The Rank 2 Blood Attraction Gu.
Lin Mu gazed at this crystallization of enormous effort and resources, and slowly exhaled the stale air that had been compressed in his chest.
His eyes held the quiet relief that comes only after exhaustion.
"Come."
He extended his hand with a light gesture. A thread of faint-red Red Iron Primeval Essence flowed outward like a gentle current, washing over the Gu worm.
The Rank 2 Blood Path Gu was tamed. At its core, Lin Mu imprinted his spiritual will — and it settled into his palm with complete docility.
"Let me see how this key of yours is meant to be used."
There was no time to waste. Lin Mu did not pause for even a moment.
He drew directly on the Rank 2 Red Iron Primeval Essence within his Aperture and poured it without reservation into the newly bonded Blood Attraction Gu.
Hum.
As the higher-grade Primeval Essence flooded in, the surface of the Gu worm — shaped like a miniature blood-red compass — blazed with a deeply unsettling crimson light.
Then the needle at the compass's center — dark red, like congealed blood — reacted as though struck by an overwhelming magnetic force, and began spinning wildly, beyond all control.
One revolution. Two. Ten.
Faster and faster it spun, until it left a blurred red afterimage hanging in the air, dizzying to look upon.
Lin Mu held his breath, not daring to make a sound, his dark eyes locked unblinking on the Gu worm in his palm.
Half a cup of tea's time passed.
Zing.
With a faint, sharp vibration, the frenzied blood-red needle lurched to a dead stop.
It locked onto a single direction.
No matter how Lin Mu rotated his wrist or shifted his body's orientation, the needle held as though welded in place — pointing steadily, immovably, beyond the heavy stone door of the sealed chamber.
"This thing works like... a compass?"
Lin Mu stared at the blood-red compass in his hand pointing out a direction, and the corner of his mouth twitched slightly. A strange, indescribable feeling rose in his chest.
The sight reminded him, somewhat absurdly, of the wandering Daoist fortune-tellers from his previous life — the ones who roamed the streets clutching feng shui compasses, searching for dragon veins and auspicious burial sites.
The difference was that those men sought propitious land. His compass was pointing toward a Demonic Path inheritance capable of unleashing a tide of blood.
"Since it's given me a direction, I'll go see what's there."
Lin Mu wasted no time.
He quickly cleared away the residual powder and materials from the chamber, tucked the freshly refined Blood Attraction Gu carefully into his sleeve, and muffled the glaring red light it emitted.
Then he turned the winch and opened the chamber door.
Outside, it was deep into the night.
The cold wind of Black Wind Ridge howled through the Silent Stone District. Darkness blanketed everything.
Only a few distant lanterns swayed in the hands of patrolling guards.
Lin Mu dissolved into the heavy darkness like a drop of ink into black water. He began moving through the back alleys of Black Blood Stockade in silence.
A few months ago, slipping past the clan's layered patrols in the dead of night would have been a nerve-wracking ordeal — every step a risk of exposure.
But he was a genuine Rank 2 Gu Master now. The gap between him and the anxious boy he had once been could not be measured.
Thud. Thud.
A squad of clan guards carrying torches rounded the corner of a street.
Lin Mu barely touched the wall with the tip of his foot — drawing on the faintest thread of the Leaping Hare Gu's burst.
He rose without a sound, pressing himself flat against the shadow beneath the eaves three zhang above, like a cat of the night.
He waited until the patrol had passed, then descended like a falling leaf, without raising so much as a whisper of wind.
Head lowered, one sleeve drawn across his hand to mask the faint red glow of the Blood Attraction Gu, he moved swiftly through the dark alleys, following the needle's direction with careful precision.
But as he pressed deeper, Lin Mu's brow drew tighter and tighter. A sharp, rising sense of wariness took hold in his chest.
"This direction..."
He raised his head and took in the surrounding architecture — increasingly familiar — and the guard placements, which were visibly several times denser than the outer perimeter.
He realized the Blood Attraction Gu's needle was pulling him steadily toward the most heavily fortified area of Black Blood Stockade — the one place no one was permitted to approach without authorization.
Without noticing when it had happened, he had already infiltrated the clan's innermost core.
One more high wall ahead, and beyond it lay the clan's seat of power — the Grand Hall, where every Patriarch across the generations had convened councils and entered seclusion.
Stop.
Lin Mu halted with decisive immediacy.
He did not attempt to scale the wall. Instead, he pressed himself deep into the shadow of a decorative rockery, concealing his silhouette completely.
He held his breath and glanced down at the Blood Attraction Gu in his hand.
The dark-red needle trembled faintly in the dim light — but its tip remained fixed, unwavering, pointing directly ahead.
Following the needle's direction, beyond the towering wall, the silhouette of the Grand Hall rose against the night — vast and severe, like some ancient leviathan crouching in the darkness.
"The needle is pointing at the Grand Hall..."
Lin Mu leaned against the cold rockery stone, brow locked in a deep furrow.
Force his way into the Grand Hall?
The thought surfaced for barely an instant before he crushed it without mercy. What kind of place was that?
It was the nerve center of Black Blood Stockade's power.
The clan's most elite guards surrounded it on all sides, and senior elders with real authority rotated on watch day and night.
And now that Lin Cang had reached Rank 4, the security around the Grand Hall would be iron-tight beneath a deceptively calm exterior.
Even if he had wings, the moment he dared to flip over that courtyard wall in the dead of night, he would be reduced to a sieve in an instant.
But...
Lin Mu closed his eyes. His coldly rational mind began peeling back the layers, one by one.
"If the Black Bone King's core inheritance is truly sitting in some room or hidden chamber inside that Grand Hall..."
"Then over all these years, the successive Patriarchs and high-ranking members of Black Blood Stockade have been going in and out of that hall every single day — cultivating, deliberating."
"How could none of them have noticed? How could an inheritance of that magnitude have sat quietly under their noses without detection?"
It did not hold together logically.
Unless the location of the inheritance was somewhere even successive Patriarchs could not easily reach — or was completely obscured by something vast enough to bury it entirely.
Lin Mu's eyes snapped open. A bolt of lightning split the fog in his mind, and the most critical piece clicked into place.
"I've been blind to what's right in front of me."
"That inheritance was left by the Black Bone King hundreds of years ago."
"In hundreds of years, the earth shifts. Mountains move. To say nothing of Black Blood Stockade — generations of people have lived and expanded here, repeatedly building outward, filling in ground, and reconstructing the Grand Hall."
"The entrance to the inheritance is not inside the Grand Hall."
Lin Mu stared at the towering structure, a sharp, penetrating light burning in his eyes.
"It's buried directly beneath the Grand Hall's foundations."
But this conclusion brought a new problem with it.
If the inheritance lay deep underground, how was he supposed to get in? Dig down through the Grand Hall's floor? That was the thinking of a fool.
The moment he disturbed a single floor tile in the Grand Hall, the noise alone would see him seized by the duty elder before he had gone three feet down.
That route was closed. The surface was impassable.
"Is this truly a dead end?"
Lin Mu stared hard at the Grand Hall's thick stone foundation, his mind racing through every piece of terrain intelligence he had accumulated during his months of moving through and around Black Blood Stockade.
Then, just as he was on the verge of running out of ideas —
A scene surfaced from the deep recesses of his memory, unbidden and without warning.
Wait...
Lin Mu's breath caught. In his dark eyes, a blazing flash of wild realization ignited.
The dry well.
He remembered.
It was precisely to capture that Rank 1 Liquor Worm that he had once ventured down to the bottom of that dry well.
"If the surface is too heavily guarded to traverse, and the Grand Hall's foundations cannot be touched..."
"Then I go down through the dry well. Follow the Blood Attraction Gu compass from underground, and dig laterally through the earth until I'm directly beneath the Grand Hall."
Lin Mu tucked the glowing Blood Attraction Gu back against his body, concealing it carefully.
He took one long, measured look at the Grand Hall standing beneath the night sky.
Then, like a weightless ghost, he used the rockery's cover to withdraw — silently, without a trace.
Tonight's reconnaissance had yielded the most complete answer he could have hoped for.