The elder's figure vanished into the darkness below the stairs, and his footsteps were soon swallowed by the rock walls.
Mo Feng crouched down, his fingers searching through the shattered metal fragments. He picked up a bloodstained gear and examined it in his palm. "The core is still there," he said. "As long as the crystal plate isn't damaged, we can get it moving again."
Chen Wuya stood behind him, Misaligned Force slowly circulating within his body. The golden patterns in his sea of consciousness had yet to fade, and that move, "Misaligned Bone Hand · Incomplete Form," was like a taut string, faintly scorching through his meridians. He stared into the dim passage ahead without speaking.
Mo Feng had already begun piecing the fragments together. He aligned the broken leg components and pressed them into a groove, then took a small bronze plate etched with runes from his robes and fitted it into the socket on the mechanism wolf's back. His movements were steady, though his knuckles had gone white from the force.
"My family has a method that lets dead things remember the scent of the living," he said quietly. "So long as it has touched that person before—even if it was only a single drop of blood—it can track them down."
With that, he bit his fingertip, and a drop of blood fell onto the bronze plate. The blood swiftly seeped into the engraved patterns, and the entire mechanism beast suddenly convulsed.
Red light flared within its eye sockets.
The next instant, the Iron Claw Wolf sprang up, landing on all fours. Its head tilted slightly, as though sniffing out some trace in the air. Then it shot forward, so fast it nearly left an afterimage.
Chen Wuya immediately followed, with Mo Feng close behind.
The passage