The secret passage was long and oppressive in its darkness. Only the heavy, overlapping breaths of two men echoed between the stone walls.
Not a word was spoken.
Not until Lin Mu carried the completely limp Old Ma back into that dim, cluttered shop did the silence finally settle — brief and suffocating.
Beneath the dim yellow oil lamp, Lin Mu looked at Old Ma's face — aged and slightly distorted by fear — and felt something rare stir in his chest.
A faint thread of guilt.
He parted his dry lips, intending to speak first, to offer some kind of apology and explanation.
But Old Ma raised a hand and beat him to it.
There was no explosion of fury as Lin Mu had expected. Only a deep, quiet calm.
Old Ma picked up the dry pipe from the table, packed in a pinch of tobacco, lit it, and drew a long, slow breath.
"Boy..."
He exhaled a thick curl of blue smoke. His raspy voice drifted through it, sounding almost distant.
"I've lived most of my life and seen more than my share of geniuses and fools. I know that with your kind of talent, this little Black Blood Stockade was never going to hold you."
His cloudy eyes settled on Lin Mu, stripped of their usual shrewd, mercenary edge.
"But this old man is going to presume on his years and say a few words to you."
"In this world where Gu Masters eat each other alive — be careful. Think three times before every step you take."
"The waters out there run deep. If you're not, then the best you can hope for is to end up looking like me."
"On the path of a Gu Master, one misstep and it's not just failure — it's the Dao extinguished, the body gone, nothing left but ash..."
Listening to Old Ma's words — words that came from somewhere genuine — looking at this old man who had given him everything he had to offer —
Lin Mu's eyes, in a rare and quiet moment, grew faintly warm.
In that instant, Old Ma's hunched, solitary silhouette seemed to blur and overlap with another figure from the pages of Reverend Insanity— a bearded Gu Master who had once offered nothing but pure, uncalculated kindness to Fang Yuan in the lowest depths of his previous life.
In a merciless and chaotic age, it was the rarest kind of light.
Lin Mu drew a slow breath. For once, he set aside every mask he wore.
He looked at Old Ma and spoke with quiet, unshakeable certainty.
"Don't worry, Old Ma."
"I, Lin Mu, have a hard life. I'll outlive you without question. When your day comes, I'll carry the coffin myself."
Old Ma blinked.
Then he slapped his knee and burst into laughter — loud, genuine, the kind that brought tears to the corners of his eye.
He jammed his pipe stem at Lin Mu and laughed through his bruises.
"You rotten little bastard! Still won't learn, will you? Hard-mouthed to the end! First thing out of your mouth and you're already cursing this old man to die!"
When the laughter finally ran its course, Old Ma waved his withered arm in a dismissive sweep — shooing him away like a fly.
"Alright. Same as I said before. No matter how high you fly from here — in this world, coming back alive is worth more than anything else."
"Go on, boy. That old snake Li Mang may be vicious, but when it comes to playing minds, he's no match for you."
"I'll take those words with me."
Lin Mu clasped his fists and bowed deeply.
He pushed open the shop's worn wooden door. The Grey Street and its amber lamplight were gradually swallowed by the closing door and left behind entirely.
What met him was the bone-cutting cold of deep autumn wind.
And the eyes hidden beneath the shadow of his bamboo hat slowly shed every last trace of warmth and softness, sharpening into something cold and keen as a hawk's gaze.
Beyond every mountain lies another. Beyond every sky, another sky.
Advancing in cultivation brought more than surging Primeval Essence and raw power. It brought a leap in perspective — a complete reshaping of how one saw the world.
Tonight, standing face to face with the terrifying pressure and power of Wuxiang, a Rank 4 Gu Master — what it left him was not merely the trembling of a man who had brushed against death.
Lin Mu felt no defeat. No fear.
What ignited instead, from the deepest reaches of his soul, was a towering, roaring will to fight.
If Rank 4 was already this terrifying, what was Rank 5? What was a Rank 6 Gu Immortal?
And beyond that — what were the Rank 9 Venerables who held heaven and earth in their grasp?
The ambition burning inside him — the hunger for power, for the realm of a Gu Immortal, for that supreme and legendary pinnacle that most dared not even dream of — was set fully ablaze in this moment by the cold wind.
"Since Heavenly Dao saw fit to send me into this world — brilliant and brutal in equal measure — and made me an insignificant variable in its grand design..."
Lin Mu strode through the dark alley, cloaked in night, like a supreme predator on the verge of breaking free from its cage.
"Then let me, Lin Mu, contend for this world within the rolling tides of fate."
"Let me become the one who holds the pieces — and moves them."
——
The wheel of time rolled forward without pause. Two days passed in the blink of an eye.
When the morning light spread once more across Black Blood Stockade, the entire mountain stronghold had already been draped in red and festooned with banners, plunged into a clamor and fervor unlike anything it had seen before.
The "Friendly Youth Exchange Tournament Between Two Stockades" — long prepared, then forcibly postponed by the arrival of the Jia Clan Caravan — had finally, on this day, officially begun.
From the highest Elder down to the lowest mortal servant, every face in Black Blood Stockade was flushed with excitement and pride.
The reason was simple.
Anyone with eyes could see that in this so-called friendly tournament, Black Blood Stockade held an overwhelming advantage.
They weren't just here to win face — they were here to grind White Bone Stockade's face into the dirt.
"White Bone Stockade came all this way just to hand over money and take a beating! We don't even have to pay for the venue — they're covering the prize pool too!"
"Naturally! After all, we have Young Master Lin Feng holding the line!"
"Young Master Lin Feng just made a high-profile exit from closed cultivation — a genuine Rank 2 middle stage cultivation base! What does White Bone Stockade have to answer that with?"
The spectator stands surrounding the plaza buzzed with overlapping voices.
Lin Feng — who had already shone brilliantly in the recent grand tournament and now openly displayed a Rank 2 middle stage cultivation — had become the undisputed first among Black Blood Stockade's younger generation, standing in a class entirely his own.
The entire stronghold's sentiment had lifted him onto a pedestal, surrounding him like stars around the moon.
But in sharp contrast to Black Blood Stockade's festive, blazing confidence — at the far end of the martial arena, a delegation was walking in slowly through the mountain wind.
The White Bone Stockade envoy.
At the front of the delegation walked the White Bone Stockade's young lord — Li Huang — his complexion pale, his eyes carrying a deep and venomous gloom.
He stared fixedly at the Black Blood Stockade banner snapping in the wind, his gaze filled with the festering resentment of a man who had once been outmaneuvered by Lin Feng and forced to flee in disgrace.
And ahead of him —
Seated at the center of the delegation, radiating a suffocating and savage pressure like an ancient god of violence, was White Bone Stockade's Patriarch himself.
Li Mang.
His expression was dark and still as stagnant water. Those eyes — burning like ghost-fire — swept in cold silence across the cheering, boiling plaza of Black Blood Stockade.
No one noticed that beneath the cover of his wide sleeves —
Li Mang's pale, claw-like hand was gripping the Bone Scepter — the inheritance token of the Black Bone King's "spine" — with white-knuckled, vein-bulging force.
The curtain had risen.