Chapter 58 — Beneath the Red Stone

CHAPTER 58

Beneath the Red Stone

The rope ended above a floor of dark red tiles. Shi Feng let go at the last arm’s length and stepped aside before the next laborer’s boots landed on his head. His lamp showed an empty pedestal, the lower half of a broken statue, and long scratches across the floor.

The scratches ran straight over the broken stone instead of stopping at its edge. Shi Feng frowned. Something passed through here after the collapse, he thought, and it didn’t bother with the door.

“Does anyone see anything alive?” Ma Zheng called from the rope, his voice thin and hopeful.

“Haha! Only the cripple, Broker Ma!” Pang Xun said, dropping to the floor with his saber already out. “Does he count?”

Duan Kang landed last. His flying blade circled the chamber once, stirring up dust, and nothing answered it.

“The room is safe,” Duan Kang announced. “Spread out. Remember the terms. Nothing past the entry chamber is common property.”

Duan Kang touched each red tile with his staff before putting his foot on it. Pang Xun marched across the row beside him and looked back with a grin.

“Too cautious, Leader!” Pang Xun said.

Duan Kang didn’t answer. He let Pang Xun reach the far wall first. The porters noticed and hurriedly stayed behind the staff.

Ma Zheng nodded eagerly, very pleased that someone else was checking the room for him.

A skeleton lay against the northern wall. Pang Xun reached it first and tried to pull a belt knife from its scabbard. Rust had welded blade and sheath together.

“Worthless!” Pang Xun spat, and flung it at the wall.

Shi Feng watched the dust rise from the impact. One thin stream of it drifted upward along a seam instead of falling. He raised his lamp, and the seam moved.

“Back,” Shi Feng said.

“What did he say?” the old porter Gu Tie asked.

Ma Zheng shouted another warning and dragged the old porter away by the collar.

Pang Xun turned to sneer, and a black mandible burst through the wall behind him. His sneer froze. The laborers were stunned into silence for one long breath.

He threw himself flat. A second mandible snapped through the air where his neck had been and cut his tied hair loose. Red stone exploded across the chamber, and a Stonehide Spirit Centipede uncoiled out of the hole, its armored segments scraping sparks from the tiles.

Its head was wider than the doorway it had come from.

“A spirit beast!” Ma Zheng shrieked. “N-nobody told me it was a spirit beast!”

Duan Kang’s flying blade flashed downward. The point struck a plate behind the skull and skidded away, taking only a thin sliver of armor. The centipede turned toward him.

Duan Kang turned toward the stairs.

“Fall back to the upper passage!” Duan Kang barked. “This leader will cover you! Everyone, fall back!”

He was already running before he finished the sentence.

The laborers stampeded after him. Ma Zheng snatched a dropped lamp and ran with them. Pang Xun scrambled behind a pedestal, then realized it wouldn’t protect him from a creature longer than a cart.

“Leader, wait for me!” Pang Xun wailed. “Leader!”

Nobody waited. Pang Xun’s face turned pale, and he stared after them in shock.

Shi Feng didn’t fight for the stairway. The centipede’s outer legs were already reaching it, and he saw no reason to die in a queue. Instead, he kicked the fallen statue under those legs and slid sideways into a broken doorway.

The beast followed the closer movement. Good, Shi Feng thought. It chases whatever is nearest, and the nearest thing is me.

The others’ lamps vanished around the upper bend. Shi Feng set his own lamp in a shallow niche in the wall and drew his sword. It was a plain blade, freshly sharpened. It would be enough if he hit the right places.

The centipede smashed headfirst into the doorway.

Shi Feng met it with his left palm. The impact shook dust from the roof and snapped the creature’s head sideways, crushing the doorjamb. He stepped inside the snapping mandibles and drove his sword into the soft fold under one armored cheek.

Dark fluid ran over his knuckles.

The centipede reared back with a hiss. Shi Feng pulled the blade free before its twisting body could trap it, planted a foot on the broken jamb, and struck again from above. The point sank in behind the skull, and this time he left the sword where it was.

Boom!

The beast rolled and smashed the pedestal behind him into three pieces. Shi Feng dropped under a scissoring leg, grabbed the ridge of the exposed neck plate, and drove his knee against the sword’s hilt. The steel sank deeper, and the head crashed to the floor.

He didn’t wait to see if it was finished dying. Both hands found the broken seam in the armor. His refined bones answered together, one strength flowing through all of them.

“Open,” Shi Feng said through his teeth.

He pulled, and the plate tore away.

The creature’s last thrash flattened the doorway. Shi Feng stepped over the wreckage and forced the head backward until the inner joint parted with a wet crack. Silence came slowly: first the mandibles, then the legs, then the last pieces sliding to a rest around his feet.

Shi Feng wiped his face with his sleeve. A Foundation Establishment cultivator decided this thing was somebody else’s problem, Shi Feng thought coldly. Duan Kang’s leadership was worth exactly as much as the contract’s safety clause.

He picked up his sword. There was one shallow chip near the point, but the blade was still sound.

Then he laid his hand on the exposed flesh. The All-Devouring Physique stirred and pulled the beast’s vitality inward in a great wave of heat. Duan Kang had barely scratched this armor. Shi Feng had faced its full strength and killed it himself, and the reward was his alone.

Heat flooded his chest and pushed into the stubborn places in his skeleton. He breathed until the first fierce rush grew steady, then stopped drawing. The rest could wait. A ruin with moving walls was a bad place to cultivate.

Voices echoed down from the upper passage.

“Is anyone still alive down there?” Duan Kang called.

Shi Feng didn’t answer.

“The cripple went down the lower passage, Leader!” Pang Xun shouted. “I saw him! The beast must have eaten him by now!”

“Th-then his entrance share is forfeit,” Ma Zheng said, and even through the stone his voice sounded relieved. “Write him down as lost.”

“Lost, then,” Duan Kang said. “We go around.”

Not one of them suggested going back for him. Shi Feng’s expression didn’t change as he listened to their footsteps fade. He only smiled faintly.

“Thanks for the funeral,” Shi Feng said to the empty dark. “Everyone is so generous with other people’s shares.”

He turned to the shattered doorway. The centipede had opened a route the map didn’t show, and cooler air flowed beyond it, under a hanging slab. His lamp showed tool marks along the lower edge and old wedges crushed under the weight.

Someone dug here before us, Shi Feng thought, and his eyes narrowed.

He crouched beside the opening. The ordinary fallen stones he could lift, but the slab itself was locked into dark grooves on both sides, and the carved lines inside them were fused into glass. An ancient trap once guarded this passage, and it had gone off right here.

He worked around the edge instead of putting his neck under it.

A strip of torn cloth appeared in the dust. Then a pale hand. Then a broken sword lying beside the hand, its edge ruined by something fiercer than rust.

The dead man hadn’t been laid out on an altar. He lay on his side with one shoulder pinned under the slab and digging tools scattered around him. No offering, no waiting disciple’s cushion. Just an explorer who met a danger he couldn’t escape in time.

Shi Feng raised his lamp.

A metal badge glinted at the dead man’s waist. He wiped the dust away with his thumb and read the four characters stamped into it.

Artificer Hall.