Chapter 177: The Analysis

Chapter 174: The Analysis

Elder Rowan turned to her. "An alchemical formula?"

"An ancient one," Seana replied.

During the days she had rested. While her meridians healed from the tribulation, she had spent hours studying the worn, leather-bound grimoire her mysterious master had given her. Among its ancient pages was a section on forbidden biological preservation.

"The formula was banned centuries ago," she explained. "You mix alum salt, zinc vitriol, and fermented cedar resin with animal bile. It doesn’t kill microbes by burning them. It puts living cells into a state of suspended sleep.

It keeps organs fresh and muscle fibers soft even in freezing, stagnant air."

Caelan frowned, his hand resting on his sword hilt. "Why use an embalming fluid on living children?"

"Transit time," Seana said. "If you drag children through miles of cold, pitch-black tunnels without fresh air, normal mortals go into shock. Their lungs collapse from bad air. Their blood slows down. If you need their vital energy warm and unblemished when they arrive, you bathe their chambers in this vapor to keep them asleep."

A grim silence settled over the room.

Lothe immediately turned and walked back outside.

——————————

In the narrow alley beside the shed, the wind blew dry pine needles across the stone path.

Darian was on his knees, his brass formation rings resting flat on the ground. A pair of yellow talismans hovered in the air, glowing with a faint, steady light.

"Nothing," Darian muttered as the others gathered around. "If an earth cultivator softened the ground to pull the boy down, the soil would still carry residual Qi. But the ground here is completely inert."

"It’s not earth magic," Lothe said, stepping into the narrow gap.

He crouched beside the circular groove he had noticed earlier.

"See, look at the ground," Lothe said, pointing to the seam between the stone and the soil. "If someone dug a hole to swallow a child, sixty pounds of dirt had to go somewhere. Where did it go? The ground is completely flat."

Darian blinked, looking closely at the soil. "He’s right. Nothing was displaced."

Lothe looked down.

His Qi Sight was naturally active, an effortless layer of his everyday perception. He didn’t need to force it. The surface of the stone stripped away in his vision, revealing the fine structural lines beneath.

There were no active runes. No glowing spell pathways.

Instead, the circular stone was carved into nine interlocking wedge segments, fitted together like the shutter of a camera. The seams were cut with incredible mechanical precision, held together by spring-tension latches.

"It’s a mechanical trap," Lothe said, tracing the faint circle with his finger. "It doesn’t use spiritual energy at all. It uses buried counterweights. When a child’s weight steps onto the center, the pressure trips a release. The nine segments pull back into the stone, the target drops into a chute below, and the counterweight snaps the shutter closed. The whole process takes less than half a second."

Caelan exhaled softly. "That’s why our talismans didn’t react. It wasn’t an array being cast. It was just a mechanical trap."

"And look at the stone itself," Seana added.

She knelt beside Lothe and pulled a small silver scraper from her herbal kit she had made. She scraped a bit of fine gray dust from the edge of the seam into her palm.

She brought her hand close, letting her Blood Qi warm the powder. The dust didn’t crumble like rock. It turned slightly ivory and gave off a faint, bitter white wisp of steam.

Seana’s lips pressed into a thin line. "This isn’t slate or granite. It’s Marrow-Porcelain."

"What’s that?" Oren asked.

"An old corpse-refiner material," Seana said, wiping her palm clean. "They ground animal and human bones into meal, mixed it with slaked lime, and baked it with rendered tallow. It looks like stone, but it has the flexibility of bone.

It can slide open and shut hundreds of times without chipping."

She pulled the torn blue cloth—the plush rabbit’s ear, from her sleeve and held it out to Lothe.

"Smell the torn edge."

Lothe leaned in. His nose twitched.

"Blind-mole bile," Seana confirmed. "A heavy subterranean grease that doesn’t freeze in cold weather. They greased the trap’s edges with it so the shutter wouldn’t squeak. When Anthony fell, his toy got caught in the teeth, and the shutter sheared the ear clean off."

Elder Rowan’s expression turned grim. "This was prepared weeks in advance. Who has a map of the region?"

——————————

Caelan pulled out a map of Country B, pinning it to the top of a wooden barrel with four steel daggers.

Lothe took a piece of charcoal and marked nine points on the map.

Stonebrook in the north. Two villages on the eastern trade road. Four hamlets in the foothills. Willowbrook right where they stood. And Pine Ridge, five miles to the east, where the ninth child had vanished earlier today.

Nyren studied the marks. "These settlements belong to different territories. Some pay taxes to our sect, some to Azure Wind, some to Myriad Sword. The families have no common lineage, no special cultivation blood, and no shared history. What connects them?"

"You’re looking at surface borders," Lothe said.

He took the charcoal and drew a single line through all nine marks.

The line didn’t follow the roads or avoid the mountains. It cut straight across the province in a direct angle to the northeast.

Darian stared at it. "A straight line across the Granite Ridge? Nothing on the surface can travel in a straight line like that."

"Not on the surface," Lothe said, tapping the center of the line. "Beneath it."

Elder Rowan’s eyes widened. "The Black-Iron Pneumatic Arteries."

"What are those?" Oren asked.

"Old mortal industry," Rowan explained, his deep voice carrying a trace of memory. "Forty years ago, before the cataclysm and the awakening of cultivation, the mortal mining combines bored high-speed vacuum rail tunnels through the mountain roots. They used massive pneumatic tubes to shoot refined ore from southern pits to northern cities. When the world changed, toxic mine-gas flooded the tunnels, and the entrances were sealed with lead."

"They weren’t destroyed," Lothe said. "Someone cleared the gas, repaired the tracks, and turned an old freight railway into an underground highway."

He pointed to the nine circles on the map.

"These villages weren’t chosen because of the families. Every single one of them was built directly over an old ventilation shaft. The abductors don’t walk through the woods. They travel thirty miles an hour beneath the bedrock, stop under a chimney, open a trapdoor in an alley, grab a child, and disappear before anyone finishes a game of hide-and-seek."

"And the children are alive," Seana added. "If they wanted dead bodies, they wouldn’t need non-toxic mole grease or embalming vapor to keep them breathing. They need their vital energy intact."

"Where is the nearest shaft?" Oren chimed in from the side.

Rowan pointed toward the pine forest east of the village. "Six hundred paces into the trees. The old North Exhaust Station. It was capped with heavy lead and iron thirty years ago."

Lothe turned toward the trees.

"Let’s see if it’s still sealed."

——————————

The pine forest was damp and quiet.

The six youths and Elder Rowan moved through the shadowed trees in silence until they reached a mossy clearing.

In the center sat an octagonal stone bunker built from thick granite slabs. At the top of the bunker was a heavy cast-iron intake grate, eight feet wide, secured with rusted bolts and thick iron padlocks.

"The padlocks are still closed," Darian said quietly. "The rust on the bolts looks undisturbed."

Lothe stepped up onto the stone roof and knelt beside the iron bars.

He didn’t touch the locks. He tapped the center bar with his fingernail.

PING.

A neat, three-foot-wide section of the cast-iron grate slid downward half an inch, completely cut away from the rest of the frame.

It hadn’t been blown apart with an explosive talisman or bent by brute force.

The heavy iron had been sliced through with a cut so thin, flat, and precise that the severed piece had stayed in place purely by friction—until Lothe tapped it.

Lothe reached into the gap. His fingers caught a small snag of fabric stuck to the sliced edge.

He pulled it out.

It was a tiny scrap of bone-white silk, woven from delicate, high-grade spider thread.

Seana leaned over his shoulder, her eyes widening. "That’s five-ply moon-silk. Only high-tier alchemists and scholars wear robes like this. It repels acid and corrosive vapors."

Lothe brought the scrap to his nose.

The scent was clean and sharp, wild mountain mint, crushed camphor, and the metallic mineral smell of black-orchid calligraphy ink—the special ink alchemists used to record pill recipes.

Lothe looked at the mirror-smooth slice through the three-inch iron bar.

No burn marks. No shattered metal. Just a clean, circular cut, as if someone had sliced through the iron with the sharp edge of a folding fan.

An alchemist, Lothe realized. An alchemist who cuts metal like paper and wears pristine white silk into a dirty mine shaft.

Someone else had found this place first. Someone sharp, quiet, and completely separate from them.

From deep inside the pitch-black shaft—hundreds of feet beneath the forest floor where no sunlight reached—a faint, rhythmic sound drifted up through the cold draft.

Clack.

Clack.

Clack.

CHUNK.?