The Altar Beneath the Buddha
The rear of Gyotaejeon lay sunk in a deep stillness unlike any other part of the palace. The shouts of the Imperial Guard moving at the Emperor's command and the clamor of their torches might have belonged to another world; not a whisper of that din reached this tranquil ground. Moonlight settled softly over the carefully tended garden, and each time the wind stirred, the heavy sweetness of splendid peonies drifted languidly through the air, as though every uproar in the world had agreed to pass this one place by.
At the garden's deepest reach, beside a small pond, sat a modest prayer hall. Its graceful hip-and-gable roof and finely wrought painted eaves were a picture in themselves, and the scent of the costliest agarwood seeping from within stirred something close to reverence. This was where the Empress, renowned for the depth of her devotion, offered her private prayers.
Ouyang Qiangang opened his eyes, having driven himself through an urgent full circulation of the Transcendent Formless Divine Art. The effects of the Yang Dragon Pill had not yet fully burned away, and his internal energy was refilling at speed. Not a trace remained, either, of the false surge he had borrowed from the foreign substance.
My internal energy is at half its usual strength. At this level... unless I run into a Peak-Exceeding master, I can hold my own.
The Yang Dragon Pill has restored a portion of your internal energy, Doctor, but this is only a stopgap. Its potent yang energy is merely suppressing the activity of your Nine Yin Severed Meridians for a time. The moment the medicine wears off, the cold energy you have held down will rebound several times more violently than before. You must bring everything to a close with all haste.
Understood.
Doctor, there is a passage leading underground within the prayer hall. The presence of the ritual is rising from below it.
The moment Akasha finished speaking, Qiangang's figure became a single bolt of black lightning and blasted into the prayer hall. He no longer bothered to keep his concealment.
KWAANG! The massive doors of the prayer hall met a single punch, shattered, and blasted inward in a spray of splinters.
Doctor, beneath the lotus pedestal of the Buddha statue. Surface-penetration scans show an underground space fifty feet below the pedestal, sealed off with solid iron.
A cold smile curled across Qiangang's lips.
So they hid a hell that offers up living sacrifices beneath the very feet of a Buddha that symbolizes mercy.
Without hesitation, he unleashed the Explosive Thunder Flame King Hammer upon the statue wearing its benevolent smile.
KWANG! The Buddha burst apart as if detonated, and a hidden staircase descending into the earth was revealed beneath the lotus pedestal.
Following the steps down fifty feet like the wind, Qiangang came face to face with an iron door four inches thick. Without pause, he struck it once more with the Explosive Thunder Flame King Hammer.
The instant his fist met the six-inch iron door, KWAAAAAANG! With a thunderous roar, the shriek of steel tearing like paper shook the underground chamber.
KRAKOOM. The massive iron door, ripped out hinges and all, hurtled inward and slammed into the far wall.
The scene revealed before Qiangang's eyes was horrific. The underground stone chamber, twenty feet high and more than a hundred feet on every side, was thick with the nauseating reek of blood mingled with viscera, the faint moans of the living, and a low, unintelligible chant of grotesque incantation. The maids who had already lost their lives numbered more than thirty, and the floor was sodden with sticky pools of blood.
A dozen or so maids still lived. But their blood points had been sealed and their bodies paralyzed, leaving their minds horribly intact as they were forced to watch the hell unfolding before their eyes. It was an intent of unmatched cruelty: to draw their terror out to its very limit and harvest it as an offering.
The severed heads of the maids had been laid out upon the altar. And two men in red robes, as though dipped and drawn from a bath of blood, their faces hidden behind grotesque masks, were slitting open the bellies of the living maids and drawing out their organs one by one.
The blood spilling from the women did not pool on the floor. It gathered instead along the grotesque patterns carved into the altar, and at the center of it all was drawn into a black censer engraved with the image of a serpent biting its own tail.
From the blood-fed censer, a blood mist seethed and bloomed upward. Faint at the first, it grew denser and vaster with every offering added, and it quivered and writhed with the same ominous vibration as the foreign substance that had been cut from the Crown Prince's heart.
Doctor, I am detecting a powerful life-energy absorption and long-range amplification wavelength from the censer at the center of the altar. That blood mist is a kind of shamanic transmission medium, sending the fear and malice harvested through this blood rite to a specific coordinate. The target coordinate is Jaseondang.
Qiangang's eyes blazed with fury, and with a revulsion every bit as fierce. Since coming to this world he had witnessed countless deaths, and he had cut short enemies' breaths with his own two hands. But the rite unfolding before his eyes ran on a track entirely apart from all of those. Death within the struggle to survive, however brutal, still dwelt within the laws of life. What was happening here simply consumed defenseless lives as fuel and material for another's purpose. This was a desecration of life itself.
Qiangang flashed past the ruined iron door like lightning, his face gone utterly expressionless.
KWAAAAAANG! At the crash of the massive door caving in, the two red-robed fiends presiding over the rite before the altar were just turning their heads.
Qiangang was already past the fallen door, his body hurtling at them as he unleashed the Gale Cyclone Chain Palms. What filled the fiends' turning vision was a wave of palm force like a raging storm, already bearing down to reap their lives.
SHWEEEEEE!
Entry into the prayer hall, the destruction of the statue, the breaking of the iron door, and the strike against the enemy. The whole of it had taken place in less than a single second, less time than a single blink. Naturally, the red-robed fiends had no room to grasp what was happening, and it was into that very state that Qiangang charged.
CRUNCH! The first fiend's head burst apart without so much as the smallest reaction. His red blood scattered, chilling to behold, across the face of a maid already dead upon the altar.
The second fiend recoiled in horror and met the attack head-on, both palms spread wide and wreathed in rising blood mist.
KWANG! The instant their palm forces collided, the shockwave rocked the entire stone chamber, and dust came pouring from the ceiling like rain.
"Gahk!"
Under an impact vast enough to wrench his meridians askew, blood burst from the fiend's seven orifices, and with a scream he was driven back a full five steps. The red-robed fiend was dumbfounded. He was a Peak master, but he had failed to anticipate Qiangang's charge and so had not committed his full strength. That miscalculation was what had cost him. White-faced with shock, he scrambled to raise his power, but the response came far too late.
Qiangang closed the distance with the Flash Step, and his hand, ghostlike, hooked the retreating man's nape. The Pouncing Dragon Grasping Hand, swift to the very extreme of speed, was beyond what the fiend's eyes could follow.
KRAK. With no chance even to scream, came the horrific crunch of cervical vertebrae giving way, and his head bent to an unnatural angle.
Having settled the underground chamber in a single stroke, Qiangang rose to the surface like lightning, without an instant of hesitation. What met his eyes outside was the sharpened confrontation of two camps beneath dozens of torches.
Before the prayer hall, the eunuchs and maids of Gyotaejeon had drawn up an airtight defensive formation, moving as though a single body. In every hand gleamed a foot-long dagger, its coating of poison unmistakable in the eerie pale-green sheen along the blades. The spear points of the Imperial Guard ringing them caught the moonlight in a cold glitter, and only the scrape of armor cleaved the silence.
The eunuchs and maids had come running in desperation the moment they learned of the prayer hall's calamity. But Qiangang and the Imperial Guard had moved too swiftly, and they had failed to force their way inside in time.
Then the Empress walked out of the darkness. Her fist clenched tight within her long sleeve, her lips trembled with fury.
To run wild in Gyotaejeon of all places... That wretch must be torn limb from limb, this very moment!
Yet she could not loose her fury. The Imperial Guard led by Chief Seal-Holding Grand Eunuch Sang On stood squarely in her path. Sang On faced the Empress with unshaking eyes. He was bearing out the Emperor's command, and even were his opponent the Empress herself, there was no reason to yield a single step.
The Empress spoke in a voice cold as ice. "Chief Grand Eunuch, what insolence is this? Before whose residence do you dare marshal troops!"
"Your Majesty the Empress, I beg forgiveness for the discourtesy, but this is His Majesty's command. His Majesty has ordered that the traitors who have stolen into the palace be rooted out. He has further decreed, in the strictest terms, that the Imperial Guard secure Doctor Hahu and the scenes of every incident within Gyotaejeon, and establish the truth beyond a shred of doubt."
At Sang On's words, the Empress strove to keep her composure. "Traitors! The hall collapsed for reasons unknown, and nothing else has occurred. I will contain this place myself, so withdraw at once!"
Ouyang Qiangang, who had watched everything, spoke in a voice cold as ice. "Nothing else has occurred, you say? Then how does Your Majesty the Empress account for the horrific sorcery that was being carried out beneath that prayer hall?"
The Empress's face went deathly pale in an instant. Before she could frame a single rebuttal, Qiangang had already turned to Sang On, his voice swift and low. "Chief Grand Eunuch, a horrific blood rite, sacrificing the living, was being performed in that underground chamber. The traces of the sorcery used in the attempt on the Crown Prince's life will be unmistakable. It must be verified at once."
At the shocking report, the blood drained from Sang On's face. "Is that true, Divine Doctor?"
"It is true."
Without the slightest hesitation, Sang On gave his order to the commander of the Imperial Guard. "Search the underground!"
"How dare you!"
The Empress shot forward like a bolt of lightning and planted herself before the entrance to the underground. Fixing Sang On with blazing eyes that looked ready to tear a man apart on the spot, she shrieked, "Insolence! How dare you defile my prayer hall! Before I close my eyes for the last time, not one of you shall pass!"
But Sang On did not waver. Without a word, he drew from his robes the golden tablet bearing the Emperor's command and held it up for her to see. "Your Majesty the Empress, this carries His Majesty's will. I must ask you to step aside. Should you refuse... you too may be regarded as one of the traitors' band."
Before the golden tablet that embodied the Emperor's absolute authority, the Empress's fire guttered low. Her face turned white with despair.
Sang On left her standing there and commanded the captain of the Imperial Guard once more. "Search it."
The captain who went down and came back up crawled out staggering, the steel of a face tempered by every kind of battle gone deathly white. "Ugh..." With a groan he doubled at the waist and retched, his mind scattered. He had crisscrossed countless battlefields and stood amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood, yet the scene he had witnessed below was hell itself, beyond all belief as the work of human hands.
Having received the captain's report, Sang On turned to the Empress, his expression frozen and drained of all color. "Your Majesty the Empress, the scene of the horrific sorcery has been confirmed. By His Majesty's command, and to preserve the evidence and forestall any further threat, the Imperial Guard will take control of Gyotaejeon from this moment. This humble servant is bound to carry out the Emperor's will."
The Empress understood that stirring up further commotion would only work against her. She cast a gaze cold as ice at Sang On. "Very well. If it is His Majesty's will, then I too must obey. But... I will not forget today's insolence."
Leaving those words heavy with unspoken threat, she led her maids back into Gyotaejeon.
With the situation thus settled, Sang On approached Qiangang and spoke with careful courtesy. "Divine Doctor, you must remain in the palace dungeon for a time. It is His Majesty's command."
Qiangang nodded. "So I shall."
His gaze deepened. Resisting now would be a fool's errand. The board has already been set; all that remains is the Emperor's move.
Through voice transmission, Qiangang asked, "Did you secure Chae Geum, the eunuch of Jaseondang?"
Sang On answered in a low voice. "He took his own life."
I shattered his arms and sealed his blood points besides, so how did he manage it... What utterly relentless people...
Qiangang followed the Imperial Guard toward the palace dungeon. Opening the Crown Prince's chest and forcing his way into Gyotaejeon were acts of high treason; until his innocence was proven, a criminal was all he could be.
As he was led toward the dungeon, the eastern sky slowly began to brighten. The cold air of dawn, as though it would wash everything clean, coiled about the palace.