Lin Yu spread the map across the table in the courtyard's back room. Not a real map. A printout from the Jade Guard's survey drone, thermal overlay showing the Red Zone boundary in harsh orange cutting across Yangmingshan's northern slope.
The Seal Temple sat dead center. A white-hot blotch on the thermal image, radiating so much spiritual energy it had burned out three of the drone's sensors on the flyover.
"Lei Gong," Lin Yu said. "Seal number fifty-five. Thunder God. One of the oldest enforcement deities in Chinese mythology. He punished the guilty, struck down oath-breakers, and enforced cosmic law when the other gods couldn't be bothered."
Zhao Kai stood across from him, arms crossed. Sister Hao leaned against the doorframe. Two Jade Guard soldiers, names Lin Yu hadn't bothered to learn, waited in the corridor.
"And you want this fragment because?" Kai asked.
"Because the next Correction Tribulation is coming and I'd rather not die."
Blunt. Maybe too blunt. But Kai seemed to prefer directness. His jaw tightened, then relaxed.
"The system timer is recalculating," Lin Yu continued. "Every time it does that, the next beast comes in harder. I have two fragments and one trick. Fragment Weaving only works if I have enough raw material to work with. Three fragments gives me more combinations. More options. Better odds."
"And you need us because you can't get through the Red Zone alone."
"I need you because you have guns, vehicles, and tactical training. I have a history degree and the ability to sense vibrations in dirt."
Hao snorted.
Kai was quiet for a long moment. Lin Yu could read the calculation happening behind those careful eyes. The Jade Guard needed intelligence on Seal Temples. The Pantheon Council had been pressing all regional commanders for data. Every temple that appeared could contain fragments that would shift the power balance. Letting Lin Yu go in first, absorbing the risk, while the Guard documented everything from behind...
"I'll authorize a joint reconnaissance," Kai said. "Five-person team. You, me, Bearer Hao, and two of my squad. We enter, we assess, we document. If the fragment presents itself, we evaluate the situation."
"Fine."
"Su Weilin stays."
Lin Yu had already decided that, but hearing Kai say it made his stomach clench anyway. "Agreed. Her karma's too high for combat situations."
Mercy plus eighty-seven. Three points from the threshold where Ascension whispers became Ascension screaming. Every act of compassion, every person she helped, fed the golden thread tying her to something that wanted to eat her alive. Bringing her into a Red Zone where wounded teammates might need healing was like dragging an alcoholic through a distillery.
He found her in the medical ward, restocking bandage kits with mechanical precision. She looked up when he entered.
"Yangmingshan?" she said before he could speak.
"How did you..."
"Hao told me." A faint smile. "You're going after the thunder fragment."
"Yeah."
She set down a roll of gauze. Her hands were steady. They were always steady. "Be careful. Red Zones aren't like what you've seen."
"You've been in one?"
"Once. In Hsinchu, right after the Convergence. Before I understood what I was." She paused. "The divine realm bleeds through there, Lin Yu. It's not metaphorical. The physical rules get... confused."
He wanted to say something reassuring. Nothing came. He nodded and left.
At the gate, he stopped. Turned back. She was already watching him through the medical ward's window, gauze still in her hand.
Three points. That's all the distance between Weilin and whatever Guanyin had planned for her. Three points of Mercy karma, and every instinct she had, every fiber of her training and her nature, pushed her toward acts that would close that gap. She was the best healer in the shelter. Possibly the best healer in Taipei. And the better she got at helping people, the faster she'd lose herself.
Lin Yu filed that thought away in the part of his brain that was starting to feel like a war room. Too many problems, not enough solutions.
They drove north in a Jade Guard transport vehicle, military surplus retrofitted with spiritual dampeners along the chassis. The road from Taipei proper into the Yangmingshan foothills was mostly clear. Yellow Zone territory. Some buildings damaged, some overgrown with that weird crystalline vegetation that sprouted wherever spiritual density crossed certain thresholds, but navigable.
Then they hit the boundary.
There was no wall. No fence. No visible line. But Lin Yu felt it through his tremor sense the moment the tires crossed over. The ground changed. Not its composition exactly, more like its intent. Soil that wanted to be something else. Rock that remembered being clouds.
He pressed his palm against the vehicle's floor.
"The underground density is off the charts," he said quietly. "This whole mountain is saturated. It's like the bedrock has been soaking in divine energy for months."
Kai glanced at him through the rearview mirror. "How dense?"
"Imagine the Yellow Zone readings you've seen. Multiply by twenty. Maybe more."
Nobody spoke for a while after that.
The trees came first. They'd been normal trees once, deciduous forest, the kind of camphor and maple that covered Yangmingshan's slopes in every tourist photo. Now they were jade. Not jade-colored. Actual jade. Translucent green stone where wood should be, branches frozen mid-sway, leaves that clinked against each other when the wind blew, producing a sound like distant wind chimes played through broken speakers.
Hao pressed her face against the window. "That's beautiful."
"That's terrifying," one of the soldiers muttered.
Both true.
They abandoned the vehicle where the road dissolved into something that might have been a river. Clear liquid flowing uphill over stones that glowed faintly amber from within. It wasn't water. Lin Yu's soul sight showed it pulsing with spiritual energy, a current of raw divine power running through the landscape like blood through veins.
Lin Yu activated both fragments as they moved on foot. Tremor sense mapped the terrain below, showing him a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers carved into the mountain's bones by forces that had nothing to do with geology. Soul sight painted the world in overlapping shades of spiritual energy, every surface glowing, every shadow hiding pockets of concentrated power.
The whole mountain was alive. Not in a metaphorical way.
They moved in tactical formation. Kai on point, Hao at the rear, Lin Yu in the middle calling out terrain hazards as his tremor sense fed him data. The soldiers flanked, scanning the jade forest with weapons that suddenly looked very small and very human against the divine landscape.
Something moved in the trees. Not an animal. A shape made of compressed spiritual energy, vaguely humanoid, watching them from behind translucent branches before dissolving like fog. Nobody shot at it. Nobody said anything. There was an unspoken agreement that acknowledging the watchers would make this worse.
Lin Yu's soul sight picked up more of them as they climbed. Dozens. Hundreds maybe. Remnants of something, echoes of worshippers or guardians or just the mountain's immune system registering intruders. They kept their distance.
It took them forty minutes to reach the temple.
It rose from the mountainside like it had grown there. Traditional Chinese architecture, sweeping eaves, stone steps, vermillion pillars. At first glance it could have been any temple on any mountain in Taiwan.
At second glance, the stairs went sideways.
Not broken or collapsed. Deliberately sideways. A staircase that climbed horizontally, each step transitioning smoothly from vertical to lateral as if gravity had been politely asked to rotate ninety degrees and agreed without argument. Above the sideways stairs, a doorway opened into a room that Lin Yu's tremor sense told him was three times larger than the building containing it.
"Spatial distortion," Kai said, voice flat. Professional. But his hand had drifted to the hilt of his combat knife.
"This is a test," Lin Yu said. "Seal Temples don't just hand out fragments. The myths always involve trials. Challenges. The god inside decides whether you're worthy."
"And if we're not?"
Lin Yu looked at the impossible architecture, the stairs that defied physics, the doors opening into spaces that shouldn't exist. "Then I really hope your fire powers work in here."
They climbed. The sideways stairs felt normal underfoot despite looking impossible, gravity pulling them at an angle that made Lin Yu's eyes water and his inner ear scream. Hao walked with her arms slightly extended, wind energy stabilizing her balance. The two soldiers kept their weapons raised, sweeping corners that led to more corners that led to more corners.
The entrance hall swallowed them.
Vermillion pillars stretched upward into darkness that Lin Yu's soul sight couldn't penetrate. The floor was polished stone that reflected their images back wrong, too sharp, too detailed, showing not just their bodies but the spiritual energy flowing through them. Lin Yu could see his own grey karma in the reflection, a storm of indeterminate color swirling around a shape that might have been him.
Then the temple shook.
Not an earthquake. Something deliberate. Something breathing.
A voice filled every inch of the space. Not the system's clean, clinical tone. This was old. Ragged. Furious, in the way only something that had been waiting for centuries could be furious.
"WHO DARES SEEK THE THUNDER?"
The pillars cracked. Lightning, real lightning, arced between them in branching white fire that left afterimages burning across Lin Yu's vision.
Lei Gong was not a passive seal waiting to be collected.
He was awake. And he was absolutely furious.
---
Thanks for reading\! If you're enjoying the story, please add it to your library and vote with Power Stones. New chapter every day. The karma system gets even wilder from here.