Chapter 2 The Worm Bites Back

"DO IT!" I roared.

Bao Teng's paralysis broke. He spun, slammed his palm against the third formation flag on his left, and the makeshift heat trap detonated.

Not cleanly. Not the way a proper formation array would have discharged — controlled, directional, precise. This was a rupture. Six months of ambient thermal energy releasing in a single, uncontrolled burst. A wall of superheated air screamed across the ravine floor and hit the Corpse-Hound mid-leap like a closed fist.

The beast didn't die. But it came down wrong — all four legs scrambling for purchase on loose gravel, its trajectory broken, its momentum gone. It crashed two feet to my right in a cascade of scattered debris and skidded hard into the ravine wall.

I was already moving.

Not running. I couldn't run. I dragged myself forward on both elbows, the broken sword in my right fist, covering the distance between us in the three seconds the hound spent stunned against the wall. The black flame in my chest was roaring now — silent to the ear but deafening to something deeper, something that lived below the level of sound.

I drove the broken blade into the hound's throat.

Once. Twice. The rusted edge was dull but the flame-cold strength behind it wasn't. The beast convulsed, its claws raking furrows into the stone an inch from my face, and then it went still.

The ravine went quiet.

I lay there for a moment, cheek against the gravel, breathing.

"You're bleeding," Bao Teng said from somewhere above me.

"Noted."

"A lot."

"Also noted."

He crouched beside me — I could hear him, couldn't see him from this angle — and after a moment's hesitation, got his hands under my arms and hauled me upright against the ravine wall. The movement sent a white spike of pain up both legs and cracked something sharp across my ribs. I absorbed it. Filed it. Moved on.

The Corpse-Hound was dead. Larger than I'd clocked in the dark — genuinely the size of a bull, its hide thick and scarred, its claws still extended even in death. A beast at the Spirit Beast first rank at minimum. Something that should have killed two broken, cultivation-less men without breaking pace.

It hadn't. Because of a formation flag and a rusted sword and a black flame that had no business existing.

I looked at my right hand. The strength that had flooded my grip during the fight was already receding, draining back to wherever it had come from. My fingers ached. The knuckles were split.

But the sword had gone through. That was what mattered.

"How did you know about the flag?" Bao Teng asked.

I looked at the wall where his makeshift heat trap had been. The three remaining flags were scorched, their copper thread blackened, but their positions were unmistakable — an asymmetric arrangement that any formally trained cultivator would have dismissed as random. It wasn't random. The angles were deliberate, the spacing calculated for maximum thermal retention in a confined space.

"You built it without thinking," I said. "That's how I knew."

Bao Teng was quiet for a moment. "I was just tidying."

"You were solving a problem." I met his eyes. Round face, open expression, completely covered in soot, hands that had stopped shaking now that the crisis was over. "You do that. You solve structural problems without recognizing them as problems. It's a talent."

He looked at the flags. Then back at me. "Elder Mao said—"

"Elder Mao built anchoring sequences that collapse under wind stress above forty li per hour." I leaned my head back against the ravine wall. "His opinion of your talent is irrelevant."

Silence.

Then: "I'm Bao Teng."

"Yan Chen."

"What happened to you?"

"The same thing that happened to you. Someone with more power than sense decided I was worthless." I closed my eyes briefly. The black flame had settled back to its resting state — small, quiet, patient. "They were wrong about both of us."

He had food.

A wrapped parcel produced from somewhere inside his robes — cold rice, something salted, the kind of practical provision a man packs when he knows he's going somewhere uncertain. He split it without being asked, held out my half without ceremony.

I took it. Ate slowly. My body needed fuel more than it needed dignity.

"How long have you been down here?" I asked.

"Since yesterday morning." He settled cross-legged across from me, eating with the unhurried calm of someone who had already processed his situation and arrived at acceptance. "You?"

"Same." I paused. "The hound — has it been here the whole time?"

"I heard it last night. Stayed still. It didn't find me." He glanced at the dead beast. "It found you instead."

Because I'd been unconscious and bleeding. An easy target. The black flame must have masked my scent somehow, or the hound had simply been biding its time.

Either way — information.

I looked around the ravine while I ate. Properly this time, with eyes that had adjusted to the dark and a mind that wasn't occupied with immediate survival. The debris field was extensive. Broken cultivation tools, cracked pill furnaces, stripped formation flags, crates stamped with the Heavenspire disposal seal. Years of accumulated waste.

Not waste. Assets.

"The flags you didn't use," I said. "How many are left functional?"

Bao Teng counted without getting up, his eyes moving across the wall. "Seven with intact copper thread. Three more that might hold a partial charge."

"The pill furnaces — the cracked ones. Can you tell which cracked from structural failure and which from thermal overload?"

He looked at them. A long, assessing look that had nothing casual about it. "The one on the far left. Thermal overload. Interior chamber should be intact."

I nodded. "Tomorrow we start building."

"Building what?"

I looked up. Above us, the narrow strip of sky had shifted from black to the deep grey-purple of pre-dawn. Somewhere up there, thirty meters of sheer rock face, was the world. Crevasse Market four li northeast. Eleven copper coins. A compass. A cracked jade pendant with something ancient and irritated living inside it.

And a black flame that had just driven a rusted broken sword through a Spirit Beast's throat.

"A way out," I said. "And then everything after that."

Bao Teng looked at the ravine wall. At the thirty meters of sheer rock above us. At my two broken, splinted legs.

"You have a plan?"

The black flame pulsed once in my chest. Steady. Patient. Hungry.

"I will by morning," I said.