If I Can't Have It, I'll Destroy It

Memory was just that—a memory.

After hearing it, everyone could only sigh inwardly. They all knew very well that their mission had probably failed.

At that moment, the eighteenth basement level was, in fact, the laboratory hidden underground.

In terms of actual depth, it might not really have been as far down as eighteen floors.

The group stepped out of the elevator.

Outside, the darkness was absolute. Not even the emergency lights were working.

The darkness swallowed everything around them, leaving only the sound of several people’s breathing echoing back and forth through the passageway.

Liu Zheng wasted no time and immediately unpacked his equipment.

The tactical flashlight in his hand could be adjusted for brightness, and its beam could be narrowed as well.

When the white light spread out, the entire passageway was revealed at once.

Wang Xincheng instinctively narrowed his eyes.

The passageway was wider than they had expected. Both walls were covered with talismans, pasted from floor to ceiling in dense layers, leaving not even half a section of bare wall.

All the talismans had white backgrounds and black patterns, with a prominent character for “Seal” in the center.

But they had been there for far too long. The edges of many had curled, and much of the paper had turned yellow and brittle.

As the flashlight swept over them, tiny particles of dust floated through the air, like case files freshly pulled from an old archive cabinet.

Liu Zheng raised the flashlight and shone it farther down the passage.

“So this really was the Japanese’s base.”

Xie Yuling walked over to the wall and reached out to press a hand against one of the sealing talismans.

She wanted to use her spiritual sense to probe the residual power within it.

But the moment her fingertip touched the paper, it crumbled into powder and pattered to the ground.

Xie Yuling’s hand stopped in midair, and her expression turned slightly awkward.

“I didn’t even use any force.”

Jiang Yunlu added from beside her, “It didn’t put up much of a fight, either.”

The remark loosened the oppressive atmosphere a little.

Liu Zheng did not laugh. He simply pressed the flashlight closer to the wall.

“Natural decay. This place has been sealed for at least sixty years. The fact that the paper survived this long means it was fairly high quality. If it had been ordinary yellow paper, it would have turned to wall dust long ago.”

Xie Yuling withdrew her hand, a little white powder clinging to her fingertips.

“These sealing talismans lost their power ages ago. The question is, what exactly were the Japanese trying to seal back then?”

She did not know much about talismans and formations, especially the systems of sorcery used in Japan. They shared certain similarities with the Chinese tradition, but had been altered into a chaotic mixture. The Japanese had learned only the superficial aspects of many techniques, yet perversely preferred to take them down sinister paths.

Liu Zheng looked around the passage.

“If this was a laboratory deliberately established by the Japanese, they must have known that a dragon vein lay beneath this place. That means they were probably targeting the dragon vein.”

He faltered at that point.

If they had come for the dragon vein, they could have broken it, extracted its power, or borrowed its configuration to devour its fortune.

But the sealing talismans covering the walls did not look like a simple attempt to exploit the dragon vein.

Were they trying to seal the dragon vein’s fang?

The logic did not quite add up.

Jiang Yunlu stood at the edge of the flashlight’s beam and suddenly spoke.

“Wait. If the story about the eight coffins is true, then the ones who originally sealed this place were the Japanese.”

The sealing talismans on the walls, the eight coffins underground, and the concealed elevator and laboratory—

One sentence had redirected everyone’s thoughts.

Each of those things showed that the dragon vein’s fang had been suppressed from the very beginning.

Not by the remedial measures later put in place by Wang Xincheng and the Yanhuang Awakening.

The Japanese had made the first move.

Wang Xincheng realized it as well.

At last, Lin Mo spoke up and explained.

“Pollution.”

Everyone turned to look at him.

Lin Mo walked over to the wall and rapped his knuckles against a section that had already gone hollow.

“At first, the Nine Chrysanthemum Sect wanted to extract the power of the dragon vein, draw out the energy of Huaxia’s earth veins, and transfer it to Japan. Their goal was to weaken Huaxia’s national fortune while strengthening their own. With one side diminished and the other enhanced, Huaxia would eventually be devoured. But they failed.”

He spoke very briefly, yet every word contained an enormous amount of information.

Liu Zheng’s brows drew together.

Wang Xincheng immediately picked up the thread. “I’ve heard of the Nine Chrysanthemum Sect. They’re a major Japanese school of feng shui and geomancy, and they were active in Hong Kong as well. Several high-rises there had their influence behind them in the past. I never imagined they had been laying groundwork on the mainland so early.”

“Not groundwork,” Lin Mo said. “They came at it with everything they had.”

Xie Yuling, however, focused on the key point.

“So they failed to extract the dragon vein’s power and switched to polluting the dragon vein instead. But that makes it even stranger. If they wanted to pollute it, why seal this place at all? Wouldn’t the contamination spread faster if they left it unsealed?”

Lin Mo raised a hand and swept it through the air.

The remaining sealing talismans covering the walls collapsed soundlessly. Great swaths of paper fragments fell to the ground like a layer of old snow, except that they were gray with age.

Wang Xincheng’s eyelids twitched.

Those were sealing talismans covering the entire wall.

What if some of them had still been working?

“If they hadn’t sealed it, people might still have died, but it would also have been easier to deal with. If the construction of Liling Plaza had completely broken the seal back then, I’m afraid at least the entire surrounding district would have become uninhabitable.”

After thinking it over, Wang Xincheng nodded.

“That’s true. Based on the Nine Chrysanthemum Sect’s intentions, they may have wanted the pollution to keep eating away at the dragon vein. If it remained hidden, then one day it would explode like a time bomb.”

The thought sent a chill down his back.

What a vicious scheme.

They had driven a rotten nail into the earth vein, then waited for decades as it decayed and corroded the dragon vein from within.

When the Nine Chrysanthemum Sect failed to extract the dragon vein, they had turned around and created an even more troublesome trap.

If they could not take it, they would destroy it.

If they could not have it, then no one else would be allowed peace.

Thinking of this, Wang Xincheng also realized how foolish his earlier idea of merely reinforcing the seal had been.

Seeing the atmosphere grow heavy again, Jiang Yunlu deliberately pulled the conversation back on track.

“So what do we do now? Clean up the contamination like janitors?”

She sounded quite curious.

Lin Mo looked left and right, then moved to the front.

“First, we need to confirm what the source of the contamination is.”

The passageway was not short, and there were two more forks ahead.

Abandoned pipes were buried behind the walls, some of them rusted through. Old wheel tracks could be seen on the floor, along with several dark, dried stains. It was impossible to tell whether they were chemicals, blood, or something else.

Lin Mo stopped at the first fork.

His spiritual sense began spreading through the passageways.

At the end of the passage on the left stood an iron door, also covered with talismans, though only half of one remained.

The passage on the right extended deeper underground. The dust from the talismans was thicker there, and several places on the walls bore signs of having been scorched by fire.

Lin Mo looked to the right.

“This way.”

Everyone followed him without hesitation.

At the end of the passage was a laboratory.

The door stood half open, its metal panel dented inward as if something had slammed into it from outside. A faint smell of rot and chemicals drifted through the gap.

Liu Zheng shone the flashlight inside.

The next second, everyone stopped.

In the center of the laboratory sat a coffin.

It was not made of wood.

It was a black stone coffin wrapped tightly in iron chains.

A long spike had been driven into each of its four corners, the shafts covered in Japanese incantations.

Suspended directly above the coffin was a cracked bronze mirror, its surface facing downward toward the lid.

At the center of the lid, the character for “Seal” had split in two.

Black liquid was slowly seeping through the crack.

Looking at it, Lin Mo finally confirmed the premonition he had been harboring.

“No wonder.”

Jiang Yunlu swallowed.

“This thing... was the work of the Nine Chrysanthemum Sect too?”

Lin Mo did not answer.

His gaze fell to the bottom of the stone coffin.

There, half-buried beneath the corrosion, was a spirit tablet with only three characters remaining:

Dragonfang Rite.

The next moment, a faint sound came from inside the stone coffin.

It sounded as though someone within had lightly scratched the lid with a fingernail.