13 Heavens: Rise Of The Bloodline Dreg

Between Stone and Beast

The crystalline chiming grew louder, shaking droplets from the ceiling into the dark pool. Elias shifted his grip on the spear, his knuckles white. He didn't look back at Leo.

"Stay in the water," the old man growled. "The Heart-Stone is your only chance. If you get out now, the corruption will rush back in, worse than before. And you'll be too weak to fight."

[Corruption Extraction: 41%. Pure Energy Drain: 5.8%. Vital signs stabilizing.]

[Host is combat ineffective. Estimated recovery time: 9 minutes.]

Nine minutes. An eternity.

The beast emerged from the tunnel. It was transformed. The broken crystal antlers had regrown, but now they were smaller, darker, and sharper, like obsidian daggers. Its six legs ended in points that scratched deep grooves in the stone floor.

Its eyes, once swirling purple, now burned with a focused, hateful crimson light. It had evolved. It had consumed the chasm's energy to heal, and it had come for the thing that had hurt it.

It saw Leo in the pool and let out a shriek that was pure, crystalline fury.

Elias didn't wait. He moved with a speed that belied his age. He wasn't a cultivator with flashing Qi. He was a survivor, all economy of motion. He darted forward, not aiming for the thick chitinous plates, but for the joints in the beast's front legs.

His stone spearpoint struck with a tock sound. It didn't pierce, but it made the beast flinch, throwing its weight off balance.

"Stay back, shiny!" Elias yelled, dancing away from a sweeping crystal claw.

The beast ignored him. Its target was the bright, painful, pure energy it sensed in the pool Leo's energy, now mixed with the alluring scent of the Heart-Stone. It wanted to shatter the stone and feast on the resulting explosion of chaos.

It charged the pool.

Elias threw himself in its path. He jammed his spear into the ground directly in front of the beast's central mass and leaned his whole weight against it.

It was like a twig stopping a truck. The spear snapped. The beast's momentum slammed into Elias, throwing him against the wall with a sickening thud. He crumpled, groaning, not getting up.

"No!" Leo shouted, surging up in the water.

[Warning! Leaving the spring will halt purification!]

The beast was at the pool's edge. It lowered its head, aiming its obsidian antlers at Leo's chest, ready to gore him and smash the Heart-Stone behind him.

Leo was trapped. He couldn't fight. He couldn't run. Elias was down.

He had one weapon left. Not his body. Not his Qi.

His mind.

As the beast tensed to strike, Leo did the only thing he could think of. He stopped trying to push the corruption out. He reversed it.

He grabbed mentally at the silvery threads of chaotic energy still inside him and, with all his will, he yanked them toward the surface. He didn't expel them into the water.

He pulled them to his skin, to his hands, concentrating them into a dense, visible fog of purple-black mist that swirled around his fists.

He wasn't pure prey anymore. He was radiating the very poison of the beast's home.

The beast hesitated, its crimson eyes flickering with confusion. This small thing now smelled wrong in a different way. Dangerous.

"THAT'S RIGHT!" Leo roared from the water, his voice raw. He slammed his corrupted-energy-wreathed fists down onto the surface of the black pool.

The impact sent a wave of water over the Heart-Stone rim.

The reaction was instantaneous.

The gentle blue-grey light of the stones flared blindingly bright, white-hot. The water that touched them didn't just glow; it activated. The pure, anti-chaos energy of the stone and the concentrated corruption Leo had channeled created a violent reaction.

A beam of searing white energy, shot through with jagged purple lightning, erupted from the pool's surface, not at the beast, but straight up.

It hit the ceiling above the Crystal-Stag with the force of a bomb.

BOOM!

Chunks of rock and ice-cold water rained down. The beast shrieked, blinded and pummeled by the falling debris. A huge slab of rock landed on its back, driving it to its knees.

The chamber was filling with dust and steam. The Heart-Stones were pulsing erratically, their light dimming. Leo had wounded the sanctuary to save it.

Elias stirred, pushing himself up on one elbow, coughing. "You... maniac..." he wheezed, but there was a wild grin on his face.

The beast, buried under rubble, was stunned but not dead. It began to thrash, heaving the rocks off.

Leo was out of tricks. His gambit had used up the last of his focused will. The corruption was still in him, now agitated and angry. The draining pull of the damaged Heart-Stones was weakening.

He was going to die in this pool.

Then, something changed in the air. The chiming malice of the beast faded, replaced by a new sound a deep, rhythmic thumping, like a massive heartbeat coming from the tunnel.

The beast stopped thrashing. Its crimson eyes widened, not with hate, but with something else. Primal fear.

It forgot about Leo. It scrambled to its feet, ignoring the rocks, and turned towards the tunnel entrance, lowering its head in a defensive posture.

From the darkness of the tunnel, something flowed into the chamber.

It wasn't a solid creature. It was a shifting cloud of darkness and jagged, purple light, roughly the size of a car. It had no clear shape sometimes a mass of tendrils, sometimes a gaping maw, sometimes a cluster of glowing, hateful eyes.

It was pure, concentrated chasm energy given a hungry will. A Chaos Wisp, but a giant one. The true apex predator of this zone.

It had been drawn by the violent explosion of energy, the conflict between pure Heart-Stone and concentrated corruption.

The Crystal-Stag, the beast that had terrorized Leo, was now just the first course.

The Chaos Wisp lunged. It didn't bite or claw. It enveloped the stag. There was a terrible, crunching, dissolving sound. The stag's crystalline shrieks were cut off abruptly.

In three seconds, the massive beast was gone, absorbed into the shifting cloud, which pulsed with a satisfied, darker light.

Then, every single one of its shifting eyes turned and fixed on the next brightest source of energy in the room.

Not the dimming Heart-Stones.

Leo, sitting in the black pool, his body a battleground of pure and corrupt power, glowing like a lighthouse in the dusty gloom.

The Wisp began to glide toward him, silent and inevitable.

Elias tried to stand, to throw a rock, but fell back with a cry of pain. He was out of the fight.

Leo was frozen. This thing had eaten an evolved beast in seconds. His Diamond Hide wouldn't save him. He was out of energy, out of tricks, out of time.

The Wisp loomed over the pool, its cold, chaotic presence sucking the warmth from the air. It extended a pseudopod of darkness and crackling light towards Leo's face.

This was it.

Suddenly, the System interface, which had been flickering, blazed to life in his vision. Not with a warning. With a command. Words that burned with absolute, desperate authority.

[HOST SURVIVAL PARAMOUNT.]

[EMERGENCY PROTOCOL OVERRIDE: FULL ASSIMILATION.]

[DO NOT RESIST.]

Before Leo could even understand, the System took over. He felt his body go rigid, not with fear, but with external control.

As the Chaos Wisp's tendril touched his forehead, Leo's mouth opened.

But he didn't scream.

He inhaled.