Dragonblood Chaos Heir

Chapter 12: The Net and the Shadow

Dawn over the Blackroot Woods was not a brightening, but a leaching of darkness into a monochrome grey. Mist clung to the gnarled trunks and dripped from the needled leaves of the gloom-pines, muting sound and limiting sight to a dozen yards. It was the perfect canvas for a hunt, and for being hunted.

At the forest’s main entry point, the mood was grimly purposeful. Sixty men stood in ordered ranks, their breath pluming in the chill air. Thirty were Lin Clan enforcers in dark green, their auras a unified, disciplined thrum of earth and wood energy. Twenty were Deng Clan trackers and bruisers, leaner, harder, their earth-attribute qi jagged and aggressive. The final ten were City Guard auxiliaries in burnished leather, their presence a stamp of official sanction.

At their head, mounted on a Spirit-Break Stallion whose hooves crackled with subdued lightning, was Elder Tian. He wore functional but ornate platy armor over his green robes, a heavy, single-edged dao sword at his hip. His face was a mask of cold authority, but the shadows under his eyes betrayed a sleepless night. Beside him, on a lesser steed, his son Lin Tao rode. The young master’s face was a mess of fading purple and yellow around a splint on his nose, his eyes holding a mixture of simmering rage and newfound, anxious fear.

To Tian’s other side stood Hou, the Deng Clan’s premier tracker. He was a wiry man of indeterminate age, with eyes the color of wet river stones and fingers that seemed to permanently twitch, as if reading currents in the air. He carried no visible weapon, but the air around him tasted of upturned soil and iron—a deep, sensory connection to the earth.

“The pattern is clear,” Hou said, his voice a dry rustle. He pointed to a map spread over his saddle. “The convoy was hit here, on the Muddy Leaf Road. The Roosting Phoenix incident was here, in the city. The beast found drained of all vitality was here, two miles into the woods.” His finger tapped each location, forming a rough triangle centered on the deepest, oldest part of the Blackroot. “It’s not hiding. It’s operating from a lair. It moves between these points with speed and silence, but it returns to a core. Here.” His finger landed on a blank spot marked only by the symbol for a waterfall and dense rock formations. “The Ravine of Weeping Stone. The energy there is wild, chaotic. It would mask any unnatural signature.”

Elder Tian nodded. “A sound analysis. We will advance in three tips. Deng trackers and half the Lin enforcers with me, making for the ravine directly. Captain Lu,” he addressed a grizzled Lin veteran, “you take the remaining Lin men and half the city guard and sweep the western quadrant. Hou, you and your best trackers, with the rest of the guard, take the eastern quadrant. We drive any game toward the center. Signal with flare-arrows at any contact. This thing is dangerous and cunning. Do not engage alone. Surround it, contain it, and signal. We will crush it with overwhelming force.”

It was a classic, competent military maneuver. A net cast wide, designed to flush and envelop.

As the groups split and began to move into the mist-shrouded trees, the forest seemed to swallow them. The sounds of snapping twigs and rustling foliage were quickly absorbed by the dense, damp air. The hunt had begun.

Lin Feng watched them from a branch they would never think to look: not in a tree, but within one.

He had used the Gasp of the Withering Root not offensively, but meldingly. He’d sunk the dark, devouring twigs into the bark of an ancient, half-hollow gloom-pine, and had his chaos qi mimic the tree’s own sluggish, ancient life-force. To any spiritual sense, he was just a slightly denser knot of wood energy in a forest full of it. He was the shadow in the net’s own weave.

He saw the groups split. He felt the three-points advance. His mind, sharpened by constant consumption and peril, analyzed their formation instantly.

The main force, with the leaders, is the hammer. The two flanking groups are the pincers. They want to drive me to the ravine and smash me.

A cold, tactical calm settled over him. He would not be driven. He would not be the prey in their trap. He would be the rust in the metal, the rot in the wood. He would dismantle the net, strand by strand, starting with the weakest link.

He focused on the spiritual signatures. The eastern group, led by the tracker Hou, was the most dangerous in terms of finding him. But the western group, led by the Lin Captain Lu, was the most conventional, the most reliant on discipline and formation. They were also slightly larger, noisier. Their confidence was a brittle shell.

Lin Feng flowed from the tree, his form a whisper of displaced mist. He began to move, not away from the western group, but in a wide, silent arc that would bring him behind their sweeping line.

Captain Lu was a good soldier. He followed orders. He kept his twenty men in a loose but connected skirmish line, each within sight of the next, advancing methodically through the undergrowth. They used standard hand signals, their weapons—mostly spears and swords—at the ready. They expected an ambush from the front, a sudden charge from the mist.

They did not expect the ground to betray them.

Lin Feng, from thirty yards behind their rearmost guard, pressed his hands to the damp earth. He didn’t drain it entirely. He performed a selective feast. He targeted the specific, brittle root systems of a patch of carnivorous Snap-Jaw Ferns that lay directly in the path of three advancing Lin clansmen.

The ferns, robbed of the stabilizing energy that let them lie dormant, instinctively reacted to the sudden imbalance. As the three enforcers stepped into the spot, the ground erupted. Thick, thorn-covered vines lashed out not with predatory intent, but with panicked, flailing spasms. They wrapped around legs, snagged armor, thorns biting through leather.

“Ambush! Ferns! To the right!” one man yelled, hacking at the vines.

The line stuttered, bunching inward toward the disturbance. Discipline held, but attention was fully focused on the botanical threat.

In that moment of collective distraction, Lin Feng struck. Not at the main group, but at the anchor point—the two men on the far-left end of the skirmish line, now slightly isolated as the line bulged right.

He used the Nine Phantom Steps. From the mist behind them, three afterimages of a dark figure seemed to flicker. The two guards spun, weapons raised, confusion breaking their focus. The real Lin Feng was already between them.

His hands shot out, a Chaos-Stealing Palm on each. Not a brutal, crippling drain, but a swift, deep drain. He felt their 4th and 5th Layer Qi Condensation cores shudder as a significant chunk of their cultivated energy was ripped away. It was a spiritual mugging, leaving them dizzy, weak, and gasping. He delivered two precise, qi-enhanced chops to the base of their necks. They dropped without a sound, unconscious, their vitality and a portion of their cultivation gone.

Lin Feng melted back into the mist, leaving the Snap-Jaw Ferns to continue their dying throes and the main group to rally around a non-existent threat. By the time Captain Lu realized two of his men were missing from the line, several minutes had passed.

“Halt! Form a circle! Check in!” Lu barked, his voice tight with sudden dread.

The count came up short. Two men. Vanished. No struggle, no cry.

A low, cold fear began to seep into the unit. This wasn’t a beast. Beasts attacked. This was a ghost that snipped threads from the tapestry of their formation.

In the eastern quadrant, Hou the tracker stopped dead. He knelt, his twitching fingers pressing into the soft clay. His eyes narrowed. “He’s here. He’s moving… not away. Circling.” He looked up, his river-stone eyes scanning the grey. “He’s hunting the western group.”

He signaled swiftly to his Deng trackers—a series of subtle hand gestures. They changed direction, not toward the ravine, but to cut across the forest to intercept whatever was stalking Captain Lu’s men. They moved with terrifying silence, becoming one with the forest’s own predatory stillness.

Lin Feng felt the shift. The eastern group’s energy signature had changed vector, moving to intercept. The tracker was good. Very good. The net was trying to re-knit itself, to close around him.

Time to cut another strand, and send a message.

He shadowed Captain Lu’s now-nervous group as they moved more slowly, in a tight defensive cluster. He needed to isolate one more. Not a grunt. A leader.

Opportunity came when Captain Lu himself moved to the edge of a small, murky stream to refill his waterskin, two guards flanking him.

Lin Feng acted from across the stream. He extended a hand, fingers expanded. Gasp of the Withering Root.

Five tendrils of devouring darkness shot across the water, silent as shadows lengthening. They didn’t aim for Lu. They wrapped around the ankles and wrists of the two flanking guards.

The effect was instant and horrifying. The tendrils didn’t constrict; they bonded, sinking dark, chaotic energy into the guards’ meridians. The men gasped as their qi was violently drained, and a creeping, grey necrosis spread from the points of contact up their limbs. They dropped, writhing silently, their skin turning the color of dead bark.

Captain Lu spun, his dao sword flashing out, severing the dark branches. They dissolved like smoke, but the damage was done. His guards were down, their cultivation and vitality savaged.

“SHOW YOURSELF, DEMON!” Lu roared, his voice cracking with fear and fury, his qi flaring in a defensive shell around him.

From the mist on the other side of the stream, Lin Feng finally stepped into view. He didn’t speak. He simply looked at Captain Lu, his eyes in the gloom holding that faint, chaotic swirl.

Lu’s blood ran cold. He’d known Lin Feng since he was a boy. The build was similar. The age was right. But the presence… this was not the crippled, quiet youth. This was something else wearing his shape, filled with a silent, cosmic hunger.

“Y-you…” Lu stammered, his battle resolve crumbling before the unnatural reality.

Lin Feng raised a single finger to where his lips would be beneath the high collar of his dark attire. A universal gesture for silence.

Then, he pointed past Lu, deeper into the woods, toward where the main force with Elder Tian was advancing. The message was clear: Your fight is not with me. Go. Tell him.

Before Lu could process it, Lin Feng was gone, vanished back into the mist as if he’d never been.

Captain Lu stood trembling over his withering men. The hunt had turned. They were not the hunters. They were the bait, the casualties, the message-bearers.

He fired a red flare-arrow into the sky—the signal for “contact, casualties.” Its bloody light pierced the grey mist, a stark warning to the other prongs of the net.

The net had been cast. But the shadow within it was not trapped. It was dissecting it, teaching it the meaning of fear, one vanished sentry, one withered guard at a time.

And it was now turning its attention toward the hammer at the net’s heart.