The plan was simple. That was what made it dangerous.
Su Chen laid it out in the war council chamber, his finger tracing a circle on the map. "The Seeker needs blood. Strong blood. Yours is the strongest within fifty li. If you make yourself visible—vulnerable—he will come."
Cain stood across the table, Su Yao beside him. Xiao Lian waited by the door, her new senses stretched toward the eastern forest. Yin Wuji leaned against the wall, drinking.
"Where?" Cain asked.
"The old watchtower. Two li south of our border. Close enough for us to reach in an emergency, far enough that he won't suspect an immediate trap." Su Chen's voice was calm, but his knuckles were white. "Two of our elders will be positioned half a li behind you, concealed. When he commits, they will close the net."
"He's Core Formation," Cain said. "He'll sense them."
"Not if they move before he arrives and hold position. At half a li, his blood sense won't penetrate their concealment formations—not if he's focused on you."
*If. Too many ifs.*
"And if he doesn't take the bait?"
"Then we try something else." Su Chen looked at him. "But he will. His dagger is depleted. He needs fresh blood to recharge it. And he knows you're wounded—the cut on your chest hasn't fully healed. He'll see you as weakened. Tempting."
*He's right. The Seeker's pride will do half the work.*
"I'll go at dusk," Cain said. "Make camp at the tower. Visible. Alone."
"Not alone." Su Yao stepped forward. "I'll be there. Concealed. If he attacks, I can disrupt his concentration—buy time for the elders."
Su Chen hesitated. Then he nodded. "Xiao Lian stays at the sect. Her senses are too new; he might feel her watching."
Xiao Lian looked like she wanted to argue. Through the progenitor bond, Cain felt her frustration—hot and sharp. But she held her tongue.
"One more thing." Yin Wuji pushed off from the wall. "The Seeker's dagger feeds on blood. If you wound him—draw his own blood—the blade will turn on him. It's the only weakness I know."
"I remember."
"Good. Because I won't be there to remind you." Yin Wuji's gold-toothed grin was thin. "I'll be with the elders. Waiting."
---
Dusk painted the watchtower in shades of rust and shadow.
Cain sat on the tower's second level, visible from the road, his wounded chest bare to the cooling air. The cut from Han Xian's dagger was still raw—a pink line that throbbed when he moved. He'd left it unbandaged. Let the Seeker see it. Let him smell the blood.
*Come on. You know you want it.*
His blood sense stretched outward. Half a li to the north, two Core Formation signatures held perfectly still—Elder Tao and another, their qi suppressed to near nothing. A quarter li east, hidden in a bamboo grove, Su Yao waited with her flute.
And somewhere south, a cold presence was moving toward him.
*He took the bait.*
Cain stood, making a show of stretching. His hand rested on the blood blade he'd manifested—visible, threatening. The message: *I'm ready. But I'm also alone.*
The cold presence stopped at the tree line. Waiting. Watching.
*He's checking for traps. Good. Let him check.*
Cain sat back down. Picked up a piece of dried meat. Ate it slowly. The performance of a man who thought he had nothing to fear.
---
Han Xian stepped into the tower's base as the last light bled from the sky.
"You're either very brave or very stupid," the Seeker said. His dagger was drawn, its glow faint—depleted, but not dead. "Camping alone. Wounded. In my territory."
"Your territory?" Cain didn't turn. "I thought you were just passing through."
"I was. Then you became interesting." Han Xian climbed the stairs, slow and deliberate. "Blood Condensation in record time. A progenitor bond. Allies who shouldn't trust you. You're not like the others I've killed."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"It wasn't."
He was ten feet away now. Cain could feel the dagger's hunger—a pull on his blood nucleus, like a leech trying to attach.
*Now.*
He dissolved into blood mist.
The dagger swept through empty air. Han Xian's eyes narrowed—but he didn't retreat. He spun, the blade tracing a circle, forcing Cain's mist to scatter.
"You think I haven't seen this trick?" The Seeker's voice was cold. "Every blood cultivator thinks mist form makes them invincible. It doesn't."
He pressed his free hand to the dagger's blade. Blood—his own—flowed from his palm into the weapon. The glow flared, bright and hungry.
*He's recharging it. With his own blood.*
The mist burned. Cain reformed ten feet away, gasping. His blood nucleus throbbed.
"That's new," he said.
"I adapt." Han Xian advanced. "That's why I've survived seventeen hunts. That's why you'll be number eighteen."
He lunged.
Cain met him with a blood blade—solid, dense, the strongest he could muster. The dagger sheared through it, but the impact bought him a step back. Another blade. Another deflection. Step by step, Han Xian drove him toward the tower's edge.
*Where are the elders?*
He reached out with his blood sense. Elder Tao's signature was moving—not toward the tower, but *away*. Retreating.
*What—*
A scream echoed from the north. Not human. Spiritual. A formation collapsing.
*The concealment formations. He didn't come alone.*
Han Xian smiled. "Did you think I wouldn't scout? Your elders are occupied. Two WARLORD scouts are keeping them busy. Nothing fatal—just… distracting." He raised the dagger. "It's just you and me now."
---
Su Yao's flute cut through the night.
The note was high, piercing, aimed at the Seeker's spiritual channels. Han Xian flinched—not much, but enough. Cain used the opening, driving a blood needle at his throat.
The Seeker deflected. The needle glanced off his shoulder, drawing a thin line of blood. But the dagger's glow flickered.
*It's feeding on his wound. Draining him.*
"You brought backup," Han Xian said, not looking away from Cain. "Clever. But she can't hurt me from there."
He threw something—a small jade disc—toward the bamboo grove. It exploded in a flash of white light. Su Yao's flute went silent.
*He's blinding her. Temporarily. But long enough.*
Cain attacked. Blood blades, needles, mist—everything he had. Han Xian met him blow for blow, the dagger singing. Each impact drained a little more of Cain's blood nucleus. Each near miss cost him a second of regeneration.
*He's stronger. Faster. And his dagger counters everything I do.*
A cut opened on Cain's arm. Another on his side. The wounds didn't heal—the dagger's residue saw to that.
*I'm losing.*
And then a new voice cut through the chaos.
"You're not dying alone, boy."
---
Yin Wuji stepped out of the shadows.
The old blood cultivator looked worse than Cain had ever seen him. The grey lines on his throat had spread to his face, and his eyes burned with a desperate, terminal fire. But his hands were steady, and the seals he wove were ancient—older than the sect, older than the Seeker's order.
"Yin Wuji," Han Xian said. "The old drunk. I thought you'd died years ago."
"Been saving it for a special occasion." Yin Wuji's gold-toothed grin was bloody. "The elders are pinned. I slipped away. They don't need me—you do."
The first seal completed. White-gold light exploded from his chest—not attacking, but *binding*. Han Xian's movements slowed. The dagger's glow dimmed.
But Yin Wuji wasn't done. His second seal lashed out—not at the Seeker, but at the dagger. A thread of white-gold energy wrapped around the blade, and the weapon *screamed*, a high-pitched whine like a dying animal.
"What are you—?" Han Xian stared at his own hand. The dagger's glow flickered wildly, its hunger turning inward.
"I've been studying your kind for sixty years," Yin Wuji said. His voice was fraying, blood seeping from his nose. "That blade feeds on blood. But it doesn't care whose. I just made it *very* hungry for yours."
The dagger pulsed. Han Xian's face went pale.
"Cain! Now! Before the binding breaks!"
---
Cain moved.
Not with blood blades. Not with needles. He reached deep into his blood nucleus—into the dragon's legacy that had been sleeping there since the first chapter of this new life. The blood of Ao Lie, the four-thousand-year-old Blood Flood Dragon, stirred.
*Blood Dragon Devours the Heavens.*
The forbidden technique tore through his channels like wildfire. It consumed his qi, his blood, his very lifespan. His body twisted, reformed—a serpentine shape of crimson light and killing intent, jaws wide enough to swallow a man whole.
Han Xian looked up. The blood-dragon's maw descended.
For a heartbeat, the Seeker's cold composure broke. His eyes went wide—not with fear, but with *recognition*.
"That blood—you're not just a cultivator. You're—"
The dragon closed its jaws.
---
When the light faded, Han Xian was gone.
Not dead—*erased*. His body had been consumed, broken down into raw spiritual particles that scattered on the wind. All that remained was his dagger, lying in the ash, its core still intact—a dark red crystal pulsing with a dim, hungry light.
And Yin Wuji.
The old man had fallen to his knees. The white-gold light was gone. His face was the color of ash, and his breathing came in shallow, wet gasps. But his eyes—milky, almost blind—found Cain's face.
Cain collapsed beside him. The blood dragon technique had gutted him. His qi was gone, his blood nucleus cracked—a spiderweb of fractures across its surface. His vision swam with black spots.
"Yin Wuji. Don't—"
"Shut up, boy." Yin Wuji's voice was a whisper. "I'm not wounded. I'm *empty*. There's a difference."
Su Yao appeared at Cain's side. Her vision had cleared. She pressed her hands to Yin Wuji's chest, wood-qi flowing in warm green waves. The old man's body drank it like dry earth drinking rain—and stayed broken.
"It's not working," she said, her voice tight.
"Told you." Yin Wuji coughed, and dark fluid stained his lips. "Sixty years of borrowed time. Today I pay the debt."
His trembling hand caught Cain's wrist. His grip was surprisingly strong.
"Listen to me. Below the Sect—below the old meditation chambers—there's a passage. Sealed for centuries. It leads to the Blood Pool."
Cain's blood nucleus throbbed despite its cracks. "The Blood Pool?"
"The Ancestor's true inheritance. The first Blood Ancestor's legacy." Yin Wuji's eyes focused, sharp for a moment. "Your blood—the dragon blood—it's the same blood that flows through the pool. The key is in your own blood, boy. Drip it into the pool. The Ancestor will show you the way. The Blood River Sect… the seven bloodstones…"
"Yin Wuji—"
"Don't waste it." The old man's hand fell from Cain's wrist and pointed—toward the south, toward the Sect's mountain. "Below. The key is in your blood."
His hand fell.
His eyes stayed open.
Yin Wuji, the last surviving veteran of the Battle of Broken Ridge, the man who'd protected the Sect for sixty years in silence, stopped breathing.
---
The silence that followed was absolute.
Su Yao was the first to move. She reached out and closed Yin Wuji's eyes with two fingers, then sat back on her heels. Her hands were still faintly glowing with wood-qi—leftover energy with nowhere to go.
"He knew," she said quietly. "He knew he was dying. He came anyway."
"He wanted his death to mean something." Cain's voice was hoarse. He was still on his knees, his cracked blood nucleus pulsing with every heartbeat. "It did."
Elder Tao arrived minutes later, her robes singed, her leg bandaged. The WARLORD scouts had fled when Han Xian fell. She looked at the Seeker's ash, at Yin Wuji's body, at Cain kneeling in the dirt.
"The old man," she said. "He was Foundation stage. He had no business being here."
"He had every business." Cain's voice was flat. "He saved my life. He saved all of us."
Elder Tao was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded. "We'll take him back to the sect. He'll be buried with honors."
She gestured to the disciples who had followed her. They began gathering the bodies—or what remained of them.
Cain knelt beside the dagger's remains. The dark red core still pulsed, dim but steady. He pried it from the hilt. The crystal was warm—almost alive—and faintly, almost imperceptibly, he felt it resonate with the wood-qi still clinging to Su Yao's hands.
*Maybe she could use that.*
He tucked it into his belt.
---
Xiao Lian's voice whispered through the progenitor bond. *Master. Someone's watching. From the east. I've been feeling them since the fight started.*
Cain extended his blood sense. Faint—barely there—but unmistakable. A presence at the edge of his range, perhaps two li away. Not moving to attack. Just… watching.
*The WARLORD. Or another hunter.*
"We'll deal with it later," he said aloud. "Tonight, we bury our dead."
---
They returned to the sect at dawn.
The funeral rites took most of the morning. Yin Wuji's body was laid in the ancestral tomb beside the sect's fallen elders—a place of honor he would have hated. Su Chen spoke the eulogy: short, honest, the words of a man who had known the old blood cultivator for decades.
"He was difficult. He was drunk most of the time. And he saved this sect more times than any of us will ever know."
Cain stood at the back of the gathering, Su Yao beside him, Xiao Lian a step behind. Through the progenitor bond, he felt Xiao Lian's grief—raw and new—and something else. Wariness. The presence from the watchtower hadn't gone away. It had followed them.
*We're not done. The WARLORD knows where I am now. And they'll send someone else.*
But that was tomorrow's problem.
When the rites ended, Cain walked to the edge of the sect's eastern wall. The sun was climbing, burning off the morning mist. His blood nucleus still ached—the cracks would take weeks to heal. Weeks he didn't have.
*The key is in your blood.*
He touched his chest, where the nucleus pulsed.
*Below the meditation chambers. The Blood Pool. The Ancestor's inheritance.*
Su Yao came up beside him. "You're thinking about leaving."
"Not yet. There are things we need to do first. Preparations. And I need to recover—the blood dragon technique cost me more than I expected."
"How long?"
"Weeks, maybe. But we don't have weeks. The presence Xiao Lian felt—whoever it is—they're waiting."
She nodded. "Then we prepare faster."
"Together."
"Together."
They stood in silence, watching the sun rise over a world that had just become a little smaller and a lot more dangerous.