The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 16: Chapter 16

Read chapter 16 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"The fool tries to swallow the lake because he is thirsty; the wise man takes a cup." Leaving the resin pillar wasn't a simple matter of climbing down. Vane-Uru's earlier shift had brought the cavern's ceiling down with her, creating a jagged, unstable boulder field perfectly level with our plateau. The faint ambient light from the cave-bugs above vanished entirely inside the tight, and choking gaps between the fallen rocks. We couldn't go over, and squeezing through the shifting crush of the ceiling collapse was suicide. Maybe Pendra could, but we were built differently and had vastly different parameters for what we considered safe. Our only path was down, directly into the massive, and hollowed-out husk of Vane-Uru’s upper coils—the same structural system I had used to reach this cavern in the first place. Judging by the cavernous layout, centuries of concentrated Rot and Toxic Qi must have broken down her softer internal tissues, leaving behind a petrified labyrinth of empty veins, dried bio-chambers, cable-like tendons, and chitinous tunnels. We were walking though the fossilized body of a sleeping myth. We hit our first intersection twenty feet inside. The internal tunnel fractured into a massive junction of dried arteries. The air in each path felt equally dense, thick with heavy metals and the stagnant, and sharp taste of Rot Qi. Guessing wasn't an option. One wrong step into a pocket of concentrated acidic vapor trapped in an atrophied tracheal chamber, and my own lungs would melt before I could curse my stupidity. Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. My refusal to wander blindly inspired my second rock talisman. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the smooth, square chitin plate etched with the mycelial algorithm. "Stay behind me," I projected to Pendra through the tether. She received the message, but I still had to keep a constant, conscious tension on our link to prevent her from bolting ahead. It was clear her predatory instincts gave her a better baseline for navigating this dark than me, but our connection had introduced an irritating psychological variable: I was worrying about her subconsciously. It felt like an underlying pit in my gut that flared up every time her emotions signaled an urge to venture ahead. Worse, I could feel a building kinetic tension radiating through the link. Her biological drive was demanding a target to neutralize, and without data on how a spirit beast's psychological backlog affected a human tether, I didn't want to find out what happened when she redlined. Putting that problem on the back burner, I sorted through my talismans. They weren't uniform in size or material, but I had calibrated each one before leaving, jotting brief operational notes on a separate plate since my fountain pen refused to draw ink normally anymore—not a surprise, considering the caustic, high-acid mixture I had been using to etch the chitin. Feeling Pendra’s impatience spike within the link, I threw the mycelial plate hard against the jagged edge of the central artery. The chitin shattered with a sharp, echoing crack. The compressed energy triggered instantly. A dense knot of blue bioluminescence erupted from the impact point. Instead of forming a static barrier, the fungal threads behaved exactly like a starved slime mold. They shot outward across the petrified floor in a frantic, forward-moving cone, seeking raw resources and breathable air currents. I watched in silent fascination as the glowing blue veins raced down the different biological tunnels. It was cartography in real time. Down the far-left path, the threads hit an invisible pocket of highly alkaline gas trapped in an old digestive duct; they instantly blackened, died, and withered back. The main network immediately rerouted its energy away from that dead zone, pushing deeper down a narrow, jagged fissure to the right. Within thirty seconds, the fungal colony had mapped the entire junction, leaving a glowing, pulsing blue line