Forty seconds.
Li Tian counted.
Not in his head — in his blood. The transfer
had its own rhythm, slow and grinding, like
stone being dragged across stone. Fragment 2
was older than the first. More broken. The
system was pulling it through pathways that
weren't fully healed from the last time.
Above them — movement. Two sets of footsteps.
The entrance gap. The sound of someone
pressing through sideways.
"They're in the tunnel," Mei said.
She had positioned herself between the chamber
entrance and Li Tian. Back straight. One good
arm ready. The other held close — not useless,
but limited. Her face said nothing. Her eyes
said she was calculating how long she could
hold a trained operative in a narrow passage.
Not long. But long enough, maybe.
"Don't engage," Li Tian said. "Not yet."
"Then tell your bloodline to move faster."
[Fragment 2 transfer — 28 seconds remaining.]
[Stability: 52% and dropping.]
---
The footsteps in the tunnel were careful.
Professionals don't rush into dark spaces they
don't know. They move slow, they read the
ground, they let the darkness show them things
before they show themselves to the darkness.
Li Tian knew this because he was learning to
think the same way.
Twenty-two seconds.
The partial memory from Fragment 2 was already
bleeding through before the transfer completed —
not images this time, but sensation. Weight.
The feeling of carrying something enormous
for a very long time. Fatigue that had nothing
to do with muscle and everything to do with
will.
The man in the vision had carried this bloodline
the way a dam carries water — holding back
something vast and destructive, not wielding
it. Never wielding it freely.
Because it couldn't be wielded freely.
Not yet.
Not at one fragment out of seven.
[14 seconds.]
The first operative appeared at the chamber
entrance.
---
He was not what Li Tian expected.
Not large. Not armored. Medium height, lean,
moving with the particular economy of someone
who had never wasted a motion in their life.
His eyes swept the chamber in one pass —
collapsed wall, bloodstone veins, the remains
against the left wall, Mei standing between
him and Li Tian.
He stopped.
He looked at Li Tian's hand still pressed
against the wall. At the faint glow. At the
blood seeping through unbroken skin.
Something shifted in his expression — not
fear. Recognition.
He had been briefed. He knew what he was
looking at.
"Step away from the wall," he said. Quiet
voice. Reasonable tone. The voice of someone
who didn't need to shout because they were
already certain of the outcome.
[4 seconds.]
Li Tian did not move.
[Transfer complete. Fragment 2 of 7 absorbed.]
[Stability: 41%.]
[New data: Partial technique — Blood Suppression.
Stage 1 only. Full activation unavailable.]
[Warning: Host is approaching critical threshold.]
41%.
The technique imprint settled into him like
a coal dropped into cold water — hot, heavy,
not yet readable. Blood Suppression. He didn't
know what it did fully. He knew what the name
suggested.
Hide the blood. Suppress the signature.
Make a Tracer blind.
He pulled his hand from the wall and stood.
---
The second operative entered behind the first.
Bigger. Carrying a short blade already drawn.
Posted at the entrance — blocking the way
back. Standard formation. Cut off retreat,
let the talker work.
The talker looked at Mei.
"You're not the target," he said. "Step aside
and this ends without unnecessary damage."
Mei didn't move.
"Unnecessary is subjective," she said.
Li Tian took that half-second of dialogue
and used it. Not to attack. To think.
41% stability. Blood Suppression technique —
partial, unstable. One exit behind a collapsed
wall. Two trained operatives. Mei with one
good arm and bruised ribs.
Standard fight: they lose.
But a standard fight wasn't the only option.
The collapsed wall. The moving air beyond it.
He had no idea what was on the other side —
but the operatives didn't either. And a Tracer's
advantage was reading blood signatures in
known space.
Unknown space erased that advantage.
"Mei," he said quietly. "The wall."
One second of silence.
Then she moved — not toward the operatives,
but sideways, fast, the motion so clean and
unexpected that the talker had to adjust his
positioning to track her.
That adjustment cost him half a step.
Li Tian activated Blood Suppression.
Partial and unstable, it didn't make him
invisible. It folded his blood signature
inward — compressed it — like closing a
fist around a flame. Not extinguished. Hidden.
The Tracer's eyes snapped to him and then —
flickered. Uncertainty crossing his face
for the first time.
He had lost the read.
"Now," Li Tian said.
Mei hit the collapsed wall at a run —
not with her shoulder, not recklessly —
with a precise strike at the weakest point
she had already identified while Li Tian
was at the marker. Practical. Always.
The wall gave.
Not completely. Enough — a gap, dark air
rushing through, the sound of open space
beyond.
The bigger operative moved toward Li Tian.
Li Tian did not fight him.
He absorbed.
Not from the operative — from the residual
blood energy still saturating the chamber
walls. Ancient, thin, barely enough. But
at 41% he needed anything that wasn't
nothing. It bought him three seconds of
steadiness where there should have been
collapse.
Three seconds was enough to reach the gap.
---
The other side was a slope.
Steep, loose stone, dropping sharply into
a wider passage that the old mining maps
— if any still existed — had never recorded.
Mei was already moving down it, controlled
descent despite the ribs, because she had
calculated the angle before she'd broken
through.
Li Tian followed.
Behind them, the bigger operative tried the
gap. Too wide. It would take him thirty
seconds to widen it further. Thirty seconds
was a distance now.
The Blood Suppression flickered and dropped.
[Blood Suppression — deactivated. Duration
exceeded host stability. Stability: 38%.]
38%.
He kept moving. Down the slope, into the
wider passage, into air that smelled like
deep earth and old stone and something else —
faint, but present. The smell of water.
Somewhere ahead, there was water.
Which meant a way out.
Which meant — not safety, not yet, never
yet — but a direction.
He caught up with Mei at the base of the
slope. She was breathing harder than she
wanted him to notice.
"Ribs?" he asked.
"Manageable," she said. Then — because
she was Mei and she didn't pretend with
numbers: "One might be cracked now.
The wall."
He said nothing.
She had broken a rib to get them through.
She had done it anyway.
They moved into the dark passage together,
the sound of the operatives widening the
gap echoing behind them. Not close. Not
gone either.
And in the chamber above, Li Tian knew
the Tracer had already sent a signal —
to the response unit, to whoever was
coordinating this hunt, to whoever sat
in a room without windows and waited
for confirmation.
Zhao Yun would know within the hour.
Not just that Li Tian was alive.
But that he had touched something ancient.
Something the operatives had recognized
and reported. Something that would make
Zhao Yun stop treating this as a cleanup
operation.
The quiet recalculation was already happening.
Li Tian could feel it — the way you feel
a storm before the wind changes.
38% stability. One cracked rib between
them. Two operatives behind. A response
unit hours away.
And somewhere ahead, water.
He walked toward it.
---
What was the ancient serpent truly guarding?
What does Blood Suppression fully unlock?
Why did the Tracer recognize the bloodline —
and who briefed him?
What happens when Li Tian's stability
finally breaks the critical threshold?
And when Zhao Yun learns the truth —
what piece will he move next?
To find out, keep reading —
The Dragon's Ancestral Legacy.