The open rooftop, a hundred meters above the ground, had no barriers whatsoever. Jiang Zhinan’s lips trembled as she was shoved to the edge of death. Ye Jingqiu couldn’t see her eyes, but through the screen, she could clearly make out the terror etched on her face.
So it was the Savior group—they had kidnapped Jiang Zhinan.
Ye Jingqiu ground her molars nearly to dust. Finally, the image on the television shifted. A silver-masked woman, her face only half-visible in the frame, gave her a faint smile.
“Twenty-seven kilometers to the northeast. If you want her to live, come alone. Don’t tell a soul.”
The transmission cut off abruptly the moment she finished speaking. Ye Jingqiu didn’t even have time to utter a word before the room fell into pin-drop silence.
This was a blatant trap. The woman’s tone had been far too casual, like a kidnapper calling the family to say that alerting the cops meant tearing up the ticket, and the ransom was set—come fetch it yourself.
The fact that they could hack into the system and hijack the screen without Aether reacting at all meant her opponent might already be watching her. If she knocked on the Captain’s door right now, there was no guarantee Jiang Zhinan wouldn’t be shoved off that rooftop.
The Submerged Abyss Plan was set for eight o’clock tomorrow night. If she moved fast enough, she could rescue Sister Nan-Nan tonight, rest during the day, and still have the energy to dive.
Ye Jingqiu stopped thinking. She yanked open the wardrobe, selected a gun and a tactical knife, then burst out the door without a second thought.
“Aether, auxiliary mode.”
“Received.”
Little Cat’s voice chimed in response, and the ring of will dimmed instantly. In the pitch-black night, the roar of an ancient bell-like engine suddenly thundered to life. Ye Jingqiu leaned low over the motorcycle, her gaze icy cold, the tails of her black coat whipping through the air.
Meanwhile, in the control room of the Balor aboard Felling Tower—beyond her sight—a monitor suddenly blared a shrill beep. Under the incredulous stares of the on-duty personnel, the Black Point on the screen flared brightly. The depth readings skyrocketed at an impossible rate.
Nine hundred meters. One thousand meters. Fifteen hundred meters. Three thousand meters…
Alarms wailed deafeningly.
~~~
Ye Jingqiu scratched the back of her neck again. She took a deep breath, forcing her emotions to settle.
The desolate air unique to abandoned factories hit her full force. This was a vast industrial zone, its exhaust-spewing smokestacks towering about a hundred meters high. The gray-brown pipes lurked beneath the ink-black night sky, exuding an eerie desolation. Ye Jingqiu glanced toward the rooftop of a nearby stack—the backdrop and colors matched the video perfectly.
This had to be the place. No mistake.
Her right hand gripped the knife hilt as she stepped through the factory gates.
The moment she entered, a damp, chilling gloom enveloped her. The factory was unnaturally quiet, as if devoid of life. The acrid stench of spilled chemicals mingled with the grime on rusted gears and machine tools coated in black dust.
A sudden ding echoed from all directions. Ye Jingqiu whipped toward the sound, eyes alert. A freight elevator stood with its doors open, revealing an interior lined with dangling sheet metal.
“Come up.”
A cold female voice drifted out. Ye Jingqiu’s head snapped up, catching a fleeting glimpse of a snow-white figure vanishing. Otherwise, the space was empty.
Take the elevator? What was the trick here?
Without hesitation, Ye Jingqiu drew her slender high-manganese steel tactical knife. The meter-long blade, etched with a blood groove, gleamed menacingly under the moonlight. She reversed her grip on the hilt and stepped into the car.
Whatever came, she would meet it head-on. Tonight, she was bringing Jiang Zhinan home.
The freight doors slid shut slowly. The dim yellow overhead light swayed, and a strange odor flickered in the air. The wide but sealed elevator lifted off the ground, steel cables hoisting the massive iron box upward.
The eerie smell intensified. Ye Jingqiu sniffed, her right hand subtly shifting into Quick Knife’s starting stance.
“Boom—”
A long iron spike suddenly punched down from the elevator’s ceiling! Ye Jingqiu’s blade flashed out like lightning. With a soft puff, it sliced through the metal roof, rocketing skyward.
A cat-like wail of agony exploded, filling the space—the decibels nearly shattering her eardrums. Ye Jingqiu didn’t so much as flinch. She withdrew the blade—and in an instant, black-red blood erupted like a geyser. Elemental forces clashed with the scalding beast blood, hissing into white steam.
No sooner had one threat ended than another arose. Booms rang out in succession—from the left, the right, behind…
The elevator car began to shake. Dozens of Exotic Beasts swarmed its surface, bird-shaped, fox-shaped, cat-shaped… All of them snarled like starving beggars, clawing at the metal to tear into the lone living thing at the center.
The car was riddled with holes now, the cables dragging this makeshift zoo upward at a crawl. The top of the elevator shaft had been pried open, pale moonlight spilling in and making the crimson stains on the white iron all the more vivid.
Roars filled the air as the elevator deformed completely. A crack tore open under the raw strength of a six-eyed, three-legged Shangfu, and the Exotic Beasts howled even louder. They crowded the doors, desperate to pour in—until a deafening knife-whistle cracked like thunder. A fierce gale whipped up from nowhere—
Instinct: Hurricane Blade, activated.
A section of blade had already sliced through the elevator wall unnoticed. The full moon cast its shadow on the polished back, the knife reflecting its glow like a shimmering spring. But in the next instant, the blade moved—and the moonlight clinging to it splashed outward like liquid light!
The blade traced a near-perfect arc, slicing paper-thin! The long knife swept forward in a level cut. The gale swirling through the narrow shaft shoved every Exotic Beast toward that brief glimpse of exposed edge. Crushing wind pressure pulverized their bodies, mingling the snap of shattering bones with screams of pain.
Ye Jingqiu stood unmoving as a mountain. Ignoring the claws and fangs whipping around her, she simply gripped the hilt and cut level. Boiling blood was compressed before it could spray, swept away with the corpse fragments into the endless Hurricane Blade. Countless bodies were crushed against the now-blackened blade. In a flash, the shadow of death obliterated every Exotic Beast.
Perhaps it lasted an age, or perhaps only an instant—a terrifying blade light flashed past, slicing the elevator cleanly in two like a cake. The piercing screech of rending metal echoed through the shaft as Ye Jingqiu stomped down hard, sending the severed metal box swaying into the abyss below.
She rolled onto the elevator’s upper half, with the Cyclone Turtle, Shangfu, Peng Bird, and others in tow… Dozens of grotesque animal limbs lay scattered beside the elevator shaft, the concrete walls smeared with splattered flesh. Ye Jingqiu gripped the steel cable with one hand and slowly rose to her feet. She watched the corpses plummet, but no trace of triumph lit her face.
As the exotic beast remains tumbled down, a faint gurgling sound bubbled up. Sure enough, the bottom of the shaft opened into a pool of water. Chunks of bloody flesh rained down like a storm, soon joined by an eerie noise like a school of fish thrashing out of the waves.
Ye Jingqiu kept climbing, but her eyes remained fixed on a patch of seawater dozens of meters away. Fragmented chewing sounds rose first, followed by increasingly loud gulps that grew and grew. At last, something breached the surface!
Thousands upon thousands of exotic beasts of every variety leaped and lunged and tore into the feast, their teeth clashing against bone in a relentless drone like an endless welding torch. Blinding crimson churned across the pool’s surface. A Chi Ju vaulted upward, snapping up a leg bone from Shangfu with deadly precision. But before it could plunge back down, its own kind roared and ripped it apart, like fiends starved for millennia.
A chill raced down Ye Jingqiu’s spine. She suddenly understood why the base’s sensors had missed the beast tide entirely. Someone had corralled it down here.
The abandoned factory’s depths must connect to the sea. Ye Jingqiu shuddered at the thought of how feral these exotic beasts would be for fresh blood. If Jiang Zhinan got shoved off from here, there’d be no grave, no burial—nothing.
The elevator neared the top. Ye Jingqiu’s patience snapped. She vaulted onto the rooftop, her right hand’s blood-soaked long blade dangling at her side, dripping scarlet drops like a wordless threat.
Across a two-meter chasm, Ye Jingqiu locked eyes in silence with Messiah.
Jiang Zhinan stood directly opposite her, flanked by the silver-masked woman in white. Her frame was still impossibly slender, drifting like a stray breeze.
Did Messiah feed their people this poorly?
Ye Jingqiu reversed her grip and plunged the blade into the concrete. The surface was unyielding as rock, but it parted under her strike as easily as a head of cabbage. Number Thirty-Seven watched her, then broke into a smile.
“Incomplete Hurricane Blade?”
“Yes,” Ye Jingqiu nodded. “But it’s enough.”
“Good. You’ve honored our deal,” Number Thirty-Seven said, stepping forward twice before suddenly yanking off Jiang Zhinan’s blindfold. “So I’ll keep my end.”
“You bastard!”
Ye Jingqiu bit back a curse. Number Thirty-Seven had given Jiang Zhinan a deliberate shove forward. At this height, did they get off on watching people panic?
Light flooded Jiang Zhinan’s world in a rush. Deprived of it for so long, she squeezed her eyes shut against the glare, instinctively savoring the glow. Then a achingly familiar voice cut through.
“Sister Nan-Nan—don’t look down! Don’t be scared!”
Xiao Qiu?
She cracked her eyes open hesitantly, but in that split second, her peripheral vision snagged on the yawning abyss beneath her feet.
Jiang Zhinan’s face went deathly pale.
Ye Jingqiu seethed with impatience on her side of the gap. She whipped around to glare at Number Thirty-Seven. “So what will it take? What do you want to let Sister Nan-Nan go?”
“Simple,” Number Thirty-Seven replied airily, gesturing down at the blood-mad exotic beasts thrashing in the pool. “You jump.”
~~~
“Emergency notice: The Submerged Abyss Plan will activate in thirty minutes. All units, prepare.”
“Emergency notice: The Submerged Abyss Plan will activate in thirty minutes. All units, prepare.”
~~~
In the crimson blare of the warning, Zhou Xianhui suited up in her specialized diving gear and glanced toward the distant, unreadable Shi Zui.
“No word from Xiao Qiu yet?”
“Nothing,” Shi Zui replied evenly, her face a mask. “Balor’s cameras only caught her stepping out the door. Her Ring of Will went dark—no contact.”
Xie Pingzhi paced in frantic circles. “Xiao Qiu wouldn’t just wander off like that. Someone lured her out! Messiah’s goons, probably, trying to sabotage us.”
“It’s handled. The rest of the base crew’s already hunting for leads on Xiao Qiu. Suit up first. Constance is en route—if she makes it in time, you’ll dive with her.” Shi Zui turned to Xie Pingzhi with a calm directive.
“Come on, Captain, we’ve got half an hour. Let me go look for Xiao Qiu? I’ll be back before you know it.”
“No. Black Point’s hit five thousand meters deep. If you don’t return, the mission’s scrubbed.”
Xie Pingzhi’s anxiety spiked. “Captain, but it’s Xiao Qiu!”
“The op’s timed down to the second, and you’re here now,” Shi Zui said flatly. “Fail to neutralize that S-rank exotic beast, and we’re all goners. Doesn’t matter who.”
Zhou Xianhui watched her teammates and chimed in softly. “No point agonizing. Xiao Qiu’s rampage value’s climbing to B-level fast. Trust her, A-Xie.”
Xie Pingzhi balled her fists. “But Captain, don’t you even wor—”
“No buts!” Shi Zui cut her off at last, wheeling around with ice in her eyes. “I’m more worried about her than any of you. But you’re staying put.”
