Chapter 178: The Ghost Bloom

Chapter 180: The Ghost Bloom

The air rising from the open intake grate was stale and damp, carrying a faint, sour chemical smell.

While Lothe stood examining the severed scrap of white silk, Darian stepped toward the stone foundation at the edge of the octagonal bunker. A thick tangle of dried gray moss covered the masonry, half-buried beneath pine needles.

Beneath the moss, something pale caught his eye.

It was a solitary flower growing from the mortar between two granite slabs. The petals were translucent, resembling frosted glass, with thin red veins running through each leaf. The center of the blossom pulsed with a faint, steady rhythm.

"What is this?" Darian muttered, leaning closer. "A spirit herb growing on old stone?"

Before anyone could answer, he reached out with his gloved hand.

Seana glanced in his direction.

Her vision shifted. Her [Herbal Sight] kicked in naturally, peeling away the surface appearance of the plant to reveal its underlying botanical structure. The moment she saw the distinct, spider-web pattern of red veins and the dormant spore sacs beneath the petals, her face changed.

"Darian, don’t touch it!" she shouted. "GET BACK!"

Darian froze, but his finger had already brushed the petal.

PHUT.

The blossom ruptured.

A burst of pale-lilac powder exploded into the air, instantly dispersing into a fine, sweet-smelling mist. It didn’t drift on the wind; the powder expanded in an immediate shockwave, covering a thirty-foot radius before anyone could step back.

"Hold your breath!" Nyren ordered, her hand snapping to her hilt.

"It doesn’t enter through the lungs!" Seana warned. "It absorbs through the skin—"

The mist struck them before she could finish.

Darian stiffened. His pupils dilated until they swallowed his irises. He stumbled back, his brass formation rings lighting up with erratic yellow light.

"Corpse beasts!" Darian yelled, panic tearing through his voice. "They’re coming from the trees!"

"Darian, calm down!" Caelan stepped forward to grab his shoulder.

But as Caelan moved through the mist, his own vision twisted. To his eyes, Darian was no longer a fellow disciple—he saw a rotting ghoul with jagged bone spurs lunging for his throat.

Caelan drew his sword.

SHING!

A clean arc of blue sword Qi slashed through the air, heading straight for Darian.

"Caelan, stop!" Oren shouted, his telekinetic power flaring outward.

Yet the moment Oren reached out to deflect the blade, the environment around him warped. The trees dissolved into a black swamp. He saw dozens of shrieking phantoms dragging Seana into the mud.

"Get away from her!" Oren roared.

His telekinesis detonated. Three massive boulders tore free from the forest floor, flying violently across the clearing.

BOOM! BOOM!

"Stand your ground!" Elder Rowan barked.

Even the elder was affected. In Rowan’s eyes, the quiet pine clearing had turned into the violent beast stampedes from the initial days of the apocalypse. Frost Qi erupted from his body, freezing the surrounding brush solid and sending jagged icicles shooting in every direction.

Within seconds, the group had fractured into blind chaos, attacking phantoms that only they could see.

——————————

Near the iron grate, Lothe felt a subtle, sharp pressure push against his mental barrier. It was cold and intrusive, trying to distort the shapes of the people around him and twist his perception of distance.

He didn’t panic. His spatial perception remained anchored to the physical world, recognizing the discrepancy between what the air felt like and what the mental poison was trying to feed his mind.

He raised his hand, intending to form a neutralizing boundary, but Seana moved faster.

"Stay beside me, Lothe!"

Her hands came together in a swift sequence of seals.

From the palms of her hands, nine distinct drops of dense, crystallized blood emerged. They rose into the air, solidifying into nine glowing, cherry-sized spheres.

[Nine Crimson Blood Pearls.]

HUMMM.

The nine pearls dropped into a tight orbit around Lothe and Seana, circling their bodies in an unbroken ring. They moved like floating beads of red jade, leaving faint trails of clean, warm energy in their wake.

The moment the lilac mist touched the perimeter of the revolving pearls, a sharp hiss sounded.

Tzzzt!

The toxic spores dissolved on contact, completely blocked by the pure alchemical circulation of the pearls. Inside the ring, the air remained cool and crisp, carrying the light fragrance of fresh herbs.

Lothe looked at the rotating ring, a faint smirk touching his lips. "Impressive."

"Don’t stand there smiling," Seana said, her brow furrowed with focus. "That flower was a Ghost Orchid. The spores overstimulate the nervous system and force the brain into a state of panic until people kill each other!"

CRACK!

A frozen boulder, deflected by Rowan’s ice wall, shattered twenty feet away, spraying sharp stone fragments against the outer edge of their barrier. Right behind it, Caelan’s sword Qi sliced through the brush toward them.

"They’re going to tear each other apart," Lothe noted, watching the trajectories.

"I’m clearing it," Seana said.

She stepped to the center of the platform and lifted both arms toward the canopy.

"Disperse!"

The Nine Crimson Blood Pearls broke their horizontal orbit, shooting upward twenty feet into the branches. They arranged themselves into a wide, rotating circle above the mist.

Seana opened her right palm.

A tenth pearl formed over her skin—smaller, brighter, and humming with concentrated crimson Qi.

With a sharp downward motion, Seana drove her palm toward the ground.

BOOM!

The tenth pearl merged into the center of the overhead ring. A broad, descending wave of crimson light swept down through the trees like a heavy curtain of rain.

The light touched the lilac spores, vaporizing them on contact.

The sweet smell vanished, replaced by the clean scent of crushed mint and mountain pine.

THUD.

The floating stones dropped back into the dirt.

Caelan’s sword dipped, his chest heaving as the haze cleared from his eyes. Darian fell to one knee, groaning as he clutched his forehead. Oren hit the dirt with a rough gasp, wiping a thin trickle of blood from his nose as his telekinetic focus snapped back to reality.

Elder Rowan lowered his staff, the frost around his boots slowly dissipating.

The clearing fell quiet, save for the sound of heavy breathing.

"What...

what was that?" Darian wheezed, staring at his shaking hands, then at Caelan’s drawn blade a few feet away. "Caelan?"

"I saw..." Caelan shook his head, sheathing his sword with an unsteady hand. "I saw beasts."

Elder Rowan stood straight, looking around at the shattered rocks and frozen trees. His gaze turned toward Seana with genuine respect.

"A hallucinogenic spore," Rowan said. "If Lady Seana hadn’t cleared it, we would have injured each other before discovering the source."

Oren wiped his chin, his expression complicated. He looked at Seana, then glanced at Lothe, who was standing untouched beside the bunker. Once again, while he had fallen into disarray, Lothe hadn’t even drawn a weapon.

Lothe walked past them toward the stone bunker, crouching where Darian had first found the plant.

"Look at the base," Lothe said.

Caelan and Darian walked over, still rubbing their temples.

Lothe pointed at the root of the withered flower. "It didn’t sprout here naturally. The stem was grafted into the mortar using a dried sap adhesive."

Nyren stepped up, her sword already away. "Grafted? You mean it was placed here deliberately?"

"Yes," Seana said, examining the blackened root with her Herbal Sight. "Ghost Orchids only grow in deep, damp caverns where ancient matter decays. Someone cultivated this, rigged it to rupture on physical contact, and planted it directly beside the iron grate."

Caelan frowned. "An alarm."

"A lethal one," Lothe said. "Anyone tracking the abductors would naturally inspect the ventilation bunker. The cut grate draws your eye, and the flower sits right where someone would place a hand to climb up."

Nyren’s brow furrowed. "Then the person who set this trap..."

"Is down there," Lothe said, looking at the black opening beneath the severed iron bars. "And they don’t want company."

——————————

High above the clearing, perched on a thick pine branch, a figure watched them in complete silence.

He sat with one knee raised, resting his back against the tree trunk. He wore clean bone-white silk that seemed impervious to the forest dampness. Across his lap lay two closed, ink-black folding fans with razor-sharp steel rims.

His skin was pale, his dark eyes sharp and observant.

Zhao Meiyun.

His fingers tapped the side of his fan in a quiet, measured rhythm.

Nine Pearls, he noted, his gaze resting on Seana. She recognized the Ghost Orchid instantly, formed a clean perimeter, and used a tenth focal point to purge third-tier spores without harming her companions. A trained alchemist. And not a minor one.

Then his eyes drifted toward the dark-haired youth in purple beside her.

Lothe.

Zhao Meiyun’s eyes narrowed slightly.

When the spores had burst, the entire sect delegation—including their Core Formation elder. had succumbed to the illusion within seconds.

Yet the youth in purple hadn’t moved an inch.

He hadn’t panicked. He hadn’t reached for a talisman. He had simply stood there, his eyes tracking the attacks as though he were watching a sparring match in an academy courtyard.

He saw right through the illusion, Zhao Meiyun thought, his interest piqued. Not by overpowering it with raw Qi, but by reading the physical space around him.

Zhao Meiyun smiled faintly.

He had come to investigate the missing children on his own, planning to dismantle the network beneath the mountains without dealing with clumsy sect cultivators. He had planted the Ghost Orchid to delay whatever pursuit the Arbitration Hall sent, so as not to complicate his plans

He hadn’t expected them to dismantle the trap in under two minutes.

One is a dangerous alchemist with refined foundation... and the other, an array master who doesn’t react to chaos.

Zhao Meiyun stood up on the branch, his white robes rustling softly in the mountain breeze.

Interesting.

Without making a sound, he stepped off the branch, his figure slipping through the mist and disappearing down into the dark mouth of the ventilation shaft.?