Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

The door swung wide, and the space beyond it was no mine chamber.

It looked as an office, a cramped stone burrow where a man ran a place like this from behind a chair. A heavy table held the middle of it, an oil lamp guttering low on one corner, ledgers stacked across the wood spine on spine, their covers split and furred from handling.

Drawers had been let into the rock along the walls, half of them hanging open with papers nosing out. Whatever the overseer had dragged up out of this mountain, the count of it lived in this room, every load and tally and shipment set down in some clerk’s patient hand.

Xuan swept the place with a look and found nothing worth a second glance. An office. Paper. The dull machinery of keeping a hole in the ground on the books. He almost respected it, in a tired way; even a demon sect needed someone to do the sums.

[ All that murder and somewhere in here is a man who filed it in triplicate. ] Mira, amused. [ Honestly, the paperwork is the scariest thing in this mine. ]

Which tracked. This pit ran a fraction of the size of the first one. The difference lay in what came out of the rock, because the seam they had crossed two days of foul country for was worth more by the ounce than everything the bigger mine had ever coughed up in two years. Higher grade. A metal you could forge real things from, not the workmanlike spirit ore that filled most veins in the range.

Lin Kai stepped past him toward the table. "Plenty of records in here. I might finally turn up something of my mother’s."

"There could be enemies down here yet, Kai. Don’t drop your guard the second a room looks quiet." Xuan tipped his chin toward the far passage, where the working chamber pinched into a throat that ran deeper into the rock. "We haven’t cleared the whole place. The material’s that way, and we’ve still got to secure it. That’s where the Dragonvein Ore sits." He let the name hang, because in a sect like theirs it carried real weight. "Rare vein, drinks sword Qi like nothing else does. It’s the metal Skyedge runs on, Kai. You know what a single seam of it is worth to us."

What he kept behind his teeth was the rest of it. A vein of Dragonvein was the exact thing Marrow Dragon had been waiting on, the one piece standing between his blade and a grade it had not yet grown into.

Lin Kai gave no sign he had heard. He bent to the ledgers and began turning pages, which prickled at Xuan more than he let show. There were still men breathing at the bottom of this hole, and breathing men found ways to make a night expensive if you left them to themselves.

Mira handed him a way out of the bind. [ If you’re this twitchy about it, I’ll walk Han Ying down and let him tidy up the ones below. Not many left, and they’ll know his face on sight. I count five. ]

’Good. Do that please. I’ll dig through the paper while you’re at it.’

[ On it. ]

Han Ying lifted his head, and the voice that came out of him was the elder’s and yet not the elder’s at all. "Five of them down at the bottom. I’ll go take a look and see them dealt with. Once that’s done, there shouldn’t be a soul left in the mine."

"Go," Xuan said.

Lin Kai’s head snapped up, the wariness back in his eyes and hard this time. "I don’t like that. He should wait for us, not go wandering off alone." His hand rode his mother’s hilt. "What’s stopping him turning on us the second he’s out of sight? He cut down his own people not an hour back. You’re handing a knife a lot of room to swing."

Han Ying held where he stood, back to them, unmoving as cut stone. Inside Xuan’s skull Mira went dry. [ Well? Your brother won’t let me out of the room. ]

’Relax. I’ve got it.’

"Kai." Xuan kept his voice level and let the weight ride underneath it instead of on top. "Our father handed me command back at the first mine. Coming out here was my call too. That makes my word the one that stands in this place, the same as it did there. Are we clear on that?" He held his brother’s stare and did not blink. "If you don’t like it, you’re free to step outside, or go down with him and keep an eye on his hands yourself. You came here for something of your mother’s. So do as I tell you, and go look for it."

Lin Kai’s jaw flexed. He clicked his tongue, and turned back to the table without another word.

With that, Han Ying crossed the chamber and slid into the black of the lower throat to finish the mine, the slope swallowing him inside a few strides. Whatever waited at the bottom had five breaths left in it, and an old man’s spear coming down the dark to collect them. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

That left the three of them in the office. Wei planted himself at the doorway, sword out, eyes ticking between the room and the passage the elder had taken, jumpy as a cat in a thunderstorm but holding his post, which down here counted for plenty.

Xuan and Lin Kai worked the table from opposite ends. Xuan skimmed the shipment manifests, sorting in his head what was worth carrying home from what was worth a torch. Lin Kai tore through the older bundles with a focus that had nothing to do with ore counts and everything to do with the dead woman who had put a sword in his hand and a hole in his life.

Xuan had half decided the boy would turn up nothing but tallies of rock and rice when Lin Kai went rigid over a single page. A word punched out of him, low and raw, scraped off the bottom of his throat.

"Shit."

He had found something. And from the way the color drained out of his face as he read, it was nothing he had ever wanted to.