Chapter 110: The Scum Bastion and the Shadow Weaver
The Scum Bastion did not welcome them; it swallowed them.
As the Morningstar squad descended the hill toward the gates of the frontier city, the industrial noise became a solid wall. There were no guards in gleaming armor inspecting caravans, nor Empire-level detection formations. The massive rusted iron gates were wide open, guarded by underpaid mercenaries who collected the "blood tax"—two low-grade spiritual stones—from anyone wishing to enter who didn't look lethal enough to kill them.
Kael tossed a small pouch with the trackers' coins directly at the chest of one of the mercenaries. The man caught the pouch, weighed the contents, and upon seeing Kael's frigid glare and golden eyes shining beneath his hood, looked away and motioned them through. In the Bastion, respect was earned through fear.
Once inside, the assault on the senses was total.
The streets were a suffocating labyrinth of narrow alleys paved with rubble. Buildings of adobe, corrugated metal, and volcanic stone were piled on top of each other at impossible angles, linked by suspension bridges where venomous beast pelts hung to dry. The air was thick, saturated with coal smoke, cheap incense to mask the smell of sewage, and the chemical effluvia of thousands of clandestine alchemical cauldrons boiling in basements.
"Keep the formation tight," Kael ordered via a ground-level Qi transmission. "Varian, watch the rooftops; there are too many eyes in this fog. Bren, cover our rear. Don't let anyone get closer than two meters."
"Understood," Bren grunted. The giant adjusted his cape over his newly reconnected shoulder. His immense figure acted as an icebreaker through the motley crowd of smugglers, assassins, demi-humans, and desperate merchants crowding the main street.
They did not head to an inn. Inns had registries and owners who sold information for a few coins. The Morningstar squad operated under the doctrine of isolation in hostile territory.
Elara guided the group toward the western slums, the "Rust Sector," where the chemical fog was thickest and mercenary patrols dared not enter. They found an old, abandoned foundry, a shell of black stone and fallen chimneys.
"This will do," Kael said.
Bren pushed the heavy rusted metal doors open, and the team entered. Immediately, the giant channeled his earth Qi and melted the hinges of the main door, sealing it from the inside with obsidian. Varian moved nimbly around the perimeter, stringing invisible wind energy tripwires at ankle and neck height across all possible entrances. Anyone attempting to infiltrate their safehouse would be sliced to pieces without making a sound.
"Perimeter secured," Varian reported, dropping from a roof beam.
The team gathered in the center of the room, around a cold casting pit. The adrenaline had worn off, revealing the true exhaustion of their bodies.
Eris sat on a rusted anvil, rubbing her temples. Her skin was still pale. Violeta sat cross-legged on the floor. When she looked up, Kael could clearly see the duality of her gaze. Her left eye glowed with an intense neon violet, while the right flashed with diamond blue. Both eyes functioned perfectly, but the fine red lines of burst capillaries around her scleras showed the biological toll her mind paid for constantly processing the geometric "fractures" of space.
"We're safe for now, but we are stranded," Kael began, unrolling a worn map onto the floor, stolen from the mercenaries at the barricade. "Here is the plan. Walking from the Scum Bastion to the northern border, crossing back into the desert or toward Golden Oasis, would take us over a month. The Patriarch does not have a month. The Heavenly Sword Sect and the Alchemy Pavilion are already deploying nets. Soon they will close all land routes."
"We need a dimensional jump," Elara concluded. "But we can't use the city's official arrays. They will check our spatial rings and search us."
"Exactly," Kael nodded. "We need the black market. An array smuggler. Someone with the technical capacity to alter spatial coordinates and send us south, near the neutral desert, without registering the jump on the continent's network. But we don't know anyone in this pit."
"Then we go out and hunt for someone who does," Bren said, cracking the knuckles of his good hand.
Kael stood up, adjusting Whisper of the North on his back.
"Elara and I will go out. Bren, Varian, secure the safehouse and protect Eris and Violeta. Do not open unless you hear the cradle code. We will be back before nightfall."
Hunting for information in the Scum Bastion didn't require politely asking questions in noisy taverns. It required finding the dirtiest link in the food chain and suffocating them in the shadows.
Kael and Elara infiltrated the "Flesh Market," a dimly lit alleyway where cultivation slaves and stolen beasts were trafficked. They watched from a rooftop until they located their target: a fat, pale man, covered in shiny gold rings, leading a group of thugs. A middleman. Someone who connected the desperate with powerful criminals.
When the middleman separated from his guards to slip into a side alley to relieve himself, the hunt ended in three seconds.
Elara dropped from the sky in absolute silence, her [Frost Mist] enveloping the man's head before he could scream, freezing his throat. Kael appeared from the shadows, grabbed the man by the collar of his silk tunic, and slammed him violently against the rotting brick wall.
The man's eyes went wide, attempting to channel his Stage 4 Origin Qi to defend himself, but suddenly, he felt a mountain of steel crash down upon his mind.
Kael didn't hit him. He simply released a fraction of his [Sovereign's Will], channeling his Sword Intent directly into the terrified eyes of the trafficker. The man felt an invisible blade slice his neck, suffocating his soul. His resistance shattered.
"I won't kill you if you give me a name," Kael whispered, his voice low and raspy, the sound of scraping obsidian. "I need a way out of this city. A clandestine, long-range array jump to the southern badlands. I need the best spatial architect this city's black market can hide. Give me the name, and you live."
The man trembled violently, tears of pure terror streaming down his cheeks as Elara's freezing mist froze his breath.
"The... The Weaver!" the middleman babbled, almost choking. "They call him the Weaver! He runs the Black Lotus Casino in the underground level of the Rust District. He... he alters arrays! He's the only one who can make a blind jump without being detected!"
Kael slightly loosened his grip.
"The Black Lotus. Good. If you've lied to me, I will return, and my partner's frost will be the least of your worries."
Kael let go, dropping him into the alley mud, and both vanished into the shadows before the middleman could catch his breath.
Two hours later, the full squad—minus Varian and Bren, who stayed behind guarding the rear at the safehouse—stood before the doors of the Black Lotus Casino.
The place didn't look like a luxury casino, but rather an underground fortress built into the foundations of an old mine. The steel doors were heavily guarded, but physical guards weren't the real problem.
"It's a closed network," Violeta murmured.
They were hidden in the adjacent alley. Violeta's neon violet eye and diamond blue eye glowed faintly in the dark. Despite a constant headache, her geometric vision dissected the entrance.
"There are intruder detection arrays embedded in the walls, floor, and ceiling. They register thermal signatures, Qi fluctuations, and invisibility. If we try to force our way in or use Elara's mist, the alarms will seal the sector and gas the tunnel in two seconds."
"Can you disable them?" Kael asked.
Violeta didn't smile, but cold concentration dominated her face.
"I don't need to disable them. I just need to move them out of the way."
They advanced toward the solid stone wall, ten meters from the main entrance. Violeta raised her right hand. She made no grandiose gestures. Her index finger, glowing with a very faint platinum hue, traced an imaginary line in the air.
She didn't "hack" the runes; she felt the tectonic faults in the wall's spatial construction. She knew exactly where the arrays were "woven" into space.
She pressed her finger against the wall.
There was no explosion. Space in front of them simply "folded," as if Violeta had pulled back an invisible curtain. The stone wall and the lethal security arrays it contained arched outward into the fourth dimension, creating a perfect tunnel-hallway, clear of any detection.
Kael and Eris followed her, literally walking through the security wall of the city's most heavily protected casino without a single alarm going off. Violeta closed the spatial "curtain" behind them, and the wall became solid once more.
"Chilling," Eris murmured, impressed by her younger sister's monstrous efficiency.
They moved through the maintenance tunnels, guided by Violeta's spatial perception, until they reached the upper catwalks overlooking the casino's VIP room. Below, in a luxuriously decorated glass office, lit by spheres of golden light, was their target.
The Weaver was an older man, dressed in impeccable robes embroidered with silver threads, sitting behind an immense desk of black wood.
But the Morningstar squad wasn't alone. Someone had beaten them to it.
Kael's blood ran cold when he recognized the intruders' uniforms.
Three men stood in front of the Weaver's desk. Two of them wore the blue robes and chainmail armor of the Heavenly Sword Sect.
But it was the third man who exuded danger. He wore immaculate silver robes, no armor, and carried a straight sword sheathed on his back. His aura was suffocating, cold, and sharp—that of an expert at Stage 8 of the Origin Realm. He was an Inquisitor. A high-ranking Executor.
Kael signaled for them to stop on the dark catwalk, straining to listen.
"...I don't care how much the smugglers pay, Weaver," the Inquisitor was saying, his voice resonating with deadly arrogance, as the toe of his boot crushed the chest of a casino bodyguard lying dead on the floor. "There was a spatial collapse in Thunder Valley three days ago. The Stellar Dragon Root was stolen by an unknown elite squad. The Supreme Ancestor is furious. They must have fled. And if they fled quickly, they needed an unregistered array."
The Inquisitor leaned over the desk, his eyes fixed on the Weaver, who was sweating profusely.
"I want the logs of all the clandestine, long-distance dimensional jumps you've programmed toward the neutral borders or the south in the last seventy-two hours. And I want the logs from the tracking arrays that, I know very well, you secretly embed in those jumps."
Kael's heart raced.
The Weaver didn't just create portals; he put trackers on them. If the Inquisitor accessed those logs, the Morningstars' escape route would not only be blocked, but their future movements would be completely exposed. The Heavenly Sword Sect was methodically hunting them down, closing the net faster than they had calculated.
If that Inquisitor left that room with the information, the entire city would become a death trap, and True Saints would descend upon them.
Kael looked at Eris and Violeta. His golden eyes hardened, stripped of any humanity, reflecting only the cold logic of the Sovereign.
He raised two fingers, pointing at the lesser guards, and then pointed at himself, fixing his gaze on the Stage 8 Inquisitor.
The mute message was crystal clear.
They had to kill the Inquisitor. In the office. In absolute silence. Before he made a sound or sent a transmission talisman.
The urban hunt had reached its climax. The obsidian blades slid from their sheaths without a whisper, as the wolves prepared to leap from the catwalk toward their prey's throat.