The canopy of the Star Dou Great Forest swallowed the sky in a single stride.
Beyond the limestone gorge, direct sunlight ceased to reach the earth.
What filtered through the interlocking boughs three hundred feet overhead was a dim, watery emerald gloom, cold as a submerged cave and thick with the heavy hum of blood-drinking midges.
The forest floor here was not soil; it was a rotting carpet of centuries-old leaf mold, black peat, and treacherous moss beds hiding bottomless sinkholes filled with sulfurous bog water.
Every step was a calculation.
Tang San walked at the point of their triangle, her ox-hide boots testing the firmness of the root-bridges before transferring her weight.
Her Purple Demon Eyes remained engaged at a low, continuous frequency, scanning the damp shadows for thermal anomalies and predatory silhouettes.
Ten paces behind her right flank, the Grandmaster kept his ash staff planted with steady, rhythmic thuds, his senses tuned to the upper canopy.
Xiao Wu brought up the rear.
The boy had fallen completely silent since they crossed beneath the ancient boughs.
His usual playful bounce had vanished, replaced by an unnerving, feline lightness.
His cloth shoes barely dented the moss, his large dark eyes darting between the thick curtains of hanging epiphytes, his nostrils flaring continuously as he scented the stagnant draft.
“We are entering the peripheral wetland buffer,” the Grandmaster whispered, his voice barely louder than the hum of the insects.
“Ghost Vines avoid rocky soil; they thrive where decaying organic matter provides high nitrate concentrations.
Keep your eyes on the trunks of ancient ironwood and water cypress.”
Tang San paused atop an exposed root as thick as an ox’s belly.
She knelt, lowering her right palm to the moss.
Instead of summoning her martial soul, she simply released a faint pulse of internal force through the root.
The vegetative network answered immediately—a dull, sluggish echo of millions of tiny fungal filaments and shallow water-grass roots whispering beneath the mire.
*No apex predators within fifty paces,* she noted.
*Small aquatic vermin.
A cluster of bone-scaled frogs burrowed in the mud.
And…*
Her eyebrows twitched.
Not dead as in rot.
Dead as in absolute, parasitic consumption.
“Master,” Tang San murmured, pointing two fingers toward the base of the submerged cypress.
“Look at the cambium layer along the western face of that trunk.”
The Grandmaster squinted through the gloom, drawing a small brass monocular from his pack.
The cypress trunk was twenty feet around, but its bark was not the healthy gray-brown of the surrounding titans.
It was mottled with large, scabby patches of bruised purple, looking like gangrenous flesh.
Wound around the trunk in a tight, suffocating spiral was a thick, serpentine creeper.
It was as thick as a grown man’s thigh.
Unlike the common green vines of Nuoding, its surface was a slick, bruised violet, dotted with faint, glowing yellow rings that pulsed with a slow, hypnotic luminescence in the murky twilight.
Along its ridges ran sharp, thumb-sized thorns curved like barbed fishhooks, their tips glistening with a clear, viscous fluid that smelled of fermented honey and bitter almonds.
“Ghost Vine,” the Grandmaster breathed, lowering his monocular with hands that had gone completely rigid.
“And look at the length of those thorns…
each one exceeds two inches.
The main stem has completed nine full spirals around that cypress.”
He turned to Tang San, his face pale with a mixture of academic vindication and sharp apprehension.
“Seven hundred and thirty years.
At least.
It is only thirty years shy of the absolute biological threshold a human vessel can endure.”
Xiao Wu crept up beside them, his gaze fixing on the purple vine with an intense, unreadable gaze.
“It’s awake,” Xiao Wu whispered softly, his voice carrying that strange, ancient resonance.
“It felt your probe, San’er.
It hasn’t fed in three weeks.
The tree’s sap is almost dry.”
As if responding to his words, the purple creeper shifted.
It did not move with the slow, sluggish crawl of common flora. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
*Hiss—*
A sound like water dropped onto red-hot iron rose from the black pool.
The seven-hundred-year Ghost Vine uncoiled its upper ten feet from the dying cypress with terrifying, whip-like speed.
Its barbed head reared into the dim air, fanning out into four flattened, petal-like sensory fronds that quivered as they tasted the air currents.
The yellow rings along its purple body flared with bright, predatory phosphorescence.
“Sanpao!” the Grandmaster hissed, stepping into the open mud, his two yellow rings rising from his feet.
“Prepare the perimeter!”
“Master, wait,” Tang San commanded quietly, her voice dropping into the cool, lethal detachment of an assassin measuring target dynamics.
“Do not summon Sanpao.
The beast has no eyes or ears; its sensory fronds track airborne moisture and metabolic heat.
A concussive blast from Sanpao will only scatter its parasitic spores across the entire pool, filling the air with caustic dust.”
She reached into her left sleeve, adjusting the leather harness of the silent sleeve dart.
“Botanical predators rely on hydraulic pressure within their vascular cambium to strike,” she explained, her voice steady as slate.
“Sever the primary nutrient valve at the root node, and the kinetic whip collapses.”
“Its outer bark is reinforced by seven hundred years of mineralized cellulose,” the Grandmaster warned, his knuckles white around his staff.
“Common steel cannot pierce it.”
“Then we do not use common steel,” Tang San said softly.
She stood upright on the root, her straw-like silence falling over her frame.
Her right hand reached into the third jade of Twenty-Four Moonlit Bridges.
When her fingers emerged, they held a single steel bodkin—not the standard triple-grooved needle, but a specialized six-inch armor-piercing spike she had ground from the core of the northern spring steel.
Its tip was fashioned into a triangular chisel point, tempered in cold mutton lard to diamond hardness, its spiral channels packed with concentrated Datura neurotoxin.
The Ghost Vine detected her movement.
*SPLAT!*
The black water of the pool detonated.
The twelve-foot purple creeper struck across forty yards of open marsh like a released ballista bolt.
Its barbed body tore through the hanging moss with a deafening, whistling shriek, aimed directly at Tang San’s throat!