Miles away from the damp silence of the Sunken Archives, frustration was boiling over in the middle rings of Val-Kreth.
Vane paced aggressively across a polished stone command balcony, his heavy boots clacking against the masonry. His face was twisted into a dark scowl. For a full week, his enforcer squads had scoured every standard street, checkpoint, and alleyway in the middle and lower districts, turning up absolute zero. Not a trace of the anomaly. Not a single reliable sighting.
He knew for a fact they hadn't crossed the primary transit tolls leading up to the upper rings, because his syndicate contacts monitored every official gate around the clock. The Black-Tide had eyes everywhere in the civilized sectors—every merchant, every tavern keeper, every low-level informant was on the payroll.
And yet, nothing.
Vane stopped pacing, his eyes widening slightly as a sudden realization hit him, accompanied by a spike of annoyance. The root-veins.
"Damn it," Vane muttered under his breath, slamming a heavily armored fist against the stone railing. "How did I let that slip my mind?"
To a high-ranking enforcer captain like Vane, the jagged, subterranean root-veins and forgotten drainage tunnels were beneath notice—filthy, insignificant drainage bowels of the mountain reserved for vermin and outcasts. It was so low on the hierarchy of sensible travel that it had completely bypassed his tactical sweeps. But if a pair of fleeing rats wanted to drop off the grid entirely, that wretched labyrinth of stone and roots was the only place they could possibly be hiding.
Vane didn't hesitate. He spun on his heel, signaling his subordinate commanders. "Gather an elite strike team. Full gear, suppression units, and seismic trackers. We're heading down into the root-veins."
Syndicate Command
Deep within a fortified obsidian redoubt tucked away in the middle rings, Vane stood before a shimmering communication array, projecting a secure, low-bandwidth resonance channel upward.
The air in the chamber hummed with dense, high-tier arcane pressure. Vane was a high-ranking enforcer captain within the syndicate, but he was far from the top of the food chain; this channel bridged straight to a regional under-boss who answered to several layers of higher command above him. The under-boss and his immediate peers had spent decades clawing out a massive, bloody slice of territory, dominating vast sections of the outer lower slums and securing a brutal foothold in the middle rings. They didn't own Val-Kreth—no single faction did—but within their corner of the mountain, they had swallowed rival sects, broken stubborn merchant guilds, and seen every standard cultivation breakthrough imaginable. Routine bred stagnation, and they had grown numb to ordinary violence.
Until now.
"Report, Vane," a cold, synthesized voice echoed from the shadows of the projection. It belonged to the regional under-boss—a man sitting several tiers above Vane, yet still well beneath the apex of the syndicate's hidden leadership. "You have pulled elite squads off the middle-ring checkpoints. This better not be another ghost hunt."
"It's not, Under-boss," Vane reported, keeping his head bowed respectfully. "We tracked the target's last movements to the lower transition zones before they vanished. But the issue isn't the major target—I already know who handled the more powerful enforcer that went down. The critical puzzle drawing all our focus right now involves the two mortal enforcers stationed with him."
Vane paused, tightening his stance as he broke down the mechanics of the soul-jades. "By all rights, those two mortals shouldn't even register on a spiritual grid. They were low-tier grunts, wiped out by simple, unrefined physical combat arts without a single drop of true arcane energy involved. But here is how syndicate soul-jades operate when a soldier falls: the jade bonded to their life force acts as a recording sponge. The moment they are killed, it automatically attempts to capture whatever ambient arcane energy or lingering spiritual residue is hanging in the air from the attack, drawing from the energy fields of whoever delivered the fatal blend or anyone assisting them nearby. Once that energy signature is trapped in the jade, a tracker can replay a visual flashback of the incident."
Vane swallowed hard, preparing for their reaction. "That's where the contradiction happened. When those two mortals were cut down by pure physical combat, their soul-jades tried to latch onto an arcane signature to log the killer. But they couldn't latch onto our target at all. The playback rendered a total void where he stood. Now, to anyone standard, that blank spot would normally mean he's a non-cultivator, a total nobody. But the jade recorded the physical devastation he left behind—it clearly showed he isn't a normal mortal because of how he moves and strikes, yet he exists completely off the grid, blanking out spiritual retention entirely. The only other time a jade records a void like that is when the killer is a high-tier master operating far beyond the tier of the jade itself, which we know isn't the case here."
A heavy, breathless silence hung over the communication chamber for a long moment. Then, a low, rasping chuckle echoed from the shadows, dripping with sudden, sharp curiosity.
"A soul-jade blinded by a mortal using bare-handed combat?" the under-boss murmured, leaning forward into the faint blue light of the array, his eyes gleaming with predatory hunger. "In all our years running these rings, a jade only fails to log a footprint when the target is protected by a high-grade ancient treasure, or when their internal method is so fundamentally alien that it bypasses the laws of spiritual resonance altogether."
The under-boss shifted, his tone sharpening with authoritative decree. "We have swallowed sects and broken guilds in our districts to secure every scrap of power we hold down here. Someone running around butchering our men with raw physical force while completely blinding our soul-jades? Whether he's carrying a legendary hidden treasure or running an unknown technique that defies the system, finding something this unusual is a luxury we don't often get."
The projection flickered as the under-boss gave his final verdict down to Vane.
"You have full authorization for your sector," the under-boss commanded. "Tear apart every root-vein, every old archive, and every forgotten hole in our districts if you have to. Find out what kind of treasure he's hiding or what artifact is shielding his energy, and bring him to us intact. I want to see what makes him tick—and if we have to dissect him piece by piece to figure out his secrets, consider it approved."
Vane's Perspective
The projection blinked out, leaving the chamber in heavy, suffocating shadow. Vane stood alone in the dim redoubt, staring at the cold, dark surface of the comm-array as the resonance hum died away.
He exhaled slowly, rolling his shoulders to shake off the oppressive weight of the under-boss's orders. To the higher-ups, this was a novelty—a welcome distraction from the mind-numbing routine of extorting merchants and crushing low-tier gangs in the slums and middle rings. But to Vane, it was something entirely different: a rare, god-given ladder.
Let's be entirely honest with himself, Vane didn't give a damn about the two dead grunts. In the syndicate, low-tier mortals and expendable foot soldiers were worth less than the dirt under his boots; they were meat meant to be spent. If a rival captain had slaughtered them in a turf war, Vane wouldn't have batted an eye.
But this? This was an anomaly wrapped in a mystery.
In the ruthless hierarchy of the Black-Tide, loyalty and grunt-work only kept you alive—they didn't get you promoted. To climb past the captain ranks and catch the eye of the higher under-bosses, you had to deliver something extraordinary. If Vane could hunt down this ghost who blinded soul-jades, if he could claw whatever strange treasure, artifact, or unorthodox technique that kid was hiding right out of his cold hands and present it to the upper echelon... that wasn't just solving a murder. That was a ticket up.
Unless, of course, the prize turned out to be too good to hand over.
A slow, dark grin stretched across Vane's face in the empty room. Why give up the golden goose if the power it offered was enough to tilt the scales of the district entirely in his favor? If the technique or treasure driving this anomaly was potent enough, there was nothing stopping a captain from keeping the prize for himself, silencing any witnesses, and carving out an empire of his own.
He turned sharply on his heel, his heavy boots echoing off the stone walls as he strode out toward the balcony to brief his elite strike team. Keep running, kid, Vane thought to himself, his grin widening in the shadows. You're my way up—or my way to the top."