The heavy lab door groaned open. Two guards stumbled in, faces pale and strained, carrying Lao Chen's stretcher. The big man looked terrible – skin gone a sickly grey, breaths shallow and rattling, lips tinged blue. The temporary seal Ye Chen had put on the poison was failing fast. Elder Mu followed, clutching the broken piece of Feng's jade talisman like it might bite him, his eyes wide with terror as they flicked from the ruined, still-smoking cauldron to the unnervingly calm kid standing in the mess.
"Put him here," Ye Chen ordered. His voice was thin, brittle like ice, but it cut through the room with absolute command. He pointed to the clear spot near the wall where the toxic sludge had eaten into the stone. The cold coming off him was a physical thing now, frosting the air with every breath he took.
The guards laid Lao Chen down gently, then practically scrambled back, unable to meet Ye Chen's ancient, shadowed stare. Elder Mu hovered, holding out the jagged jade piece. "Young Master... what... what are you planning to...?"
"Quiet," Ye Chen cut him off, his eyes never leaving Lao Chen. "Guard the door. No one comes in. No matter what you hear." He took the jade shard. It felt weirdly warm in his freezing hand, humming faintly with unstable energy, a leftover buzz from Feng's escape.
Elder Mu practically bolted, sealing the door with a heavy thud. The lab plunged back into near darkness, lit only by the dying glow of the slag heap that was the cauldron and the sickly sheen on Lao Chen's skin. The air felt thick, charged with tension and the bone-deep chill radiating from Ye Chen.
He stood beside the dying guard. The void core inside him was like a black hole, cold and starving. The botched potion, the accidental leak, the sheer exhaustion – they'd worn him down. The void smelled life, strong life fading fast, and its hunger was a physical ache, a sucking vacuum pulling at his insides. This is insane. Trying to actually use the void? To shape its pure nothingness into a tool? One tiny slip, one blink of lost focus, and Lao Chen wouldn't just die. He might vanish. Or the void could rip loose and devour everything.
But sunset meant death for Lao Chen. Failing wasn't an option anymore. He'd already bet everything; now he was betting his soul.
He shut his eyes, blocking out the grim sight. He focused inward, on that awful void sense. It stretched out, a field of pure absence, mapping Lao Chen's failing body with terrifying detail. He found the poison core instantly – a pulsing, evil silver knot wrapped around the guard's lower belly, its toxic threads worming into his energy channels, his blood, his life itself. Worse than before, fattened on stolen vitality, ready to burst.
Ye Chen gripped the jagged jade fragment in his left hand. He focused on its unstable buzz, not as a key, but as a target. A bullseye for chaos. He pressed his right hand, small and death-cold, flat against Lao Chen's chest, right over the poison knot.
Then, he did the impossible. He didn't push his weak qi. He didn't fight the void's hunger. He let it in. He cracked open a sliver of his will, a hair-thin channel, aiming the void's mindless erasure towards the jade fragment's spatial buzz. It was like trying to steer a tornado with a whisper.
AGONY. White-hot and absolute. Not physical pain, but the feeling of his very self being shredded and pulled apart. Memories, thoughts, his sense of being Ye Chen all tugged towards the hungry dark. The void surged through the channel he'd opened, zeroing in on the jade's unstable buzz like a predator. He screamed, a silent, breathless rip tearing from his throat. His vision blacked out, then exploded into swirling patterns of wrongness.
But he held onto the idea. The purpose. Not destruction. Surgery. He pictured the void energy, shaped by the jade's jagged frequency, not as a devouring mouth, but as an impossibly sharp, impossibly cold scalpel. He aimed it with desperate, agonizing care right at the edge where the pulsing silver poison met Lao Chen's own life force.
Cut.
It wasn't a physical cut. It was deletion. Where the void-scalpel touched the poison's edge, the silvery sickness just... stopped existing. Lao Chen's whole body jerked violently. A choked gasp ripped from his lips. The grey pallor deepened suddenly as a wave of deathly cold washed over him from Ye Chen's hand.
Ye Chen felt the void buck against his grip, ravenous. It wanted everything – the poison, Lao Chen's core, the life surging nearby. The jade fragment focused it, but also made the hunger worse. He felt another chunk of his own life force, his time, snap away, feeding the effort. His small body shook violently. Blood trickled from his nose and the corners of his eyes, freezing instantly on his icy skin. Flashes hit him – the Heaven-Shattering Spire, cold faces of overlords, his little sister chasing fireflies... memories being sucked into the dark.
HOLD! The command was a silent roar in the storm inside his head. Father. Clan. Vengeance. He poured every scrap of his emperor's will, his alchemist's focus, into keeping that scalpel's edge sharp. He traced the poison's border, erasing it thread by agonizing thread, isolating the core.
Sweat froze instantly into a crust on his face. His right hand, pressed to Lao Chen's chest, felt like solid ice, merging with the void. He could feel the guard's heartbeat stuttering under the assault of cold and negation. Too slow. Losing him. The void's hunger was swelling, threatening to swamp the jade's focus.
With a final, desperate heave of will that felt like tearing his own soul in two, Ye Chen twisted the spatial buzz channeled through the jade. He didn't just cut; he isolated. He used the void to wrap the entire poison core in a microscopic bubble of pure nothing, severing its last links to Lao Chen's body in one brutal, focused snap.
Lao Chen arched off the stretcher, a raw cry tearing from his throat, then collapsed back, completely still.
Ye Chen ripped his hand away, collapsing backwards onto the cold floor like a puppet with cut strings. The connection broke. The void core, momentarily full from the feast of his life force and the erased poison, settled back into a cold, heavy thud inside him. The jade fragment in his left hand was dull grey now, dead, all its energy sucked dry.
Silence. Thick, heavy, broken only by Ye Chen's ragged, shuddering gasps. He felt hollowed out, scraped down to the bone. Every part of him screamed with icy pain. He looked at his right hand – ghostly pale, almost blue-white, the skin weirdly see-through, showing dark veins underneath. He could barely feel it. The price was written right there on his flesh.
He dragged his eyes to Lao Chen. The guard lay motionless, but... the awful grey colour was fading. The blue lips were turning pink again. His chest rose and fell slowly, deeply – the rhythm of sleep, not dying. The terrifying bulge of the poison under his skin was gone. Only a faint, icy spot remained on his chest where Ye Chen's hand had been.
Success. A brutal, costly, terrifying success. Lao Chen would live. The poison was gone. Before Ye Chen could even catch his breath or process the hollow victory, frantic pounding hammered the lab door, way harder than before. Elder Mu's voice, shrill with pure panic, sliced through the thick wood: "YOUNG MASTER! CLAN LORD! THE SCARLET MOON! THEY'RE BACK! THEY'RE AT THE GATE! THE SUN... IT'S GOING DOWN!"