The moment the short halberd pierced my skin, it was as if a red-hot iron wire seared into my chest. I could vividly sense the resistance of the metal blade splitting through my epidermis, the stabbing pain of hair follicles being torn out root by root exploding along my nerves—followed by a bone-chilling cold. That was the tip of the halberd steeped in Gui 墟's abyss-water three centuries past, carrying the chill of the Nine Nethers, hissing as it clashed with the boiling dragonblood in my veins.
The crack of my collarbone shattering reverberated in my ears, amplified a thousandfold like the splintering of icicles. The Godslayer Chains seized the chance to cinch tighter around my scapula; the instant their bronze runes burrowed into my flesh, I smelled the fragrant of my own flesh being scorched by curse-magic—a sickeningly sweet stench of dragon-marrow and rust, more revolting than the ashes of the Frontier. The Surface Twin's fingers, scaled like reversed dragonhide, dug into my throat, their jagged edges splitting my skin. Salty blood beads rolled onto my tongue, but were drowned out by pain even before reaching my taste buds.
With each fraction the halberd drove deeper, I felt muscle fibers tearing with a dull, grinding ache. I could trace the path where my pectoral muscle was pried apart by metal, the pulling sensation of ruptured fascia spreading from collarbone to neck, making my jaw tremble uncontrollably. When the halberd met my ribcage, the screech of porcelain grinding against stone nearly shredded my nerves—then a click. The third rib caved in, its splintered edges scraping my lung, and I tasted blood surging up my throat.
"A—!" The broken roar lodged in my throat, smothered by the Inner Twin's black mist pouring into my ears. The chains' runes now swarmed like ten thousand insects along my veins toward my heart, leaving blazing trails in their wake. I looked down to see golden-red froth churning in the wound over my chest—the signature hue of the White Tiger Guardian's blood—now dimming like spilled ink, dissolving into black mist that flowed along the halberd toward the Surface Twin's reversed scales.
As the halberd finally pierced my pericardium, time seemed to stutter. I "saw" my heartbeat stall on either side of the blade, a bead of blood hovering at the tip, refracting the cave's phosphor-fire like the Vermilion Flame in the Vermilion Guardian's eyes three centuries ago. Then came a tearing sensation—not pain, but an eerie emptiness, as if an invisible hand were clawing my soul through the halberd, yanking at every nerve in my chest.
Hearing sharpened to a razor's edge. The dragonling's roar fractured into a thousand syllables, each discordant note stabbing my temples like ice picks. The Surface Twin's breath boomed like shifting earth, his scaled hide scraping in a hideous duet with the popping of my dislocated joints. I could even hear the sizzle of blood being absorbed by the fungal carpet, and the infrasonic thud of Zhulong's embryonic heartbeat vibrating my eyeballs.
Vision blurred into double. The Surface Twin's face fragmented—now the bronze mask of the Grand Libationer, now the Azure Guardian mid-strike. My chest's tiger tattoo was disintegrating, each falling spark dragging a memory: the ecstasy of first transforming in the Frontier, the warmth of the dragonling's young scales, comrades' shadows in the storm three centuries past. These shards shattered like glass under the halberd, mixing with blood dripping to the ground.
Worst was the tactile dissonance. Though my heart was pierced, every pore felt like it bled. Where the chains bound my limbs, numbness gave way to a scalding ache like boiling oil poured over skin. The rock wall at my back suddenly seared, as if Gui Xu's inferno seeped up from the earth, branding our twisting shadows into the stone—a ritual sacrifice etched in pain.
The dragonling's cry cut through the haze. I turned to see it tearing at the Soul-Binding Pennant, each scale peeling away with strings of blood, yet still inching toward me. Its third eye mirrored my face: ashen as Frontier ashes, pupils swirling with translucent fragments of myself—soul-shards severed by the chains, flowing toward the Twin.
"Stay back…" I tried to snarl, but only blood bubbles escaped. The Surface Twin twisted the halberd, its edge scraping my heart wall—a screech like nails on metal bored into my skull, blinding me with static. Then, three-century-old memories flooded in: the Azure Guardian's halberd, the Vermilion's falling feathers, the Black Tortoise's melting shell. Sealed pains erupted, multiplying the agony a hundredfold.
When the Inner Twin's misty form burrowed into my shattered soul, I tasted true despair. Not bodily pain, but the cold of soul-rupture—like being cast into Gui Xu's depths, watched by twelve ancient dragons as my existence was rewritten by curse, morphing from "human" into a revenant weapon for their bidding.
My final lucidity clung to the dragonling's pupil. It broke free of the pennant, collapsing at my feet, its claws trembling to touch my dangling fingers. I wanted to say the Frontier winds would never cease, but words choked into a bloodline slipping from my lip, staining its downy brow—just like the first drop of dragon-marrow I'd wiped for it when we met.
As the halberd pierced my rib, all phosphor-lights on the wall swiveled, stretching the Surface Twin's shadow into a ten-zhang ancient dragon phantom. I heard the click of the third rib breaking, mingling with the drip-drip of dragon-marrow from stalactites, each strike hammering my temples. The iron tang of blood in my chest mixed with the charred odor of fungal carpet burning from dragonblood, as if a heated chain had been shoved into my lung. The Twin's breath on my neck was cloying-sweet, laced with the salt of Gui Xu's water; his reversed scales grated against my collarbone, their barbs tearing skin until my vision dimmed.
Worst of all, the murals moved. Banners of the Four Guardians faded, my silhouette replacing the White Tiger's, while the Azure Guardian's face—now the Surface Twin's grinning visage—emerged. The dragonling's roar shattered into a storm of cyan blood-beads, each igniting the chains' runes into fiery serpents slithering toward my heart. I looked at my hand: golden blood seeping from under my nails was absorbed by the carpet, its slimy tendrils inching the halberd deeper with each pulse. The blade's cold and my body's heat clashed into ice crystals, forming blood-tears on my lashes.
And then I fell into darkness. Endless, consuming darkness.
Darkness poured into my nose and mouth like thick ink, and in the fall, I heard a thousand faint sounds. The Frontier's wind sighing through ashes, the dragonling's first delicate chirp as it lapped blood from my fingertip, and the final heartbeat of the White Tiger Guardian three centuries ago, collapsing before Gui XU's gate. When consciousness condensed into a pinpoint, I floated in a stellar expanse of memory-shards, each bead reflecting a different me across time: the lost orphan before weathered murals, the cursed tiger confronting the Twins in Dragon Ruins, the White Tiger Guardian impaled by a halberd in storm.
"So I never truly died." My fingertip grazed a golden bead, and three-century-old memories surged: as the Azure Guardian thrust his halberd, he slipped half a tiger tally into my palm, its runes resonating with my chest tattoo—not betrayal, but the final protection sealing my soul in the Frontier. "We should have known the Guardian Bureau's rituals required living sacrifices," came the voice of the First Guardian from the shard's depths, his spectral form materializing before me, Frontier sandstorm leaking from cracks in his armor instead of blood.
More beads shattered, revealing sealed truths: the Four Guardians had long seen through the ancient dragons' revival plot, volunteering as anchors for reincarnation. Each White Tiger Guardian's soul reborn in the Frontier, until one could gather memories to sever the Bureau's strings. The dragonling's roar pierced the star-dome—I saw its spirit weaving through shards, each scale clinging to my memory-fragments. Not a chance companion, but a soul-lamp kindled by the First Guardian using dragon-spirit.
"They meant to forge you into a revenant weapon," its spirit-claw pressed to my brow as the star-dome quaked, "but the Frontier's wind belongs only to souls that refuse to bend."
In agony, all beads exploded at once, a torrent of memories flooding my core. I "saw" my soul-reforming: the tiger tattoo was no curse, but a Soul-Calming Armor woven from ten thousand undead grievances; the bone-cracking of transformation, a resonance between Four Symbols' blood and ancient dragon-force. When the first true tiger-roar thundered in my soul-abyss, something awoke—not wild fury, but the unfulfilled guardian's resolve from three centuries past.
Consciousness snapped back to the cave's putrid stench. I lay on the fungal carpet, the halberd shattered from my chest, a golden-red river of light flowing over the wound, each blood-bead mirroring soul-abyss shards. The Surface Twin stood before Gui XU's fading gate, reversed scales drinking dragon-marrow from the ceiling. When he turned, his pupils reflected the White Tiger Aspect rising behind me—a colossal tiger formed from ten thousand undead phantoms, each whisker tangled with Frontier sand.
"Impossible…" The Inner Twin's misty form detached from his chest, voice trembling, "Your soul should have been forged into—"
"Forged was your ambition." I rose, voice a rumble of tiger's roar mingling with the undead's murmurs. My skin shimmered not with flesh, but a tiger-patterned armor of light-shards, each vein etched with the First Guardian's soul-calming incantations. The dragonling lunged from shadow, its flame no longer cyan but a storm swirling with golden grit, dissolving blood-crystals on the carpet to reveal sealed ancient battle-marks beneath.
When the Surface Twin's reversed-scale blade slashed, I blocked instinctively. Metal screeched as spiderweb cracks spidered across his edge, while my tiger-claw glimmered with memory-chains from the soul-abyss—the World-Protecting Array bound by the Four Guardians three centuries ago. "You thought to manipulate the undead," I stepped closer, the Aspect's paw crushing Godslayer Chains underfoot, "but every lost soul in the Frontier is a victim of the Bureau."
The Inner Twin shattered into twelve black mists lunging for my throat, only to recoil at contact with tiger-patterns. I saw clearly: each mist imprisoned a broken soul—commoners from Emperor's State, cultivators twisted into Taotie automata, even fragments of the First Black Tortoise Guardian. "Return us…" their voices seeped from the mist, merging into a deafening accusation.
"Enough!" The Surface Twin wove seals frantically, reversed scales splitting to reveal Zhulong's writhing embryo beneath, "Even with soul-abyss power, you can't stop Gui XU —"
His words choked off. My tiger-claw had pierced his chest, the crack of reversed scales shattering in unison with soul-abyss beads reassembling. The embryo's vertical pupil constricted in my palm, stolen soul-lights flowing back along my arm to brand its surface with twelve tiger-marks. The Inner Twin's mist tried to flee, but the dragonling's flame solidified it—at its core, I saw half a Guardian Bureau command-flag etched with "Birth, Age, Sickness, Death."
Stalactites overhead oozed fluorescence as a thousand water droplets hung mid-air, fracturing my reflection into shimmering motes. The Surface Twin lay at the carpet's center, the sickly-sweet humus and metallic tang of reversed scales swirling around him like warring mists, electric sparks crackling at their boundary.
"Bonding with bone—" Before the incantation finished, fist-sized rocks collapsed from the ceiling. I caught one, tiger-patterns melting it to ash in my palm, sand sifting through fingers to trace the First Guardian's soul-seal across the Twin's chest. Seventy-two phosphor-lights erupted, not ghost-green but iron-gray with grievance, swirling around his body in twelve spirals like a silent murder of crows.
The Inner Twin's mist had barely seeped from his nape when Frontier sandstorm swept it up—scorching from centuries of sun, yet hissing coldly on contact with Bureau seals. I saw fragmented memories of his transformation: childhood wrists where Bureau's sun-moon tattoos were being overgrown by reversed scales, veins beneath skin glowing eerie silver-blue as if injected with quicksilver.
When the tiger tally pressed to reversed-scale shards, the entire cave's strata cracked like glass. Four Symbols' battle murals bled black slurry, ancient dragon phantoms once awakened by the Twins' blood now being devoured one by one by tiger-patterns. As the leftmost Vermilion Banner disintegrated, its departing fire froze into ice crystals in mid-air, scattering like coral shards over the Twins' robes.
"Look, little dragon." I murmured, fingertips brushing the Surface Twin's brow, Bureau seals beneath his eyelids flickering azure like Frontier's ghost-market fires at midnight. The dragonling's claw suddenly sank into stalactite, its cyan flame s*ck*d into the cave's depths, coalescing into an inverted tiger-head projection above the Twins.
The most awe-inspiring change came during core-remolding. As my blood-bead resonated with his reversed-scale shard, the cave's fungal carpet contracted like living flesh, revealing buried bronze skeletons—the soul-seals planted by the First Guardian. Their fingerbones pointed to the Twins, palm tiger-marks pulsing in sync with my chest tattoo to piece together the complete Gui XU star-map in mid-air.
The Surface Twin's body arched violently, vertebrae cracking like popped beans. His robes split to reveal a translucent black mist torso, veins flowing with grievance-mixed gold sand, each heartbeat a faint sand-rattle. When the Inner Twin's head rose from his chest, neck-skin remolded like melting wax into a misty tiger-head, its ghost-fire eyes reflecting the earth-vein patterns swirling on my armor.
The dragonling swept across the Twins' brows, its wing-beat freezing time briefly. I saw phosphor-light crystallize into tiny icicles on its scales, blood-beads on the Twins' lashes hovering like frozen rubies—deep in their pupils, the Bureau's "Sickness" seal was being gnawed apart by tiger-patterns, each peeling stroke dissolving into butterfly-shaped light-shards fluttering toward broken Four Symbols' banners on the wall.
"The pact is sealed." The moment the words left me, stalactites overhead shattered in unison, water droplets crashing into the carpet to rouse fluorescent spores. These parasites, once corrupted by the Twins' blood, now glowed ice-blue under grievance's wash, dancing like Frontier sand under moonlight.
When the Twins rose, the carpet retreated automatically, revealing a path paved with Guardians' bones through the ages. Their shadows were no longer solid, but fluid mixtures of mist and sand, each step igniting hidden patterns resonating with my tiger-marks—a map legible only to the undead. The dragonling's cry rang clear, its flame first showing ash-white and cyan—the fusion of life's azure and death's mist. Where it swept, Taotie patterns on the Twins' robes disintegrated, revealing Frontier proverbs written in sand: "Armor of Grievance, Blade of Bone."
A final tremor from Gui XU's gate echoed deep within, twelve golden lights rising from the earth to illuminate tiger-marks in the Twins' eyes. These lights didn't belong to the mortal realm, but to unfaded undead resolve in the soul-abyss, now projecting the Bureau's full conspiracy onto the wall through their pupils: endless Twins being transformed across time, countless Four Guardians' skeletons melted into ancient dragon-chains.
But wind and sand erased these images swiftly. As we stepped from the cave, moonlight silvered the Twins' translucent forms, grievance within them glowing like a galaxy. The Frontier's wind lifted sand not to bypass, but to coalesce into cloaks, as if this barren land at last embraced these former invaders, carving their existence into the rings of rebellion.