Stingy
It arrived as scheduled the day after tomorrow evening.
As afternoon approached, the mountain light gradually thinned and narrowed, shifting from bright white to pale gold, then to grayish-blue, until the last vestiges of twilight crept over the ridgeline, darkening the moss on the stone rooftops. Long Tian finished a final, close inspection of his belongings, then stretched his wrists and shoulders in the open space. Yu Jin stood beside him for a while, took off the stone pendant from his neck, weighed it in his hand, and put it back on, confirming for the third time that its knot was securely tied.
"Let's go."
The five-person team split up and descended the mountain according to the pre-arranged route. Long Tieshan and Shen Mo took the shortcut to the north towards the camp's supply route. When they parted at the fork in the road, neither of them spoke much, only nodding to each other before disappearing into the twilight and the shadows of the mountains. Mu Shuang led Long Tian and Yu Jin along the beast trail on the western ridge, walking faster than the previous two times, hardly stopping. Long Tian followed behind Mu Shuang, stepping on pine needles and moss. The Origin Return Pearl kept rotating slowly in his dantian to maintain the extremely faint grayish-white light film on his body, suppressing the fluctuations of his Soul Power to a minimum.
As night fell completely, the three arrived at the outskirts of the old brick kiln site in the northwest of the city. Mu Shuang crouched behind the broken wall and used a small mirror to reflect the direction of the camp for a few moments. After putting the mirror away, she made a hand gesture. From the angle of her gesture, Long Tian judged that there must have been some movement from the direction of the north wall—a very short metallic clanging sound could be faintly heard coming from the supply passage. It was carried by the wind across the open field for a short distance before it stopped, like a door being hastily closed and then someone blocking the bolt from the inside.
"They've drawn them away," Mu Shuang said in a very low voice, "Let's go."
As the three of them traversed the familiar alleyway of the old brick kiln and climbed into the maintenance corridor on the equipment floor, most of the wall lights in the corridor were off, leaving only two emergency lights casting a cold, dim red glow. Mu Shuang squatted in front of the main power switch and inserted three short iron wires into the holes. This time, she only turned it half a turn—not completely cutting off the power supply to the entire building, but only severing the sensor signal link between the three underground floors and the upper floors. The alarm system below the third floor was temporarily silent due to the broken link, while the lighting above the third floor remained normal, not attracting the attention of the staff on duty.
The airflow that rushed out when the vent cover was lifted was drier and hotter than before, carrying the smell of residual engine oil and dust from years of exposure to heat in the old pipes. The three of them crawled in one after another. Long Tian moved sideways in the pipe, the gray ring rune on his left hand continued to glow faintly, canceling out the residual shockwaves from the induction lines on the inner wall of the pipe. This time, the pipe did not encounter any forks or detours along the way, and continued smoothly to the end cover.
Mu Shuang silently removed the bolts securing the cover plate, lifted it open a crack, and looked outside. Outside was the backup area behind the equipment room. The lighting was a colder white than in the processing area; the walls were bare cement, and the floor was covered with non-slip industrial tiles. The main equipment room was about ten steps in front of the backup area, with a heavy gray iron door embedded in the wall. A ring of Soul Power array patterns was inlaid around the door frame, gleaming with a dark silver luster under the cold white light.
Level 6 restriction.
After sliding down from the ventilation duct to the ground, Long Tian quickly walked to the iron gate, took the key card from his clothes, and affixed it to the sensor area on the side of the door frame. The aura of the Origin Return Pearl flowed through his fingers into the card, and the runes on the back of the card suddenly lit up, emitting a low buzzing sound when they connected with the sensor area. The silver magic array pattern around the door frame receded from the middle to both ends, like two curtains being drawn back, retreating to the left and right edges of the wall, revealing the metal door panel in the center.
After the magic array patterns completely dissipated, the iron gate slid open a crack half a foot wide. A hotter, more stuffy stream of air surged out from the crack, carrying the continuous hum of mechanical operation and a faint remnant of Soul Power mixed with light and darkness.
Long Tian squeezed through the crack in the door, with Yu Jin close behind. The two stopped in their tracks as soon as they entered the equipment room—the core area was larger than they had imagined, about three or four zhang square and nearly two zhang high. In the center of the room stood a giant device composed of multiple layers of metal rings and intersecting conduits. A constantly rotating light membrane floated between the rings. The base color of the light membrane was grayish-white, very similar to the color of Long Tian's Origin Return Pearl, but golden and black light threads were constantly being peeled off from the edges, being transported outward at a uniform speed like a spinning wheel drawing silk from a silkworm cocoon. These light threads were collected by the conduits and guided into several sets of sealed containers arranged along the wall, with numbered labels on the surface of the containers.
The Reverse Fusion Device is running.
Yu Jin stood a step away from the device. The Origin Core spun faster automatically, and golden-black light uncontrollably seeped from his palm, tilting at a tiny angle toward the machine. His brows furrowed instantly, as if he were forced to listen to some kind of noise resonating with him through a thin wall. Long Tian reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder, transferring a strand of the Origin Return Pearl's energy to him, and only then did the tilted light in Yu Jin's palm recede.
"It's drawing in." The sound of the Yu Jin was tight. "Even without contact, it continuously absorbs the surrounding chaotic energy as it operates. If I get too close, I can feel a thin layer being torn away from the edge of its origin."
Long Tian walked around to the side of the device to observe its structure. A vertical metal core was connected to the axis of rotation of the light membrane between the multiple rings. Embedded in the base of the core was a gray crystal the size of a fist. Inside the crystal, a gray-white halo of the same origin as the Origin Return Pearl faintly flowed. That was the core control node of the entire machine. As long as that crystal was removed or broken, the light membrane of the Reverse Fusion Device would collapse.
"The crystal is the core." Long Tian shifted his gaze from the crystal to the sealed containers arranged along the walls—the light filaments inside those containers were slowly coalescing. "We need to remove the crystal first. Yu Jin, use your source to interfere with the rotation of the light membrane, making it stop absorbing the surrounding free chaotic energy the moment the crystal is removed, preventing the protection mechanism from being triggered."
Yu Jin nodded, placing his palms flat on the metal surface of the outer ring. The golden-black Power of Origin seeped into the ring from his palms, and the moment it touched the edge of the light membrane, the rotation of the membrane abruptly halted, as if a piece of gravel had gotten stuck between gears. Yu Jin's face paled, but he gritted his teeth and continued to push the primal power deeper, causing more golden-black light threads to Entanglement the outer edge of the light membrane, forming a slowing band.
Long Tian squatted beside the core pillar base, his right hand covered by the grayish-white halo of the Origin Return Pearl. He reached into the slot inside the base and slowly pulled the crystal out. A harsh scraping sound came from the joint between the crystal and the base, and a large amount of grayish-white fragments of light burst out from the gaps and scattered into fine dust in the air. The light membrane trembled violently the moment the crystal was separated from the base, and the primordial band of the Yu Jin was shaken open with several cracks. He groaned and a trickle of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth, but his hands remained pressed on the ring without letting go.
The crystal was completely removed. The light from the membrane dimmed rapidly, and the grayish-white base layer, after fading to transparency, disintegrated into countless tiny stardust fragments, falling from the gaps between the rings like a miniature Xue Beng compressed within the room. The golden-black light filaments in the sealed containers arranged along the wall, having lost the pull of the membrane, ceased to condense and slowly dissipated into free-floating Soul Power dust, seeping out wisps from the vents in the container walls and diluting in the stuffy air of the equipment room.
As Long Tian stood up, clutching the crystal in his palm, he felt the Origin Return Pearl suddenly light up in his dantian, as if it had been responded to from afar. The residual halo on the surface of the crystal resonated briefly with the aura of the Origin Return Pearl; their pulses synchronized and then separated within a few very short breaths. He wrapped the crystal in a thick cloth and tucked it into his clothes.
Yu Jin withdrew his palms from the circular wall, the skin on the back of his hands reddened from the residual heat of the metal, his palms trembling slightly. He wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth, looked up at Long Tian, and nodded.
Mu Shuang tapped lightly twice on the door of the equipment room with her short blade. It was the agreed-upon signal to withdraw—less than half of the three-quarters of an hour window remained. When Long Tian squeezed back into the standby area from the door of the equipment room, Mu Shuang had already reopened the vent cover. She was half-crouching on the edge of the cover, gesturing towards the ductwork.
As the three of them crawled into the pipe one by one, Long Tian turned back for one last look at the gray iron door. The magic array patterns on the iron door closed again after the key card was taken, and a dark silver light slowly spread back from around the door frame, sealing the dissipating light filaments and debris inside the equipment room behind the door. His vision was completely blocked by the dark walls at the corner of the pipe, and the iron door completely disappeared into the darkness behind him.
The entire process of retreating from the ventilation duct back to the maintenance passage, passing through the narrow passage in the city wall, and climbing over the gap in the iron fence was completed a quarter of an hour faster than expected. Mu Shuang fired a short signal flare towards the north from the wilderness on the outskirts of the city. The dark red arc of light rose into the night sky and then went out. A moment later, two figures approached quickly from the shadows in the direction of the wasteland— Long Tieshan and Shen Mo were both unharmed. Shen Mo's left sleeve was missing a piece of fabric, but his arm was uninjured. Long Tieshan's breathing was heavier than when he set off, but his steps were steady.
Without lingering, the group retreated along their pre-arranged routes into the depths of the wilderness. Long Tian draped Yu Jin's arm over his shoulder, and the two moved swiftly through bushes and ditches toward the Heavenly Wolf Mountain Range. Behind them, the lights of Spirit City gradually shrank into a blurry, warm yellow halo as they receded into the distance, their outlines blurred by the low-hanging night fog.
When they reached the familiar pine Long Tian slowed his pace, setting Yu Jin down to rest against a tree trunk for a moment. Yu Jin, panting, watched as the red marks on the back of his hand, burned by the metal wall, slowly faded in the night breeze. His Origin Core returned to a steady rotation in his dantian, and the connection between the halo of the Third Ring and the outer two rings was tighter than before entering the equipment room, as if a high-intensity external force had actually pressed some previously loose seams even more firmly.
Long Tian sat down on a nearby rock, took the cloth-wrapped crystal from his clothes, and unfolded it in his palm. The remaining grayish-white halo on the crystal's surface shone with a warm, ethereal light in the night, continuously resonating faintly with the Origin Return Pearl in his dantian through the fabric, like two grains of sand vibrating gently in their respective positions with the same rhythm. He wrapped the crystal again and put it away, then looked up at the small patch of starry sky above the pine forest, fragmented by the tree canopy. The stars were cold and bright, and the wind blowing from the mountain ridge carried the astringent scent of pine needles and the chill of the remaining snow in the distance.
Yu Jin leaned against the tree trunk, gazing at his profile. After a while, he also looked away and up at the same starry sky between the tree canopy. Neither of them spoke. The wind in the forest gently stirred the fabric of their clothes on their shoulders, then calmed down for a moment, like turning a very thin page of a book.