MUTE BUT ALMIGHTY: Return of the Archmage

C6

"Hold him flat!" Senior Physician Marcus roared, his voice echoing across the damp flagstones of the Cursed Wing. "He is an infected cripple! The Vice-Patriarch ordered a full spinal extraction to protect the clan!"

Lucas did not scream as the two armored guards slammed his shoulders down onto the stone floor.

The cold iron gauntlets dug viciously into his collarbones, but Lucas kept his gaze locked on Marcus’s face. Behind the three physicians, a dozen lesser nobles and elders stood near the shattered entrance gate. Jessica stood among them, her silk dress gathered tightly in her hands as she watched with cold, distant eyes.

"His spiritual sea is entirely dry," Marcus declared loudly, turning toward the crowd of watching nobles so every word carried across the chamber. "The miasma has rotted his internal organs. He is permanently crippled, his meridians are beyond repair, and his presence here threatens the safety of the entire inner estate."

"Then execute the disposal procedure!" an elder called out from the back of the group. "Why waste medicine on a dead man?"

"We are performing a mandatory mana purge first," Marcus lied smoothly, raising the heavy brass rod in his right hand. "We must drain the dark energy lingering in his broken meridians before he is thrown into the mass grave."

Lucas felt the icy tip of the brass rod press directly against the base of his skull.

Marcus wasn't trying to drain dark energy. The brass rod was carved with an array meant to violently strip a cultivator's remaining life essence, tearing what little vitality they had straight out through their throat until their lungs collapsed.

"Damon sent you to finish his dirty work," Lucas said softly, his voice cutting through the noise of the room. "You call yourself a physician, yet you act as a butcher's dog."

"Shut your mouth, trash!" Marcus spat, his face turning red with sudden fury. "You are nothing! A coreless hound who lost his right to speak!"

Marcus activated the array.

ZZZZZT!

A harsh, jagged purple light burst from the brass rod, driving straight into the back of Lucas's neck.

Pain spiked through Lucas's brain like a white-hot needle, tearing at his central nervous system. He felt his blood boiling under the sudden, brutal pressure as the spell attempted to rip his life force out of his chest.

Lucas let the spell operate for one second. Two seconds. Three seconds.

He allowed the pain to sear his consciousness, establishing the exact geometric coordinates of Marcus's spell matrix in his mind. The array was crude—a sixteen-node suction loop built on unstable elemental vectors.

"Three seconds is enough," Lucas whispered.

Deep inside his left palm, the dormant golden lines awakened. A sharp, geometric sigil flared onto his skin beneath his fingers, spinning in a tight, silent counter-clockwise circle.

The ghost-sign.

The air around Lucas's hand distorted instantly, blurring space like intense heat shimmer above a furnace.

Flip.

With a subtle, lightning-fast twitch of his left index finger, Lucas mentally grabbed the anchor node of Marcus's brass rod and inverted its suction direction by one hundred and eighty degrees.

The purple light on the rod didn't just stop—it turned a blinding, violent crimson.

"What—" Marcus gasped, his eyes going wide with sudden, agonizing terror.

The spell reversed violently. Instead of drawing life force out of Lucas, the brass rod sucked every drop of Marcus's own cultivated mana directly out of his core and fed it straight into the feedback loop.

BOOM!

A sickening, wet explosion echoed through the silent hall.

The brass rod shattered into a hundred flying iron shards. The massive feedback wave tore through Marcus's right arm, instantly snapping his forearm bone in two and blowing his sleeve into burning rags. Blood and bone fragments sprayed across the stone floor as Marcus was thrown backward six feet, hitting the wall with a heavy thud.

"AAAAAHHHH!" Marcus shrieked, clutching his ruined, blood-dripping arm as he rolled on the floor in agony. "My arm! My core! My cultivation is destroyed!"

The entire hall fell into a dead, suffocating silence.

The two guards holding Lucas's shoulders froze, their hands trembling violently as they let go of him and scrambled back three steps in sheer horror. The watching nobles stared with wide, disbelieving eyes at the screaming head physician lying in his own blood.

Jessica's face went deathly pale. Her hands shook so hard her silk handkerchief slipped from her fingers and fell into the dust.

She looked at Marcus's shattered, bleeding arm, then looked at Lucas, who was slowly standing up from the floor. For the first time, a cold, sharp crack appeared in her composure. She had abandoned Lucas because Damon was strong and Lucas was broken. But Lucas hadn't even raised a weapon, and the strongest physician in the estate was lying half-dead at his feet. A sickening realization began to creep into her gut—she had chosen the wrong brother.

Lucas brushed the stone dust off his knees, his eyes cold as ice as he looked down at the weeping physician.

"Your spell structure was flawed, Senior Physician," Lucas said calmly, his voice echoing in the paralyzed silence. "You shouldn't handle tools you don't understand."

He raised his left hand slightly, flexing his fingers. The glowing ghost-sign on his palm faded beneath his skin, the spatial distortion smoothing out as if it had never existed.

In the shadows near the entrance of the wing, a quiet figure clad in gray robes shrank back against the wall. It was one of Damon's personal shadow scouts. The spy stared at Lucas's left hand, his breathing coming in fast, terrified hitches. He didn't care about Marcus's broken arm; his eyes were glued to the fading geometric light on Lucas's palm.

"The flicker..." the spy whispered to himself, his voice trembling with sheer panic. "It's the same flicker the assassins reported..."

Without making a sound, the spy turned and sprinted up the dark stone stairwell, rushing toward the patriarch's upper quarters.

In the high pavilion overlooking the main training grounds, Damon stood behind a carved wooden railing, his knuckles white as he gripped the polished stone.

The gray-robed spy dropped to his knees behind him, gasping for air as blood trickled from his nose from running too fast.

"Report!" Damon barked without turning around. "Is the cripple dead? Did Marcus complete the spinal extraction?"

"My Lord..." the spy stammered, his forehead pressed flat against the floor. "Marcus... Senior Physician Marcus failed. His right arm was completely shattered by a spell backlash."

Damon spun around, his face twisting into a hideous, purple mask of rage. "What did you say?! A spell backlash from a coreless trash who can't even hold a spirit stone?!"

"It wasn't a normal backlash, Young Master!" the spy wept, shivering violently. "I saw it with my own eyes! When Marcus activated the brass rod, Lancelot didn't fight back with physical force. A glowing mark appeared on his left palm—the flicker! The air around his hand bent like fire! He turned Marcus's own spell back into his body!"

Damon stepped forward and grabbed the spy by his collar, dragging him up to eye level. "A mark? What mark?!"

"A geometric sigil, My Lord!" the spy cried out. "The ghost-sign! It matched the description from the survivor of the Shadow Blade squad! He isn't using cultivated mana, Young Master! He's using something ancient!"

Damon threw the spy backward onto the floor, his breath coming in short, ragged bursts.

Cold sweat soaked through the back of his embroidered silk robe. Ever since the ancestral brand had failed on the dais, a dark, suffocating fear had been growing in his chest. He had stolen Lancelot's core, he had poisoned his meridians, and he had thrown him into the most lethal environment in the estate. Yet every time he tried to crush him, Lancelot turned the strike back with terrifying, effortless precision.

"He's hiding something in that wing," Damon muttered, his voice shaking with a dangerous mixture of envy and terror. "He's using the ancient array to rebuild himself."

Elder Vane stepped out from behind the decorative screen, his expression dark as a storm cloud. "If the Imperial Inspector sees him like this tomorrow morning, we are finished, Damon. Marcus is ruined, and half the lesser nobles saw the backlash. Questions are already spreading through the outer yards."

"I know!" Damon screamed, slamming his fist onto the marble table, shattering a crystal tea set into hundreds of flying shards. "I know!"

He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, his eyes narrowing into two venomous, murderous slits.

Public trials, poisoned needles, and hired assassins were no longer enough. As long as Lancelot drew breath, Damon's title as heir was built on sand. The only way to guarantee his own survival was to ensure Lancelot vanished completely before the sun rose over the mountains.

"No more games," Damon whispered, his voice dropping into a cold, lethal register. "No more physicians. No more low-level executioners."

He reached into his inner pocket and pulled out a heavy, blood-red obsidian token carved with the shape of a nine-headed serpent—the forbidden seal of the Blood-Core Annihilation Guard.

"Vane," Damon ordered, tossing the heavy red token onto the shattered table. "Take my personal blood token. Mobilize the four Blood Guardians. Tell them to activate the Crimson Boundary Formation around the Cursed Wing."

Vane gasped, his eyes wide with shock. "The Blood Guardians?! Damon, using them inside the estate without the Grand Ancestor's permission is high treason! If the elders find out—"

"If Lancelot lives until morning, we'll be executed for treason anyway!" Damon roared, grabbing Vane by his robes and pulling him close. "Collapse the entire Cursed Wing! Crush every stone, burn every piece of flesh to ash, and bury him forty feet underground! I want him dead!"

Vane swallowed hard, looking down at the red token on the table. He nodded slowly, picking up the heavy seal. "It will be done before dawn."

Damon turned back to the window, his chest heaving as he stared down at the foggy court yards.

"You won't make it to the Imperial Inspector, Lancelot," Damon growled into the dark night, his teeth grinding together until his jaw ached. "I will grind your bones into dust myself."

Down in the pitch-black depths of the Cursed Wing, Lucas sat on the stone floor, his legs crossed and his eyes closed.

The single thread of silver mana inside his chest had expanded. Guided by his precise structural calculations, it had split into eight distinct, glowing channels that circulated smoothly through his major nodes. His strength was recovering rapidly, fueled by the endless miasma he was absorbing from the surrounding environment.

He opened his eyes.

Sitting five feet away on an overturned wooden crate was a small, dusty iron box that Marcus had dropped when his arm was shattered.

Lucas extended his left hand. The ghost-sign flared faintly on his palm, and a invisible spatial vector grabbed the iron box, pulling it smoothly across the floor straight into his grip.

He snapped the weak lock off with his thumb and opened the lid.

Inside lay three black medicine pills, a small bag of high-grade spirit stones, and an official leather-bound ledger stamped with the seal of the Vice-Patriarch's treasury.

Lucas picked up the ledger and flipped it open to the last page.

His eyes narrowed as he read the blood-red ink written across the bottom line:

Transfer Record #402: 100,000 High-Grade Spirit Stones paid to the Shadow Pavilion for the immediate eradication of the True Sovereign Bloodline.