Chapter 102: South

"We go to it," Lin Feng said. "Not the other way around."

Gao Jun had the overlay running four tracking models simultaneously, each one projecting the convergence timeline for the four beasts approaching Hub Fourteen-Northeast. The models disagreed on specifics but agreed on the shape: if they stayed in the hub, all four signatures would reach the surface perimeter within a six-hour window. The nearest in five hours. The farthest in eleven.

"If you engage one here and the others arrive during the engagement—"

"Then I'm fighting wounded and outnumbered in a confined space with one exit." Lin Feng was already pulling his boots on. The Barrens boots Gao Jun had requisitioned from the division's supply cache three weeks ago, built for the terrain outside. He hadn't worn them since arriving at Hub Fourteen-Northeast. "The southern signature. Nine kilometers. That's the closest."

"Seven point eight now. It's accelerated."

Lin Feng paused with one boot half-laced.

"In the last fourteen minutes," Gao Jun continued, checking the monitoring feed. "Speed increase of approximately twenty percent. Bearing unchanged." The rod was spinning. Not the fast analytical spin. The slower rotation he used when the data was giving him something he didn't like. "The acceleration started eleven minutes after you engaged your direct conduit interface to read Old Ghost's communication."

"When I pulled more energy through the hub's supply line."

"When your template's formation-frequency output increased during the substrate contact. The beast responded to the spike." He set the overlay down. "Your template at active output is a louder signal than your template at rest. The beast heard the difference."

Good.

That meant it could hear him coming, too.

"I need you at distance," Lin Feng said. "Overlay range, monitoring capability, but outside the engagement zone. If the beast's formation-frequency output spikes during the consumption attempt—"

"I pull you back through the hub connection. Same as the Wei Sen operation."

"No." He finished the boot. "There's no conduit-line connection to interrupt in an open-field engagement. If the consumption goes wrong, you observe and record. The division's survey data on corrupted beast behavior during formation-frequency events is limited. Whatever happens, your overlay data has value."

Gao Jun's rod stopped. The flat-palm position. "You're telling me to watch you die and take notes."

"I'm telling you that if the consumption works, we have a new capability. If it doesn't work, the data on why it didn't work is the most valuable thing in the field."

"Your definition of value needs adjustment."

"Noted." Lin Feng climbed the iron ladder. "Bring the overlay."

---

The Barrens at dawn looked different than it had twelve months ago.

Lin Feng had entered this terrain as a practitioner with shattered meridians and a Scripture he couldn't read, walking through dead landscape where the pre-Abandonment conduit network had gone silent ten thousand years before. The soil had been inert. The air had been still. The only energy in the Barrens had been whatever the corrupted beasts carried in their biology and whatever residual radiation the dead infrastructure leaked into the ground.

The cascade had changed that.

Beneath the surface, the activated conduit lines ran in patterns that his routing sense could read like veins through a body. The soil above them carried a faint luminescence—not visible in direct sunlight, but in the predawn gray it showed: threadlike lines of pale amber light tracing paths across the terrain, following the conduit infrastructure's routing. The air had weight. Not humidity—formation-frequency density, the energy output of activated conduit lines radiating upward through rock and dirt and into the atmosphere. His direct conduit interface read it as a constant low-frequency hum, the way you might feel the vibration of a distant machine through the floor.

The Barrens was waking up.

Gao Jun moved beside him efficiently, four years of Barrens fieldwork in every step. His overlay ran in passive mode, tracking the southern beast's signature while simultaneously logging the environmental formation-frequency data. He didn't comment on the luminescence. He'd been studying the conduit network's surface effects for years. But Lin Feng caught him glancing at the lines more than once, the way a man who'd read about rivers all his life might look at the ocean.

They covered the first four kilometers in forty minutes. The terrain was broken rock and sparse vegetation—scrub plants that had adapted to the Barrens' low-energy environment over millennia, their root systems shallow and tough. The activated conduit lines ran deeper here, three or four meters below the surface, but the routing sense tracked them without difficulty.

At the fifth kilometer, Lin Feng stopped.

The beast's formation-frequency signature in the monitoring sensors had changed. Not speed—direction. It had been moving north-northwest toward the hub. Now it was angling west. Toward them.

"It's tracking us," Gao Jun said, checking the overlay. "Or tracking you. Your template output at walking pace is generating enough formation-frequency signal for it to read the bearing change."

"How far?"

"Two point three kilometers. Bearing two-seven-four from our position." He looked up from the overlay. "Closing at current combined speed in approximately eighteen minutes."

Lin Feng reached into the substrate.

Old Ghost's presence in this sector was thin—the conduit density out here was sparse compared to the hub's concentrated supply lines. But the background resonance gathered when Lin Feng reached for it, assembling itself into something that could carry meaning.

*The beast is tracking me. What do I need to know about the consumption that you haven't told me?*

The response came in fragments, the thin conduit lines struggling with the bandwidth.

*Physical contact. Your formation-frequency architecture must interface with the beast's biology at the point of contact. The interface is not gentle. The beast's energy resists integration—it has been shaped by corruption, by decades of absorbing residual radiation in patterns that serve the beast's biology, not yours. Your template must override those patterns. Force them into your architecture's format.*

*How long does the override take?*

*The First Operator's initial beast consumption took four minutes of sustained contact.* A pause. *He was at full conduit-network specification. The network supported his integration capacity. You are at fifty-seven percent efficiency in a network that has been inactive for ten thousand years and is running on cascade activation, not administrative power.*

*So longer.*

*Unknown. The conditions are unprecedented. I consumed beasts with the full network's processing capacity behind my template. The Third Devourer consumed beasts at fifty-nine percent efficiency with a partially active network. You are between those states. The network is active but not at administrative specification. Your efficiency is below the Third Devourer's but your substrate conversion is higher.*

*You don't know what will happen.*

*I know the mechanics. I do not know the timeline.* The substrate carried something that might have been frustration in a being capable of it. *The beast will not wait while you learn.*

Lin Feng released the contact.

"Eighteen minutes?" he asked Gao Jun.

"Fourteen now. It accelerated again when you reached into the substrate."

Every time he used the conduit interface, the signal got louder. The beast responded to the volume.

"Find a position," Lin Feng said. "Elevated if possible. Minimum two hundred meters from my location. Keep the overlay running on full recording."

Gao Jun looked at him for a moment. The rod was in the flat-palm position again.

"The division's field protocol for encounters with corrupted beasts in the Barrens is observation and avoidance," the analyst said. "Four years of fieldwork. We mapped their territories, tracked their movements, documented their behavior. We never engaged."

"You didn't have the Devourer's Path."

"No. We had common sense." He put the rod in his coat pocket. Lin Feng had never seen him do that before. "I'll be on that ridge. Two hundred and thirty meters southeast. If the formation-frequency output exceeds the overlay's recording threshold, I'm coming down."

"If it exceeds the recording threshold, stay on the ridge. The data—"

"I heard you the first time." Gao Jun moved toward the ridge without looking back. "The data. Of course."

---

Lin Feng stood alone in the Barrens and waited for the beast.

The monitoring sensors tracked its approach. One point four kilometers. One point one. The formation-frequency signature growing more distinct as it closed—not just the general classification of "corrupted beast, low-tier" that the monitoring infrastructure had assigned from fourteen kilometers out, but specific characteristics. The energy patterns in its biology. The way its corruption had shaped the formation-frequency medium in its body. The rhythm of its movement, transmitted through the conduit lines beneath the surface as ground vibration.

It was large. Bigger than the monitoring data's classification had suggested. The formation-frequency output scaled with body mass in corrupted beasts—the division's survey data had established that much—and this signature was at the upper range of the low-tier classification. Bordering on mid-tier.

Eight hundred meters.

He could feel it through the conduit infrastructure now. Not just the monitoring sensor data—his own routing sense, reading the formation-frequency disturbance the beast created as it moved through the activated terrain. The conduit lines beneath its path flexed. The beast's biology was pulling energy from them as it moved, absorbing the cascade's output the way a plant absorbed water from soil. Feeding on the infrastructure.

Five hundred meters.

The scrub vegetation thinned. The terrain opened into a shallow bowl—a natural depression in the rock where water had pooled in some ancient era and left the stone worn smooth. The conduit lines here ran close to the surface. The luminescence was brighter, the amber threadlines visible even in the growing dawn light.

Three hundred meters.

He saw it.

The wolf was wrong.

That was the first thought—not analytical, not formation-frequency assessment, just the visceral recognition that what was coming toward him through the broken rock did not belong in any version of the natural world. It had the basic shape of a wolf. Four legs, a predator's build, a head carried low and forward in the hunting posture. But it was the size of a horse. Its fur—if it was fur—had a matte quality that absorbed light instead of reflecting it, making the animal look like a hole cut in the landscape. The air around its body bent. Not heat shimmer. Formation-frequency distortion. The energy in the beast's biology warping the space around it the way a strong magnet warped iron filings.

It had been absorbing cascade energy for six days. The monitoring classification said low-tier.

The monitoring classification was based on two-year-old survey data from before the cascade.

Two hundred meters. The beast had stopped moving. It stood at the far edge of the shallow bowl, its head low, its body motionless. The formation-frequency distortion around it pulsed in a rhythm that Lin Feng's routing sense read as physiological—the beast's equivalent of breathing, its corrupted biology cycling the absorbed energy through whatever organ structures it had developed.

It was reading him.

He could feel it. The beast's formation-frequency sense—crude compared to his routing sense, crude compared to Wei Sen's hybrid capability, but functional—scanning his template the way his direct conduit interface had scanned the monitoring data. It was assessing him the same way he'd assessed it. Size, energy, threat level.

Lin Feng let his template's output settle to its baseline. Fifty-seven point eight percent efficiency, the formation-frequency architecture running at passive levels, not the active output that had drawn the beast's attention during his substrate contact with Old Ghost.

The beast didn't move.

One hundred and fifty meters of open rock between them. The conduit lines beneath the surface glowed amber. The dawn light was coming in from the east, casting long shadows across the bowl's uneven floor.

Lin Feng took a step forward.

The beast's formation-frequency output spiked.

Not the steady pulse of its breathing rhythm. A sharp, focused spike—the corrupted biology redirecting its absorbed energy from passive cycling to something concentrated. Something directed. The distortion field around its body tightened, pulling inward, the warped air snapping close to its fur like armor.

Then it moved.

The monitoring data's speed estimate had been based on the beast's travel pace—the steady, unhurried gait of an animal crossing distance toward something it could sense. That was not what Lin Feng saw now. The beast covered the first fifty meters of the bowl in under two seconds, its legs driving it forward with a force that cracked the worn stone beneath its feet, the formation-frequency distortion trailing behind it like a wake in water.

Lin Feng's routing sense calculated the distance and the closure rate and the time remaining before the beast reached him and the answer was: not enough.

He shifted his weight to dodge left.

The beast adjusted mid-stride. Not a correction—a prediction. It had read his body's movement before he completed it, the formation-frequency sense picking up the shift in his template's output as his muscles engaged, and it had angled its charge to intercept where he would be, not where he was.

It was faster than the data said. It was smarter than the data said.

And it was forty meters away and accelerating.