The tomb’s stale air carried the sharp tang of ozone and dried blood. Lin Hao’s newly awakened eyes adjusted instantly, revealing every crack in the chamber’s weathered stones. Dust motes hung suspended like frozen fireflies in shafts of pale light filtering through crevices.

  “If you’d slept any longer,” Bai crunched another spirit sunstone between molars that gleamed like steel ingots, “we’d have started eating the floor tiles.”

  Lin Hao’s fingers brushed his storage ring. His stomach dropped. Once piled high with luminous spirit sunstones, the dimensional space now gaped like a plundered tomb—barely a hundred faintly glowing crystals remained. The metallic aftertaste of loss coated his tongue.

  “You did what you had to.” He forced a smile, throat tight. Two years. His robes hung in tattered veils, their fabric brittle with accumulated tomb mold.

  16:03 – Reckoning

  Bai’s horns scraped the ceiling as it stretched. The juvenile horned dragon ape now stood eye-to-eye with Lin Hao, muscles coiled beneath fur that shimmered with latent static. Kung Fu Fly’s scanners revealed the truth—Bai’s energy signature now pulsed at eighth-tier beast levels, its claws leaving smoking grooves in the stone where it paced.

  “Growth spurt?” Lin Hao rasped, voice unused to speech.

  “Evolution,” Bai corrected, preening. “While you snored.”

  16:05 – Revelation

  Memories flooded through shared neural links—Bai’s lonely monologues echoing through the chamber, Firelion melting stone to create emergency vents, Wolf Spider spinning silk hammocks that reeked of burnt keratin. The claustrophobic weight of passing seasons pressed down until Lin Hao’s chest ached.

  16:07 – Departure

  Stone grated against stone as Lin Hao triggered the hidden exit. The rising metal door screeched like a dying leviathan, revealing a tunnel choked with bioluminescent fungi. Purple lightning crackled through the gloom—a nest of thunder lizards, their scales hissing against wet stone.

  16:08 – Awakening

  The lead lizard lunged. Lin Hao saw its death before it moved—a phantom image overlapping reality showing charred bones in the creature’s future. Firelion’s magma breath turned the tunnel into a kiln. The stench of seared reptile flesh mingled with ozone as thunder lizards exploded like overcharged capacitors.

  16:10 – Ascendancy

  Bai moved like liquid mercury, crushing skulls with blows that left craters smoking with residual energy. Kung Fu Fly’s lasers painted targeting sigils that Lin Hao’s enhanced vision instinctively followed. Each coordinated strike felt choreographed by destiny itself.

  16:12 – Revelation

  The last lizard fell. Lin Hao knelt beside its twitching corpse, fingers tracing the energy patterns in its scales. His cycle eyes revealed the truth—these weren’t natural beasts. Their DNA spirals contained traces of Wu Tian’s genetic markers.

  “The tomb reshapes intruders,” he murmured. “Evolution or death.”

  16:14 – Convergence

  As they neared sunlight, mechanical groans echoed behind them. The four rune golems stood sentinel, their stone joints grinding like millstones. Lin Hao’s enhanced perception saw the truth—energy cores pulsing in sync with his own dantian’s rhythm.

  “Kneel.”

  The command emerged layered with Wu Tian’s ghostly timbre. The golems collapsed into parade rest positions, cracking the floor beneath their tonnage.

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  16:16 – Calculation

  Kung Fu Fly projected schematics. “Power reserves at 33%. Combat viability estimate: three engagements.”

  Lin Hao’s throat tightened. The math was brutal—reactivating even one golem would consume spirit sunstones like kindling. He sealed them away, their stony hides cold against his storage ring’s dimensional membrane.

  16:18 – Emergence

  Sunlight struck like a physical blow. Lin Hao’s cycle eyes darkened to smoke-colored lenses, filtering the glare into bearable wavelengths. The valley below teemed with new growth—vines strangling the collapsed tomb entrance, their blossoms reeking of necrotic pollen.

  Bai sniffed the wind. “The world smells… sharper.”

  Lin Hao agreed. Every leaf’s rustle carried layers—the whisper of photosynthesis, the crackle of ambient mana, the subsonic hum of distant mechanized cities. Two years asleep had birthed a new reality.

  16:20 – Resolve

  He surveyed his ragged cohort—Firelion’s magma veins glowing brighter after constant combat, Wolf Spider’s carapace etched with fresh battle scars, Bai’s adolescent swagger hardening into warrior poise.

  “Home,” he declared, the word tasting of ash and possibility.

  The mountains echoed their departure, stone remembering their footsteps long after they’d faded from view.

  Decapitation Protocol

  The tomb corridor reeked of charred flesh and ionized air. Lin Hao’s nostrils flared as blood mist settled on his skin—each droplet carrying the acrid tang of thunder lizard biology. Firelion’s magma-heated fur warmed his thighs through tattered robes as they charged through the carnage.

  16:22 – Convergence

  The lizard king emerged in a storm of ozone. Six meters of scaled fury crackled with violet lightning, its dorsal spines humming at frequencies that vibrated teeth. Lin Hao’s cycle eyes dissected the threat before conscious thought—neural clusters glowing vulnerable amber along the spinal column, cardiac nodes pulsing beneath armored throat plates.

  “Visuals match ninth-tier threat parameters,” Kung Fu Fly buzzed in warning. “Recommend tactical withdrawal.”

  Lin Hao grinned. Firelion’s molten saliva dripped onto stone, hissing as it bored through petrified bones. “Full assault.”

  16:23 – Illusion

  The lizard king’s slit pupils met swirling voids. Lin Hao’s cycle eyes vomited ancestral memories into its primitive brain—a lifetime compressed into nanoseconds. The beast staggered, reliving its cannibalistic hatchling phase through endless recursive loops. Firelion’s fangs found purchase in electromagnetic-charged scales, magma meeting lightning in a corona discharge that seared Lin Hao’s eyebrows.

  16:24 – Execution

  Dragonbane Sword flashed. The blade’s fractured edge resonated with ultrasonic harmonics, finding microscopic gaps in bio-armored plating. Lin Hao felt the moment of severance—muscle fibers parting like overripe fruit, vertebrae crunching like stale bread. The decapitated head bounced twice, leaking cerebrospinal fluid that smelled of burnt walnuts.

  16:25 – Aftermath

  Silence fell heavier than the corpse. Remaining lizards scattered, their panicked squeals echoing through stone arteries. Bai shrank to housecat proportions mid-leap, landing with comical grace beside the twitching body. His claws extracted the thunder core with surgical precision—a crackling sphere of plasma contained by organic capacitors.

  “Mine.” The words emerged garbled around mouthfuls of volatile energy. Bai’s fur stood electrified, each strand conducting miniature lightning storms.

  Lin Hao catalogued losses—three hundred seventy-two spirit sunstones consumed during hibernation, two years of surface-world changes unknown, robes disintegrating into sulfur-scented rags. He pressed a palm against Firelion’s steaming flank. “Priorities?”

  The magma beast rumbled deep in its thorax. “Garments. Sustenance. Revenge.”

  16:27 – Revelation

  Bai’s transformation proved unexpectedly practical. The horned dragon ape now resembled a disheveled scholar’s pet—if scholars kept pets that smelled of ozone and digested thunder cores. Lin Hao tossed him a moth-eaten apprentice robe from storage. “Play docile.”

  “Always.” Bai’s grin revealed fangs still smoking from energy absorption. His disguised form radiated deceptive harmlessness—claws sheathed in false keratin, horn disguised as a leather cap’s decorative stud.

  16:29 – Exodus

  They emerged under skies stained sunset crimson. Lin Hao’s cycle eyes adjusted instantly, parsing atmospheric contaminants—spiritual energy residues from distant cultivation battles, traces of mechanized transport exhaust, the ozone signature of functioning power grids.

  Wolf Spider scuttled ahead, sensory bristles mapping terrain changes. “Surface settlements expanded 300% beyond previous parameters.”

  16:31 – Resolve

  Firelion accelerated to cruising velocity—a blur of molten afterimages. Wind whipped Lin Hao’s lengthened hair into a nest of split ends. Bai whooped in exhilaration, stolen robes flapping like battle standards.

  The tomb’s entrance dwindled behind them, its secrets buried beneath two years’ accumulation of radioactive moss and opportunist flora. Somewhere in the dark, four stone golems waited—patient, hungry, expensive.

  Lin Hao catalogued priorities. The list began and ended with one imperative:

  Reclaim what’s mine.