Fay and the rest of the tower raiding party advanced by inches, careful not to spook the Five Segment Chimeric Centipede before the trap was ready.
One of the cultivators, a man skilled in trapping and hunting, began weaving hand seals. A fowl flew out soon after, its body packed with sleeping agents, paralyzing neurotoxins, and qi numbing poisons meant to slow the flow of power through flesh.
The tactic had worked on the first four floors. The centipede had been unable to use movement techniques under the poisons' weight.
Unfortunately, its natural speed as a chimeric centipede was still monstrous enough to let it dart wherever it pleased.
The fowl was caught. At once, the cultivators moved into place. Then the creature sniffed.
Its eyes turned toward one hiding place after another, almost lazily, and it gave the captured fowl a slow, mocking lick.
It had smelled the toxins. Worse, it knew exactly where their hunters crouched.
A second fowl was sent in. This time the centipede's smile widened, as if it found the effort insulting.
The same scent drifted from the bird. The same trick. The same stupidity.
Then the beast's expression changed. A flicker of unease touched it. Some instinct told it something was wrong.
The second fowl exploded in teal underworld flame.
"Attack," Fay roared.
A hundred cultivators struck at once. The centipede never had time to recover. Spells, blades, arrows, and bursts of qi crashed down on it in a storm, and before the beast could answer with even a single proper counter, the Five Segment Chimeric Centipede was dead.
Fay moved quickly after the kill. While the others caught their breath and checked the floor, she knelt by the corpse, cut into its underside, and removed the poison sack once more without drawing notice.
The trick carried them all the way to the tenth floor.
There, the boss was a Ten Segment Chimeric Centipede, large enough to make the earlier beasts look like larvae.
It swallowed both fowls whole, poison and all, and still came on.
The eleventh floor proved worse.
The chamber felt tighter than the one before, as though the tower had shaved away space just to make the fight more vicious.
Worse still, there were two centipedes waiting this time, each with two segments.
Fay saw the danger at once. Hesitation here would kill people.
"I will take one, i only need a group of twenty. The rest of you already have my flame, deal with the other," she said.
Then she moved. Spectral Steps carried her forward with ghostlike silence, each stride so light it seemed the floor itself failed to notice her passing. She rushed one of the centipedes, snapped her whip up, and caught it across the middle where its two segments joined.
The wolf head at the tip opened its jaws and breathed, coating the length of the whip in underworld flame.
The centipede let out a harsh, tearing wail.
"Hit it now," Fay barked.
The other centipede saw its chance and turned to run, but a clay sphere struck its face and burst apart in a splash that made it shriek just as wildly.
It died even faster than the first. The underworld flame sealed inside the spherical pot had ruined its elemental spell, and without that, the beast was little more than meat waiting to be carved.
Fay looked over the gathered cultivators, then bent and seized the second centipede's head, forcing its face upward for all to see.
"Fellow Daoists, these creatures are not as witless as they pretend," she said. "Look at its eyes."
The cultivators did. The thing had died with shock still frozen in its gaze, and something uglier beneath it. Indignation. The first ten centipedes had hidden that intelligence well enough, but now the truth lay open before them.
"We will follow Sister Fay's arrangements," the cultivators said, cupping their fists to her.
After that, their climb through the tower of treasures grew more cautious, answering feigned stupidity with an equally convincing show of ignorance.
Far below, Oswin had already descended more than three kilometers, and still the abyss showed no end.
For cultivators, building an airtight passage of that length with fewer than two thousand men was not the difficult part.
The true trouble was keeping such a structure steady while it crept deeper into a place no one yet understood.
Oswin set another wooden cylinder into place.
Then his expression changed.
It dropped too easily.
A moment later, he heard the wood whistle as it fell into something far too deep.
"Stop. Everyone stop moving the corridor," he roared.
The order traveled at once. Every hundred meters, another cultivator shouted it onward until the warning reached the men above.
Even so, Oswin could tell that at least five wooden cylinders had already slipped before the descent fully halted, and the room he stood in now hung at a dangerous angle, as though it might slide out into the abyss at any moment.
Oswin used his inner propulsion to lift himself slightly. He dared not move too much within the hanging room.
He did not order them pulled back. There was no point. The structure had been made with softness on purpose, built to descend cleanly and not to be hauled up once committed.
Still, the problem could be corrected.
"Call the earth, water, and fire cultivators," Oswin ordered.
They came at once and began working the passage behind him, shrinking and reinforcing it little by little, inch by inch, with painful care.
No one dared crack the walls. No one dared let even a thread of fog slip into the sealed corridor.
Ten minutes passed before the repair was complete, and only then did Oswin feel the room settle properly instead of hanging like a loose tooth over the ledge.
"We'll need a bridge to cross this chasm."
Oswin began calculating the path forward while the cultivators skilled in structures gathered to argue out the safest design.
Then the ground rumbled again. The Flesh Titans were back.
This time, the Flesh Titans did not charge as they had before.
They came on like an army.
Still naked. Still obscene to look at. Yet there was order in them now.
The smallest marched at the front while the largest held the rear, all packed tight and advancing in a single direction with grim purpose.
The cultivators answered at once, bombarding the first ranks with spells and arrows until the front line collapsed in heaps of twitching flesh.
The first Flesh Titans fell quickly.
But Fay had already exposed their trick of feigning death, so no one rushed forward to finish them. They let the creatures lie where they had fallen.
Then the larger Flesh Titans behind the line stooped, hoisted the pretend dead onto their shoulders, and carried them toward the rear.
There, the fifty meter titans seized the bodies and hurled them against the wall, piling them one atop another with ugly efficiency.
They had changed tactics.
Jenkii moved then with her fellow disciples from the Infernal Warfiend Court.
All of them practiced the same Blooming Lotus Consecutive Arts, and together they struck like cavalry loosed across an open field.
They did not aim for the largest titans. Instead, they descended upon the ones already lying on the ground, smashing the corpses apart and harvesting fifty charges at a time.
The moment their arts were primed, they slammed into the flanks of the smallest Flesh Titans and tore through them so quickly it looked like men cutting weeds.
They moved fast. Too fast. In less than a minute they had brought down more than fifty.
Yet as Jenkii fought, something unsettled her.
She looked into the eyes of the Flesh Titans and found no old frenzy there. No slobbering hunger. No delight in slaughter. What she saw instead was boredom.
Real boredom.
The dull, listless sort she knew too well from her own face on bad days.
That chilled her more than rage would have.
When they paused to catch their breath and swallow stamina pills, a wet squelching cry rolled out from the rear.
Jenkii knew that sound at once. It was the call of the hundred meter titan.
She looked for it, but before she could find the source, the expressions of the Flesh Titans changed.
Their dead eyed boredom vanished. In its place came those maniacal smiles again, and with them the old fervor for battle returned in full.
Then they charged. Arrows rained from above. Spells screamed through the air.
This time, however, the Flesh Titans did not wail and stagger as they had before. They only gritted their teeth and kept coming. Some bit down so hard their gums split open, yet even with blood running down their chins, they did not slow.
Undead soul arrows and cultivator spells crashed into them, but the Flesh Titans simply endured and pressed on.
Then the ground behind them shifted.
Eight sixty meter titans rose from what had seemed to be squatting forms in the rear.
When they stood to their full height, the cultivators trembled, and more than one felt bile surge into his throat at the sight of what those monsters carried on their shoulders.
