Breaking a formation was more art than science.

  From her storage pouch, Bai Ning retrieved a formation disk. Formation Disks and their accompanying Flags were specialized tools—each set could only deploy the specific formation inscribed upon them. For every formation a cultivator wished to use, they needed a dedicated disk and corresponding flags designed for that exact pattern.

  There were only two exceptions to this rule.

  The first: Core Formation cultivators and higher, who could reshape their natal artifacts into any form they desired—including customized formation tools.

  The second: the Thousand Inscriptions Formation. The Thousand Inscriptions Formation was infamous among cultivators. Weak, inflexible, and largely useless in real combat, it served primarily as a training tool. It allowed for the deployment of a dozen or so minor formations using the same disk and flags—none of which could hold off even a Qi Condensation cultivator. But it had one specific utility: probing unknown formations. Her master had drilled that into her. “For those without shapeshifting treasures,” he’d said, “it’s the only safe way to feel out an unknown formation.”

  Bai Ning activated the disk. The flags zipped out, hovering over the glowing barrier within the skull’s eye socket. The disk in her hand began to rotate, slowly at first, as glyphs bloomed in the air above it—burning, shifting symbols that responded to the array before her.

  She squinted, reading what the disk revealed. That glyph was fire-aligned. That one reversed qi flow. Another twisted ambient yin qi into a feedback loop. Her fingers moved automatically, tracing lines in the air, parsing structure from chaos. Her knowledge of formations was limited—she had memorized a half-dozen and practiced against twice as many with Mo Jian—but she knew enough to grope her way through unfamiliar territory.

  Eventually, she leaned back with a sigh. The flags returned to the disk, and she stored them both away.

  “Well?” Yan Qixue asked from behind, her interest evident.

  “It’s fire-aligned,” Bai Ning replied. “It’s using a reversed yin qi current to sustain itself. I don’t recognize the exact formation, but I might have something that could work.”

  She tapped her pouch again and withdrew a different formation disk—this one etched with the pattern of the Yin-Yang Reverse Polarity Formation. She had been saving this for emergencies.

  Unraveling, infiltrating, or redirecting a formation all followed the same general principles. Only brute-forcing a formation was different—loud, violent, and often more dangerous than the formation itself.

  The first step was always understanding. What was its elemental nature? How did it sustain itself? Was it warping qi flow or simply creating an isolated effect? The more questions answered, the higher the chance of success.

  The second step was trickier: layering a formation that was similar—but not too similar over the target formation. If it was entirely different, the original formation would treat it as a threat and lash out. If it was too close, they’d sync, and no points of friction would form.

  Bai Ning’s goal was to induce subtle clashes—to find slippages between the two arrays where energy disrupted and canceled out. From there, she could exploit null zones to either take control, slip inside, or unravel the array altogether.

  It wasn’t just about knowledge. It was also about luck. And today, she had gotten lucky—she actually had the right formation with her. If not, they would’ve had no choice but to move on. The flags of the Yin-Yang Reverse Polarity Formation flew from her hand and embedded themselves into the bone surrounding the socket in a perfect circle. Unlike before, they didn’t hover—they sank into the material, disappearing from sight as her formation aligned with the existing one.

  She exhaled, steadying herself, and poured qi into the disk.

  Carefully, she began the process of deployment—not to override the barrier, but to let her own formation brush against it. From there, she could identify conflict points, friction zones, energy dips—anyplace where the two formations failed to reconcile. It was painstaking work.

  Bai Ning’s brow furrowed in concentration as she concentrated on the delicate balance of qi flowing between the formations. Her own array was beginning to resonate, not quite harmonizing with the original—but just enough to graze against it. The glowing formation inside the socket shimmered in response, like ripples spreading across a pond. The fire-aligned array pushed back instinctively, rejecting the foreign structure brushing against it. Good, that was exactly what she needed.

  She watched the faint points of friction spark into existence where the two formations misaligned—places where the interaction wasn’t smooth, where symbols flickered or qi hiccupped. Those were the null zones, gaps in the weave, cracks in the logic of the barrier. Just large enough, if she was precise, to slip through.

  Behind her, Yan Liang muttered, “It seems to be working.”

  “Quiet,” Qixue hissed, though her eyes didn’t leave Bai Ning. “Don’t disturb her.”

  Bai Ning appreciated the thought, though she had kept a sliver of awareness trained on both of them from the start. If a betrayal were to come, this would be the moment. Her guard remained up—quiet, but unshakable.

  Her fingers moved in a practiced rhythm over the formation disk, adjusting flow lines, shifting parameters by the smallest degrees. With each movement, her array edged closer to a null zone—testing the seam, pressing gently at the weak points. Sweat beaded along her brow. This close to the heart of the formation, even a single misstep could trigger a backlash.

  The barrier flared suddenly—bright, almost blinding—as if issuing one final warning. Then it settled.

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  Now.

  She poured qi into her flying tool and shot forward, darting through the eye socket as the formation parted for her. It no longer resisted her presence. The moment she was through, she deactivated the disk and felt the outer barrier stabilize behind her—still intact, but no longer hostile.

  Outside, she heard the faint sound of Yan Qixue and Yan Liang cheering quietly, their voices light with relief. Bai Ning allowed herself a small smile, then turned her attention inward.

  The skeleton lay bundled at the center of the socket, draped in rotting robes and tangled in timeworn prayer cords. She hovered in silence, her parasol casting its muted crimson glow across the remains. With a gentle pulse of qi, she extended her will and drew the storage pouch from the corpse’s side. As it brushed against the robes, the fabric crumbled into dust—dry flakes and brittle threads falling away, revealing just how long the body had rested here.

  Bai Ning pressed her palms together in a brief, silent prayer for whoever this person had once been, then turned her focus to the pouch.

  It was disappointingly sparse.

  A few bottles of pills and elixirs—all low-grade. Two magical tools, both cracked or burned beyond immediate repair. A single formation disk, likely the control array for the barrier she had just bypassed. And one item of interest: a jade box, sealed with a faded talisman.

  She retrieved both the formation disk and the jade box, letting the former hover idly in the air as she studied the latter. Carefully, she peeled the talisman away and opened it.

  Inside, nestled on a bed of aged cloth, lay several gleaming black beads.

  Bai Ning blinked twice, then leaned in, just to be sure her eyes weren’t deceiving her.

  Umbral Beads.

  And not just one or two. She counted—seventeen in total.

  It was an incredible haul.

  She exhaled slowly, her fingers brushing the edge of the jade box as she considered what this unknown cultivator must have endured to possess so many. Then, without hesitation, she snapped the box shut and called the hovering formation disk to her hand. It took her a moment to orient herself before she recalled the flags and deactivated the array encircling the eye socket.

  The glowing barrier vanished. She stowed both the disk and the flags back into her storage pouch. They were hers now. An interesting formation—one worth studying later. She doubted the others would object.

  The moment the formation fell, Yan Qixue and Yan Liang flew in, alighting lightly on the inner curve of the eye socket. It was barely wide enough for the two of them to stand, with the remains of the dead cultivator still occupying space. Bai Ning chose to stay aloft, hovering just above them.

  “Here,” she said, sending the jade box gently their way. Qixue caught it and opened the lid. Her expression went slack, stunned into silence. “By the fires of Redboy,” she murmured. “This is... quite something.”

  Liang rose slightly on his toes, peering over her shoulder. His brows shot up. “Seventeen beads,” he breathed. “Even if the rumors amount to nothing, this trip has already paid for itself.”

  Qixue blinked, recovering herself. She looked a little embarrassed. “Of course... it’s not ours, strictly speaking. Since you did the heavy lifting, Sister Bai Ning, how about this—Liang and I take three each, and you keep the rest. Eleven for you. Fair?”

  Bai Ning gave a slow nod. She could have pressed for more—but there was a limit to greed. The last thing she wanted was to provoke a fight over Umbral Beads. Valuable though they could be even to most Foundation Establishment cultivators, for her master—and, by extension, for her—they were probably not worth shedding blood over.

  Qixue deftly separated out six beads and handed them to Liang, then returned the box—now containing eleven beads—to Bai Ning. She stored it quickly in her pouch, satisfaction flickering in her eyes.

  “Shall we move on?” she asked.

  Both nodded, and with a chorus of agreement, the three left the skull behind and flew deeper into the crater’s heart.

  At the rim, just before crossing over, Yan Liang paused. He clasped his hands together and bowed low toward the skeletal remains. “May you enter the cycle of reincarnation with good karma.”

  Qixue followed suit with quiet reverence.

  Bai Ning merely watched. She had already said her prayers.

  The three pressed onward, the mist tightening around the bones strewn across the slope. Overhead, the sky dimmed further, muting the thin gray light to a dusky pallor. Still, they moved forward. Eventually, the ground became so choked with massive bones that they took to the air, burning qi to maintain their pace.

  They remained on high alert, but as before, no ghost or cadaver blocked their path. The utter lack of threats was more unnerving than any confrontation would have been.

  At last, they reached the heart of the Domain. A wide, flat basin of blackened stone stretched out before them, ringed by titanic bones curving inward like the ribs of some colossal, long-dead beast. The crater's floor was cracked and scorched, as if a massive force had once detonated there. But aside from the curling mist and the overwhelming potency of yin qi—so dense it made their skin crawl—the place was empty.

  They glanced at one another, uncertainty flickering in every eye. Surely this couldn’t be it.

  Bai Ning was the first to stop, hovering in place as her parasol spun slowly, casting a faint halo of crimson light. Her spiritual sense fanned out, searching for traps, traces of power, movement—anything.

  Nothing.

  Yan Qixue and Yan Liang landed beside her, both frowning. Yan Qixue knelt, placing a hand to the scorched ground. Her brow furrowed. “I don’t sense anything deeper. It just feels… dead.”

  Yan Liang stepped forward, slowly circling. “Maybe we were wrong. Maybe there’s nothing at the heart of the Domain. All the treasures are at the edges, scattered. We haven’t run into any other cultivators either.” He shrugged, fatalistic. “Perhaps they knew better.”

  Bai Ning rose higher, guiding her flying tool to lift her above the basin so she could take in the terrain from a greater height. From here, the symmetry of the space was undeniable—far too precise to be natural. Whatever this place had once been, it had been built or shaped—whether by design or through sheer, destructive force.

  And yet, Yan Qixue was right. She could sense nothing. Had she really wasted all this time for nothing? Well, not nothing—the Umbral Beads were a worthy prize—but still, disappointment curdled in her gut.

  Let’s just leave, she thought, opening her mouth to say as much to the others—

  Then the air split with a sound.

  No—that word didn’t do it justice. It was a shriek. The echo of something ancient and long dead. The chorus of a hundred thousand ghosts, screaming in unison. It screeched like iron nails raked across stone, boring into her skull. She clapped her hands over her ears a heartbeat before the pain drove her from the sky.

  Below, Yan Qixue and Yan Liang staggered, grimacing, hands to their heads. The sound wasn’t just heard—it inhabited the space, reverberating like a living thing.

  Then, it was answered. A second wave of shrieks rose all around them—howls and screams coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  Bai Ning looked up—and froze.

  The mist above was breaking open. Torn like fabric, it parted as spectral shapes burst through, leaving curling vapor trails in their wake. Ghosts. Countless ghosts. A vast flock of pale phantoms flooded through the sky in a tidal wave of the dead. They swooped and rolled through the air, all of them turning—aiming—directly at the three cultivators.

  They weren’t alone. Black dots were falling from the sky too, landing with a wet squelch on the half-bone, half-soil ground of the crater. Jiangshi, she realized numbly. The living, shambling corpses were throwing themselves over the rim of the crater and landing below in a pile of blood and broken bones. Still, even with cracked and broken limbs, held together by rotting sinews, they rose, half crawling, half lurching towards the three of them.

  In an instant, the silence of the crater shattered, and an army of horrors was closing in to kill them.