Chapter 24 — Holy Land (3)

The door to the central chamber was not locked.

This came as a surprise to Lin Che, as the team outside had been treating the far junction as a hard boundary for weeks, and he’d assumed the door itself would present some additional mechanism — a sigil, a test, or just something commensurate with what was apparently behind it.

Instead, when he pressed his palm flat against it, it simply swung open with a creak.

The chamber itself was vast, which itself was an understatement.

The sourceless light here was dimmer and more amber than in the corridors, and the ceiling rose into darkness far above — high enough that the upper walls were not visible, but rather even reinforced eyes would see a gradual loss of definition as the light failed.

The floor was smooth stone cracked in long radiating lines from the centre outward, the kind of damage that suggested something enormous had hit it or been thrown onto it with significant force at some point in the distant past.

Along the walls, the same heavy rings as the outer chambers, but large, and many of them had been pulled clean from their anchoring points, leaving only craters behind. The chains that had connected them lay in coils on the floor, rusted to the colour of dried blood.

Not all chains ended on the floor, however.

One ran from a ring on the far wall across the length of the chamber and ended in a collar of dark metal around the neck of the largest living thing Lin Che had ever been in the same room as.

He stood in the doorway and rubbed his eyes to make sure he was not seeing things.

It was a wolf. This much was clear in the way that a mountain is clearly a mountain — the category was unmistakable, but the scale transformed it into something unrecognisable. Lying on its side, it measured the length of the chamber that made it feel like a cramped prison cell.

The body was deep-chested and long, built for sustained, inexorable force. But what stopped him the longest was the fur.

It was not grey or white or black, but shifted between all three depending on the angle of the light and the observer. It was silver at the chest and along the spine, but closer to a blue-grey at the edges of the ears and tips of the paws. The rest of its body contained a darkness that was nearly absolute.

It was mesmerising.

The face was long and narrow, and unmistakably in pain.

The injuries were extensive and old.

Deep scarring across the left flank meant that the fur had grown back wrong compared to the surrounding coat, tracing the outline of wounds that must have been catastrophic at the time. The right foreleg was held at a slight angle — perhaps something had healed incorrectly at some point. Along the neck, beneath the collar, the fur was worn entirely away, and the exposed skin was cracked, bruised, and discoloured, with chemical burns from the constant contact with metal.

It had been in this chamber for a very long time.

Its eyes were open, pale gold with a vertical pupil.

Lin Che felt sorry for it.

He understood that this one had not stayed here out of choice, but because it had not been able to leave. That whatever had injured it so severely had done so long enough ago that the injuries had all healed improperly.

He took a step into the chamber.

The wolf’s head lifted slightly.

He took another.

It began the process of standing, which was slow and effortful. The incorrectly-healed foreleg took the weight badly, and the breathing became laboured as it committed to the movement. Despite this, there was no hesitation in moving, perhaps as the creature had got used to its injuries and decided they weren’t worth crying over any longer.

Standing, it was as large as it appeared, possibly even more so. It occupied much of the vertical space in the building.

The chain went taut.

The ring held for a couple of seconds before the anchor point, rusted through over a very long time, pulled free of the wall with a crack that the chamber amplified into something more seismic. The chain hit the floor in a long collapse, and the wolf was no longer attached to anything.

It looked at the chain and then back at Lin Che.

Then, it lowered its head, and the amber light shifted across its silver-dark fur, and it charged.

***

Lin Che moved — body computing trajectory and vacating space before even noticing the charge — and the wolf passed through where he’d been and met the far wall with a concussive impact that sent cracks racing up the stone from the point of contact. Rubble fell from the ceiling onto its head.

It shook itself and turned around.

The second charge was lower, with the wolf adjusting its angle slightly to cut off Lin Che’s path. He jumped up, legs infused with Qi, and landed on the back of the creature in motion. It almost shook him off, before he continued jumping off instead of allowing it to slam him to the ground.

The landing jolted up through his legs with incredible force.

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Lin Che knew he could not hurt the creature, nor did he really want to. He was redirecting it and staying out of its way, which was completely different to hurting him, he told himself.

The third charge he redirected properly, with both palms pushing with full strength at the side of the skull, the force of which was significant enough to stagger him four steps back. His hands were numb to the wrist, and the wolf had barely deviated from its path.

He reset his position, just as the wolf did. Its breathing was much more laboured than before, the old wounds on its flank darkening as the exertion reopened them.

It was bleeding and it was not stopping. It lowered its head for the fourth charge.

Lin Che flared up his Qi, running Liuhe at all six harmonies and the Hollow Bell at full capacity. The external Qi that had been pooled around him since the breakthrough was there, present and available, but he still did not know what to do with it that was useful.

The wolf charged.

He moved right, brought both hands up, and, without conscious direction, the external Qi moved with them. It followed the trajectory of his palms the way it would have if his palms had been extended eighteen inches further than they could reach.

It met the side of the wolf’s skull at the angle his hands were positioned for, and it transferred force along that angle, redirecting the wolf’s own momentum.

The wolf hit the floor.

The impact was harder than anything he’d managed physically, with the push of the Qi providing zero warning for the wolf to brace its body for the direction of force. The full mass had been redirected, and the floor cracked beneath it.