Lin Tianren didn't answer the entity yet. He turned toward the threads instead, studying the way they pulsed in slow, deliberate rhythm, weighing the shape of the problem before he committed to solving it any particular way.
System. If I sever these threads, what happens to the villagers?
[Warning: Forced Disconnection Will Cause Immediate Soul Collapse]
He absorbed that carefully. Cutting the connection outright wasn't rescue. It was execution, dressed up as intervention. Whatever this formation was actually doing, it had woven itself into forty-seven lives too thoroughly to simply be undone with a blade.
"We can't just cut them free," he said quietly, mostly to himself.
Gu Chen, still watching the threads with visible unease, caught the words anyway. "Then what can we do?"
"I don't know yet. Which means we don't touch anything until I do."
Xia Qing had drifted closer to one of the chamber walls while they spoke, her attention fixed on the inscriptions running along its surface rather than on the suspended villagers themselves. Something in her posture shifted as she studied them, recognition settling into her expression.
"This isn't a normal cultivation formation," she said.
Lin Tianren turned toward her fully. "What do you mean?"
"My family's trade is artifacts," she said, tracing one of the carved lines without quite touching it. "I've spent years around forging formations, even if I've never built anything major myself. These inscriptions — some of them match patterns used in artifact creation, not spiritual restraint or cultivation support." She frowned, working through the implication as she spoke it aloud. "Why would someone use artifact-forging script on a formation built to hold people?"
Lin Tianren studied the walls again with that framing in mind, something considerably more unsettling settling into place. "Unless the villagers aren't the actual product," he said slowly. "Unless they're raw material."
Xia Qing didn't answer that directly, though her expression made clear she'd already arrived somewhere close to the same thought.
Gu Chen moved to check on the wounded disciple, still slumped against the chamber's entrance where they'd left him. "We should stabilize him properly before this gets worse," he said, kneeling to check the black lines still spreading slowly along the man's arms.
"I already told you," the disciple said, voice weak but clear. "I'm connected. Stabilizing me doesn't disconnect me."
"It might buy time," Gu Chen said, already working a basic circulation technique into the man's chest to slow whatever the formation was still drawing from him.
The disciple let him work, though something in his expression suggested he didn't fully believe it would matter. "There's something you should know," he said, looking toward Lin Tianren. "Something I didn't say upstairs."
"Say it now."
"Every time the formation activates fully — the way it did tonight — one person disappears entirely. Not slowly drained like the rest. Gone, all at once." His jaw tightened. "I've counted three cycles since I arrived. Three people, simply erased from the restraints without warning."
Lin Tianren went very still. "Then the forty-seven we're looking at now—"
"Aren't the full count," the disciple finished. "They're just whoever's left from the current cycle. There were more, before tonight."
The chamber felt considerably colder after that, and not from anything the temperature had actually done.
The voice returned, patient and unhurried, filling the space the way it had before.
You want them?
Lin Tianren straightened. "Yes."
Then give me something equivalent.
"What?"
A pause, weighted with something that felt almost like amusement. A drop of sovereign dragon blood.
The offer settled over the chamber, simple in its wording and considerably heavier in its implication. Lin Tianren didn't answer immediately, turning the proposal over carefully rather than reacting to it on instinct.
[Warning: Bloodline Transfer Not Recommended]
[Unknown Entity May Establish Permanent Resonance With Host]
"Permanent how?" he asked the system quietly.
[Insufficient Data. Recommend Caution.]
Not a refusal. A warning shaped like one, which wasn't the same thing at all. He weighed forty-seven lives, a disciple slowly dying against a wall, and an entity that had already proven it could reach directly for something inside him without asking permission first.
The fox pressed close against his leg before he could settle on an answer, its tension unmistakable even through the disguise it still carried. It didn't growl, didn't flare its power the way it had earlier. It simply stayed close, refusing to let him move any nearer to the sealed core without making its own objection felt clearly.
"You don't trust it," he murmured, quiet enough that only the fox would catch it properly.
Something shifted through their bond in response — not agreement exactly, something closer to old, wary recognition.
"You've seen something like this before, haven't you?"
The fox didn't answer directly. It couldn't, not in words, not through a bond built more on feeling than language. But its nine tails, hidden beneath the disguise, resonated faintly against something he couldn't quite name, a response that told him considerably more than silence should have.
She knows something about this, he realized. Something older than anything I've learned about my own bloodline so far.
He didn't press her for more. Whatever she carried, she clearly wasn't ready to share it, and he trusted the years of instinct behind her hesitation more than he trusted an entity offering him a deal wrapped in someone else's suffering.
"I'm not giving you my blood," he said finally, loud enough for the entity to hear clearly.
Then they die slowly instead of quickly, it said, unbothered. Your choice changes the timeline. Not the outcome.
He didn't accept that framing either. He turned back to the formation instead, studying the threads and the chamber's structure with the same patient attention he'd once used to read a corrupted demon's fighting pattern in a forest that felt impossibly distant from here now.
System. There has to be another way to power this. Something that doesn't require his blood or mine to already exist.
The system took several seconds longer than usual to respond, working through something considerably more complex than its typical instant readings.
[New Calculation Complete]
[Formation Possesses a Secondary Energy Channel]
[Current Channel Status: 97% Dormant]
[If Activated, Host May Temporarily Replace the Existing Energy Source]
Lin Tianren's breath caught slightly. "I can power it myself instead of them?"
[Confirmed. Estimated Energy Requirement: 31% of Host's Current Spiritual Reserve]
[Estimated Consequence: Severe Cultivation Regression]
He absorbed the cost carefully. Nearly a third of everything he'd built since crossing into this realm, gone in a single exchange — not lost permanently, likely, but set back far enough that the tournament countdown ticking somewhere above his head would suddenly matter considerably more than it had this morning.
The entity's voice returned, something close to genuine curiosity threading through it now.
Interesting, it said. You would sacrifice your own cultivation for strangers?
Lin Tianren looked toward the suspended villagers — the herb gatherers, the families whose meals still sat cooling in houses above, the disciple slumped against the wall who'd tried to warn three separate groups away from exactly this fate and failed each time.
"They're not strangers anymore," he said.
The chamber held its breath around the answer, the formation's dormant secondary channel waiting, patient and untested, for whatever he decided to do next.