The escape wasn't a chase. It was a slow-motion inevitable doom.
Lu Chen's world became three kinds of pain: the icy-hot knife wound in his arm, his muscles screaming like 7-9 overworked employees, and the two human sacks of dead weight dragging him down. The brutes were struggling. But Mo Tian was the real problem.
He was falling apart. And not in a cool, dramatic way.
First, the second brute's leg just… quit. One minute he was still hobbling, then next his foot was already dragging a trench in the moss. His face turned the into the color of old dishwater.
Then Mo Tian's teeth started going clack-clack-clack-clack like a possessed typewriter. Between chatters, he whimpered, "C-c-can't f-feel my c-c-core... it's f-freezing..." His blood qi wasn't just cold—it was seizing up, sending painful shudders through his body that Lu Chen felt through his grip.
Lu Chen's own bandaged arm was already a terrible thermometer. The wound had stopped hurting and now just burned with a deep, impossible cold. Each breath felt thinner, like the life was being sucked right out of the air around them.
"Hey, Mo Tian," Lu Chen grunted, hauling the shuddering man over a root. "Any brilliant last-minute ideas? A secret teleportation pill? A sudden burst of hero power?"
One of the brutes, pale with pain, blinked slowly. "Y-you... your speech pattern changed?"
Lu Chen stared. "That's what you're noticing? Not the soul-eating mist or your friend turning into a human Popsicle?"
Mo Tian let out a wet sob. The dam broke. "I'VE GOT A WIFE! TWO KIDS! Little Fei-fei just learned to say 'dada'!"
It was like a starting pistol for a crying competition. The dagger-wielder sniffled. The brute with the broken arm moaned like a haunted house sound effect.
Lu Chen's patience, already thinner than the last coin in his pocket, vaporized. "DID YOU THINK ABOUT THAT BEFORE TRYING TO MURDER ME IN A BAMBOO GROVE?!"
"Murder?!" Mo Tian cried, indignant through the snot. "We just wanted to cripple you! It was a job! My sister owes the Alchemy Hall! Xu Rang's people said they'd clear her debt if we... if we..." He dissolved back into messy weeping.
No time for this. Lu Chen's eyes scanned the swirling grey—and landed on a dark shape. A massive boulder, older than dirt. And at its base: a crack. An opening.
"SHUT UP," he hissed, with a force that cut through the waterworks. "All of you. I have a plan."
He quickly fed them his plan.
The opening wasn't a cave. It was a rock's bad haircut. A narrow, downward-slanting crack just big enough to stuff a body through. Inside: cramped, dry, and blessedly still. The mist coiled at the entrance like a curious snake, but didn't pour in. For one precious second, it was quiet. The silence was so loud it rang.
He shoved the three semi-conscious disasters inside. It was a tight fit.
His brain did two things at once:
Cultivator Logic: You're putting three leaking, spiritually loud kettles in a stone box. You're not hiding them. You're meal-prepping for the ghosts.
Stubborn Idiot Logic: But the rock is dry. No wind. If they go still and cold enough... maybe they'll look like more rock. Maybe the hungry shadows only chase what moves.
It wasn't hope. It was the math of "well, it's slightly better than nothing." The math of "if you're unlucky it's just fate."
"Listen," Lu Chen said, crouching at the entrance like a grim statue. "Sit. Still. Don't cycle your blood qi—it's like ringing a dinner bell. Don't scream. Don't even breathe too loud. Be rocks. Be the most boring, cold, unappetizing rocks in this entire cursed forest. Your only job: be invisible."
From the darkness, Mo Tian shuddered. "Y-you... you're a saint! A righteous soul! I'll build you an altar! Burn incense every day!"
The dagger-wielder nodded like a bobblehead. "My life is yours, Senior Brother! My sword is your sword!"
The sobbing brute grabbed Lu Chen's hand and pressed his forehead to it. "My second father! My dead daddy watches from heaven, and you guide me on earth! I'll name my firstborn after you!"
Lu Chen snatched his hand back, wiping it on his ruined robe. "Are you cursing me? Stop. Just... don't die. Don't thank me. Don't name your weird kids after me. Just survive so this wasn't a total waste of my afternoon." He couldn't believe the words coming out of his own mouth.
He turned to leave.
The math was simple and brutal: Four warm, scared things in one spot equals a ghost buffet. One warm, scared thing running away equals a distraction. It didn't mean anyone lived. It just meant the dice were still in the air.
He took one last breath of the slightly-less-cold cave air and dove back into the mist.
He ran.
Not like a hero. Like the last chicken in a fox convention. He spammed Mirage Step. The first burst was clean—three afterimages, decent distance.
The second burst sputtered. The afterimages flickered like bad reception.
The third was a pathetic stumble. He reappeared only a few feet ahead, his meridians screaming, the taste of copper blood in his mouth. Too fast. Too cold.
He glanced back. The boulder was gone, eaten by the mist.
The mist around him... shifted. The glowing, blurry shapes within it all turned. At once. A tide of hungry nothingness pivoting toward the only thing stupid enough to still be moving.
A cold that had nothing to do with temperature gripped Lu Chen's spine.
Seriously? Lu Chen thought, legs burning as he pushed harder. That's it? Just "ooh, moving thing, let's chase it"? Basic predator instinct?
It was almost more insulting. He wasn't special. He was just the only idiot still making noise.
This wasn't an escape. He understood now, with perfect, icy clarity as a wispy shadow-hand brushed his heel. He was bait. And he'd tied the hook himself.
Ahead, the mist thinned. Revealing not a path, but an edge. A sharp drop into a ravine where the mist pooled like a thick, toxic soup. The other side was maybe fifteen feet. It might as well have been the moon.
New math. Distance: Doable with a perfect Mirage Step. Stamina: In the negatives. Odds: A snowball's chance in a furnace.
No time to think. He coiled the last dregs of his warmth, his anger, his sheer stubborn refusal to die like this, into his legs. The world shrank to the lip of the cliff and the safe patch of ground across the gap.
I can make this.
Two running steps. A leap into open air.
For one glorious second, he flew. The cold air ripped at him. The mist fell away below. The far side rushed up. He saw the texture of the rock, a stubborn little vine. Stupid, brilliant hope flared in his chest.
It was at that exact moment, at the highest point of his jump—all vulnerability and hope—that something moved.
Not from behind. Not from the mist.
From below. From the deep, and scary ravine he was leaping over.
A shadow, darker than a black hole. It wasn't the mist. It was a void in the shape of a hand. No warning. No System shout. No time.
It wrapped around his ankle.
The feeling wasn't cold. It was the absence of feeling. Where it touched, his body just… stopped being his. The force was impossible, ancient, and utterly odd.
His forward momentum died. The far side of the ravine started sliding away.
Then he was yanked down. Not falling. Erased. The rock face, the mist, the grey sky—all swallowed in an upward blur as he was dragged into the ravine's throat. The last thing he felt was the warm pulse of Li Yun's talisman against his chest, a tiny echo of kindness, before the darkness snapped shut above him like a jaw.
[TO BE CONTINUED…]