On the great fifth balcony three elders practiced a combined formation.

They were older and their coordination was precise. For them Lin Mu and Elyon staged a small, false alarm. Elyon’s darkness slipped into the corridor and carved a line of shadow that described a distant pot breaking.

The servants rushed along the outer galleries in an illusion engineered by shadow, and the three elders moved to inspect. As they hurried through corridors that would have otherwise been empty, their steps matched a rhythm Lin Mu had anticipated.

Waiting in a gap between beams he stabbed straight, passing through all of them at once. One by one they fell, and by the time the servants returned there was only silence and the faint worry on their faces at the absence of sound from those rooms.

They worked up through the halls, floor by floor.

Lin Mu counted in his mind as he removed one after another, feeling the heavy tally of power fall from the structure like dead leaves from a tree. He had learned to mark cultivators in an instant by their Qi signatures and his Sword Heart’s sensitivity allowed him to detect the moment their attention flickered.

Elyon’s darkness hid the path for retreat and erased any small disturbances the two men could not wholly hide.

At times, the elders’ methods caught at a thread of counterattack.

In a side gallery an elder at the edge of the sixth Tribulation Stage felt disturbance and thus raised a thread of immortal sense for detection. The array trembled, and a pulse moved toward a search pattern that would sweep the immediate levels.

Lin Mu’s breath hitched and he felt the pressure of time.

In the same beat Elyon poured a shadow into the array’s peripheral sensing nodes. The darkness acted like a cloth over a light, dulling the ping of the search and making the sensing network report only a minor fluctuation.

That gave Lin Mu the sliver he needed. He passed through the floor and struck with a blade of compressed sword intent that hit the elder’s Dantian like an imperial verdict. The elder’s attempt to raise the alarm died in his chest.

THUD

They did not rush. They did not waste energy on spectacle. For every finished elder Lin Mu stored a formations token in his ring and sealed the place with a formation stone that read with the same presence as the elders. He took time to read the pattern of the hall and to leave the minimal disturbance necessary so the false image of life persisted.

Nineteen bodies at the fifth floor, seven more at the thirty eighth.

Another at the forty fourth fell and three at the fifty first floor went quietly counting from the top.

They counted thirty one elders by the time they reached the lower garden levels and then the private meditation terraces. Some had guarded themselves with barriers of illusion and some with simple curtains.

These they handled with even greater subtlety, as the lack of proper isolation formations allowed more traces of sound and energy to escape. The Grand Hall still held the low murmur of people moving, but those lives were not the same as before.

A quietness spread that smelled of missing things.

As they worked their way lower, the air in the Grand Hall seemed to hold its breath with them.

The discipline of the Hidden Cave Sect caused the remaining elders to move in expected rhythms even as their number dwindled. That obedience made manipulation easier for Lin Mu.

He matched expected movements and struck the experts down. Elyon, for his part, used the darkness like a loom, weaving threads of false memory into the corners where anyone might look.

He had to pay great attention to each of his illusions, as this was the first time in a long time that he was using his Darkness Dao to this level. But rather than tiring him out, it made him excited.

’Never expected to improve in the middle of a mission like this.’ Elyon thought to himself, a hidden smile appearing under his hood.

By the time they reached the lower ten floors the tally had become a number larger than any single elder might bear. The elders who might have led a counterattack were gone and the Grand Hall still hummed with presumed order.

The illusion Lin Mu had placed over the Patriarch held firm. His formation stone fed back continuity to the lattice and the memory of a living Patriarch persisted in the inner sensors. It was a lie woven with caution and craft, but it kept the greater threat asleep.

Hours passed like this...

At the end of the night they stood on an upper walkway located between the grand stairwell and looked down.

Floors upon floors of the Grand Hall spread below, an array of empty chairs and cushions, unused chalices and teacups, immortal tools and weapons of practice abandoned where they had been left.

The absence was a new kind of silence. It felt like walking through the ruins of a festival after the song had ended.

Elyon stood beside him, shadows clinging like a second skin.

He let a small grin show, hungry and pleased in the way of predators who had honored their rules.

"We cleaned well," he murmured.

Lin Mu allowed a small nod.

He felt the weight of what they had done. Forty one elders removed from the balance of power inside one containment sphere, a collapse of experience and power structure that would not be repaired quickly.

Their strike had been surgical, precise, and without flare. The results would soon show themselves. The Hidden Cave Sect’s internal networks would break and their purchased protections would be slow to react.

Yet Lin Mu also knew the danger had not passed.

There were other foes to fell, other halls to examine, and still the larger question of who had helped this sect make such a refuge in the void remained unanswered.

For now, they had created the chance necessary for the wider plan to unfold.

They had removed the heart while the body stayed unaware.