Yan's attack was not the wild, brute force of Jiao. It was precise, surgical, and fueled by a fanatic's fury. The energy blade sliced through the air where my head had been a split second before. I rolled, coming up into a crouch, my own dark energy swirling around my hands defensively.
"You cannot win, Wa Lang!" Yan snarled, his form blurring as he closed the distance again. "I am a Foundation Establishment cultivator! You are just a budak with a fancy parasite!"
He was right about the disparity in raw power. A direct confrontation was suicide. My strength lay not in pure cultivation level, but in versatility, in the thousands of years of combined experience and knowledge I carried.
As he thrust his blade towards my heart, I didn't block. I shifted, a movement borrowed from the memory of a drunken master boxer I had absorbed, letting the blade graze my side. A searing pain shot through me, but I used the momentum, grabbing his extended arm and channeling a burst of chaotic, toxic energy—a mixture of Spirit-Clog residue and the despair from the Soul Mist—directly into his spiritual pathway.
Yan screamed, not in pain, but in outrage. It was like throwing mud on a pristine white robe. The energy wasn't strong enough to seriously harm him, but it disrupted his focus, fouling the purity of his cultivation. He recoiled, shaking his arm as if to dislodge something disgusting.
"You filthy creature!" he spat.
'He relies on order, on control,' the strategist's voice chimed in. 'We are chaos. We are the unpredictable.'
I pressed the advantage. I didn't launch a powerful counterattack. Instead, I used a dozen minor, annoying techniques from a dozen different disciplines. A pressure point strike from an acupuncturist aimed at causing spiritual numbness. A blinding flash of light created by manipulating residual photic energy. A psychic shriek composed of the most discordant voices in my collection.
Yan was forced constantly on the defensive, not against one powerful enemy, but against a swarm of gnats. He batted away each attack with ease, but the constant, erratic assault was fraying his nerves and breaking his concentration. He was a master swordsman being pelted with rocks from all directions.
"You think this petty resistance matters?" he roared, finally unleashing a wide-area spiritual pulse. The wave of force threw me back against the cavern wall, the breath knocked out of me. "The project may be delayed, but the Clan's will shall prevail! You will still be used! You are all just resources!"
He strode towards me, his expression grim. "I see now. You are not a tool. You are a flaw. A corrupted specimen. You must be purged."
He gathered energy for a final, decisive blow. I tried to rise, but my body screamed in protest. The gash on my side was bleeding freely. This was it. I had gambled and lost.
But then, a voice, weak but clear, echoed from the tunnel entrance.
"Pengawas Yan! Halt!"
Standing there, flanked by two of his trusted guards, was Pengawas Shen. He looked pale, and one of his arms was in a sling, but his eyes were sharp and filled with grim determination. The trap at the Forgotten Spring had caught him, but it seemed he had managed to escape or was released due to the chaos.
Yan froze, his face a picture of shock and fury. "Shen? What is the meaning of this? You are relieved of duty!"
"On whose authority?" Shen shot back, stepping into the chamber. His guards fanned out, their hands on their weapons. "The Elder Council is in an uproar. The energy readings from the Heart have crashed. Your project has failed, Yan. Spectacularly."
"This is his doing!" Yan pointed a trembling finger at me. "The subject sabotaged the Primordial! I was attempting to neutralize the threat!"
Shen's gaze fell on me, battered and bleeding on the floor. I saw a flicker of understanding in his eyes. He saw the spent Primordial Fragment near my hand. He knew.
"A curious form of sabotage," Shen said, his voice dry. "One that appears to have stabilized the seal and averted a catastrophic breach. The Council will be very interested in my report."
Yan's face went from red to white. He understood the implication. Shen was not here to help him; he was here to seize the opportunity, to pin the failure and the near-disaster squarely on Yan.
"You have no proof," Yan hissed.
"I have the energy logs," Shen replied calmly. "I have the testimony of the surviving Chosen Slaves. And I have... him." He nodded towards me. "The Council will want to debrief the subject who 'sabotaged' your project by apparently saving us all."
It was a masterful political move. Shen was using me as a pawn to destroy his rival. But in this case, being Shen's pawn was infinitely preferable to being Yan's experiment.
Yan looked between Shen, his guards, and me. The rage in his eyes was so potent it was a physical force. He knew he was checkmated. If he fought here, he would be branded a traitor and killed. If he surrendered, he would face the tender mercies of the Elder Council, which for a failure of this magnitude, would be a fate worse than death.
With a final, venomous look at me, a look that promised this was not over, Yan did the only thing he could. He dropped his energy blade.
"Take him into custody," Shen ordered his guards.
As they moved to secure Yan, Shen walked over to me. He crouched down, his voice low. "You used the Fragment to communicate with it, didn't you? You convinced it to go back to sleep."
I just looked at him, too exhausted to speak.
"A dangerous gamble," he murmured. "But it seems your 'collective' is more persuasive than I imagined." He stood up. "You have my... gratitude. For now. But the Council will have questions. And you, Wa Lang, are now the most valuable, and most dangerous, asset in this entire mine."
He was right. The immediate threat of Yan was over. The Primordial Parasite was pacified, for now. But I had traded one cage for another. I was no longer just a slave with a strange Seed. I was the key to the Clan's most powerful secret. And keys are either used carefully or melted down and reforged when they are no longer needed.
As guards helped me to my feet, the collective within me stirred, not in triumph, but in grim resignation. We had survived the battle. But the war for our soul, and for our freedom, had just entered a new, more complicated phase.