Dragonblood Chaos Heir

Chapter 25: The Echo of a Falling Tower

Dust settled over the central plaza like a shroud of grey snow. The collapse of the Northstar Clock Tower—a landmark that had marked Verdant Cloud City’s hours for two centuries—was more than a physical destruction. It was a psychic blow. The screaming panic had subsided into a stunned, murmuring dread as guards and citizens dug through the rubble for survivors. The confrontation between Lei and Deng was utterly forgotten, scattered like leaves before the avalanche.

Lin Feng watched from the roof of a nearby spice warehouse, his metallic shell-aura carefully rebuilded. His heart was a steady, cold drum in his chest. He hadn't felt Shej's energy signature extinguish in the collapse. The hunter was tough, resourceful. He’d likely survived. But his mission, clean, logical assessment, was buried under ten tons of symbolic ruin. The message was sent.

Now, he had to listen for the echo.

He didn't wait long. The ozone-and-iron scent re-emerged from the rubble pile an hour later, weaker, jagged at the edges, but burning with a new, cold intensity. Not the calm pursuit of a puzzle-solver. This was the focus of a provoked predator. Shej had been upgraded from an analyst to an enemy.

Good.

Let the Lei Clan know their tool had been damaged. Let them feel the first sting of consequence for reaching into the shadows with greedy hands.

But Lin Feng's primary target wasn't the hunter, or even the Lei Clan. Not directly. His father's final words echoed: "The chaos must have a heart." He had settled the blood debt. He had rejected the role of a weapon for hire. What was left?

The Deng Clan. They were the co-conspirators in his father's poisoning. They had provided the resources, the political backing for Tian's coup. Their ore had fueled his uncle's regime. Their hands were just as dirty, even if the poison hadn't been in their vial.

And now, thanks to his planted message, they were off-balance, paranoid, and lashing out. They were a wounded, angry beast. Dangerous, but predictable.

He needed to finish them. Not just for vengeance, but to cleanse the board. To remove another pillar of the corrupt old order. And in doing so, he would send a second, even clearer message to the watching Lei Clan and the trembling city: The Ghost’s records includes all collaborators.

He spent the rest of the day in motion, a phantom gathering intelligence. He used his remaining coins to buy drinks for off-duty city guards near the barracks, listening to their scared, gossip-laden talk.

"The Deng have pulled everyone back to their main compound and the mines outside the city."

"Lei Zong’s offering'assistance' with the tower collapse investigation—snake offering to help find its own tail."

"Word is,Deng Lei is furious. Thinks the Lei orchestrated the whole thing, the message, the tower, everything. He's not thinking straight."

"The mines…they say Deng’s got a private force of Earth-Shaper cultivators out there. Nasty lot. They’re on high alert."

The mines. The Earth-Spine Mines. The source of the Deng Clan’s wealth and power. Their fortress outside the city walls. That was their heart. Not the sullen compound in the city.

That night, under a moon hidden by the lingering dust haze, Lin Feng left Verdant Cloud City. He moved like a wind through the darkened fields, toward the low, brooding hills to the northwest. The Earth-Spine Mines weren't hidden; they were a blight. A series of gaping pits and slag heaps carved into the flesh of the hills, illuminated even at night by the cold, chemical glow of spirit-lanterns. The air here tasted of crushed rock, flamy chemicals, and a deep, grinding misery.

He observed from a ridge. The main mining compound was a walled fortress at the base of the largest pit. Guard towers. Patrols. The earth here vibrated with a constant, sub-aural hum of machinery and concentrated earth-attribute energy. It was a harder target than the Lin compound had been. More disciplined. More fortified.

A direct assault would be suicide, even for him. He needed to be not a storm, but a cancer.

He focused his senses, filtering out the noise, seeking the flows. The energy of the raw ore being hauled from the deep pits. The refined spirit stones being stockpiled. The waste being dumped. The movements of men and machines.

He found his point of insertion not at the walls, but at the tailings pond—a vast, toxic lake of grey sludge, the runoff from the ore processing. It was lightly guarded, a place of stench and despair, not value.

Lin Feng slipped into the foul, lukewarm water without a ripple. His chaotic qi circulated, neutralizing the immediate toxins. He swam across the pond to where a large iron pipe, crusted with mineral deposits, pour out a continuous stream of waste into the pond. It came from the main processing mill.

He placed his hands on the pipe. He didn't try to break it. He focused the Chaos-Stealing Palm into its most subtle, insidious form. Not to drain, but to suck from within. He injected a thread of his mercurial-chaotic energy into the flow of slurry inside the pipe. The energy was designed not to cause an explosion, but to disrupt the spiritual stability of the crushed ore residue.

This energy would travel back up the pipe, into the milling machines. Any low-grade spirit stones or ore fragments passing through those machines in the next few hours would have their energy patterns subtly, fatally destabilized. They wouldn't explode immediately. They would become… volatile. Unreliable. A spirit stone that might release its energy in a sudden, uncontrolled burst when used.

He spent an hour at the pipe, injecting tiny, measured pulses of chaotic corruption into the waste stream. A slow poison for the Deng Clan’s economic heart.

Next, he moved to the perimeter. He found a section of the wall where a patrol passed at regular intervals. He waited in the shadows of a slag heap. As two Deng guards passed, muttering about the troubles in the city, he struck.

Not to kill. He used the Gasp of the Withering Root, but in its lightest, most gentle form. The dark twigs brushed their ankles, leaving not a withering mark, but a spiritual itch, a persistent, nagging feeling of being drained, of weakness, that no amount of rest would cure. It would sap their morale, their vigilance. A thousand tiny cuts on the clan’s spirit.

He slipped over the wall in the momentary gap between patrols, his movements a blur. Inside the compound, he became a ghost. He sabotaged machinery not by breaking it, but by placing tiny, unstable fragments of his own chaotic qi into gearboxes and spirit-stone conduits. They would cause unpredictable, frustrating breakdowns.

He found the main ore stockpile, a mountain of raw, glowing stone under a vast shed. Here, he was more direct. He placed his hands on the pile and performed a wide-area, shallow drain. He didn't take enough from any one stone to be noticeable, but he skimmed the very top layer of energy from the entire mountain. It was a massive quantity of crude earth energy that flooded into his dantian, causing the vortex to swell and spin with furious joy. The ore pile dimmed just perceptibly, its value decreased by perhaps five percent—a catastrophic financial loss in bulk, but not immediately obvious.

He was a thief, a saboteur, a poisoner. He wasn't here for a glorious battle. He was here to demonstrate that the Deng Clan was not a fortress, but a body, and he was a toxin in its bloodstream.

His final target was the command center, a stout, two-story building of stone at the compound's heart. He could feel the dense, angry aura of Deng Lei inside, along with several other powerful cultivators.

He didn't approach the door. He climbed the outer wall, clinging like a spider, until he reached a shuttered window on the upper floor. Through a crack, he saw a war room. Deng Lei stood over a map, his face purple with rage, surrounded by his captains.

"—the Lei are behind it! The message, the tower, it's all a ploy to make us look weak while they grab what's left of the Lin remains!" Deng Lei snarled.

"Patriarch," a cautious captain said, "the Ghost's methods… they don't match the Lei's style. The tower collapse… it was chaos. The Lei prefer—"

"I DON'T CARE WHAT THEY PREFER!" Deng Lei slammed his fist on the table, cracking the wood. "We are under attack! From within and without! I want the guards at the city compound doubled! I want our shipments to the Azure Cloud Sect accelerated! We need their protection! And I want that sniveling Lei steward who came sniffing yesterday thrown into a holding cell! Send a message!"

So, the alliance was truly shattered. Paranoia was consuming them from within. Perfect.

Lin Feng took from his pouch a single item: one of the devalued, mid-grade spirit stones from the Lin undercroft. Using a sliver of his own chaotic will, he imprinted a simple, silent message onto its energy matrix—a message that would be felt, not read, by any cultivator who handled it: "Your ore turns to dust. Your alliances are ash. You are next."

He slipped the stone through the crack in the shutter. It landed with a soft tap on the floorboards behind the arguing men.

One of the captains turned, frowning. He walked over, picked up the stone. As his fingers closed around it, he flinched, his face going pale. He felt the message, the sheer, alien hatred in the energy. He looked at the stone, then slowly, dread dawning on his face, looked toward the shuttered window.

Lin Feng was already gone, melting back over the wall and into the night.

He didn't look back as he left the mining compound. Behind him, he left a fortress sown with doubt, its wealth slightly diminished, its machinery cursed with impending failure, its leader spiraling into paranoid rage, and its men feeling an inexplicable, creeping weakness.

He hadn't slain a single Deng clansman.

But by dawn, the Earth-Spine Mines would be a place of whispered curses, malfunctioning equipment, and financial reports that would make Deng Lei’s blood run cold. The Deng Clan would be crippled, not by a sword, but by a sickness they couldn't diagnose or cure.

As he crested the ridge back toward the city, the first faint glow of pre-dawn lightening the sky behind him, he felt the ozone-and-iron signature again. Fainter, but moving. Searching the outskirts of the city, methodical, relentless. Shej was still hunting.

Lin Feng allowed himself a cold, grim smile. Let him hunt. Let them all hunt the Ghost in the ruins and the shadows.

They were looking for a monster in the dark.

They hadn't realized the dark itself was now his ally. And it was patiently, inevitable, swallowing them whole.

The echo of the falling tower was still ringing. And in the mines, a new, deeper tremor had just begun.