“Sister… Brother Fei!”

  Timo Yang stared at the holographic screens, spotting Yue Yang and Fei hurrying through the rain-slicked streets.

  The usually bustling cafeteria and training grounds felt eerily empty today. The cheerful shouts of children had fallen silent, as if the entire Watch Regiment held its breath.

  Overnight, word had spread through every rank: something catastrophic had happened. No one knew just how bad it was yet.

  Timo Yang was lost in the feeds when a presence materialized behind him.

  With his current cultivation, he didn’t sense a thing.

  In the dark reflection of a monitor, a pair of eyes flashed—then everything went black.

  “That smug Old Gan always thinks his magitech can see everything,” a voice sneered moments later. “Hmph. As long as there’s shadow, no place is beyond Ghost Shadow’s reach.”

  Much later, the heavy clang of an iron door jolted Timo Yang awake. He rubbed his throbbing head, disoriented.

  He hadn’t seen the speaker. It felt like he’d only blinked—and suddenly he was here.

  “It’s my fault… all my fault for being so obsessed! I fell right into the Evil Cultivator’s trap…”

  “Shut it!” a cold voice barked from beyond the door. “Keep whining, and I’ll have them bring out the heavy torture.”

  The weeping man in the corner fell silent.

  “You’re… Brother Zhao, the night watchman from last night!”

  Through the dim light filtering from a high grate, Timo Yang recognized the tear-streaked face. Just hours ago, the man had been grinning foolishly in his sleep, murmuring Wan Lin’s name.

  If not for Old Gan’s antidote potion, he might never have woken. And if that had happened… his fate would have been far worse.

  At Timo Yang’s words, Little Zhao scrambled over on all fours, voice dropped to a whisper.

  “I remember you—they call you the Wind Kid! You have to vouch for me! I swear I didn’t betray the regiment. They’d have to kill me before I’d ever—”

  Timo Yang’s stomach twisted at the man’s groveling fear. His first instinct screamed untrustworthy.

  But then he remembered Lulu Gan in the Black Forest dungeon—how she’d bent without breaking. Was this just survival?

  “Not Brother Zhao,” Timo Yang whispered back. “Where are we?”

  Little Zhao glanced nervously at the door. “Iron Law interrogation cell. Wind Kid, you’re a hero’s son—they’ll listen to you. Vouch for me, and I’m golden. Once we’re out, I’ll teach you a killer technique, I swear.”

  Interrogation cell. Timo Yang exhaled in relief. As long as it wasn’t the Evil Cultivators, it couldn’t be that bad.

  A secret technique? That sparked interest—until doubt crashed in.

  Who would vouch for him? If Iron Law delved into his mind and found he hadn’t been controlled… worse, that he’d somehow turned the tables on Regiment Leader Yi…

  He shifted restlessly, tapping the protective band on his forehead. Thoughts raced.

  Those bald Iron Law enforcers were merciless with their own. Backed by ancient code, they feared no one—not even the regiment leader’s authority. Step out of line, and suffering followed.

  Timo Yang sighed heavily. Little Zhao’s face fell; he clearly took it as refusal.

  “Brother Zhao, it’s not that I won’t help. I’d love someone to speak for me too—but I’ve got nothing. Now I’m locked up same as you. Can’t escape those Iron Law baldies… or Ghost Shadow, apparently.” He slumped dramatically. “Guess we just wait for the judgment platform.”

  Back when he’d failed to awaken, he’d scoured every corner of the forest for a wind spirit rabbit, desperate. Nothing worked. So why fight now? Might as well give up.

  “Wind Kid, you’re a hero’s blood—they won’t touch you. But me? My whole family joined as refugees. No pull at all. Please…”

  Little Zhao fussed over him, pounding his back, massaging his legs.

  “Wait…”

  Timo Yang’s sudden exclamation froze the man mid-motion.

  “What?”

  “The wind spirit rabbit… could it have been a trap from the start? Someone laying an ambush?”

  Little Zhao’s eyes darted, but he kept kneading. “Wind Kid, just tell them I never colluded with the Evil Cultivator. They’ll clear me—worst case, send me to mountain watch.”

  Mountain watch.

  The words clicked. When the Evil Cultivators had chased him and Fei, a mountain watcher should have been nearby. But no one showed.

  Was the watcher a traitor? Why target him specifically? Did it tie to his bloodline talent?

  But the evil cultivators hadn’t seemed to know who he was. Something didn’t add up.

  Timo Yang slapped the floor with both palms, using a burst of wind essence to spring upright.

  “Brother Zhao, if you’re innocent and they still condemn you… that means those baldies have something to hide.”

  Little Zhao clapped a hand over his mouth, eyes wide. “Shh! Don’t say that out loud. We’re outsiders here—no battle merits, living on borrowed ground. We should be grateful just to breathe.”

  True enough. The Watch Regiment’s standards for recruited essence users were brutal.

  But Timo Yang couldn’t risk vouching blindly. If Wan Lin tempted him again, he’d be a walking liability.

  “Last night… I don’t remember anything,” he mumbled, playing dumb. “I was so scared I passed out. It’s all a blank.”

  He was only twelve, after all. No one would doubt a terrified kid.

  Little Zhao had seen the empty detention block himself—three massive holes blasted in the wall, blood staining the floor. Terrifying even for an adult.

  “Sigh… guess I’ll accept my fate.” Little Zhao curled back into his corner, gazing up at the narrow skylight. He began humming a mournful hometown tune.

  The melody tugged at Timo Yang’s memories—the attack on Aunt Guo. Tears welled unbidden.

  He wished he could turn back time, warn her not to enter alone. Everyone knew: once you faced the judgment platform, you didn’t walk away unscathed.

  Hearing the boy’s quiet sobs, Little Zhao’s song grew more desolate. He braced for the worst—accompanying the dead. All because he’d let lust cloud his judgment.

  “Make way!”

  Outside the command center, Elder Bai and her group pushed through the growing throng. The crowd’s chant thundered: “Living proof or a body—we demand answers!”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  At Elder Bai’s shout, Vice-Commander Gao raised broad arms for silence.

  Seeing the four white-robed physicians, the soldiers parted instinctively, clearing a path.

  “Yue Yang!” Gao called. “Captain Guo always treated you like her own. Tell Regiment Leader Yi for us: the entire Wilderness Regiment stays right here until we see proof—living or dead.”

  Yue Yang nodded solemnly. Even staring at the stark announcement, she refused to believe Aunt Guo was gone.

  Not without seeing the body.

  “Deacon Bai, Regiment Leader Yi is occupied. No visitors.”

  A line of armed guards blocked the main gates. Their captain shouted the warning.

  Elder Bai didn’t waste words. her form flickered ethereal, slipping past in a blur—reappearing behind the line.

  She reached for the doors just as they creaked open a crack. Deacon Lan emerged, blocking her path.

  Grief Carved in Stone

  “No one has ever stopped me from going where I please,” Elder Bai said, her voice low and steady, like an elder gently but firmly correcting a mischievous child. There was no outright anger in it—only a quiet authority that made resistance feel not just futile, but foolish.

  Everyone in the Watchers legion knew Elder Bai as their living saint of medicine, the one who could pull warriors back from the brink with herbs and elixirs. But only a handful—the five chief Deacons among them—whispered of her deeper mastery: poisons that killed without a trace, silent as shadow and twice as deadly.

  Feiying Lan caught the fleeting violet gleam in her eyes and felt his breath catch. Without a word, he held it in and stepped aside, gesturing for her to pass.

  At eighty, Elder Bai’s sight was sharper than most men half her age. She took in Feiying Lan’s disheveled state—the faint dust on his uniform, the subtle grit of a hidden tunnel still clinging to his boots—and the corner of her mouth twitched in faint amusement, or perhaps disapproval.

  She turned her head slightly, glancing back at the guard captain stationed at the entrance. He understood immediately and waved the small group of physicians forward, clearing the path.

  When Fei tried to follow, the captain’s arm shot out, blocking him firmly. “You cannot enter.”

  Fei’s jaw tightened, frustration flashing hot in his chest, but he swallowed it down. He was no stranger to orders, and defying them here would help no one. He stayed put, fists clenched at his sides, watching the heavy doors close behind the others.

  Yue Yang paused just long enough to meet his gaze. She gave him a small, steady nod—quiet reassurance laced with the unspoken worry they both carried—and then turned to follow Elder Bai into the command center.

  The moment the iron doors thudded shut behind them, sealing with a resonant finality that echoed through the hall, Yue Yang felt the air grow heavier. The command center, once a place of crisp orders and strategic maps, had been reduced to wreckage.

  Her heart sank as she surveyed the devastation: books ripped apart and scattered like fallen leaves, sturdy desks and chairs hacked into splintered halves as if by a frenzied blade, and across the cold stone floor, rare spirit herbs lay spilled and trampled, their delicate leaves crushed under careless boots.

  She recognized them instantly—those very herbs had been meticulously prepared only yesterday by Deputy Zhang, laid out with reverent care. Now they were ruined, their faint spiritual glow dimming as the essence leaked away into the dust. To any elemental master, such plants were treasures beyond price—luxuries that could mend shattered meridians or bolster fading vitality.

  Many warriors would bankrupt themselves, sacrifice years of savings, for even a single stalk. Harvesting herbs of this caliber demanded Elder Bai’s personal seal of approval, granted only to those with legendary battle merit, commanders who had bled for the legion time and again.

  Were they meant for Aunt Guo? The thought flickered through Yue Yang’s mind, but it didn’t fit. No—something was profoundly wrong with Uncle Yi. The destruction around her felt too visceral, too laced with personal agony, to be mere accident or invasion.

  Her unease deepened as she glanced at the elderly physicians walking ahead. Their faces mirrored her own confusion—brows furrowed, eyes scanning the chaos without comprehension.

  In the dim flicker of lantern light that cast long, wavering shadows across the walls, Fan Yi sat slumped in the center of it all. His voice drifted through the gloom, cracked and raw: “Feng, it’s time to come home. I was wrong to hold you back. Take whoever you love… go see the wider world. Feng… wake up, son… please, wake up…”

  Hearing the regimental commander—the man who had led them through countless battles with unyielding steel—unravel like this sent a chill racing down Yue Yang’s spine. She slowed her steps instinctively, dread pooling cold and heavy in her chest.

  “Grandma Bai… please, save my father…”

  The broken sob came from the shadows, piercing the heavy silence. A boy about Timo Yang’s age burst from a hidden corner, tears streaking his face as he ran straight toward Elder Bai, arms outstretched.

  “Kai Yi,” one of the elderly physicians exclaimed, voice thick with shock. “You’re supposed to be studying in the Five Allied Nations. What are you doing here?”

  She reached out and gently but firmly pulled the boy aside, holding him steady as Kai Yi trembled.

  Elder Bai, meanwhile, had already begun gathering her elemental energy, subtle currents swirling invisibly around her. She scented it then—evil lingering in the air like a foul mist, twisting the atmosphere into something oppressive and wrong.

  Her expression hardened. With a sharp gesture, she signaled the three physicians trailing her to halt where they stood. Her sharp gaze swept the room once more before locking onto the scattered herbs on the floor.

  “Uncle Gan said Father was in trouble,” Kai Yi whispered, his voice small and shaken. “Mother brought me back overnight. We rode without stopping.”

  He had arrived just as dawn broke, but his father—lost in whatever torment gripped him now—hadn’t truly seen him, hadn’t acknowledged his return. After hearing Lin Gan’s grim report, Kai Yi’s mother had wasted no time; she had marched straight to the Iron Law Division, demanding they launch a full investigation to defend her husband’s and her son’s honor against whatever shadows threatened them.

  “Deputy Zhang,” Elder Bai cut in sharply, her tone brooking no delay, “the medicine he took yesterday—did it do nothing at all?”

  The physician knelt hurriedly beside the pile of ruined herbs, his experienced fingers sifting through them with growing alarm. Some stalks had withered completely, their spiritual essence sucked dry as if devoured from within. But when he carefully lifted one stem half-buried beneath torn pages of an ancient tome, his hands froze.

  “The prescription was precise,” he said, voice tight. “A calming draught to steady the mind, followed by absorption of the herbs’ pure essence—it should have mended the commander’s heart meridian fully. But this… this tainted herb. It doesn’t come from our guarded gardens. It’s wrong.”

  He leaned closer, drawing a cautious thread of elemental energy to test it. Immediately, dark wisps of corruption uncoiled, twisting like smoke from a poisoned flame.

  The old physician recoiled at once, cutting off the flow. The evil energy dispersed swiftly into the air, vanishing as if it had never been—but leaving behind a faint, acrid tang that made Yue Yang’s throat tighten.

  “How long has he been like this?” Elder Bai demanded, her eyes narrowing as she turned toward Feiying Lan.

  He glanced sideways at Lin Gan, who stood motionless and eerily composed, as though the heartbreak unfolding around him was merely another logistical report.

  “I searched the mountain gorge all night for Deacon Guo,” Feiying Lan said, his voice steady but his gaze fixed accusingly on Lin Gan. “Found nothing but shattered stone remains.”

  Lin Gan offered no elaboration, no defense—just silence.

  “When I returned at dawn, the commander was already waiting,” Feiying Lan continued. “He saw the statue fragments, ordered me to announce Rui Guo’s death officially… and then he shattered, just like this.”

  Every head in the room turned toward the shadowed corner where the broken stone pieces lay piled like forgotten rubble.

  Yue Yang’s breath hitched in her throat. She knew the old tales—some earth elemental masters, in their final moments, turned not to flesh and blood but to unyielding stone, their bodies petrified as if the earth itself reclaimed them.

  Her legs carried her forward before her mind caught up. She dropped to her knees beside the fragments, hands trembling as she brushed away layers of dust from a gray, lifeless arm. She turned it carefully, wiped again and again until the faint lines emerged. The tattoo was unmistakable—identical to the one Rui Guo had borne proudly in life, a mark of her clan and her service.

  The patterns on the neck and forehead matched too, unique swirls that no impostor could replicate. Yue Yang’s vision blurred with hot tears as she pieced the petrified remnants together, fragment by jagged fragment. Aunt Guo—gone. Truly gone. The reality crashed over her like a wave, and she pressed a hand to her mouth to stifle the soft, choking sobs that escaped.

  “Shh… don’t wake him,” Fan Yi whispered from across the room, his voice eerily tender. He set the reddened long knife down with exquisite care, as if it might shatter, then patted the corroded battle armor cradled in his lap. Mildew clung to the metal, sour and thick, but he hummed an old lullaby anyway, rocking gently as though soothing a sleeping child.

  Elder Bai’s patience, thin at the best of times, finally snapped.

  “Fan Yi, enough,” she said, her words slicing through the gloom like a blade. “Feng Yi is dead. You owe him a proper resting place in the ancestral tomb. Honor him—don’t cling to ghosts.”

  But Fan Yi remained adrift in his fractured world, deaf to her command. In his eyes, his son lived still—shifting from eager boy to brilliant young man, training relentlessly, surpassing all expectations, alive and breathing.

  “That medicine came straight from your medical division,” Lin Gan interjected, his voice cold and unyielding, cutting off Deputy Zhang’s incipient protest. “He drank it last night. And now look at him.”

  He paused only long enough for the accusation to sink in before pressing harder. “And Wanwan—that Evil Cultivator who wrought such havoc? She was one of yours too. How much longer do you intend to keep up this pretense?”

  His gaze swept over the physicians like a judge’s verdict before settling on Elder Bai, heavy and unrelenting, as she took a cautious step toward the commander.

  In that moment, she felt the trap spring shut. The stubborn old dog had bided his time perfectly—this was the opening he’d waited for, and he’d seized it with ruthless precision.

  “Lin Gan,” she said slowly, turning to face him fully, her voice laced with ice, “what exactly are you implying? I watched you grow from a scrappy boy into the man you are. Are you truly accusing me?”

  Lin Gan held no formal authority to convict or even interrogate. But doubt? That he wielded like a weapon honed over decades. It was the reason he had endured as logistics commander longer than most—because he trusted cold, obedient machines far more than the fickle hearts of men.

  The entire legion had felt the bite of that suspicion at one time or another. Even the commander himself.

  And now, in this shattered hall thick with grief and lingering evil, that doubt had grown teeth sharp enough to draw blood.

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