Chen Mo looked through the Shadow Puppet's eyes.
It was a fist-sized, dark-red sphere, smooth and rounded, like a heart freshly gouged from a chest cavity, still faintly throbbing.
With every beat, a layer of dark-red light surfaced across the sphere. Within that glow, countless tiny faces could vaguely be seen howling.
The Shadow Puppet bearing Chen Mo's spiritual sense passed through the crowd of yin souls, walked to the middle of the ashes, picked up the sphere, then turned and vanished into the darkness.
The other seven Shadow Puppets continued deeper in with the fierce ghosts.
He withdrew his attention from the core and refocused on the depths of the tunnel.
The tunnel grew narrower and its ceiling lower. Great swathes of black patterns began appearing on the rock walls to either side, spreading outward from the depths.
The air was thick with the pungent smell of sulfur.
After another incense stick's worth of walking, the Shadow Puppet rounded a bend, and the view suddenly opened up.
This was a vast natural cavern, more than ten zhang high. Its ceiling was jagged with fangs, stalactites hanging upside down like a forest of blades.
The rock walls around the cavern were covered in those black patterns, packed so densely they had reached an extreme.
At the very center of the cavern, an underground river flowed out of the darkness.
The river was not wide, only around three zhang across. Its water was black as ink, with no bottom visible at all.
At one side of the cavern, a humanoid monster was bound in iron chains.
It stood roughly seven feet tall, gaunt in frame but large-boned. In life, it had likely been a tall man.
Its skin was a deep bluish-black, stretched tightly over its bones and outlining the contours