The beast's formation-frequency output hummed through the rock above them like a second heartbeat.
Lin Feng worked the buffer with his eyes closed and his back against the diagnostic platform's cold surface. The mid-tier beast's signature filtered through the conduit lines in the earth, a constant low vibration that registered even without his interface active. Ten meters of stone and soil between them. The beast on one side, breathing. Lin Feng on the other, breaking patterns.
The boar's deep-layer corrupted energy yielded its last configuration at the fourth hour. A nine-loop interlocking structure, the most complex pattern he'd encountered, its junctions buried so deep in the layered architecture that finding them required his routing sense to map the entire remaining buffer contents. He broke it in stages. Three junctions first, destabilizing the outer loops. Then four more in rapid sequence, collapsing the middle layer. The final two junctions held for nearly ten minutes, the structural memory in the corrupted medium fighting his interference with a persistence that bordered on spite.
They broke.
The freed energy entered his integration cycle, and his template crossed fifty-five percent.
*Template efficiency: 55.3%. Substrate conversion: 79.1%. Buffer: cleared.*
The number meant recovery. It meant his architecture was running at better than half capacity, the three beast consumptions fully processed, the corrupted medium converted and incorporated. But the number didn't capture what had changed beneath it. The beast energy sat in his template differently from the conduit infrastructure energy that had built his foundation. Infrastructure energy was clean. Regulated. It integrated smoothly because the conduit network produced it to specification.
Beast energy was rough. The converted medium carried traces of biological origin, formation-frequency patterns shaped by living tissue and corrupted absorption rather than engineered conduit architecture. His template had processed it, stripped the corruption, made it compatible. But the result was a formation-frequency reservoir with texture. Grit. His architecture felt less like a precision instrument and more like a precision instrument that had been used in the field, the tolerances unchanged but the surfaces harder.
He opened his eyes.
Gao Jun sat at the workbench. The overlay displayed the beast's signature above them, unchanged. The analyst had the rod in his right hand, turning it between his fingers. Slow. He'd been waiting, and he'd used the time.
"Five hours," Gao Jun said. "The beast hasn't moved. Its cycling output has been constant. No behavioral changes."
"My buffer's clear."
The rod paused. "Template?"
"Fifty-five point three."
The rod resumed its rotation. "Higher than before the beast fights."
"The beast energy converts at a higher density than infrastructure energy. Three consumptions gave my template more usable medium per unit than weeks of conduit-line integration." He sat up. His ribs protested. He noted the protest and continued. "The beast is ten meters above us. The conduit supply lines run through the earth between us and the surface. Three lines converging on the hub's junction."
"You want to hit it from below."
"Close range. Ten meters instead of two hundred. The simultaneous junction disruption worked on the boar at forty meters with my template at forty-nine percent. At ten meters with fifty-five percent, through conduit lines I'm directly connected to—"
"The output should be sufficient." Gao Jun ran the calculation on the overlay. "The energy density in the supply lines at this distance is approximately four times what you were pushing through the surface conduit lines during the boar engagement. The disruption amplitude would scale accordingly."
"If it works, the beast's cycling collapses. We open the hatch. I consume it on the surface."
The analyst checked the overlay one more time. The beast's signature sat directly above the hatch position, dense and steady. "And if it doesn't work, you've just sent a formation-frequency disruption through the conduit lines directly beneath a mid-tier corrupted beast that is currently lying on top of our only exit."
"Yes."
Gao Jun set down his rod. Picked it up again. "Do it."
Lin Feng activated his direct conduit interface.
The network flooded back. Routing sense, monitoring feeds, the cascade's energy flowing through the activated infrastructure in a web of formation-frequency data that his template read the way a musician reads sound. Above him, the mid-tier beast's signature resolved from a vague hum into a detailed three-dimensional map of corrupted cycling architecture.
His stomach dropped.
The low-tier beasts had been built from simple parts. Cycling loops, junction points, layered configurations. Complex in aggregate but composed of elements that followed consistent rules. The mid-tier beast's cycling was something else.
The loops were there. The junctions were there. But the architecture included features the low-tier beasts hadn't possessed. Redundant pathways between junction points, secondary routes that could carry a cycling loop's energy if the primary junction failed. Self-correcting feedback mechanisms in the deeper layers, monitoring subsystems that detected disruption and rerouted before the disruption could propagate. The cycling wasn't just organized. It was defended.
He hit it anyway.
Three conduit lines. Simultaneous disruption at every junction point his routing sense could identify. The formation-frequency interference screamed through the supply lines and into the earth above, the supervisor-class output driving the disruption at four times the amplitude he'd used against the boar.
The beast's cycling absorbed it.
The redundant pathways activated. The self-correcting mechanisms fired. His disruption hit thirty-one junction points and broke nineteen of them, and the beast's architecture rerouted around every single break in under two seconds. The cycling stuttered, flickered, and resumed at ninety percent coherence.
Then the beast moved.
The formation-frequency signature above them shifted from resting to active in a single heartbeat. The cycling output spiked from passive baseline to full combat intensity. Through the monitoring sensors, Lin Feng read the beast's body rising from the ground, the enhanced musculature engaging, the distortion field snapping tight around its mass.
And then a sound came through ten meters of rock. A grinding, tearing sound. Claws on earth.
"It's digging," Gao Jun said. The overlay tracked the beast's position. "Directly above the hatch. It's—the monitoring sensors show soil displacement. It's excavating."
Lin Feng could hear it now without the sensors. The beast's claws, driven by formation-frequency enhanced muscle and cycling-reinforced bone, tore through the packed earth above the hub's iron hatch. Each stroke removed kilograms of soil and fractured stone. The sound was rhythmic. Methodical. Not the frantic scratching of a panicked animal. The steady, efficient digging of something that knew what it was doing and had the tools to do it.
"How thick is the earth layer above the hatch?"
Gao Jun checked the hub's schematic on the overlay. "Ten meters of soil and rock. The hatch itself is iron, reinforced. But the earth surrounding the hatch frame—"
Another grinding stroke. Dust fell from the ceiling.
"—is not reinforced."
The beast was not trying to break through the hatch. It was digging around it. Undermining the frame's support structure, collapsing the earth that held the hatch in position. The iron door could be as strong as it wanted. If the ground around it gave way, the whole entrance would cave in. The beast on top. Them underneath.
Lin Feng made a decision.
He reached through the conduit supply lines and did something he hadn't tried before. Instead of disrupting the beast's cycling, he pushed energy outward through the conduit lines surrounding the hatch's position. Raw formation-frequency output, cascade energy driven at maximum amplitude through every line running through the earth above them. Not a targeted disruption. A wall.
The energy field materialized in the soil around the hatch. Formation-frequency radiation at a concentration that turned the earth into a barrier of hostile energy, the conduit lines blazing with output that would interfere with any corrupted cycling architecture that entered the field.
The digging stopped.
Through the monitoring sensors, Lin Feng read the beast recoiling. The concentrated formation-frequency field was doing to the beast's cycling what the deep Barrens' radiation did to the division's equipment. At this proximity and density, the interference was strong enough to destabilize even the mid-tier architecture's self-correcting mechanisms. The beast pulled back from the hatch position, its cycling flickering as it retreated from the energy field.
Three meters. Five. The beast stopped at seven meters from the hatch and held position, its cycling recovering, its formation-frequency sense reading the barrier Lin Feng had created.
"That's working," Gao Jun said.
"It won't hold." Lin Feng's template was dropping. The barrier consumed energy at a rate that made the simultaneous junction disruption look efficient. His integration cycle couldn't replenish what the barrier was burning. "I'm losing a point of efficiency every three minutes. At this rate I have—"
"Fifteen minutes before you're back to where you started. Twenty before you're below fifty." The analyst was already reaching for the overlay's communication interface. "I'm calling them in."
"The team is twelve kilometers out."
"Then they'd better run." Gao Jun opened the channel. His voice went clipped, professional. "Division team, this is Field Analyst Gao Jun at Hub Fourteen-Northeast. Disregard waypoint hold. Converge on hub position at maximum speed. Corrupted beast, mid-tier classification, attempting to breach the hub entrance. Practitioner is maintaining a formation-frequency barrier that will fail in approximately twenty minutes. Engage the beast from the surface on arrival. Confirm."
The response came in eight seconds. A voice Lin Feng didn't recognize, tight and professional. "Confirmed. Team moving. ETA thirty-two minutes."
Thirty-two minutes. He had twenty.
"I'll hold it," Lin Feng said.
"You can't hold it for thirty-two minutes."
"Then I'll hold it until I can't, and after that we find out how fast the beast digs through iron."
He closed his eyes and poured everything into the barrier.
---
His template hit fifty-one percent when the beast renewed its assault.
The mid-tier's cycling had adapted. The twelve minutes of exposure to the barrier's edge had given the self-correcting architecture time to develop a partial resistance, the redundant pathways learning the barrier's frequency profile and building compensation patterns. The beast advanced two meters toward the hatch before the barrier's interference destabilized its cycling enough to force another retreat.
Two meters closer. Seven became five.
At fifty percent, the barrier's field strength dropped below the threshold that had been holding the beast at distance. The cycling pushed through, the compensation patterns doing their work. The beast advanced again. Dug again. One stroke. Two. Soil fell from the ceiling in a steady rain.
"Twenty-four minutes," Gao Jun said.
"I know."
"Drop the barrier. Conserve template."
"If I drop the barrier it reaches the hatch in two minutes."
"And if you burn to forty-five percent you can't consume it when the team arrives."
Lin Feng heard the logic. He hated the logic. He dropped the barrier.
The beast's digging resumed. Fast. Each stroke of its formation-frequency enhanced claws sent vibrations through the hub's structure. The iron hatch groaned as the earth supporting its frame shifted. Dust became gravel. Gravel became chunks of stone falling from the ceiling.
His template stabilized at forty-nine point eight. The barrier had cost him over five points. Five points of efficiency burned to buy twelve minutes of delay. The math was bad and getting worse.
A crack appeared in the ceiling.
Not the hatch. The rock beside it, where the hub's original construction met the natural stone of the underground formation. The beast's excavation was destabilizing the entire entrance structure. The hatch might hold, but the ceiling around it was failing.
"Gao Jun. Get behind the pillar."
The analyst moved without argument. He took the overlay and his rod and positioned himself behind the amber pillar's housing, the thickest piece of infrastructure in the chamber. The hub's single pillar glowed with steady cascade energy, oblivious to the destruction happening above.
Light broke through the ceiling.
A shaft of afternoon sun punched through a gap in the fractured rock, illuminating the dust-filled air of the hub's chamber. The beast's shadow crossed the light. Claws scraped iron. The hatch shuddered in its weakened frame.
Then voices.
Distant. Above. Human voices shouting commands in the formation-frequency enhanced projection that division practitioners used in field operations. The beast's digging stopped. Its cycling output shifted from excavation to combat orientation.
"Team's here," Gao Jun said from behind the pillar.
The sounds above became a battle. Formation-frequency techniques hitting corrupted cycling, the impacts resonating through the conduit lines that Lin Feng could read through his still-active interface. Four practitioners, working in coordinated pairs, hitting the beast from opposite sides. Division tactics, trained and drilled. The beast's mid-tier architecture was handling it. Absorbing. Compensating. But the four practitioners were forcing it to divide its defensive cycling across multiple threat vectors.
Spreading it thin.
Lin Feng hit the hatch with his shoulder. The weakened frame gave. The iron door fell outward and he climbed through broken earth and fractured rock into daylight that blinded him for two full seconds.
The beast was forty meters away. A corrupted bear, twice the boar's mass, its distortion field flickering under the sustained assault of four division practitioners who kept their distance and held formation. They'd learned fast what the distortion field could do up close.
One of them hadn't kept enough distance. A woman in division field gear was on the ground, her left leg at an angle that legs didn't go, her partner dragging her backward while the other pair maintained their disruption pattern.
Lin Feng ran.
The conduit lines beneath the surface were active, alive with cascade energy. He reached through them as he ran, hitting the beast's cycling from below while the division team hit it from the sides. His disruption output at forty-nine percent was weaker than the boar assault had been, but the division team's sustained techniques had already degraded the mid-tier's redundant pathways. The self-correcting architecture was running at capacity, too many threats from too many angles.
He found the junction points the redundancy couldn't cover.
Three broke. Seven. Twelve. The beast's distortion field collapsed in sections, the warped air peeling away from its body in ragged strips. The cycling fought, rerouted, compensated. More junctions broke. The bear stumbled, its enhanced legs losing their coordination.
Lin Feng reached it at fifteen meters and grabbed the matted fur behind its skull.
The consumption began.
A mid-tier beast's corrupted energy did not yield the way the low-tier beasts' had. The cycling patterns, even shattered, carried a density and a resistance that made each second of contact a fight. His template's override processed the corrupted medium in grinding increments, the formation-frequency energy entering his buffer in thick, resistant slugs that his integration cycle couldn't touch while the consumption was active.
The bear fought. Not effectively. The cycling was destroyed, the enhancement gone, but a bear that weighed eight hundred kilograms didn't need supernatural strength to be a problem. It rolled. Lin Feng held on with his right hand while his left arm screamed through the splint and his cracked ribs registered sensations he didn't have vocabulary for.
Forty-five seconds. A minute. A minute and a half.
The bear stopped moving. The corrupted energy drained. The massive body settled into the broken earth.
*Template efficiency: 51.2%. Buffer: 1 mid-tier beast consumption, unprocessed.*
He let go and sat in the dirt beside the dead bear. Three beast carcasses lay across the terrain around Hub Fourteen-Northeast. The boar. The cat. Now the bear. His body was telling him things he should listen to. He wasn't listening.
Gao Jun climbed through the ruined hatch and crossed to where the injured practitioner was being splinted by her partner. The analyst spoke quietly with them, then moved to the team leader. A broad man, older, with the weathered look of someone who'd spent more years in the field than behind a desk. He surveyed the dead beasts. The shattered hatch. The conduit disruption residue still fading from the terrain.
He looked at Lin Feng sitting in the dirt with blood on his hands and a dead mid-tier bear at his side.
"Dr. Lian wants you at Hub Seven-West," the team leader said. He didn't phrase it as a request. "All of you. She says the pillars are active again."
Gao Jun's rod stopped.
The pillars. The six-pillar communication array that had been dark since Lin Feng left Hub Seven-West. The infrastructure that connected to something outside the mortal realm's conduit boundary. The thing Old Ghost wouldn't talk about.
Active again.
"When?" Gao Jun asked.
The team leader checked the time. "Started forty minutes ago. All six pillars. Full output." He paused. "She says something's coming through."
