Ter didn’t answer immediately, his throat bobbing as he swallowed hard against the lump of terror lodged there. He simply nodded, quick and jerky, not trusting his own voice to hold steady.
Kahn studied him for a moment longer, weighing exactly how much use the broken inner disciple might still have.
There was a great deal he needed to know before his three days ran out. Every treasury, every hidden vault, every locked door in this compound that might trigger another sign-in. Every name of every person who had ever raised a hand against his family.
’Later,’ he thought, pushing the thought aside for now. ’Sera comes first. Everything else can wait.’
He turned without another word and walked back toward the medic room, his bloodied blades still resting against his hips, the crimson veins running through the steel slowly dimming from their earlier hunger.
Ter scrambled to follow, careful to keep a healthy distance between himself and the twin daggers, his shattered wrist cradled protectively against his own chest.
The medic room greeted him with the same quiet, sterile stillness he had left it in. The dead elder’s body remained slumped near the overturned table, his glassy eyes still fixed on nothing.
Kahn stepped past the corpse without a second glance, his attention entirely fixed on the small bed in the corner.
Sera hadn’t moved. Her breathing remained slow and steady, deep in the exhausted, healing sleep his technique had pulled her into, the faint color that had returned to her lips a small, fragile comfort against the horror of everything else in this room.
Kahn crouched beside her, brushing a few strands of dark, tangled hair away from her pale forehead. His hand lingered there for a moment, feeling the steady warmth beneath her skin, the proof that she was still fighting even in her sleep.
’I’m not leaving you in this room,’ he thought, his jaw tightening as his eyes swept briefly over the discarded pins scattered across the nightstand, the half-filled bottle of stolen blood still sitting exactly where it had been left. ’Not here. Not surrounded by what they did to you.’
He carried her carefully into his arms, cradling her slight, feather-light frame against his chest with a gentleness that felt entirely foreign compared to the violence his hands had dealt out only minutes earlier.
She stirred faintly at the movement, a soft, wordless murmur escaping her lips, but she didn’t wake.
Kahn turned toward the doorway, where Ter stood frozen, watching the exchange with a strange expression flickering across his pale face.
The man couldn’t understand why this strange white haired cultivator seemed to care so much about Seraphina, and it only further confirmed his suspicious that he was indeed after her bloodline.
"Find me a room," Kahn said, his voice flat and final. "Somewhere clean. Somewhere with an actual bed instead of this... butcher’s table."
Ter nodded quickly and shuffled out ahead of him, leading the way down a narrow side corridor Kahn hadn’t explored yet. They passed two more closed doors before Ter stopped in front of a third, pushing it open with his uninjured hand.
The room beyond was modest but clean, a simple wooden bed pressed against the far wall beneath a narrow window, a writing desk cluttered with half-finished letters and a cultivation manual left open on its surface.
It had clearly belonged to one of the inner disciples Kahn had killed in the hallway only minutes ago, though he couldn’t be bothered to remember which one.
While the inner disciples could sleep on beds in a room like this, the outer disciples could only sleep on mats, and didn’t have a room to themselves.
It was one of the things the outer disciples of the sect usually used to motivate themselves to get even stronger, so they could also live a comfortable live within the sect.
Kahn stepped inside and gently laid Sera down against the modest bedding, pulling a spare blanket up over her small frame.
She curled slightly beneath the fabric, her brow relaxing into something almost peaceful for the first time since he had found her.
Kahn stood over her for a long moment, simply watching the rise and fall of her chest, letting the sight ground him after everything else that had happened tonight.
’Sleep,’ he thought. ’You’re safe now. I’ll make sure of it.’
He finally turned away, closing the door quietly behind him before rounding on Ter, who flinched instinctively under the sudden shift of his attention.
"Now," Kahn said, his voice cooling several degrees, "tell me about your sect leader. Everything. Where he is. When exactly he’s coming back. And don’t waste my patience with half-truths."
Ter swallowed hard, his eyes darting nervously toward the closed door behind which Sera now slept, before dragging his focus back to Kahn’s unblinking stare.
"Sect Master Gorath left five days ago," Ter said, his voice trembling but steady enough to get the words out. "He’s due back in three. He took his son with him, as well as the remaining elders."
Kahn’s eyes narrowed slightly. "All the elders left together? For what?"
Ter hesitated, his mouth opening and closing once before he finally forced himself to continue, clearly sensing that hesitation would cost him far more than the truth ever could.
"There’s a place two provinces east," he said. "An old demonic sect, mostly ruins now, but they still keep forbidden techniques buried in their vaults. Extraction rituals. Ways to pull a bloodline cleanly out of someone’s veins and... graft it into another person."
A cold, heavy silence settled over the corridor.
Kahn’s jaw tightened, a muscle flexing sharply along the side of his face.
"Graft it..." he repeated slowly, each word carrying a weight that made Ter take an involuntary step backward.
"The elders originally planned to just... take her," Ter continued, his voice dropping into a miserable, guilty whisper.
"Marry her off to the young master, let her bloodline pass naturally into the bloodline of his heirs over time. But then the boy—Gorath’s son—started showing signs of a weak, unstable foundation... so the sect leader started panicking."