The silence in his head lasted a single, horrifying heartbeat. Then the bonds flooded back, not with warmth, but with a jagged, staticky pain. It felt like his spiritual veins were filled with ground glass.

The guardian took another step, and the violet energy sea below them pulsed in time.

A deep, resonant hum began to build, not from the guardian, but from the chamber itself. The ancient iron walls, the corrupted crystal veins, the very air started to vibrate. Symbols Lin Tian hadn’t noticed before—sickly purple lines of power—glowed to life across the floor of the ledge, connecting the guardian, the tunnel mouth, and their own feet.

It’s not just a sentinel, the System’s voice cut through the psychic noise, clinical and urgent. It is the activation node for a large-scale spatial array. Designation: Desolation Array. Primary function: Amplify Anti-Resonance to critical levels within a bounded zone.

"Scatter!" Lin Tian yelled, but it was too late.

The symbols flared. The world didn’t explode. It inverted.

The pressure crushing them from the outside vanished. For a split second, it was a relief. Then the true attack began from the inside.

Inside Lin Tian’s dantian, the perfectly balanced vortex of Ice Flame Qi shuddered. The silver-blue strand of Xueya’s glacial essence, usually flowing in serene harmony with Su Lan’s golden fire, suddenly twisted. It didn’t just grow cold. It became actively, violently hostile to the heat sharing its space.

It was like two scorpions locked in a jar inside his gut. Xueya’s ice didn’t just resist Su Lan’s fire, it attacked it. And Su Lan’s fire, in a primal response, roared back to defend itself.

The conflict wasn’t out in the world. It was inside him. In the spiritual pathways he’d just healed, in the core he’d just stabilized.

Lin Tian gasped, a dry, ragged sound. He dropped to one knee, his hands clawing at his own abdomen. It felt like his lower body was being ripped in two different directions by teams of spiritual horses. Cold so profound it burned seared up one side of his spine, while heat that froze the soul scorched down the other.

He couldn’t think. He could only feel the war.

Through the agonizing static, he felt echoes of the same conflict reflected in his bonds. Xueya cried out, a sharp, pained sound, as her own icy meridians rebelled, turning inwards as if trying to freeze her own heart. Su Lan was on her knees too, her skin flickering between flushed red and corpse-pale, her Flowing Ember Body threatening to consume itself.

The array was turning their greatest strength against them. It wasn’t attacking their bodies. It was attacking the connections. It was making their linked energies see each other as foreign, as poison.

Internal Feedback detected, the System reported, its voice strained. Spiritual vessel integrity dropping: 78%... 72%... Conflict is escalating. Sustained exposure will cause core fission.

Core fission. His cultivation exploding from the inside out.

"Tian!" Yan Jiao’s voice was a distant shout. She was standing, swaying, but her Earth-aligned energy was simpler, more monolithic. The array’s divisive magic had less to grab onto. She moved toward him, but a wave of Void Stalkers, emboldened by their distress, surged from the tunnel to cut her off. She swore and met them with her sword.

They were being torn apart piecemeal. Pinned between the stalkers, the guardian, and the spiritual civil war in their own souls.

Lu Cang saw it. He’d been near the back, his new spear held ready. He wasn’t linked into their network. The array’s primary effect washed over him as a heavy, dispiriting weight, but it didn’t trigger any internal conflict. He saw Lin Tian convulsing on the ground. He saw Xueya and Su Lan locked in their own private hells. He saw the guardian beginning its advance, its dark shards rising.

He didn’t shout a battle cry. He didn’t hesitate.

Lu Cang planted his feet at the very center of the glowing array symbols, right between Lin Tian and the advancing guardian. He reversed his grip on his new spear, the one forged from the Mountain’s Heart. But he didn’t thrust it.

Instead, he drove it point-first into the solid stone of the ledge with all his strength.

The sound was a deep chunk, like an axe biting into a giant tree. The spear shaft vibrated, and a clear, resonant tone rang out, cutting through the chaotic hum of the Desolation Array. It was the voice of the mountain, pure and unchanging.

"You want resonance?" Lu Cang growled, his voice low and fierce. He placed both hands on the spear shaft, just below the head. "I’ll give you a resonance to fix your damn array to."

He closed his eyes. He wasn’t a formations master. He wasn’t a spiritual genius. He was a swordsman who understood one thing: a foundation. An anchor. You needed something unmoving to push against.

He poured every ounce of his qi, his will, his very life force, into the spear. Not as an attack, but as a declaration. I am here. This point is real.

The spear began to glow with a steady, earthy brown light. The chaotic, divisive purple energy of the array flowing across the floor wavered as it reached this fixed point. It couldn’t twist around it. It couldn’t ignore it. The array’s energy, seeking to amplify and distort all spiritual connections, was forced to interact with this single, simple, unwavering signal.

It was like throwing a giant iron rod into a raging river. The current didn’t stop, but it was forced to divert, to strain against this new, immovable object.

The effect on Lin Tian was immediate, and brutal.

The war inside him didn’t stop. But the two sides were suddenly, violently, yanked toward a common point. The scorpions were still fighting, but the jar was being shaken by a massive, external force.

The pain shifted from a tearing sensation to a crushing one. It felt like his dantian was being used as a battleground for two gods, with Lu Cang’s anchor as the stake they were fighting over.

But it was a unified pain. The conflict was being forced into a channel.

Lin Tian sucked in a shuddering breath, his vision swimming. He could think again. He could feel the bonds, not as static, but as screaming, strained cables pulling taut toward that brown glow.

"Lu Cang... you can’t..." he managed to choke out.

Lu Cang didn’t open his eyes. A thin trickle of blood ran from his nose. "I can hold it," he grunted, his knuckles white on the spear. "Just... fix yourselves. Fast."

The guardian was ten paces away now, moving with a slow, inevitable grace. The Void Stalkers pressed Yan Jiao, Yue Chan, and a struggling Xueya and Su Lan. The array’s hum grew louder, fighting against the anchor’s steady tone.

Lin Tian pushed himself up onto his elbows. He had to reassert control. He had to be the circuit breaker. The System was flashing warnings, diagrams of his core showing dangerous stress fractures.

Propose emergency protocol: Redirect feedback loop through primary vessel, using anchor as grounding point. Extreme risk.

Do it, Lin Tian thought back, the command a raw scrape of will.

He didn’t try to calm the warring energies. That was impossible now. Instead, he did the opposite. He opened the floodgates.

He pulled on the bond with Xueya, not for calm, but for all the raging, betrayed cold. He pulled on Su Lan for all the defensive, furious heat. He didn’t try to balance them. He let them pour into him, a torrent of opposing fury.

The pain skyrocketed. He screamed, a raw, animal sound. His body arched off the ground.

But he channeled it all, every searing, freezing volt of that discord, down the one clear path the array and Lu Cang’s anchor had created. He funneled the entire civil war into a single, focused beam of spiritual chaos aimed straight down into the point where Lu Cang’s spear met the stone.

Lu Cang’s eyes flew open. The steady brown light of his anchor flared, then flickered wildly as a storm of violet, silver, and gold energy slammed into it. It wasn’t meant for this. He wasn’t a lightning rod for discordant harem energy.

A violent shudder wracked his body. The skin on his hands, gripping the spear shaft, blistered instantly. Then the blisters burst. Blood, bright and shocking against the dark metal and stone, welled up and began to run in steady streams down the spear, dripping onto the glowing array symbols below.

He didn’t let go. His teeth were bared in a grimace of pure agony, but his grip only tightened. He leaned into it, pouring more of his own foundation into the spear, making it a better ground, a better sacrifice.

"Is it... working?" he gasped, the words wet with effort.

Lin Tian couldn’t answer. He was a conduit for a hurricane. But he could see. Inside him, the war was leaving. The ice and fire were draining out, following the path of least resistance toward Lu Cang’s unwavering anchor. The pain was still immense, but it was a clean pain of overuse, not the sickening pain of self-destruction.

On the ledge, Xueya collapsed, panting, the internal frost receding from her eyes. Su Lan slumped forward, her skin stabilizing to its normal tone. The array’s divisive effect on them was weakening, its energy being sucked into the vortex centered on Lin Tian and grounded by Lu Cang.

The guardian was five paces away. It raised its dark shard, aiming for Lu Cang’s exposed back.

Lu Cang saw it coming in his periphery. He didn’t move. He just closed his eyes again, blood now dripping from his chin, his hands a ruined, bloody mess on the spear.

"Almost..." he whispered, not to Lin Tian, but to the mountain itself. "Just... a little... more."

The cost was written in the blood on the stone. The vulnerability of the Harem Link wasn’t just a theory anymore. It was a crack in the world, and their brother was plugging it with his own flesh.

End of Chapter 172