true resting place. Not this filthy pit."
He looked back at Li Ming. The madness in his gaze was still there, but now it was alloyed with a desperate, fragile clarity. "You… you will remember it? As it was? Not as it is here?"
"I will remember the Wall of the West," Li Ming promised, his voice firm. "Not the prisoner in the pit."
A long, slow breath escaped the prisoner's lips. It sounded like the sigh of a mountain settling. He closed his eyes.
"Then take it," he said, his voice suddenly clear and strong, echoing with the ghost of his former power. "Take the Still Iron. And tell them… the wall stood until the end."
He threw his head back and did not scream. Instead, he concentrated.
The vibrating, chaotic energy that had been spraying from him like a shattered fountain suddenly coalesced. It pulled inward, into his core. For a second, he became what he was meant to be: perfectly, absolutely still. Not the limp stillness of defeat, but the poised, dense, immovable stillness of a mountain peak.
Then, he released it.
Not as a scream, but as a transmission.
A wave of silent, profound pressure filled the chamber. Li Ming felt his bones groan. His teeth ached. It was the feeling of absolute density, of unbreakable resolve. It was the complete, perfect knowledge of the Still Iron Body Art, every breathing technique, every mental fortification exercise, every method to turn flesh to iron and spirit to stone.
It flowed into Li Ming, into the waiting space of the Archive within him. It was heavy. Heavier than any of the other echoes. It carried no emotion, no personality, the prisoner's madness had been scrubbed away in that final, pure moment. It was just the Art, in its perfect, terrible form.
In the pillar, the prisoner's body went truly, finally limp. The trembling was gone. A faint, serene smile touched his cracked lips. Then, his head bowed once more, forever.
The oppressive, screaming silence of the cell was broken by a new sound.
A deep, grinding clunk from high above. A hatch, hidden in the dome, was opening. A shaft of dirty yellow torchlight speared down into the pit.
Voices echoed down. "—fluctuation just now! The dampeners spiked! Is the old monster finally dead? Or did he break through?"
"Only one way to find out. Lower the basket. And be ready with the crossbows. Even dead, his body might be tricky."
They were coming.
Li Ming stood frozen in the center of the pit, the weight of the new echo settling like a lead cloak. He was in the deepest cell of his enemy's fortress. The guards were descending.
And the only way out was the way he came in, a sheer, slimy, vertical drainpipe in the wall, now illuminated by the torchlight from above.