The lamp in the corner had not been replaced in a long time.
It burned low, casting a thin orange skin over the stone walls and leaving the rest of the cell in a grey half-dark that made distances uncertain. The ceiling was high enough that Yusheng could not see it clearly. Iron chains hung from rings set into the stone at intervals, some coiled on the floor, some dangling loose. None of them were locked.
They had never been locked.
The Ye Clan had built this prison for possessed people. The chains were for the ones who fought. The depth was for the ones who could not be allowed to see daylight. The iron lines worked into the walls were for suppressing spiritual energy, though they had never done much for either occupant of this cell.
Di Yusheng opened his eyes.
His breathing settled. The circulation cycle finished. Warmth drained slowly from his meridians back into his core and went still.
He sat cross-legged on the bare stone floor, exactly where he had been an hour ago. The same position. The same cold beneath his knees. The same stale air filling his lungs.
He stood, rolled his shoulders once, and looked around the cell.
The bed was pushed against the far wall. A thick mattress over a stone slab. Ye Luoxue lay on it with one arm behind her head and the other resting across her stomach her legs covered with a blanket. Her hair fanned out beneath her in dark ropes. Her eyes were open. They had been open the entire time he was cultivating.
The chains near the door swayed slightly, though there was no draft.
Yusheng walked the perimeter. His fingers trailed along the wall, passing over the iron lines, counting them the way he always did. Seventeen on the north wall. Fourteen on the east. The crack in the southeast corner had not changed. The stain beneath the water jug was the same shape it had been three days ago.
He circled back to the center of the cell.
From the bed, Ye Luoxue said, "Don't you get tired of this?"
Her voice was light. Conversational. The tone of someone who had said the same thing before and expected the same answer.
Yusheng did not look at her. He crouched near the southeast corner and pressed his thumb against the crack in the wall.
"Why don't you just let things be?" Luoxue continued. "When it's time, I'll get both of us out."
Yusheng stood. He brushed dust from his knees.
"We're doomed if your escape plan works the same as your robes did," he said. "I'd rather do it myself."
A pause.
Then Luoxue sat up. Her legs swung off the bed. Her expression was flat, but her voice had an edge to it.
"Those robes were legit," she said. "If you just listened to me, none of this would have happened, you know."
Yusheng did not respond. He had already turned back to the wall.
The silence between them was familiar. It had the texture of something repeated many times, worn smooth by use, neither of them truly invested in the argument anymore. Luoxue lay back down. Yusheng resumed his circuit of the cell.
Then he stopped.
His hand was on the east wall. His fingers rested over the seventh iron line. He had felt nothing unusual a moment ago, but now something pulled at the edge of his awareness, faint and strange, like a sound just below hearing.
He did not understand it.
It was not spiritual energy. Not a tremor in the earth. Not the clan dropping another beast into the pit. It was something else — something that felt as though it had a direction, as though it were coming from somewhere specific and moving toward him.
He did not understand it.
But he knew, with a certainty he could not explain, that if he called it, it would come.
He extended his right arm. Palm open. Fingers spread.
Nothing happened.
Then something did.
A warmth gathered in his palm. Faint. The pulling sensation sharpened. Whatever it was, it was getting closer now. Moving through the ground above the cell, through the stone, through the layers of earth that separated this prison from the world above.
He kept his arm extended.
From the bed, Luoxue's voice came again.
"Are you finally giving up and switching to praying now?"
Yusheng glanced at her.
She was propped on one elbow, watching him with an expression caught between curiosity and amusement. Her lips were slightly parted, as if she might laugh.
Yusheng looked at her but did not lower his arm. He did not answer. Whatever he was feeling had his full attention now. It was very close. Close enough that the air in the cell seemed to tighten around it.
Then he felt it.
A vibration in the stone floor. Tiny. Almost nothing. The kind of tremor that a burrowing insect might make, except this was heavier. Slower. Coming from directly above.
Yusheng looked up.
His arm moved on instinct — he pulled it back and stepped to the side as a thin stream of soil cascaded from a crack in the ceiling.
It did not fall like ordinary earth. It came in a single, slow pour, dense and dark, as if something were squeezing it through the stone. It gathered on the floor in a small mound, wet-looking, though there was no moisture in the cell.
Yusheng stared at it.
This was not normal soil.
He crouched. He did not touch it. The soil sat on the stone floor, still, as though it were waiting. There was something in it — something alive, or close to alive. He could feel the same pulling sensation radiating from it, the one that had drawn him to extend his arm. It was coming from this.
He reached out.
His fingers touched the soil.
It shifted.
The mound collapsed inward, and in its place the soil began to compact, reshape, harden. Limbs formed first — thin, pale, jointed. Then a torso. Then a face. The features pressed themselves into the earth and emerged as skin, as bone beneath skin, as a body.
A boy.
Small. Naked. Pale. His eyes were closed. His chest did not rise.
Yusheng picked him up by the neck.
The boy was lighter than he should have been. His skin was cool. Soil still clung to the creases of his elbows, the backs of his knees, the hollows of his collarbones. His limbs hung loose.
Yusheng turned him slightly, inspecting. He did not understand what had just happened. He had felt something come to him through the earth. Soil had fallen from the ceiling. The soil had become a boy.
None of that made sense.
From the bed, Luoxue's voice came.
"Who is that?"
Yusheng did not look up.
"An inner disciple I once met," he said.
The boy's eyes opened.
They were dark. Clear. They found Yusheng's face immediately, and something in them shifted — a brightness, quick and sharp, like a candle being lit behind glass.
"Sir," the boy said. "You remembered."
His voice was thin. Hoarse. The voice of a throat that had not been used.
"Are you the one that made my body like this?"
Yusheng looked at him.
He did not answer.
Instead he asked, "How did you become like this?"
The boy — Lei Yan, Yusheng remembered now, the one who had walked up to him at the practice grounds and asked about changing hosts — did not hesitate.
"I collected soil from the calamity site," he said. "Ate it. Then killed myself."
The cell went quiet.
Luoxue stared at Lei Yan with an expression Yusheng could not see because he was still looking at the boy in his grip. But he heard the bed creak as she shifted.
Yusheng looked at Lei Yan for a long moment. Then he set him down.
Lei Yan landed on his feet, unsteady, and stood with his arms slightly raised for balance. He did not cover himself. He seemed unaware that he was naked, or unconcerned by it.
Yusheng stepped back and sat on the stone floor.
He was thinking.
Soil from the calamity site. That was his blood. The boy had eaten it. Then died. And his body had become soil, moved through the ground, and reformed when Yusheng touched it.
He looked at Lei Yan again. Small. Standing naked in a dim cell. Waiting.
"Can you get us out of here?" Yusheng asked.
Lei Yan did not answer immediately. He looked up at the ceiling, then down at the floor, then at the walls around him. His expression was serious.
"I'll do my best, but I'm not sure how." he said.
The cell was deep underground. Deep enough that the light from the surface was a pinprick. Deep enough that the walls of the shaft were marked with scratches and old handholds where someone had once tried to climb and failed.
Yusheng looked at the distance and said nothing.
A sound from above.
Something fell.
It came through the opening at the top of the shaft, tumbling, limbs flailing, and Yusheng heard it hit the walls of the pit once, twice, three times before it plummeted to their level and struck the bottom of the shaft below with a heavy, wet crack.
Blood splattered upward. Dark arterial spray that hit the stone walls of the cell in a fine mist.
Yusheng was already moving.
It had been large once. Four-legged. Scaled. A spirit beast — Yusheng could feel the faint residue of spiritual energy still leaking from its broken body.
The beast was still alive. Its legs were broken. Its skull was cracked. It breathed in short, shallow gasps that made a wet rattling sound.
Yusheng knelt beside it.
He opened his mouth.
His teeth had changed.
They were not the teeth of a five-year-old child. The canines had elongated, pressing past the others, sharp and slightly curved. The rest had shifted too — flatter, denser, the kind of teeth meant for tearing flesh from bone. He had fed on enough spirit beasts by now that the changes had settled in. The canines were the most visible. The others only showed if he smiled, which he rarely did.
He bit into the beast's throat.
The flesh parted. Blood welled up, dark and hot. He drank.
Not much. A few mouthfuls. The blood carried the beast's bloodline essence — diluted, dying, but still present. His body would process it. Some of it would stick. A minor trait, perhaps. Slightly tougher skin. A sharper sense of smell. Something small that would settle into his bones and stay. This was something he learnt about himself from taking Ye Luoxue’s blood.
He pulled back. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Then he went to the edge of the cell.
Luoxue was watching Yusheng do all this.
Yusheng walked to her and held out his arm.
She took it without ceremony. Her fingers closed around his wrist. She lifted his arm to her mouth and bit down just below the elbow.
Her teeth were not like his. Yusheng's teath were best for tearing but hers were built for bitting.
She drank.
Lei Yan stood a few feet away, watching.
He did not understand what he was seeing.
This had started weeks ago when Di Yusheng realised Luoxue didn't drink any of the spirit beasts blood that was being thrown into the cell.
He asked her and she said it was because she didn't need it she then joked that she'd rather Yusheng eats then she'll eat him directly at least his blood has a certain taste.
Di Yusheng then said if she wants she could feed from him. His assumption was that Luoxue preferred human blood to beast blood. Without her he would have died so he offered.
Luoxue may have joked about eating Yusheng but the taste part was true so she took his offer .
Lei Yan stood naked in the dim light of a prison cell, soil still drying on his skin, and watched .