Sludge suction system

As Tan Ge's horse crushed the last patch of frozen earth, Tian Xue'er's fingertips were already frozen purple. She clutched half a fragment of blood jade, which emitted a ghostly blue fluorescence in her palm, resonating with the faint light from the fractured Kunlun Mountains in the distance—a signal from the Sang Yu Blood Jade Tortoise Shell.

“Two months and seventeen days left.” Tan Ge pulled off the water pouch from his waist; the wine inside had frozen into a block of ice. “Qian Wan Guan said that if we can’t get the Blood Jade back, we should feed our blood to Yuan Xiangya’s Blood Jade Lock.”

Tian Xue'er stared at the "Xuan" tattoo on his wrist, the blue color three degrees darker than when he set off—a sign of the jade poison spreading. She touched the back of her neck, where pale blue scales had appeared, exactly like the "prepared jade maiden" recorded in the secret chamber of the Qian family.

“The entrance to the mine is above the snow line,” she said, unfolding the map she had stolen from the old ancestral hall of the Sang family. The “Broken Jade Ruins” circled in vermilion ink was blurred by the wind and snow. “But the Taotie pattern on the map… is exactly the same as the one on your dagger.”

Tan Ge's feathered serpent dagger suddenly became hot, and the lotus pattern on the blade resonated with the map pattern, projecting a three-dimensional mineral vein model onto the snow. Tian Xue'er saw that on the altar in the center of the model, Sang Yu was curled up in a ball, hugging a tortoise shell, with a blood jade fragment behind his ear gleaming with a blinding light—a sign that the blood jade curse was about to erupt.

“She is at the core of the mine,” Tange gripped his dagger, “but the entrance is sealed by nine Taotie patterns, which can only be activated with the blood of the Jade Maiden.”

Tian Xue'er's fingertips traced the lotus birthmark on her palm, recalling Qian Wanguan's words: "Your blood is purer than Sang Yu's, because your mother was a 'blood jade vessel' that I specially chose." She gritted her teeth, cut her palm with a dagger, and the blood dripped onto the Taotie pattern on the map, turning the surrounding snow a deep blue and revealing the stone steps beneath the ice.

“Stay close to me,” Tange pulled her onto the ice steps. “The blood jade in the mine will amplify desires. Don’t touch anything you see.”

Descending several dozen feet, fragments of blood-red jade began to appear on the stone wall, each fragment containing the image of a girl resembling Tian Xue'er. She recognized one of the fragments as being engraved with "Tian Qiaoyun"—that was her mother, whom she had never met, the blood-red jade fragment embedded in her heart bearing the image of Yuan Xiangya.

“They are all ‘vessels’,” Tang’s voice echoed in the mine tunnel. “Qian Wanguan used their blood to nourish the jade, and then injected the jade poison into the lady’s body, forming a symbiotic cycle.”

At the end of the mine tunnel stood a circular altar, in the center of which floated a blood-jade tortoise shell belonging to Sang Yu. Countless skeletons floated in a pool of blood beneath the shell, each skeleton with a blood-jade inlaid behind its ear. Tian Xue'er's birthmark suddenly heated up, and the fragments of jade automatically coalesced into an arrow pointing towards a hidden door on the east side of the altar—the door was inscribed with the three characters "Wu Sheng Guan" (无生观), but was covered by spiderweb-like cracks in the blood-jade.

“Sang Yu has been here before,” Tan Ge said, picking up a fragment of a silver hairpin from the ground. The character “Lian” on the hairpin matched the one on Xia Menglian’s handkerchief. “She used her mother’s blood to open the secret door, but was forced back by something.”

Suddenly, a fluorescent glow seeped from the hidden door, and Tian Xue'er saw a twin platform deep inside. On the platform were two blood jade coffins side by side. In the left coffin, a girl looked exactly like Sang Yu, while in the right coffin lay a woman who looked exactly like her. Both of them had fragments of a dragon tortoise embedded between their eyebrows.

“That is… the First Jade Maiden and her twin sister,” Tang Ge gripped the dagger tightly. “Sang Xuan’s secret records say that the twin soul blood can split the Dragon Turtle Spirit Bone in two, one half becoming the Jade of Life and the other half becoming the Jade of Curse Removal.”

The mine suddenly trembled, and Tian Xue'er's blood dripped onto the edge of the Twin Platform, activating the blood jade cracks on the platform. Tan Ge saw countless arrows of light shooting out from the cracks, their targets aimed directly at their brows—these were attacks from the souls of past jade beings, twisted by the blood jade into puppets guarding the curse.

"Run!" He swung his sword to cut the light arrow, but saw that Tian Xue'er's lotus birthmark resonated with the Twin Platform, reflecting the attack back completely. Before the hidden door slammed shut, she glimpsed Sang Yu's figure flashing past behind the door. Fragments of tortoise shell were pieced together in her palm to form a complete dragon tortoise totem, and the blood flowing on the scales was that of Tan Ge and Tian Xue'er.

“She’s using our blood to break the deadlock,” Tian Xue’er said, clutching the blood-stained map tightly. “The three-month deadline…it’s basically a countdown to the dragon turtle’s molting.”

Blood jade fragments began to fall from the top of the mine shaft. Tan Ge dragged her towards the exit, hearing Qian Wanguan's cold laughter behind them—the sound, mixed with the flowing blood jade liquid, seemed to emanate from the tattoos on their wrists: "Tan Ge, Tian Xue'er, you think you're looking for Sang Yu? No, you are the 'blood guides' chosen by the Dragon Turtle. Every drop of your blood paves the way for the rebirth of your spirit bones..."

As the snowstorm once again engulfed the mine entrance, Tan Ge gazed at the blood-stained map in his arms and noticed a new line of small characters on the back: "To break the Longevity Formation, first destroy the Twin Platforms." Tian Xue'er's lotus-shaped birthmark was emitting a faint glow, a stark contrast to the jade-like mark on his wrist—one was healing, the other was spreading.

“Two more months,” she said, gazing at the dark clouds atop Kunlun Mountain, “but we’re not looking for Sang Yu, we’re looking for the method that can end the curse on the twin souls…”

Tange nodded, his feathered serpent dagger drawing a pattern of intertwined lotus flowers and dragon turtles on the snow. He knew this pursuit had never been a simple task—they were both hunters and prey, and three months later on the summit of Kunlun Mountain, what awaited them might not be the return of the Blood Jade, but the... ultimate collapse of the entire curse.

When Tang Ge's feathered serpent dagger struck the ice for the third time, it finally carved out a hollow large enough for him to fit inside. Tian Xue'er curled up inside, frost flowers from the paper lotus in her hair falling softly onto her knees. She counted the trail of scales spreading across his back—from his shoulder blades to his waist, bluish-gray crystal clusters had covered thirteen vertebrae.

“Fifty-seven days left.” He handed over half a barley cake, as hard as a rock, with the scales of his palm imprinted on its surface. “Qian Wanguan’s ‘Soul-Chasing Incense’ disappeared ten miles away; he may have suffered a snow blindness attack.”

She didn't take the cake, but stared at the translucent scales on her fingertips. For three days, those scales had crawled from her fingertip to her first knuckle, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the moonlight, exactly like the blood jade fragments sealed in the glacier. From the distant snow slope came the mournful cry of a ibex, the sound drawn out, much like the dying sobs of the jade maiden in the secret chamber of the Qian mansion.

One day, when they encountered the shepherd's corpse at the foot of the mountain, the sun was just three inches above the snow line. The blood-stained jade fragment embedded in the old man's heart was shaped like Tian Xue'er's birthmark, and the sheep lay in a circle around him, each sheep's pupil containing a tiny "Xuan" character—the mark of the Sang family's shadow guards.

“It wasn’t killed by a wild animal.” Tan Ge used his dagger to pry open the old man’s clothes, revealing scales that spread from his chest to his throat. “It was when the jade poison took effect that he scratched his own throat raw.”

Tian Xue'er bent down and picked up the prayer wheel that the shepherd had dropped. The lotus pattern carved on the wheel resonated with the birthmark on her palm, and a pale blue arrow appeared on the snow, pointing to the snow-covered stone house in the northwest. A faded Sang family lantern hung on the door, with icicles on the tassels, just like the "soul-summoning lantern" she had seen in the Qian family mansion.

Inside the stone house were piles of decaying copies of the "Blood Jade Scripture," each title page depicting a twin platform, upon which lay a young girl in a coffin, a fragment of a dragon turtle embedded between her brows. Tian Xue'er's scales suddenly burned, and bloody words appeared in the blank space of one of the books: "The blood of the seventeenth generation Jade Maiden can break the cocoon, but twin souls are required to guide it."

“Jade Man’s blood, Jade Man’s blood…” Tang Ge began to mutter to himself.