Rix barely registered the journey to solitary. The sheer animal terror that gripped his chest as the guards pulled him into the bowels of the prison overwhelmed all rational thought. He'd known this was likely in some capacity, but it still felt strangely unfair — to have come so far, to have tasted his first moment of triumph, only to have it all snatched away.

He jammed his eyes closed momentarily and forced himself to focus. That was a childish reaction. The situation was dire, but not yet certain doom. The guard had said they were suspected of killing another inmate, which meant they didn't know for sure. Right now, they simply wanted to question him. It seemed likely that someone — the Divemaster, or Scarface maybe — had told the powers that be about Rix and Han's feud, and they were simply investigating that lead. That meant he might yet be able to bluff his way through.

Luna seemed similarly dazed, though she gave him a firm nod when he caught her eye. The message was clear. She wouldn't break. With everything they'd been through and the lengths she'd gone to help him, he believed her.

That left the others. If they were pulling Rix and Luna in, they were almost definitely going to scoop up Wing and Huan too. The conflict between the Shadow Runners and the Iron Hand was even more public than Han's personal grudge against Rix. If anyone stood to benefit the most from Han's death, it was them.

He felt a certain sinking feeling when he looked at things from their perspective. Despite the loyalty Wing had displayed, putting the blame on Rix was the path of least resistance for the Shadow Runners. It would let them wash their hands of the issue and then turn their attention to consolidating their position in the Farm.

If she chose to do that, there was little Rix could do. He simply had to hope her honour held.

Solitary, as it turned out, was a single long room buried deep under the rest of the prison. The only objects within were a single row of metal boxes, each slightly larger than a person. They were ominous, angular things etched with array runes and sporting a thick pillar on either side that disappeared into the floor. They put Rix in mind of coffins. He suspected that was the point.

One of their captors moved along the row, opening two of the boxes with little flashes of mana, before turning to them.

"Go on, then," he said, with a thin smile. "Get comfy."

Inside, the boxes were effectively empty — just person-sized voids. Whatever power they held must have stemmed entirely from their arrays.

Rix and Luna shared another look.

"See you on the other side," she said, her voice surprisingly steady.

He nodded. The urge to fight rose in his chest, but he stamped it down. Whatever was about to come was going to be unpleasant enough without being punished by the tether first.

Stepping gingerly into the nearest box, he lowered himself down until he was lying on his back. The box was wide enough that even someone like Han would have fit. He could already tell it was going to be pitch black once closed.

"How long will we be in here?" he asked the guard as the man loomed over him.

The man sneered. "Until the boss feels you're in the right frame of mind to talk."

Rix opened his mouth to reply. They didn't need to do this if he wanted to talk. He was happy to spin his lies now. But the lid was already slamming shut.

The darkness that enveloped him was absolute. He'd never been anywhere so devoid of light before. It somehow made the space feel impossibly large and incredibly claustrophobic at the same time. He reached out to touch the walls, just to reassure himself that they were still there.

His other senses were similarly cut off. All external sound and vibration had fallen away. He felt like he'd been pulled outside the fabric of the world.

While that was unsettling enough, he knew there was more to come. He had some suspicions about exactly what this process would entail, and now he was about to find out. He swallowed hard, doing his best to mentally prepare himself. He didn't have to wait long.

The walls around him started humming, and he felt the mana in his dantian begin trembling involuntarily in response. That alone made him feel strangely violated. Through all the suffering and indignities of this place, he'd always been in control of his mana. One's Path was supposed to be sacred.

But the box was just getting started.

The hum hit a higher pitch, and then his body seized as a powerful pressure descended on him. It came from all around him, a crushing weight that locked his muscles in place and squeezed his dantian. At the same time, he felt a separate force begin to take root, a terrible, inexorable magnetism that steadily grew in power, pulling at his mana. He tried to fight it, to maintain control, but the strength of the device was overwhelming. Slowly, gradually, it began dragging his mana out into his meridians.

The effect was agony. It felt like having shattered glass drawn through his spirit. The sensation was similar to the heartstone technique, but on a far grander scale, and that comparison only grew more apt as his mana hit the edges of his spiritual network and kept going. Unlike when he used that technique, this wasn't controlled manipulation. It was wholesale theft. Mana was dragged out of him in burning streams, flowing out of his body like water wrung from a sponge. As it left his control, he could feel it being snatched up by the array and then being sucked down into the earth somewhere before he eventually lost claim to it.

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This was what he'd suspected. Solitary basically turned prisoners into mana batteries. It made a grim sort of sense given everything else he knew about the prison. Even here, they were profiting off him.

He thought the experience was bad while he still had mana, but as his pool hit empty, the pressure didn't abate. It continued to pull at him, only now there was nothing left to respond except his meridians. It was a dry, raw friction, like a sharpened stone being dragged across bone. The array didn't care that he was empty; it only knew how to take. Without the buffer of his mana, the force of it felt like it was tearing at the very walls of his spiritual network, abrading them, leaving them exposed and screaming.

The true cruelty was the System. It fought to do its job, to refill what was taken. A tiny spark of mana would flicker into existence in his dantian, a ghost of a sensation that was almost a relief. But the array never let it last. The moment the mana appeared, it was ripped away, and that tiny offering only served as fresh fuel for the fire, making the next agonizing scrape even worse. It was an endless, pulsing cycle of creation and violation.

He now understood why Yuri had looked so haggard after her stint down here.

He needed an anchor. Something to hold onto in the storm. His mind latched onto the only thing he was currently capable of that might offer even a modicum of relief: the Mountain Gate cycle. Having spent time exploring the differences between his cultivation and his Path, he now knew that each resource sat in a different part of his dantian. Indeed, his two spiritual networks, while spiralling from roughly the same place within him, were entirely disconnected. As such, while his System-infused network was in turmoil, his qi sat placidly in his dantian, utterly undisturbed. Whatever invisible walls kept the two apart, they were sturdy.

Under assault as he was, it wasn't likely he'd even be able to hold the cycle, but at that point even the vaguest chance at some strength and stability was better than nothing. Ignoring the chaos, he began cycling. Inhale — he drove his qi down, imagining roots. Hold — he felt it solidify his core. Exhale — he channelled it to his limbs. The scraping in his mana meridians didn't stop, but the steady, familiar flow of his qi beneath it was a small, defiant comfort.

He could feel his two networks running parallel, one cold and ravaged, the other warm and whole. In his arms and legs, they ran so close they almost seemed to hum against each other — two wires laid side-by-side. He'd never paid it much mind before, but in this state of heightened sensory agony, he was aware of it in a new way.

The array pulsed again. The vacuum it created in his mana channels was immense. So immense, in fact, that at several of those points of overlap, he actually felt the magnetism spill over, for just a moment, clutching not just for his mana, but for his qi as well. It wasn't a proper pull, not yet, just a flicker of attraction, a sort of questing curiosity. While the walls separating his dantian were thick, it appeared that was not true across his entire network.

He flinched, instinctively trying to pull his qi away, to shrink it back towards his dantian, but it was sluggish to reply now, caught between two opposing forces. Breaker had said that mana was effectively just filtered qi. While Rix had never been able to make his two power systems acknowledge one another, the fact remained that there were similarities.

Apparently, the array thought so as well.

It pulsed again, harder this time. The drag was no longer a suggestion. It was an active, insistent grab. His qi shuddered, straining against the invisible walls of his meridians. He fought back, focusing his will on the barrier between them, trying to thicken it, to reinforce the wall separating his Path from his cultivation. It became a spiritual tug-of-war, the array yanking on his empty mana channels while he desperately tried to keep his qi from being drawn into the fray.

It was useless. The array's next pulse was a force that was absolute.

He felt a sickening lurch as, in several places, the barrier between his mana meridians and his qi meridians gave way. There was a tearing sensation that was deeper and more fundamental than anything he'd felt before, a pain beyond the physical. In those spots, the sheer gravity of the array's hunger dragged the two meridians together. For a searing instant, he felt his qi flood into the ravaged mana channel, a torrent of clean water into a river of broken glass, before the array seized upon it, beginning to siphon it as well.

Now being drained in two ways at once, the pain flared, but it was only momentary. His qi was a limited resource, and unlike his mana, it didn't refill itself, so it was quickly exhausted.

***

He didn't know how long he remained in the array. Under constant assault, time lost all meaning.

But eventually, the hum dropped away and the relentless pressure faded. Moments later, light hit his eyes as the lid was pulled back. He let out a groan, throwing his hands across his face, before a bucket of cold water was thrown over him. He let out a hiss, though he was almost thankful for it. The sudden shock of it jolted his mind back into action.

"Get up," said a voice. Prising his eyes back open and squinting into the glare, Rix saw that it was the same guard that had deposited him in there to begin with.

While the physical damage was minimal, the ache in his spiritual network still seemed to vibrate through him as he moved. He staggered to his feet. To his left, he could see another of the boxes sat open. Apparently they'd let Luna out already. It made sense that they were being kept separately now. If they were being interrogated, the staff wouldn't want them to have any opportunity to plan or collude.

"Come on," the guard said. "Someone wants to talk to you."

Rix suspected he knew who.

He was led to a room not far away. It looked a little like the space where he met his potential sponsor, a simple room with a table and two chairs. They left him alone there for some time, which was probably done on purpose. They were letting him stew on what he'd just experienced.

Everything inside him felt raw. Scoured. Just the thought of trying to use a technique made him want to throw up. It had been a truly horrible experience. He briefly considered trying to probe the damage that had been wrought to his spiritual networks. Even now, with no qi or mana moving through his meridians, he could feel the spots where the barriers between them had torn. But he wasn't in any condition to experiment just yet. Instead, he simply lay on the table and tried to collect himself for what was to come.

Some time later, the door opened and a man strode in.

Xu Sho.

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