There’s been a development, a voice said just as he was reaching for the teapot. Wang Jun paused, then looked to the floor. His shadow was back.
“What happened?” Wang Jun asked. His shadow was usually silent; he would only alert him if something important happened in the city.
Hong Xin has been abducted. She is gone, and I can’t find her.
Pottery shattered.
Wang Jun glared at the shadow. “You’d better not be lying.”
I will take you there, the shadow said.
Wang Jun ignored Elder Bai, who’d just walked into the room, and jumped straight into the shadow. It whizzed across the city, teleporting him almost instantly to a place of desolation and ruin. Splintered wood was everywhere, and charred and frozen corpses littered the streets. Despite the carnage, he saw no signs of Hong Xin, no signs of the abductors. He did, however, see the body of Mistress Huang. It was pierced by three bloody holes; the weapons had been removed by guards on the scene.
Wang Jun reached out for threads of karma—surely such a massacre had caused enough of a stir for him to find the perpetrators—but discovered a blurry force keeping the threads away from him. They were frayed, blowing in the wind, unreachable by mere mortals.
Wang Jun’s eyes narrowed. “A transcendent?” he whispered. “Why the hell would a transcendent attack Hong Xin?”
Uncertain, the shadow said. I was out surveilling other targets. I sensed a disturbance. I came, but she was gone.
“Damn it,” Wang Jun said, his face contorted, his lips pulled back into a snarl. “Damn it all.”
Such a thing wasn’t supposed to happen. He’d seen the writing on the wall, of course. The mysterious killer had been targeting the Icy Heart Pavilion’s executive so fiercely, and it was only a matter of time until Hong Xin was forced to leave. He’d planned to welcome her with open arms, working with her to save his family. Perhaps, with luck, they’d live happily ever after. He could take her back to her parents and resolve one of his greatest regrets.
Now, that seemed impossible. Against all odds, a transcendent had acted, despite the backlash from the plane’s will. He had a pretty good idea of who had done it—the Spirit Temple. Evil spirits always bore a grudge, and capturing someone alive to exact vengeance was exactly the kind of thing they would do.
But they don’t have transcendents, Wang Jun thought. Was it their Shepherd? Do they have means I don’t understand?
“Shadow,” Wang Jun said.
Master, it answered.
“Scour the Spirit Temple,” he instructed. “Monitor them with everything you have. Every communication, every going or leaving. I want reports, and I want her found.”
It is difficult to evade their mediums, the shadow said.
Is it difficult or impossible? Wang Jun asked.
The shadow hesitated, then answered. Difficult. I will have to cease all other activities.
“Do it,” Wang Jun said. “I need her found. Don’t come back until you find her, or until I call you again.”
Affirmative, the shadow said. It jumped into the shade of a half-destroyed building and merged with it. All around Wang Jun, soldiers and patrols were rushing in, trying to make heads or tails of the situation. Healers came and tended to the wounded and dying. Others collected the dead. They passed by Wang Jun, who stood there in silence, unseen, guilt gnawing away at his heart.
Chapter 34: Full Circle
This is it, Cha Ming thought, pressing his finger to a rune. He stepped back and waited for a transparent shield to appear between the test object and their research group. Today, they were testing a smaller prototype. A small wall—Pan Su’s best wall to date—was directly in the line of fire of a single spear. The spear was mounted in the device he’d just activated, a much smaller launcher than the Breaker’s—which could accommodate hundreds of similar spears and deliver them in a single payload.
This miniature device also contained prototype components. The spears inside it were just like the final product would be. Inside, there were thousands of ball bearings arranged in a precise order. If successful, he would scale up the result to the real Breaker prototype. He wasn’t sure if it would work, though initial trials and Shao Qiang’s divinations had indicated it was promising.
The small device accumulated power. The power core, which Cha Ming and He Yin had crafted together using the best of their abilities, began to react uncontrollably, feeding power into a storage device that would only last a single launch. This accumulation continued for three long seconds before finally, the spear launched at the wall at a speed that not even a transcendent could avoid.
The main spear pierced the wall with earth-shaking momentum. Large fissures appeared as the spear tip plunged into the concrete. As a result of the sudden loss in momentum, the spear’s shaft pressed up against the spear’s tip. Together, they compressed a tiny ball of reactive chemicals barely stable enough to launch without worry but unstable enough to detonate mere fractions of a second after impact.
The spearhead exploded in a symphony of molten shrapnel. The ball bearings, which had been carefully packed in a precise pattern, flew outward in a not-so-random fashion. They pressed up against the shattered concrete, etching runic lines upon its surface, causing the wall to weaken. The other ball bearings, not needed for the effect, crashed into the wall and caused massive damage that expanded several feet from the point of impact.
One spear. One launch. Devastation. A half-step-transcendent wall, the best product Southern geomancers could manufacture, was reduced to rubble. The test section had measured
