The sky above the Great Maw was tearing open. Spatial gates, vast as thunderheads, shimmered into existence, their edges crackling with the energy of forced translocation. From the depths of the fortress, gleaming arks—sleek vessels of polished spirit-wood and inscribed metal—began to rise on columns of blue light, heading for the gates. The evacuation wasn't a future plan. It was happening now.
"There's no time," Ling Xiao said, his voice cutting through the roar of engines and the deeper groan of the planet. He clutched the data crystal Ming had stolen. It held schematics, maps of the Deepdrill network. "The core access isn't in the fortress. It's under it. The primary extraction array is at the bottom of the deepest mine shaft. That's where we need to go."
Kai, still shaky but resolute, pressed his hand to the trembling ground. "The mines… they're collapsing. The planet's fighting the drills. The paths will be… chaotic."
"That's our advantage," Ling Xiao said, already moving toward a service entrance on the periphery of the Maw—a lesser-used tunnel for survey teams, now likely abandoned. "Chaos is our path. Stay close. Move with the tremors, not against them."
The descent into the Deepdrift Mines was a journey into a dying giant's arteries.
The initial tunnels were broad, orderly, and abandoned, lit by fading glow-moss. Soon, they gave way to chaos. The first major obstacle appeared within an hour: a collapsed tunnel. A quake had sheared through a support column, burying the main path under a hundred feet of shattered rock and glittering, low-grade spirit stone fragments.
"Blocked," Ming said, her firelight dancing over the impassable wall.
Ling Xiao closed his eyes, stretching his Chaos Sensing through the rubble. He felt the weight, the pressure points, the air pockets. "There's a gap. A winding path through. But it's unstable. Kai, I need you to feel the shifts. Tell me which rocks are load-bearing, which are just waiting to fall."
Kai nodded, placing both palms on the collapse. His stone-affinity allowed him to feel the tension in the mineral matrix. "There," he pointed. "That big one in the middle is holding up the left side. If we go right, under the overhang… but we have to be quick. It's slipping."
They moved single-file, Ling Xiao leading with his senses, Kai calling out warnings, Ming providing flickering light, and Ren shrouding their sounds and heat signatures. They slithered through a crack that tightened until they had to exhale to pass, the mountain groaning around them. They emerged, dusty and scratched, into a tunnel on the other side.
Rogue energy flows were the next peril. As they descended, they passed fissures where raw, wild spiritual energy—the planet's lifeblood, now infected and feverish—leaked out. These weren't gentle streams of qi; they were geysers of chaotic force that could rewrite matter or unravel a mind.
One such flow filled a chasm they needed to cross. It shimmered with poisonous rainbows, and the air above it wavered with heat distortion.
"We can't go through that," Ren whispered, recoiling from the chaotic noise only he could fully perceive.
"We don't have to," Ling Xiao said, studying the flow with his Pattern Reading. "It pulses. Like a heartbeat. There's a three-second low-energy trough every seventeen seconds." He turned to them. "When I say now, you run across that narrow stone bridge. Don't stop. Don't look into the energy."
He counted in his head, feeling the chaotic rhythm. "Ready… NOW!"
They bolted. Ming's hair streamed behind her like a comet's tail. Kai's feet were sure on the stone. Ren was a wraith. They made it across just as the energy geyser roared back to full strength, scorching the space they'd occupied.
Deeper they went, beyond where any sane miner would venture. The air grew thick, hot, and humming with latent power. Here, they encountered the spirit stone guardians.
Not living creatures, but constructs formed from congealed spiritual residue and the vengeful will of a plundered earth. They were humanoid shapes of crystalline slag, their movements jerky, their eyes empty sockets that glowed with sickly light. They were mindless, but drawn to the living chaos of the children.
Three guardians shambled from a side tunnel, blocking their path.
"Let me," Ming said, stepping forward. Her usual control was gone, replaced by the fury she'd carried since the facility. She didn't try to command a precise flame. She opened her hands and released. A wave of raw, emotional fire, red with her anger and grief, washed over the guardians. It didn't melt them instantly. It confused them. The chaotic fire interacted with their structured spiritual residue, causing internal fractures. They cracked, sparked, and fell apart into piles of inert, blackened crystal.
Ming sank to her knees, panting, the outburst leaving her drained. "They… they felt like the machines," she mumbled.
Ling Xiao helped her up. "They were. Just older."
The descent became a nightmarish blur of danger and exertion. They navigated lakes of acidic groundwater, scaled sheer rock faces in pitch darkness with only Ming's controlled embers for light, and outran a flash flood of superheated steam from a breached geothermal pocket. Each child had their moment: Ren sensing an ambush by cave-vipers before it happened; Kai stabilizing a crumbling ledge long enough for them all to pass; Ming burning through a wall of phosphorescent fungi that released mind-numbing spores.
They were a team. A family forged in desperation.
The final obstacle was not geological, but living. A pursuit squad from the Alliance had been sent down a main shaft to intercept them. They were faster, fresher, and armed with superior artifacts. The children heard them first—the disciplined thrum of their movement, the clear, ordered signals of their tracking talismans.
The pursuers cornered them in a large, cathedral-like cavern split by a deep, dark crevasse. A single, fragile stone arch spanned the gap. On the other side was the continuation of the service tunnel, their last known path to the deepest core shaft.
"We can't fight them here," Kai said, eyeing the narrow arch. "They'll force us into the chasm."
Ling Xiao's mind raced through patterns. They could try to collapse the arch after crossing, but the pursuers could likely fly or have other means. They needed time. More than a few seconds.
Ren, who had been silent and watching the shadows at the rear, suddenly spoke. "I can slow them down." His voice was small, but certain.
Ling Xiao turned. "Ren, no. We stick together."
"The shadows here are old. Thick. Full of the mountain's memories," Ren said, his eyes like pools of ink. "I can… wake them up. Make them hungry. It will confuse the trackers. Give you time to cross and break the bridge." He looked at Ling Xiao, a sad, knowing smile on his face. "I'm the smallest. The quietest. I'm good at hiding. I'll catch up."
It was a lie. They all knew it. Waking the chaotic shadows of a dying mountain would take everything he had. There would be no catching up.
Ming made a choked sound. Kai's stony face crumpled.
Ling Xiao knelt, putting his hands on Ren's small shoulders. The weight of it—the first loss of a student, a child he was sworn to protect—threatened to break him. "You don't have to."
"I know," Ren whispered. "But I want to. For Kai. For Ming. For… for the quiet places. They shouldn't be all alone when the world ends." He hugged Ling Xiao quickly, a fleeting touch of warmth in the cold cavern, then slipped back into the darkness from which he'd come.
"Go," Ren's voice echoed, already fading. "Now."
They ran across the arch. As they reached the other side, they looked back.
Ren stood in the center of the cavern, arms wide. The shadows themselves seemed to flow toward him, then out from him, becoming a living tide of darkness that swallowed sound, light, and spiritual sense. The pursuing cultivators stumbled into it, their orderly shouts turning to confused, muffled cries. The darkness didn't attack; it absorbed, filled with whispers of ancient rock and forgotten pain.
Kai, tears cutting clean lines through the grime on his face, slammed his fist onto the base of the stone arch. His affinity told him the exact point of weakness. The arch cracked, then shattered, plunging into the abyss.
The last they saw of Ren was his small silhouette, swallowed by the vengeful shadows he had become, as the darkness closed protectively—and permanently—around him.
Grieving and silent, the three of them turned and ran down the final tunnel. It opened suddenly into a space that stole what little breath they had left.
The Core Chamber.
It was vast beyond comprehension, a spherical cavern hundreds of miles across. At its center, spinning with ponderous, terrible majesty, was the Planetary Core. It was not molten rock as he'd imagined. It was a crystalline heart, a complex, faceted geode the size of a continent, glowing with a soft, internal light that pulsed through colors—healthy gold, sickly green, feverish violet. Veins of pure spirit energy, like luminous rivers, flowed across its surface.
But it was horrifically wounded. The black fractures from the Chaos Stone's vision were real: canyon-like cracks splintering across the crystalline surface, oozing chaotic, void-black energy. And plunged into the core itself, like massive, silver syringes, were the Star-Seer extraction arrays. They hummed, drawing streams of brilliant gold energy out of the heart and into spatial conduits that vanished upward.
And the core was fracturing. As they watched, a new crack, lightning-fast and deep, spider-webbed across a major facet. With a sound like the sky breaking, a chunk of the core the size of a mountain calved off, spinning away into the chamber's void before dissolving into dissipating energy. The chamber trembled with the core's agony.
The timer in Ling Xiao's mind screamed.
TIME TO CORE COLLAPSE: 42 HOURS, 17 MINUTES.
It was happening faster than projected. The accelerated evacuation, the final, greedy draw on the arrays, was triggering the final cascade.
They had reached the heart.
And they were just in time to watch it stop beating.
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END OF CHAPTER 23