Chapter 658: The Men Beneath the Glass

Chapter 658: The Men Beneath the Glass

The transparent floor began to flicker.

Leon felt what caused it before he saw it. The man at the dais had both hands on the surface now, and the chamber below was sliding — not away, exactly, but out of true, the correspondence between the two layers loosening at the edges like a joint working itself apart.

"Six points," the man called to his people, without looking up. "Hold them and do not move."

The six Golden Core cultivators broke from the walls and took positions around the chamber, one to each of six recessed control plates set into the floor. They moved like people who had drilled it.

Then the man raised his head.

"You’ve done extraordinary work," he said. His voice arrived thin and slightly delayed through the stormglass. "Three anchors in one day. I spent a month studying this nexus and never understood half of what you repaired today. Whoever you are, you are not an ordinary Palace disciple."

Leon said nothing.

"So I’ll be direct, because I don’t think either of us benefits from a performance." The man’s hands stayed flat. "My hand is on the core housing. It is already damaged — you can see the cut, you can see the tools. If you force entry, I will finish what I started, and whatever this place is protecting will be finished with it. I don’t want that. It’s worth more to me intact than to you."

"What do you want?"

"The three spikes. Outer authority returned to this dais. And a route out for seven people." He shrugged, very slightly. "Nobody follows us and nobody dies. You keep your nine and your ruin. I keep my life. I am aware that you can kill me. I am telling you that killing me is the expensive option."

He was intelligent, which Leon appreciated, and he had made exactly one mistake.

He thinks he’s moving that chamber.

Leon crouched at the edge of the clear section and put his perception into the slipping correspondence, and did not answer for a long time.

The three anchor repairs had taught him more about this place than the enemy had learned in a month, because Leon had been forced to understand how the layers held together in order to reconnect them. What he was watching now was not a man freely relocating a room. It was a man cycling a room through a handful of damaged maintenance positions — the same four, in the same order, because those four were the only ones the broken system would still accept.

And every eleven minutes, the nexus pulsed, and for a moment everything in this complex remembered where it belonged.

"Vyra."

She was already crouched beside him. "Two currents, Young Master. One’s his and one isn’t — the one holding the chamber steady is the nexus’s own and he’s borrowing it. He can’t move that room without it, and he doesn’t know that’s what he’s using."

"Seraphine. I need the alignment interval measured, not estimated."

Seraphine put a fine discharge into the floor and watched where it went. She did it four times, across two pulses.

"It aligns for a little under two seconds," she said. "Starts a quarter-beat after the pulse begins."

"Loriel."

"All seven are physically present, Young Master," Loriel said. "Every shift, all the way through. Nothing down there is a projection and nothing is being left behind when the room moves. If you go in, you’ll be going into a room with seven living people in it."

Ira had not said anything for four minutes, which was its own kind of effort.

"Young Master," she said, "are we doing this, or are we negotiating?"

"We’re waiting nine more minutes."

Behind them, on the second terrace, nine Jade Moon Palace surveyors stood where Deacon Yu had put them and watched four women in attendants’ clothing discuss a Nascent Soul cultivator the way a formation crew discusses a jammed gate.

The pulse came. Leon went into the correspondence a quarter-beat behind it and refused to let it slip.

Leon had spent the day learning how these layers aligned and how to hold them together when they began to separate. Now he took the two-second window and made it wide enough for five people to cross.

"Go."

They went down through the floor.

The six lackeys were coming before the five of them landed, and Leon let the women have it, because there was nothing here worth his attention except the man at the dais.

Seraphine took the two on the left. The first threw a water-and-metal construct at her that would have gone through a wall, and she cut it apart at the seam holding it together and put the flat of her blade across his temple before the pieces hit the ground. The second got as far as raising his hands.

Ira went straight through the middle. She hit the third man bodily, took him off his feet, and drove him into the chamber wall hard enough to leave him in it. The fourth had a defensive art up, a good one, layered and dense — and Ira put a needle of calamity flame through it at one point and it came apart like wet paper, and she hit him once and he stopped moving.

Vyra did not attack anyone. She took the heat Ira had released and the energy the two disabled men had already spent, gathered all of it, and put it up as three curving barriers that cut the chamber into pieces — so that the fifth and sixth cultivators, who had been moving to support their brothers, found themselves alone in separate boxes.

Loriel dealt with those two. She did not strike either of them. She put a hand out toward the fifth man and something in his circulation stopped agreeing with him, and he folded at the knees and stayed down, breathing, conscious, and entirely unable to stand. The sixth she took the same way, three seconds later.

Six Golden Core cultivators, and it took under nine seconds, and none of them died.

On the terrace above, Xie Lan made a small sound.

The Nascent Soul leader had used those nine seconds properly.

He tore one hand away from the dais and released a compressed column of grey force. It came at Leon fast enough to be worth respecting, carrying the weight of a full realm above him.

Leon caught it.

He did not block it or dodge it. He folded the space it was travelling through, took the column into a pocket four inches deep, and let it exhaust itself somewhere it could not reach anybody. Then he crossed the chamber.

The man’s other hand was still on the dais and still connected to the formation beneath it, and Leon did not cut it off, because a corpse’s hand and a living hand were worth different amounts and one of them could answer questions.

He separated the hand from the connection instead — a thin, precise displacement of the four inches of space between palm and surface, so that the hand stayed where it was and stopped touching anything at all.

The man felt his authority go and his face changed for the first time.

Leon took him by the collar and put him on the floor twelve paces from the dais, and that was the end of it.

Seals went on all seven, one at a time, with Seraphine checking the work.

Deacon Yu came down the temporary route with three of his people once Ira gave him the signal, and Leon watched him look at the room: two men unconscious against the wall, four sitting or lying under seals, six Golden Core cultivators taken by four women registered in the Palace’s own books as Peak Foundation Establishment attendants.

Yu did not ask. He looked at Mo Rui, who was staring, and said, "Surveyor. Formation tools. Now," and Mo Rui went and got the formation tools.

Leon crouched in front of the leader.

"The fighting’s finished," he said. "You should understand that clearly, because I don’t want you spending the next hour looking for an opening that isn’t there." He kept his voice level. "You’re not leaving this room until I understand why nine Jade Moon Palace disciples were made to disappear."

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