Inside the bone-white great hall, the ghost-fire swayed in a frenzy.
"It appeared! It really appeared!"
Ecstasy crashed over the peak Rank 3 Patriarch like a dam breaking, drowning his reason beneath the flood.
Before this, he had seized upon the perfect opportunity of Lin Cang's closed-door cultivation,his push for Rank 4 ,to repeatedly send elite scouts to harass and provoke along Black Blood Stockade's borders, at Copper Stone Gully and the Blood Forest.
To outside eyes, it looked like White Bone Stockade taking advantage of a weakened neighbor.
But only Li Mang himself knew the truth: every one of those costly incursions had been nothing more than a probe.
He had been using the Bone Scepter in his hands, the token representing the "spine", to sense for whatever secret lay buried beneath that land.
Yet even he had harbored no absolute certainty. Centuries of change could alter anything. Who could say whether the inheritance had survived intact?
But now, the scepter's resonance, stronger than anything he had ever felt from it — delivered iron-clad, irrefutable proof.
The inheritance was not only truly buried in the heart of Black Blood Stockade's territory. In that very instant just now, someone, or something — had fully activated it.
"Heaven favors my White Bone Clan! As long as I swallow that portion of the inheritance, never mind Rank 4, I could even."
A near-delirious grin split Li Mang's gaunt face. But the laughter barely reached his throat before it died.
Like a rooster mid-crow, suddenly seized by the neck.
The ecstasy held on his face for only a few short breaths before it froze, and shattered.
In its place came a cold that reached up from the depths of his soul, draining his aged face to the color of paper and beading his forehead with fine, cold sweat.
"Wait..."
Li Mang's pale-green pupils contracted sharply. His gaze locked onto the direction the scepter pointed, toward Black Blood Stockade.
He knew the inheritance had been activated. What he did not know was who now held that token.
A thought, terrifying enough to bring White Bone Stockade to utter ruin — coiled around his heart like a cold, venomous snake.
"Lin Cang... just emerged from closed-door cultivation. Successfully broke through to Rank 4..."
"And the inheritance was activated at precisely this moment..."
The timing was too perfect. Perfect enough to make his skin crawl.
"What if it was that old fox Lin Cang who got to it?"
Li Mang's entire body shuddered. A bone-deep chill swept through him.
If Lin Cang, fresh from breaking through to Rank 4, had followed the trail and unearthed the core inheritance token, the one representing the Black Bone King's "heart" or "torso", right there on his own territory... what would that mean?
It would mean Lin Cang had not only a crushing advantage in cultivation, but the deep foundations and supreme killer moves left behind by a peak Rank 5 great figure.
At that point, Black Blood Stockade's power would swell to a world-ending degree.
And White Bone Stockade, the nearest neighbor, the one that had just been forced to sign that humiliating treaty, would without question be the first sacrifice on Lin Cang's blade when he came to test its edge and begin annexing territory.
The temperature inside the great hall seemed to plunge below freezing in an instant.
"No... don't panic..."
Li Mang paced back and forth across the hall like a cornered beast.
The Bone Scepter struck the stone floor in an erratic rhythm, each sharp crack betraying the chaos raging within him.
In the past, he could have done what he always did — dispatched his most elite scout team, or sent his son Li Huang to lead them, at any cost, to infiltrate the heart of Black Blood Stockade and search for answers.
But that was no longer an option.
Lin Cang was now a genuine Rank 4 powerhouse. And Li Mang had already been forced to bow his head and sign that humiliating treaty of territorial concessions just to save his own life.
If he dared send scouts into Black Blood Stockade's heartland now and was caught, the wrath of a Rank 4 cultivator would obliterate him. White Bone Stockade would be stripped of its last shred of dignity.
But what truly suffocated Li Mang — what truly drove him to the edge of despair — was not the inability to gather intelligence.
It was the inheritance's lethal mutual resonance mechanism.
"I hold the Bone Scepter and can sense the general location of the other token..."
Li Mang stopped dead in his tracks and stared down at the scepter glowing in his grip. Cold sweat dripped from his jaw and struck the floor.
"If Lin Cang holds another token, can he not do exactly the same — sense the location of my Bone Scepter just as clearly as I sense his?"
This was an inescapable death sentence.
If Lin Cang truly had obtained a token, then with that Rank 4 powerhouse's arrogance and greed, he would eventually follow the Dao Mark resonance straight to Li Mang's door.
No matter how deeply Li Mang burrowed behind White Bone Mountain's defensive formations, he would be a turtle trapped in a jar.
Lin Cang wouldn't even need a justification — the primal instinct of inheritance devouring inheritance would be reason enough to level White Bone Mountain to rubble.
The countdown to death seemed to tick in his ears already.
"Hah... hah..."
Li Mang's breathing came in great, heaving pulls.
His aged eyes flickered with violent struggle — fear, hesitation. But in the end, every trace of weakness was consumed by the extreme, vicious ruthlessness of a Demonic Path tyrant backed into a corner.
His gaze became that of a starving wolf driven to the edge of a cliff — carrying the madness of one willing to burn everything down.
"Either way, it's death. Reach out and meet the blade. Shrink back and meet the blade."
Li Mang ground his teeth until his jaw ached, forcing the words out like a curse:
"I have no choice but to gamble. Stake White Bone Stockade's century of foundations. Stake this old life of mine. Gamble that the one who holds that token is not Lin Cang."
It was his only chance at survival.
As long as it wasn't Lin Cang — as long as it was some Rank 3 elder of Black Blood Stockade, or some inner disciple who had stumbled into a windfall — then with his peak Rank 3 cultivation, his half-step into Rank 4, and the Bone Scepter's amplification, he was absolutely certain he could crush them in an instant and seize that unknown inheritance token by force.
With two tokens in hand, even if Lin Cang was Rank 4, he would dare to meet him head-on and test their strength against each other.
For this one chance to turn the tables — to soar beyond all expectation — Li Mang resolved to make a desperate gamble.
"I can't trust anyone else with this, and no one else can pinpoint the exact location through the resonance. It seems this old man will have to make the trip himself."
There was only one path forward: he would take the Bone Scepter and slip quietly into Black Blood Stockade's territory.
The closer he got, the more precise the scepter's resonance would become, until he could pinpoint exactly who held the token.
But a new, and lethal, problem immediately presented itself.
He was a peak Rank 3 powerhouse. The vast, cold aura of a Gu Master at his level was like a lighthouse in the dead of night.
To cross that boundary without anyone noticing — to infiltrate the heart of Black Blood Stockade's territory — would mean treating a Rank 4 powerhouse and a hundred-year-old mountain-guarding formation as nothing.
One careless misstep that triggered the formation, and he would be surrounded and captured on the spot.
"How to break through this... how to slip past undetected..."
In the vast, empty hall, the ghost-fire drifted in silence.
The supreme ruler of White Bone Stockade stood like a withered statue, both hands gripping the trembling scepter, sunken deep into a frenzied, desperate contemplation.
A hundred li away, killing intent and calculation were weaving themselves into an invisible net, quietly drawing closed around Black Blood Stockade.
And yet, in a moment of sharp irony, the scene cut back to the eye of that storm.
Black Blood Stockade. Silent Stone District.
In that secluded but spacious new courtyard, Lin Mu — who had just broken through to Rank 2 and held in his hands the "entry key" to a peak Rank 5 great figure's inheritance — was lying on a wide bed covered in soft beast hide.
No vigilant guard. No anxiety at the approach of a great enemy.
He slept deeply and soundly, his breathing long and even.
In his dreams, he was contentedly calculating which black market he should visit tomorrow to gather the materials for refining the Blood Attraction Gu, mapping out the bright and blood-soaked road ahead of him as a Rank 2 Gu Master.
This man who was ordinarily so cautious — this so-called strategist — had, for once, fallen into a rare and almost comical blind spot.
The reason was simple, and almost absurd.
Lin Mu had only channeled Rank 2 Primeval Essence into the bone plate, forcibly awakening the Black Bone King's remnant will and obtaining the Bookworm and Photo-Audio Gu as his "instruction manual."
He had not yet gathered the expensive materials, and had not yet refined the Blood Attraction Gu to unlock the first layer of the inheritance.
Which meant that his Pitch-Black Bone Plate was, at present, nothing more than a half-activated one-way key.
It could not emit the powerful two-way resonance signal of Li Mang's Bone Scepter — a scepter that had been fully refined and nurtured over a long period of time.
The bone plate had simply acted like an alarm accidentally triggered — broadcasting a single one-way signal of "I am here" to the outside world before falling silent again, settling back into the depths of his Aperture.
Lin Mu had no idea that his single, extremely cautious probe of Primeval Essence had been like dropping a blood-soaked lure into the pitch-black depths of the ocean.
He had even less idea that the lure had already drawn in a peak Rank 3 Gu Master — one who had been driven to madness by the desperate need to survive.
The night wind moved through the weeds in the Silent Stone District courtyard, raising a soft, rustling sound.
This region — already churning with hidden currents since Lin Cang's breakthrough to Rank 4 — had, with the quiet emergence of the Black Bone King's inheritance, become a powder keg primed to detonate at the slightest touch.