Hearing Lin Mu’s words, Elyon’s eyes gleamed with a predatory light. "You mean to dismantle the heart before the body can flinch."

"Yes," Lin Mu answered simply. He moved to the edge of the chamber, his presence melting back into the wall as he phased. "The Patriarch was the first pillar. Now we test how many more can be removed before the structure collapses."

Elyon let the shadows engulf him again, his form vanishing into the dim recesses of the hall. Together, their silent hunt would now begin.

They melted into the Grand Hall like shadows folding into walls, two different halves of a single, deadly instrument. Lin Mu moved through seams of space, slipping between pillars and floors with his Spatial Skills.

Elyon moved through literal shadow, his Darkness Dao swallowing the light and making corridors seem empty even when he stood within them. Where Lin Mu’s presence condensed, Elyon’s absence made a hole. Together they operated as one mind with two hands.

Their first victims were those who cultivated alone.

The Grand Hall was designed to offer solitude, and that very solitude was what made the selection of targets easy. Lin Mu took the lead in those rooms where a single presence sat cross legged and isolated.

He blinked into the chamber and his sight took the man’s cultivation like a map. A small incision of spatial skill, Meld containing Sword intent, folded thin and sharp, passed through the ribs and stilled the breath that would have called alarms. The blow destroyed internal flow without damage to the outer arrays, leaving no flare to ripple outward.

Elyon covered exits and archives.

He moved like the shadows of leaves drifting in the night, a presence that slipped behind the stunned disciples who might have heard a sound and cut their throats before panic could spread.

Where a lone elder practised with a staff, Lin Mu’s strike was precise and finished in a quarter breath. The body folded into the void and was stored away in the ring. No blood reached the floor. No cry of pain carried to the hallways.

It was clinical, cold, and necessary.

Where elders paired up the task required choreography.

Two on mid floors, deep in discussion, lifted their heads with the premonition of danger but could not name it. Elyon sent a shadow to one man as though a hand reached across the room and drew him forward by his sleeve.

The other, startled, rose to follow.

Simultaneously Lin Mu collapsed a foot of space between them and created a pocket where their breaths synchronized for a single heartbreaking second. He folded his Sword intent into that instant and each elder’s dantian was taken with a mirrored strike.

It looked from the outside like two men had simply fallen asleep at the same time. Their forms disappeared into the ring as though fate itself had reclaimed them.

On the forty second floor a cluster of elders were practicing a joint formation for defensive reinforcement. Their hands traced complex runes in harmony, conjuring an array that could have filled a battlefield with threads of power.

Lin Mu watched from the seams above while Elyon crouched below in the gloom. A direct attack would have shattered the array and screamed their presence throughout the sphere. Instead they did something quieter.

Lin Mu drew a thin line of compressed spatial qi and threaded it like a needle through the gaps in the elders’ formation.

It passed unseen, a filament of intent that severed only what it needed to sever. The joint array continued, sensing nothing wrong, while the elders’ own inner flows were constricted by the slender wire of power.

At the same moment Elyon breathed a shadow into the center of their practice ring. The shadow took shape as a short man the elders believed to be a disciple who had wandered in by mistake.

Surprise moved automatically into their faces. One elder reached to talk to the man and possibly scold him for disturbing them. it was then that, Lin Mu let his blade of intent pass through the gap between hand and throat and finished the quartet in a whisper.

SHA SHA SHA

They moved with that rhythm.

Lin Mu executed and Elyon erased the traces with darkness.

Where two hands were not enough to finish the work, where an elder had a disciple posted close by who might have raised a banner of warning, they worked like a duet that left no footsteps.

Elyon stole memories of shadows and planted them in the hallways to explain away empty seats. Lin Mu adjusted the formation stones he used to anchor his illusions to the arrays so that the system reported continuity instead of loss.

Those subtle manipulations made the absence read as presence and grief as a pause.

Though even with such preparations, some elders put up a fight.

A Sixth Tribulation cultivator who favored sword intent, saw through the illusions long enough to turn, and his blade cut the air where Lin Mu’s head had been only a heartbeat before.

Lin Mu’s spatial skill blink was a breath behind, and the sword met only a ripple of folded space. The strike that would have hit him struck nothing but air. Elyon moved then, like a converging eclipse, and his shadow wrapped around the elder’s vision.

The man staggered, reason slipping like water through fingers, and Lin Mu struck low and final. Even the more powerful elders fell to combined tactics that exploited the very strengths they relied upon.

At times the technique demanded theater.

An elder in a mid-level chamber loved the ritual of pruning and tended a small jade leaf Oak bonsai.

He had elderly hands, slow and deliberate. Lin Mu crept behind the banisters of the balcony and watched his patterns. For this one the solution was simple. Lin Mu slipped behind the pot, folded Meld into a sharp knife filled with his sword intent.

Then, with a faint touch severed the elder’s meridian coordination. The man simply let the scissors drop from his hand and slumped forward. Elyon left a shadowed trail to the servant disciple quarters to silence anyone with curiosity. A life ended like a candle blown out.