Stagnant Water

Luo Yang’s back was pressed against the pillar, his facial muscles not showing a single unnecessary twitch.

He held the empty champagne glass, the rim still wet from his lip print, but the strength in his fingers was entirely different from just two seconds ago.

Yu Mingyang was still saying something beside him, likely asking when Qin Zheng would finally come out. The voice entered Luo Yang’s right ear and drifted out his left without a single word sticking in his mind.

The explosion of those seven auras on the forty-ninth floor had been too abrupt.

The way they appeared was like a set of bombs precisely timed to detonate simultaneously.

But he couldn't just rush down there.

He wasn't sure what those things were, whether their numbers would increase, or what the current status of the two Star Initiation rank experts on the forty-ninth floor was. If those two had already begun to fight, him rushing in alone would be about as effective as a fly flying into a furnace.

Yet, he couldn't just wait around either.

Qiu Shubai had just said she was going to change, which meant she was likely in a dressing room on one of the floors. He had no way of confirming how far she was from the forty-ninth floor. The only thing he could do was go down to check the situation, confirm the threat level, and then decide on a plan.

Luo Yang turned around and thrust the empty glass into Yu Mingyang’s hand.

"Hold this for me."

Yu Mingyang caught it instinctively. "Huh? Where are you going?"

"Bathroom."

He tossed those two words behind him as he strode toward the fire door next to the elevator lobby, marked "Emergency Exit."

Yu Mingyang froze, his mouth hanging open, holding his own glass in his left hand and the empty one Luo Yang had shoved at him in his right.

By the time he recovered and thought to call out again, the wide-brimmed hat had already vanished behind the fire door.

The stairwell behind the emergency exit was cold, a stark contrast to the carefully controlled, comfortable temperature of the top floor. The exposed concrete walls were slightly damp, and a fine layer of condensation had formed on the steel handrails, feeling wet and cold to the touch.

Luo Yang suppressed his breathing to the minimum.

He deliberately slowed the circulation of his blood energy and retracted his mental power until it was barely a centimeter from his skin. He turned himself into a living being whose sense of existence approached zero, like a drop of water merging into a pool without creating a single ripple.

The only light in the stairwell came from emergency lamps, one for every floor. Their ghastly white light leaked from beneath the shades, casting intersecting shadows across the steps.

Luo Yang moved incredibly fast.

From the sixtieth floor to the fiftieth—ten floors in total—took him less than forty seconds.

The cold wind rushing downward in the stairwell brushed against his ears, and his sleeve wiped away a long streak of condensation from the handrail.

The fire door for the forty-ninth floor was two meters below his feet. It was a standard gray steel door, with light from the corridor shining evenly through the gap at the bottom, without the slightest flicker.

Luo Yang stood on the steps and looked at the door. There was nothing unusual about the door itself, the light beneath it, or the air temperature. Even the faint draft leaking through the gap was just the normal airflow from the air conditioning.

No scent of blood, no shockwaves from energy collisions, no sounds of battle.

Nothing at all.

He pressed his ear to the door, the icy steel cold against his skin.

It was unnervingly quiet behind the door.

He placed his hand on the handle; the metal felt freezing. He pressed down gently, pushing the door open just enough to see through a narrow crack.

The corridor of the forty-ninth floor was empty.

There was no one, not even the staff members who might be moving between floors.

The carpet was laid flat, its patterns extending from one end to the corner. The wall lamps on either side were arranged at equal intervals, every single one lit, their light as soft as a hotel lobby. Two coffee tables stood in the middle of the corridor about ten meters apart, decorated with green plants and ornaments. Everything looked normal.

Luo Yang pushed the door wide enough to slip through and stepped inside.

The fire door slowly closed behind him, the spring hinge letting out a faint hiss that was covered by the muffled thud of the door shutting.

He stood at the end of the corridor, glancing in both directions.

To the left, the corridor stretched to a corner where the frame of a landscape painting hung on the wall.

To the right, the corridor led to a functional area on the other side, ending in a double wooden door with frosted glass inserts.

No bodies, no bloodstains, no scorch marks from residual energy.

The leaves of the plant on the coffee table weren't even dusty, and the soil around the roots was still dark from a recent watering.

What the hell is going on?

Luo Yang walked a few steps down the corridor, his shoes silent on the carpet. He stopped by the first coffee table and reached out to touch the vase.

The porcelain was cold. Three dried flowers were tucked inside, their stems dry and showing no signs of having been disturbed.

He continued forward.

Passing a meeting room, he found the door slightly ajar. He used his fingertip to push it open a crack and glanced inside. Chairs were neatly arranged around a long table; the surface was spotless, without even a single piece of paper. The projector's power light glowed green, and the screen was retracted into a recessed slot in the ceiling.

Rounding the corner, he found another stretch of corridor, its layout almost identical to the previous one. Wall lamps, carpet, coffee tables, green plants.

Luo Yang walked a full circle around the entire floor.

He pushed open every door and checked every room, walking back and forth through every corridor. Every doorknob was at a normal temperature, none of the carpets showed signs of being trampled, every light was on, and all the air conditioners were running normally.

He reached the approximate location where he had first sensed those two Star Initiation rank auras and even knelt down to touch the floor.

There really was nothing.

Luo Yang stood in the center of the corridor, his brow furrowed deeply beneath his hat brim.

His physical eyes told him everything here was normal, as safe as a model home, but his intuition was screaming at him frantically, telling him: Something is here.

Right beside him, right under his feet, in every inch of the air around him. They existed, yet his five senses couldn't detect them at all.

Luo Yang stood still and closed his eyes.

The golden tree in his Sea of Consciousness swayed gently, the light flowing between its leaves brightening slightly.

He released his mental power.

Instead of his usual wide-scale sweep, he drew out a razor-thin filament from his brow, slowly extending it into the space ahead before letting it explode outward at the floor's central point.

The moment his mental power touched an invisible boundary, it was violently repelled. That massive force poured in from the outermost edge of his consciousness, rushing back along the connection of his mental power and slamming directly into the surface of his Sea of Consciousness.

The leaves of the tree suddenly flipped over, and its roots contracted violently beneath the water.

"—!"

Luo Yang doubled over, clutching his temples as his knees hit the carpet with a thud. His entire brain felt as if it had been split right down the middle with a sledgehammer. Intense pain spread from the top of his head to the back of his neck, then poured down his spine.

A muffled groan escaped his throat as he pressed his left hand firmly against his forehead. A faint taste of iron rose in his mouth; he wasn't sure if he had bitten his tongue or if a capillary had burst.

It hurt. It hurt too much.

But within that pain, he caught a few scraps of information.

In the fraction of a second when his mental power was repelled, he "saw" it.

In his mental vision, the entire forty-ninth floor was no longer a space he could describe with language.

The corridor, the coffee tables, the wall lamps, the carpet—all those things representing "normalcy" had vanished. In their place was a silent, black ocean.

That ocean had no boundaries, stretching from beneath his feet to beyond the limit where his mental power had been repelled. The surface was calm, unnervingly so. There were no waves, no ripples. To a normal human, it possessed no "feeling" that could be spoken of.

It was like a piece of frozen black glass.

This was a pool of pure Stagnant Water.