The crisp ringing of Lina's sky-iron rapier echoed through the frozen hollow as she pried the last Stage 3 violet beast core from the ice-encased skull of the second Basilisk.
Around us, the pale-blue glacier had begun to turn cloudy and brittle. Inside the immobilized carcasses of the three hundred beasts, my fifty million injected bacteriophages had spent the last forty minutes methodically hijacking their dormant internal bacteria. Without the beasts' active immune systems or martial qi to resist, the viral replication had proceeded like clockwork, quietly harvesting their cellular biomass from within.
Plaintext
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SWARM STATUS PANEL
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[User]: Amar Roy
[Physical Realm]: Martial Adept (Stage 2)
[Talents]: Ice World (Saint - Concealed), Bacteriophage Clone (Z-Rank)
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[CLONE SWARM MATRIX]:
- Active Bacteriophage Clones: 705,000,000 / 1,000,000,000
- Colony Tier: Primary Swarm (Tier 1)
- Harvest Status: Complete (+120,000,000 Clones Integrated)
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[PARASITE TELEMETRY: ARTHUR VANCE]:
- Distance: 850 Meters (Ashen Gorge Surface)
- Status: External Grandmaster Qi Detected (Infusion Active)
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Seven hundred and five million clones.
As the last wave of newly replicated phages flowed back into my pores through the melting frost, a sudden, violent tremor shook the cavern ceiling.
BOOM!
Chunks of loose volcanic rock rained down from the darkness above, crashing onto the ice sculptures and shattering several frozen Chitin-Prowlers into pieces. Even through eight hundred meters of dense stone, a suffocating, scorching wave of spiritual pressure bled downward, making the ambient air feel thick and dry.
Eight hundred meters above, in the Ashen Gorge, my dormant phages inside Arthur's lungs registered a massive spike in external energy.
Grandmaster Vance had arrived.
And the old man had just found his ruined, comatose grandson lying in the mud among the butchered remains of his outer-dojo disciples.
Lina immediately sheathed her rapier, her face paling slightly as she looked up at the trembling ceiling.
"Amar..." she whispered, hurrying over to my side and catching my arm. "That aura... it's a Martial Master! Did Arthur's grandfather breach the trial perimeter?!"
Inside her pendant, the Sovereign Dragon Empress's voice rang out with urgent sharpness:
"Little girl, grab that boy and run! Now! That old dog above us is a Stage 2 Martial Grandmaster! Between your Stage 2 Martial Adept realm and a Grandmaster lie three full major realms—Warrior and Master His liquefied dantian holds enough destructive force to collapse this entire subterranean cavern with three strikes of his saber! Even your lover's Saint-tier ice domain cannot bridge a gap of three major realms!"
Lina's heart hammered against her ribs. "Amar, we have to get out of this hollow! If he traces Arthur's blood or senses the residual energy of your ice domain, he'll bury us alive down here!"
I looked up at the vibrating stone ceiling, my eyes calm, dark, and purely calculating.
The Empress was right about one thing. Right now, I was only a Stage 2 Martial Adept. Even with my Chitinous Bio-Mesh, my concealed Ice World talent, and seven hundred million phages, facing a Stage 2 Martial Master head-on was suicide. A Grandmaster could project lethal elemental slashes from a hundred yards away, evaporating flesh and bone before a virus could ever take root or multiply in their system.
Fighting someone three major realms above me in a fair, face-to-face clash was what hot-blooded fools in storybooks did before dying young.
I was a businessman and a scientist. I didn't fight fair battles—I rigged the board long before the game began.
"Don't panic, Lina," I said smoothly, wrapping my fingers around her hand and leading her toward the far back wall of the sunken cavern, right behind the shattered ice husk of the giant Basilisk. "Who told you we were going to fight him?"
"Then where are we going?!" she asked, glancing back nervously as another distant thunderclap of Grandmaster fury shook the upper tunnels. "This hollow is a dead end!"
"To students following the academy map, yes," I replied, a faint, cold smirk touching my lips. "Fortunately, I don't use the academy's maps."
We reached a jagged wall of solid black basalt at the rear of the pit.
To the naked eye—and even to standard spiritual scans—it looked like an untouched, natural rock formation coated in thick sulfur moss.
I pulled a sleek, encrypted black transmitter from the inner pocket of my field coat and pressed the sequence key twice.
BEEP-BEEP.
For two seconds, nothing happened.
Then, a low, mechanical hum vibrated beneath our boots.
A four-meter section of the solid volcanic wall hissed, releasing a cloud of pressurized hydraulic steam as heavy, holographic camouflage arrays powered down. The "rock" slid smoothly inward on silenced magnetic tracks, revealing a reinforced titanium blast door stamped with a discrete, unregistered black insignia—the shadow mark of the Halcyon Group's deep-earth logistics division.
Lina's jaw dropped slightly, her amber eyes blinking in utter disbelief. "A... a secret bunker?! Inside the Black Crag Trial Realm?!"
Even the Sovereign Dragon Empress inside her sea of consciousness paused her frantic warnings, completely stunned.
"Wait... these are grade-5 spirit-insulation arrays embedded into the mountain bedrock! They completely mask all internal qi, heat, and life signatures from external divine perception! How is there a fortified fortress hidden inside an imperial trial zone?!"
The heavy titanium bulkhead swung open from the inside.
Standing at attention in the brightly lit, steel-plated airlock were four heavily armed men clad in matte-black tactical exosuits, carrying military-grade spirit suppressors. The leader—a scarred veteran at the Stage 6 Martial Master realm who served as the commander of my estate's black-ops security wing—immediately dropped to one knee, bowing his head.
"Welcome to Outpost Zero, Master Ryuk," Commander Vance—no relation to Arthur's pathetic clan, merely my top covert hound, Kael—reported in a crisp, low voice. "The perimeter arrays are at maximum output. The old Grandmaster on the surface won't sense so much as a rat breathing down here."
I nodded once, leading the stunned Lina across the threshold into the airlock.
"Seal the outer blast door and flood the cavern behind us with sulfur gas to erase our scent," I ordered calmly. "Have the outer reconnaissance drones monitor Grandmaster Vance's movements on the surface."
"Understood, Master!" Kael saluted, hitting the master lock.
CLANG-HISS.
Three feet of solid titanium alloy and grade-5 dampening runes sealed shut behind us. Instantly, the suffocating, oppressive weight of Grandmaster Vance's aura vanished as if it had never existed.
I led Lina down a wide, pristine steel walkway that overlooked a massive subterranean excavation bay.
Beneath us, illuminated by rows of cold industrial floodlights, dozens of silent, automated laser-drills and heavily armed workers in hazard suits were carving glowing purple and blue crystals straight out of a massive underground spatial vein. Crates stamped with blind serial numbers were being loaded onto subterranean mag-lev rail cars that ran through a secret tunnel bored straight underneath the mountain range toward my Western Industrial Sub-District.
Lina stared down from the catwalk, her mind struggling to process the sheer audacity of what she was seeing.
"Amar..." she breathed, looking from the massive mining lasers back to my calm profile. "The Black Crag is a restricted imperial military zone. Mining raw spatial veins without an imperial decree is treason-level smuggling! When did you build all this?!"
"Built it?" I chuckled softly, leaning an elbow against the steel railing and looking down at the bustling covert operation. "My shadow companies have been hollowing out the rich veins under this mountain for eight months, Lina. And the momentVice Principal Rosette announced three weeks ago that the academy tournament would be held here, I had Kael's unit expand Sector 4 into a fortified forward base."
Lina turned to face me fully, her eyes wide with a mixture of shock, exasperation, and reluctant amazement.
"You knew Arthur's family wouldn't play by the rules," she realized aloud. "You knew a Grandmaster might interfere, so you sent your private army in days before the tournament even started just to dig a shelter for us?"
"I told you I don't like gambling, darling," I said softly, reaching out to tuck a loose strand of pink hair behind her ear. "Why fight a desperate old man in the mud when I can sit in an air-conditioned bunker, drink hot tea, steals the empire's spatial ore right under his boots, and let my little pets rot his grandson from the inside out?"
Lina stared at me for a long, quiet moment.
Then, despite the madness of the afternoon, despite the terrifying Grandmaster roaring on the surface above us, the tension in her shoulders completely melted away. A small, helpless laugh escaped her lips, and she shook her head, resting her forehead lightly against my shoulder for a brief second.
"You really are the biggest villain in the Star Empire," she murmured against the dark silk of my coat, her voice warm and oddly fond.
"Only for you, Lina," I whispered, resting my hand gently on the back of her neck, my eyes turning cold and pitch-black as I glanced at the tactical monitor on the wall showing Grandmaster Vance raging across the barren gorge above.
"Let the old dog bark in the sun. Down here in the dark... we own the mountain."