The stripping corridor didn't feel like a path.
It felt like walking through someone else's mouth.
Mist licked at their ankles, rose to their knees, then higher, thin as silk but heavy with intent. It didn't chill the skin. It didn't burn. It simply… insisted on being noticed. On being inside their sleeves, their collars, the small spaces where people hid what they couldn't afford to lose.
Shen Lu kept his face blank.
Inside his chest, the pendant grew warm again—more a throb than a heat, like a pulse responding to pressure. The corridor's mist brushed over it with a searching patience.
Not random.
Targeted.
As if the realm could smell the seam between what belonged and what didn't.
Helian Feng walked ahead with that same infuriating steadiness, sword in hand, eyes scanning. The suppression from the toll corridor had eased, but this corridor brought a different kind of suppression—one that didn't care about qi levels so much as ownership. What did you carry? What did you think was yours?
The outer disciple was trembling. Every few steps, something small fell from his sleeves. A spare pouch. A talisman. A piece of dried rations. They landed on the floor and vanished into the mist as if they had never existed.
The severe talisman disciple's face was a tight mask. He was trying not to react, trying not to let the realm know what mattered to him. The more you flinched, the more it took.
Shen Lu knew this kind of trap. Not from the book's plot, but from the logic of cruelty: you didn't need to kill people directly. You just needed to strip them down until they couldn't survive.
A soft clink sounded near Shen Lu's hip.
His heart jumped.
He glanced down.
The vial holding the black pellet key was halfway out of his sleeve, tugged by the mist like a fishhook.
The corridor wanted it.
Because it was a key.
Because it was refined from something it shouldn't have been able to refine.
Shen Lu's fingers snapped out, catching the vial and forcing it back into his sleeve. He did it smoothly, as if adjusting his cuff.
Helian Feng's gaze flicked back instantly.
Too fast.
He'd seen movement.
Shen Lu met his eyes with calm he didn't feel.
Helian Feng didn't ask.
But Helian Feng's stare sharpened, the kind that said, I am counting every hidden thing you touch.
Shen Lu swallowed and kept walking.
Ahead, the mist thickened into a wall.
Not solid, but dense enough to hide what lay beyond. The fox-spirit refused to go any farther. It dug in its paws and made a small desperate sound.
The beast tamer's face tightened. "It's… afraid."
Helian Feng paused. He studied the mist wall, then lifted his sword.
He didn't strike.
He extended the tip into the mist, letting the blade touch it like testing water.
The blade's spiritual glow dimmed slightly.
A slow, hungry dimming.
Helian Feng pulled the sword back immediately.
His eyes narrowed. "It eats light."
Shen Lu's stomach tightened.
If it ate light, it would eat qi.
If it ate qi, it would eat the foundation of anyone who panicked.
The corridor behind them trembled faintly.
Shen Lu felt it through the soles of his feet: not the realm shifting, but movement coming closer, vibration traveling along stone.
Rivals.
The footsteps were still distant, but they had rhythm now—steady, coordinated. Not the clumsy scramble of opportunists. A team.
A team that knew how to chase.
Helian Feng's voice was flat. "We go through."
The outer disciple let out a tiny, choked sound.
No one comforted him.
There was no time.
They pushed into the mist wall.
The sensation was wrong. Like stepping into a place where air forgot how to be air.
Shen Lu's skin prickled. The mist slid into his sleeves and collar, cold now, not with temperature but with emptiness. His breathing felt heavier, as if each breath had to be negotiated.
For three steps, nothing happened.
For four, his vision dimmed at the edges.
For five—
The pendant at his chest flared hot.
Shen Lu bit down on his tongue hard enough to taste blood.
The mist surged toward the pendant like a starving thing.
No.
Not the pendant itself.
The space inside it.
The realm was trying to hook the pocket dimension, to drag at it, to see if it could peel it open like fruit.
Shen Lu's core shuddered.
His mind went blank for a heartbeat, pure instinct: hide, hide, hide.
He didn't dare pull the pendant into the jade space. If the realm was already clawing at it, opening it might be like offering the corridor a door.
He forced his wood-root qi into his meridians and let it spread thinly under his skin—not as an attack, but as a coating. A layer of living resilience. A vine wrapping around a fragile gourd.
The mist brushed that layer and hesitated, as if tasting something it didn't like.
Shen Lu kept walking.
He counted steps.
Ten.
Twelve.
Fifteen.
Then the mist thinned abruptly, and they stumbled out into a different chamber.
A chamber that made them all freeze.
It looked like an exit.
A stone archway stood ahead, carved with smooth, welcoming lines. Beyond it shimmered a pale daylight-blue glow. Fresh air drifted through. The scent of pine and wet earth. So normal it almost hurt.
To the side stood a broken stone tablet with faded writing.
EXIT.
A lie that wanted to be believed.
The outer disciple choked out a sound that was half laugh, half sob. "We… we made it…"
The beast tamer's fox-spirit lifted its head, sniffed, then suddenly flattened again and growled low.
The severe talisman disciple's face went tight. He lifted his detection charm.
This time, the charm didn't crumble.
It flared bright.
And then it split—one strand pointing to the archway, one strand pointing to the floor beneath their feet, one strand pointing behind them.
The disciple swallowed hard. "It's… layered."
Helian Feng's gaze moved to the floor.
Shen Lu followed it—and felt his stomach drop.
Fine incense ash dusted the stone in a delicate pattern, like someone had burned offerings and let the ash settle undisturbed.
Ash didn't drift like that in a secret realm corridor.
Ash was placed.
The scent hit Shen Lu a heartbeat later.
Incense.
Sweet and pale and familiar in the wrong way—like sect worship halls, like memorial tablets, like prayers for the dead.
Shen Lu's skin crawled.
This wasn't an exit.
This was a ritual trap.
A "safe" door carved to look like salvation, with incense laid like bait for desperate people.
The corridor behind them trembled again.
Footsteps, closer now.
Voices too—faint, muffled, but human.
Someone laughed.
Someone said something about "fresh meat."
The outer disciple looked back and went white.
Helian Feng's voice cut through the chamber, cold and sharp. "No one steps through that arch."
The outer disciple stared at the archway, eyes wide. "But it says—"
"It's lying," Shen Lu said, voice low.
Helian Feng's gaze flicked to him again, sharp as a blade. "How do you know."
Shen Lu's mouth went dry.
Because in the book, people ran through this door and died.
Because the incense smell was the same.
Because the realm loved false mercy.
He forced himself to answer with something that sounded like logic, not foreknowledge.
"Because it smells like a memorial hall," Shen Lu said. "Exits don't smell like death."
Silence.
The fox-spirit growled, backing away from the arch.
The severe talisman disciple nodded tightly. "There's a binding array on the threshold."
Helian Feng's eyes narrowed. "And the real path."
The talisman disciple hesitated. "It might be… beneath the ash."
Helian Feng looked down again.
The incense ash pattern wasn't random. It traced thin lines—delicate curves like calligraphy.
Not a prayer.
A map.
A hidden door.
The realm's idea of humor: the truth written in the same ash meant to lure you into the lie.
Helian Feng crouched, gloved fingers brushing the ash carefully.
The moment he touched it, the ash swirled upward like smoke, not from wind but from awakening.
A low hum filled the chamber.
Shen Lu's stomach tightened.
They had triggered something.
The false exit archway brightened, its blue glow turning whiter, harsher, almost eager.
The chamber's air grew sweeter with incense until it felt like breathing honey.
The outer disciple swayed.
His eyes glazed slightly.
Shen Lu's blood went cold.
Incense wasn't just a smell.
It was a mind-lure.
A gentle push toward "safety."
Helian Feng's voice snapped. "Bite your tongue. Now."
The outer disciple flinched and did it, whimpering as pain shocked him awake.
Shen Lu pressed the frost marrow bead to his palm and let its cold clarity spread up his arm.
It helped.
But the sweetness kept rising.
From behind them, the footsteps thundered closer.
A shadow flickered at the edge of the mist wall—someone entering the chamber behind them.
Shen Lu's heart hammered.
If the Black Sand Trio came in now, they'd see the false exit and either charge through it like fools… or use it as leverage.
Helian Feng stood abruptly, eyes narrowed. "There."
He pointed not at the archway, but at the floor to its left—where the incense ash had lifted and revealed a faint seam in the stone, a door line so fine it was almost invisible.
A hidden passage.
Their real way forward.
The seam began to open with a thin grinding sound.
Slowly.
Too slowly.
Shen Lu's throat tightened.
The shadow behind the mist wall sharpened into a silhouette.
A voice drifted through, amused and familiar in its cruelty.
"Found you."
Wei Shanshi's voice.
And the hidden door was still opening.
Not wide enough yet for even one of them to slip through.
Not fast enough to save them if Helian Feng had to fight here.
Shen Lu's fingers curled inside his sleeve, brushing the vial with the black pellet key.
His stomach twisted.
The realm had taken something from him to make that key.
And now it felt like it was asking whether he'd sacrifice a little more.
Because the false exit was glowing brighter.
The hidden door was opening slower.
And the Black Sand Trio was stepping out of the mist behind them.