"All Grayblood warships — gone. Sky's clean."
Aoki breathed as if he had been holding something since before the hold ended.
Blackthorn, Mu, Kite — the same small unbuckling of shoulders. They had been tracked like animals. Hunters turned prey on a bad day was not a metaphor; it was hours ago.
Ethan stayed quiet.
He did not like the taste.
Survival had not been his decision. It had been someone else's schedule — a clock he could not see — and the difference grated worse than fear.
From the old command voice's chair, the math looked immaculate: hook swallowed, enemy air package erased, one stroke.
From Ethan's chair, one mistimed burn, one delayed intercept, and their hull became scrap with everyone inside.
"You've got thoughts," Aoki said. Old-arts senses were not only for punches.
Ethan did not bother to hide them. "We were chum. The fish just didn't bite *today.*"
Blackthorn, Kite, Mu stayed silent — agreement without the energy to dramatize it. They had logged too many near-misses to pretend each new one rewrote the world.
"I'll raise it up-chain," Aoki said.
The moment sealed.
Ethan listened to his own mind turn a corner it had been approaching for a while.
The expedition network was strong. Profitable. Professional.
It was also a hand that moved pieces.
He had gone back to them for doors — for caves, for velocity, for information that did not arrive in academic PDFs.
He had never meant to become part of someone else's cast list.
If old arts were the path, he wanted the path — not a patron's chessboard.
---
Deep in the canyon, cloud boiled where it should not boil.
Energy fire walked the walls.
Grayblood's forward element still pushed, deaf to orbit — until the mountain bit back.
Modern weapons rose from bedrock like a second ecology — more barrels, denser cadence, uglier discipline than anything the mercenaries had carried as "tomb raider" props.
Elite mechs advanced in lines, rifles stuttering light, sabers catching that light and turning it into cuts.
Not immortal poetry.
A fortress pretending to be a grave.
"What the hell—" someone on Grayblood radio started.
"This isn't a myth site!" another voice snarled, already understanding too late.
They peeled backward.
They screamed for rear support.
Silence answered where a constellation of signatures used to live.
Their skiffs tried to lift — blossomed — became falling fragments.
Farther out, agencies waited.
Expedition cells waited.
When the rout showed its back, nobody practiced mercy as a hobby.
---
Below, the institute went quiet in a different way — the quiet of rats realizing the floorboards had ears.
Multiple interests in Greater Khingan was no longer theory.
Someone could guess who had arrived without needing a name.
Years of work off-books on Old Earth carried a price tag. Surrender without leverage would be surrender with nothing left to trade.
So they chose theater — controlled, loud, negotiable.
On encrypted lines they spoke reason with one mouth.
With the other, they hauled up an exhibit.
A bamboo segment — gold-leaf bright, leaves still attached, sap still *believing* it belonged to a living plant.
Instruments kissed its nodes.
Radiance lifted — not fire, not electricity, a pressure you felt behind the eyes.
Ripples slapped hulls. Consoles flickered.
Ethan's face filled the main screen and did not look away.
"Golden slip stock," he said — barely voice, almost fact.
"Directed," Aoki breathed. "They're not cooking themselves with their own demo."
Whatever lived down there had built a lab on denial and smuggle. Now it showed a card from a deck most people thought was only legend.
Four golden bamboo slips in known history — metal-translated text, museum arguments, blood on auction floors.
Never a **living** stem.
Never leaves shedding light like slow rain.
---
Report chains shortened.
Negotiation replaced barrage.
The elder's voice returned — steady, unhurried, still the kind of sound that could plan a sky on fire without raising pulse.
"Aoki. Take Jin-chuan. Meet the agencies in the cut. Walk the hole. Eyes open."
The expedition and oversight had always traded favors — today's cooperation was not a first date, only a marriage with paperwork omitted.
Kite and Mu watched the departure like dogs left at a window.
Blackthorn did not have to pretend neutrality. His name had been called.
"Ward," Aoki said. "You're with me."
Eight more from other cells tightened the group.
At the canyon lip, Jin-chuan waited with eight of his own — compact posture, unsmiling patience, the small smile reserved for situations he found *interesting.*
Seven agency personnel — lead a man about forty, black frames, voice suited to briefings, none of the theatrical warmth of cipher villains.
Ethan caught the profile and felt old paranoia try to attach wire.
The fishing-office phantom stirred — same glasses style as the half-asleep senior from Interstellar Group — coincidence junk piling on coincidence.
He looked anyway.
Old-arts intuition was not friendship. It was weather.
The man under those frames did not read as his colleague — not height tension, not breath rhythm, not the lazy weight of a man who scheduled trout as philosophy.
Mask or not — not the same animal.
Two uniforms — military old-arts specialists — flanked the lead.
Four civilians carried labs on their hip minds: biologists, geneticists, the kind of people who smiled politely while measuring you for a freezer.
A skiff swallowed them and dove for the bore.
---
Inside the mountain had been replaced.
Lights. Corridors. The polished boredom of a tower built wrong-way into stone.
Elevators dropped a hundred meters before the aesthetic changed — less steel, more wet rock, older air.
A New Star liaison walked them through it — polished accent, careful pride.
Their banner had a name:
**Origin Life Institute.**
Research label on letterhead — industry underneath — money deep enough to carve a country into a basement and call it science.
The man in black frames asked the obvious.
How do you pick *here?*
Greater Khingan was a map of trees — not famous peaks, not a line in mythology schoolchildren memorized. Without a needle, drilling hundreds of meters was a hobby for the insane.
A female researcher answered, clipped and clear.
"We decoded a pre-Qin slip," she said. "Damaged text. A woman — *fangshi* — known in fragments. She aimed for *liexian* standing. The slip named this grid."
New Star had exhumed enough pre-Qin dead to know what "enough" meant — odd markers in bone, stranger chemistry in hair — the kind of markers that kept universities awake at night.
A peak *fangshi* was already myth-class.
If legend ever mapped a gendered contender for "almost immortal," budgets moved.
"And you found her?" the lead asked.
"We did," the researcher said.
Stone doors rolled.
Before Ethan crossed the threshold, his body chose for him.
The sensation arrived unwelcome and unmistakable — thin drift, almost lazy, like dust motes in a sunbeam — except sunlight never felt like *that.*
Inner-landscape weather.
Mysterious factor — whatever the slips refused to name — pooling in reality thick enough to taste.
Aoki's jaw hardened first.
Everyone else caught the view a heartbeat later.
A golden bamboo trunk split, hollowed, shaped into a boat large enough for ceremony.
Inside lay a woman.
Young by any eye.
Skin holding luminescence without trying.
Hair black enough to drink light.
Cloth cut from a dynasty's wardrobe — preserved as if time had been politely asked to wait outside.
Her eyes stayed closed.
Nothing about her announced rot.
"There's life in her," Aoki said — quiet, furious, reverent in the wrong proportions — like prey scenting a lion through glass and knowing glass was the only reason bodies stayed polite.
Ethan felt it too — not romance, not superstition — metabolic *pressure,* folded and sleeping, still issuing orders to the air.
The researcher nodded once — solemn as an oath.
"Her body," she said, "still reads alive."