Xīng Hé's concept finally activated.
Not consciously. Not deliberately. Her mind was too shattered by what she'd witnessed to give coherent commands. But some deeper part of her—some instinct that lived below conscious thought—reached out with Restoration, with Preservation, with Balance, trying desperately to undo what had been done.
The concepts touched the nearest corpse.
Tang Wei's body. Still warm. Still leaking golden blood from the crater where her face had been.
Xīng Hé felt her concepts strain against the damage—felt them reach toward the terrible injuries, felt them try to restore, to preserve, to balance what had been catastrophically unbalanced.
It was like an ant trying to carry a tree.
The sheer magnitude of the damage exceeded anything her concepts could address. These weren't simple wounds. These were bodies destroyed at a fundamental level—bones pulverized to powder, organs reduced to paste, entire systems rendered non-functional in ways that no amount of restoration could reverse.
Even if she'd had the power of a Domain stage existence, even if her concepts had been refined through centuries of cultivation, these teammates were beyond saving.
They'd been dead the moment the strings were plucked.
Her concepts recoiled, unable to find purchase, unable to affect what had already been irreversibly broken.
---
The contaminated raised his guitar again.
His transformed face carried no expression—no satisfaction, no rage, no recognition that he'd just murdered twelve children in the span of a few heartbeats. Just the blank focus of a predator selecting its next target.
His hand moved toward the strings.
Toward Xīng Hé.
---
And then the courtyard erupted with motion.
The other disciples had seen what happened.
Had watched one of their own transform into a monster and slaughter the strangers who had wandered into their territory. They poured from the surrounding buildings, weapons drawn, their faces twisted with righteous fury.
"Devil Sect spy!"
"He's revealed his true form!"
"Kill him before he escapes!"
They thought he was a traitor. An infiltrator from some enemy faction, finally showing his true colors after months or years of hiding among them. They couldn't conceive of contamination—couldn't imagine that the corruption lived in all of them, dormant but present, waiting for whatever trigger would awaken it.
They attacked in force.
A dozen disciples converged on the contaminated, their weapons glowing with the power of their respective Daos. A sword that burned with impossible heat. A spear that seemed to extend and retract according to no physical law. Fists wreathed in energy that made the air itself shimmer.
The contaminated turned to face them, his guitar rising to defend.
But there were too many. Too much power concentrated in too small a space. His Dao of Music, formidable as it was, couldn't withstand a coordinated assault from a dozen practitioners of similar strength.
The first blade found his throat.
The contaminated's hands jerked across the strings one final time—a death chord, discordant and terrible, a sound that would have killed if anyone had been in range. But the disciples had learned caution in however many battles they'd fought before this one. They'd positioned themselves carefully, striking from angles that his guitar couldn't defend.
The second blade pierced his heart.
The third removed his head.
The contaminated's body dissolved before it could hit the ground—not into the twisted remains they'd seen in the outer district, but into nothing. Complete dissolution, leaving behind only the weapon that had killed so many.
The guitar fell to the ancient stones with a soft, almost musical clatter.
The disciples gathered around it, their weapons still raised, their eyes scanning the courtyard for additional threats. They were talking—rapid exchanges in their language, words that Xīng Hé's concept translated imperfectly through the haze of her trauma.
"...second one this week..."
"...Devil Sect infiltration is worse than we thought..."
"...need to increase patrols..."
"...can't trust anyone..."
None of them looked at the bodies.
None of them seemed to register that twelve children lay dead in their courtyard, that golden blood was pooling between ancient stones, that lives had been extinguished for the crime of existing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
To them, the strangers were irrelevant. Collateral damage. Acceptable losses in a war they were fighting against enemies they couldn't see.
---
Xīng Hé ran.
The remaining survivors ran with her—fourteen people, fleeing through back passages and side corridors, their feet carrying them away from the massacre without conscious thought or direction. Pure animal instinct, driving them away from predators they couldn't hope to fight.
They didn't stop until they'd crossed back through the broken barrier, back into the Core Sect district, back to the Main Hall that had become their prison and their sanctuary.
They collapsed just inside the entrance, gasping, trembling, their minds trying desperately to process what they'd witnessed.
Twenty-seven had entered the inner district.
Fifteen had returned.
Twelve teammates, dead.
In seconds.
To a single enemy wielding a guitar.
---
Hours passed before Xīng Hé could move again.
When she finally gathered the strength to stand, to think, to do anything beyond sit and stare at nothing, one thought dominated her consciousness:
The guitar.
It had fallen. The contaminated's weapon, left behind after the disciples killed him. Lying in the center of the courtyard, untouched.
That weapon had killed twelve of her teammates.
That weapon might be what they were here to retrieve.
She looked at the fourteen survivors—all of them still lost in their own trauma, all of them staring at walls with eyes that didn't quite see. Then she looked toward the inner district, toward the courtyard where bodies had dissolved and a sacred weapon waited to be claimed.
The risk was insane. The disciples could return at any moment. Another contaminated could emerge without warning. They were fifteen people—fifteen exhausted, traumatized children—against an entire district of beings who could transform into monsters at the sight of them.
But they had no choice.
They couldn't go back empty-handed. Couldn't return to the mentors and explain that twelve of their teammates had died and they had nothing to show for it. The system didn't accept failure. The system punished failure with consequences worse than death.
So they waited until the courtyard was empty.
And then they moved.
---
The bodies were gone.
Xīng Hé's breath caught in her throat as she stepped back into the courtyard. The golden blood remained—dark stains against ancient stone, marking where twelve people had died. But the corpses themselves had vanished. Dissolved, just like the contaminated. Just like every other practitioner in this place when they finally died.
No remains. No evidence they'd ever existed.
Just blood and rings.
She'd collected the rings automatically, her hands moving without conscious thought, gathering the small metal circles that had absorbed her teammates' blood in their final moments. Twelve more additions to the pocket watch at her waist.
Twelve more weights to carry.
The guitar lay exactly where it had fallen.
Xīng Hé knelt beside it, her hands trembling as she reached out. Half-expecting it to attack her, to unleash the same deadly frequencies that had slaughtered her teammates. But it remained inert—just an instrument, just wood and strings and the residue of something she couldn't quite perceive.
She lifted it carefully, feeling its weight, its balance, the way it seemed to hum with potential even in stillness.
Then she carried it back to the Core Sect district and began her analysis.
---
The examination took hours.
She traced the carvings on its surface—patterns that might have been decoration or might have been something more. She tested the strings carefully, listening to the notes they produced, trying to understand how sound could become a weapon.
She searched through the texts in the Law Hall, cross-referencing what she'd witnessed with the fragments of knowledge she could piece together.
Slowly, understanding emerged.
This species practiced Dao.
The word wasn't a translation—it was a recognition. Dao was similar to concept in the way that siblings were similar. The same fundamental truth, expressed through different methods.
Divine existences awakened to concepts—sudden connections to aspects of reality that granted them power. But these beings cultivated. They trained. They refined their understanding over years or decades or centuries, gradually accumulating the connection that divine existences received in a single moment of awakening.
And they focused that cultivation through specific paths.
The contaminated who had killed twelve of her teammates had walked the path of Music. Had spent his life—his entire existence—deepening his understanding of sound and rhythm and the power that lived within melody.
The guitar wasn't just a weapon. It was an extension of his soul, a physical manifestation of everything he had learned and understood and become.
And it was saturated with his Dao.
Xīng Hé sat back, the guitar resting across her knees, the terrible truth crystallizing in her mind.
This is what we're here for.
The sacred weapons. The tools these beings trained with, imbued with their understanding, carrying the essence of their Dao.
Divine existences with related concepts could use them. Could study the Dao contained within, could absorb understanding that might take centuries to develop on their own. A shortcut. A resource.
That's why they sent us here.
Not to explore. Not to learn. To harvest.
To strip the corpse of a dead civilization for anything that might prove useful.
She thought of the disciples in the courtyard—the ones who had killed the contaminated, the ones who were going about their daily lives, unaware that they were already monsters waiting to happen. They didn't know what had befallen their world. Didn't know that the outer district was filled with creatures that had once been their fellow practitioners. Didn't know that the corruption lived in them too, dormant but present, waiting for whatever trigger would awaken it.
They were already dead.
They just didn't know it yet.
And Xīng Hé had been sent to pick their bones clean.
She looked down at the guitar in her hands—at the weapon that had killed twelve of her teammates, at the sacred tool of a practitioner who had spent his life pursuing the Dao of Music. It was beautiful, in its way. A lifetime of devotion made physical. A soul's work, preserved in wood and string.
It would help some elder evolve faster.
It would be processed, analyzed, reduced to its useful components. The Dao it contained would be extracted, studied, exploited. And the being who had created it—who had poured his existence into its making—would be forgotten. Just another resource. Just another casualty of a war that had consumed everything.
This is what we are. This is what they've made us.
Scavengers. Vultures. Thieves picking through the ruins of a world that died before we were born.
She should have felt horror. Should have felt revulsion, disgust, the moral outrage that this situation demanded.
But she was too tired for outrage.
Too worn down by four months of survival, by twenty-one deaths, by the constant pressure of a mission that had been designed to break them.
All she felt was cold.
Cold, and the bitter understanding of exactly what she had been drafted into.
She looked at her fourteen remaining teammates—at their hollow eyes, their trembling hands, their faces that had aged years in the space of a single day.
They didn't understand yet. Didn't see the full picture the way she did.
But they would.
Eventually, they would all understand.
This is a death mission for us against a helpless species.
---
*End of Chapter 52*