The labyrinth narrowed into a corridor of polished obsidian—the Hall of Reflective Truth.
"Don't look at the walls, Dver!" Ren hissed, her voice cracking with exhaustion. Her robes were shredded, stained with the blood of the six disciples she had cut down to protect him. "They show your inner demons. If you look, you'll lose your mind!"
Dver stumbled behind her, the purple censer still billowing thick, suffocating smoke. He looked like a wreck. "I'm scared, Sister Ren! The walls... they're whispering!"
They weren't whispering. They were screaming. As Ren passed, her reflection shifted into the mangled, charred corpses of her family, their ghostly hands reaching out to pull her into the glass. She screamed, closing her eyes and swinging her sword blindly to keep the visions at bay.
But Dver looked.
In the obsidian, there was no boy. There was only a towering, infinite tear in reality—a colossal shadow with a thousand unblinking eyes. The mirrors began to crack. The obsidian couldn't contain the image.
"They are fragile things, these memories," the Void God mocked.
Dver "tripped" again, his body slamming into the mirrors. With a calculated burst of Asura strength disguised as a clumsy fall, he shattered the glass before Ren could open her eyes and see the monster standing behind her.
"I broke them! I'm sorry!" Dver wailed.
"It's okay," Ren gasped, grabbing his hand. "We're almost at the Final Gate. Just a little further!"
They burst out of the hall and into the Final Chamber.
The exit was a massive stone archway, but it was blocked by a shimmering Qi barrier. Standing before it were twelve disciples, led by a brute with a heavy mace. They were the "Gatekeepers"—disciples who had already gathered their tokens and were now simply killing anyone else who tried to pass to ensure only the "strong" survived.
"Only two spots left!" the brute roared, his mace glowing with a sickly yellow light. "And look who it is. The girl and her smoking pet."
Ren stepped forward, her legs shaking from blood loss. She raised her sword. "Dver... when I charge, you run. Don't look back. Take my tokens. Get out."
"No! Sister Ren, I can't!" Dver cried, but inside, he was preparing the kill.
The twelve disciples charged. Ren met them with a suicidal bravery that was almost beautiful. She took a spear through the shoulder just to gut the man holding it. She was a whirlwind of desperation.
But there were too many. The brute with the mace swung a crushing blow at her head.
Dver acted. He didn't use a sword. He simply "fell" into the purple smoke.
From within the thick cloud, the Void lunged. It wasn't a technique; it was an erasure. Four disciples were simply gone—no screams, no bodies, just a sudden vacuum in the air. To Ren, it looked like they had vanished in the fog. To the survivors, it was as if the darkness itself had bitten them.
Dver "panicked," swinging the heavy bronze censer wildly. He smashed the brute's knee, then "accidentally" shoved the censer into the man's face, crushing his skull.
When the smoke cleared, Ren was on her knees, coughing blood, surrounded by corpses. Dver was sitting in the corner, shaking, holding a pile of jade tokens he had "found" on the floor.
The Archway.
The Qi barrier flickered. Deacon Shen and the Saintess Lyra stood on the other side, watching.
"Only two spots," Shen's voice boomed. "Who steps through?"
Ren looked at Dver. She was dying. Her meridians were shredded from overexertion. She pushed her tokens toward him with a bloody hand. "Go... you have... a life to live. I'm just... a ghost."
Dver looked at the tokens. Then he looked at the Saintess. He saw her eyes—narrowed, analytical, searching for the lie. If he stepped through now as a hero, she would never stop watching him.
So, Dver did the unthinkable.
He stood up, looked at the tokens, and then "fumbled" them. He tripped over his own feet, sending the jade tokens skittering across the floor—right into the hands of a wounded disciple crawling nearby.
The other disciple grabbed them and lunged through the gate.
"NO!" Ren screamed, her voice a ragged sob.
Dver collapsed, wailing in "despair." He looked like the most pathetic failure in the history of the sect. He had the win in his hands and he tripped. He was a loser. A fluke. A waste of skin.
Deacon Shen's face turned purple with rage. "You... you absolute waste of breath! You survived the Pit, you survived the maze, and you drop the tokens at the feet of a corpse?"
The Saintess Lyra sat back, a look of profound disappointment—or perhaps confusion—crossing her face. The "anomaly" had just proven himself to be a clumsy idiot.
"He failed," Shen spat. "But we can't let him back into the Outer Sect. He's seen too much. And he's Rank 9. He's a defective tool."
Shen looked at the Enforcers. "The boy is a failure. He has no spine, no talent, and no luck left. We don't need another disciple. We need more 'fuel' for the lower rituals."
The Enforcers grabbed Dver. Ren tried to scream, but she was dragged away to the infirmary as the 5th winner.
Deacon Shen descended from the balcony, his heavy boots crunching on the obsidian shards. He looked down at Dver. The fury from earlier had cooled into something much more dangerous: a sadistic, calculating greed.
An Enforcer raised a black-steel executioner's blade. "He failed the trial, Deacon. The law says he becomes fertilizer."
"Wait," Shen said, raising a hand.
He leaned down, grabbing a handful of Dver's matted hair and forcing his head up. He stared into Dver's watery, trembling eyes.
"The law says he cannot be an Inner Disciple," Shen murmured, a cruel smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. "But look at him. He's Rank 9. His body has been tempered by that suicidal Asura manual. It would be a waste to just kill him. I need someone to carry my palanquin. Someone to taste my wine for poison. Someone to scrub the blood off the Discipline Hall floors."
Shen's grip tightened. "He isn't a disciple anymore. He is private property. My property."
The Saintess Lyra, still watching from above, tilted her head. "A Rank 9 slave, Deacon? Isn't that... dangerous? A dog with teeth that sharp might bite."
"Not when I clip the teeth, Saintess," Shen laughed.
He pulled a heavy, blackened iron collar from his sleeve—the Soul-Binding Shackle. It was etched with jagged crimson runes that pulsed like a heartbeat. With a swift, violent motion, he snapped it around Dver's neck.
TSHHH—
The smell of burning flesh filled the air. Dver let out a guttural, agonizing scream—half-fake, half-real—as the collar's needles sank into his carotid artery and his meridian points.
The collar was designed to suppress Qi. To a normal Rank 9, it would feel like their soul was being crushed under a mountain.
Inside Dver's mind, the Void God roared in fury. "TEAR HIS HANDS OFF! RIP HIS THROAT OUT! HE DARES PUT A LEASH ON US?!"
Be still, Dver commanded, his internal voice cold and sharp as a razor. Let him lock the cage. He's handing us the keys to his house.
Dver slumped forward, his forehead hitting Shen's boots. He gasped for air, his voice a broken whimper. "P-please... Master Shen... it hurts... make it stop..."
"It will stop when you learn to sit, dog," Shen spat. He kicked Dver in the chest, sending him rolling across the dirt. "Follow me. You're going to clean the blood off the interrogation racks. There's a lot of it today."
The Discipline Hall of the Inner Sect was a cathedral of pain.
While the rest of the Inner Court was filled with beautiful gardens and flowing waterfalls, this place was a fortress of cold stone and iron. As Shen's slave, Dver was stripped of his grey disciple robes and forced into a thin, black tunic marked with the character for 'Servant.'
For the next six hours, Dver was forced to scrub.
He scrubbed the floors. He polished the spiked chairs. He emptied buckets of bile and salt. Shen watched him from his desk, sipping tea, occasionally flicking a drop of burning-hot Qi at Dver's back just to hear him yelp.
To everyone else, Dver was a broken man. A Rank 9 powerhouse reduced to a janitor.
But as Dver scrubbed the stone beneath Shen's feet, he was listening.
He listened to the reports brought in by the Enforcers. He listened to the whispers of the other slaves. Most importantly, he felt the resonance of the Sect's internal Qi veins through the floor.
"This room," the Void God whispered, its anger subsiding into a dark, predatory focus. "The wall behind the Deacon's chair. I can smell it. A treasury. High-grade spirit stones. Cultivation pills. Blood-essences."
Dver didn't look up. He kept scrubbing, his movements slow and "clumsy."
"Master Shen?" Dver whispered, looking up with a fearful, submissive expression. "I... I finished the racks. Should I... should I clean the private vault behind the screen?"
Shen paused, his tea cup halfway to his lips. He sneered. "You can't even stand up straight without shaking, dog. You think I'd let a clumsy idiot like you near my treasures? Get out. Sleep in the kennel with the other hounds."
Dver bowed so low his nose touched the floor. "Yes, Master. Thank you for your mercy, Master."
As Dver walked out, his head bowed, he passed a mirror in the hallway.
For a split second, his reflection didn't show a cowering slave. It showed a monster with a black iron collar around its neck, smiling.
The collar was supposed to suppress his Qi. But the Void didn't use normal Qi. The Shackle was trying to "bind" an ocean with a piece of string.