Chapter : 969
He stopped and looked directly at Rosa. "Let me be perfectly clear. The moment you step past the invisible boundary at the mountain’s base, your connection to your spirit will be severed. Your immense power, your control over the elements, the very aura that defines you… it will be gone. Extinguished. You will be as weak, as vulnerable, as the most common peasant. A Transcended user and a farmer are equals on that mountain. And they are both, equally, prey."
The information was a strategic bombshell that visibly stunned her. Her greatest weapon, the very core of her identity, would be rendered useless. The confident warrior was being told she would have to enter the battlefield completely unarmed.
"But that is only half of the horror," Lloyd continued, pressing his advantage, his voice a relentless drumbeat of grim reality. "The creatures that live on that mountain, the native monsters… they have evolved in that unique environment for millennia. They have no spiritual abilities. They do not need them. They are purely physical beings, behemoths of muscle, claw, and primal, unthinking violence. They are nature’s perfect answer to a world without magic. They are stronger, faster, and more savage than any beast you have ever faced. And on that mountain, they are the apex predators. We… we would be nothing but food."
He let the horrifying picture sink in, let the cold, hard logic of their certain death settle upon them.
"So, even if we could survive the climb," he concluded, delivering the final, crushing blow to her resolve, "even if we could fight our way through a legion of monsters that have never known fear, we would be searching for a myth. The Heavenly Jade Lotus may not even exist. We would be risking our lives, your life, on a ghost story."
He had laid out the case for the absolute, unequivocal impossibility of their quest. He had built a fortress of logic and reason around their despair. He had taken her beautiful, heroic resolve and systematically, brutally, and necessarily crushed it.
The room was silent once more, the air thick with the ashes of their last, extinguished hope. Mina was weeping openly now. Yacob was staring at the floor, his small shoulders shaking. Rosa stood still, her face a mask of pale, frozen stone.
It was into this perfect, absolute silence of despair that Lloyd inserted the final, quiet, and perfectly timed hook.
"Though," he said, his voice a soft, almost casual murmur, as if the thought had just occurred to him. "There may be… a way. A way to search for it without having to face the mountain’s guardians directly. A very small, very slim chance." He looked up, his gaze meeting Rosa’s, a single, carefully calculated spark of possibility in his own eyes. "But it would require a level of… unconventional thinking that few possess."
He had not offered a plan. He had not offered a solution. He had offered a puzzle. A challenge. And he knew, with an absolute certainty, that the brilliant, analytical, and now utterly desperate mind of the woman before him would not be able to resist trying to solve it. The queen was in checkmate. And he had just offered her a single, possible, and very dangerous move to escape.
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Lloyd’s final, carefully placed words landed in the silent, grief-stricken room not as a statement of hope, but as an intellectual challenge. He had not promised a cure; he had presented a tactical problem, a puzzle wrapped in the language of impossibility. He had masterfully shifted the emotional landscape from one of pure, overwhelming despair to one of tense, analytical curiosity.
Mina’s sobs subsided, replaced by a hiccupping, questioning silence. Yacob looked up from the floor, his tear-streaked face now holding a flicker of confused, desperate interest. But it was Rosa on whom his entire gambit rested. He watched as her mind, a magnificent and finely tuned engine of pure logic, latched onto the problem he had presented. The warrior’s despair in her eyes was being replaced by the cold, hard focus of a strategist.
“Unconventional thinking,” she repeated, her voice a low, flat monotone, but the word was not a dismissal. It was a prompt. An invitation for him to elaborate.
Lloyd knew he had her. He had successfully reframed the suicide mission into a solvable, albeit incredibly difficult, strategic exercise. He began to slowly, deliberately, lay out the pieces of his insane, and brilliant plan.
Chapter : 970
“The guardians of the mountain are physical beings,” he began, pacing the room once more, the professor delivering a lecture on a forbidden subject. “They hunt by sight, by sound, by scent. They are bound to the ground. A direct confrontation, on their terms, in their territory, is a fool’s errand. It is a battle we cannot win.”
Mina looked at him, her expression one of pure, uncomprehending confusion. “But if we cannot fight them, and we cannot evade them on the ground, then how do we proceed? The mountain is a fortress with an army of perfect, sleepless sentinels.”
“Precisely,” Lloyd agreed, giving her a small, encouraging nod. “Which is why we will not engage them on their terms. We will not play their game.” He stopped his pacing and turned to face them, a new, and deeply unsettling, kind of confidence in his eyes. “We will cheat.”
He let the word hang in the air, a deliberate, provocative statement.
“The beasts are bound by the laws of their physical world,” he continued, his voice a low, conspiratorial hum. “They are creatures of instinct, of predictable patterns. But we are not. We have a tool they do not possess: a mind that can see the world not just as it is, but as it could be. There are paths on that mountain that are not on any map. Paths that are invisible. Paths that their minds, bound by instinct, cannot even conceive of.”
He was speaking in riddles, in beautiful, elegant, and utterly infuriating abstractions. He was not giving them a plan; he was giving them a philosophy, a new way of seeing the problem.
“You mean to use some form of stealth?” Rosa asked, her analytical mind trying to grasp the tactical application of his words. “Camouflage? Alchemical lures to misdirect them?”
Lloyd shook his head, a slow, almost pitying smile on his lips. “Child’s play,” he said, the words a quiet, dismissive wave of his hand. “Such tricks might buy us an hour, a day. But they will not see us to the peak. No. The path I have in mind is… more fundamental. It is a way of moving through their world without ever truly being a part of it. A way to be a ghost in their machine.”
He would not give them the details. He could not. To explain the concept of his [Void Steps], of his ability to weave a web of steel across the very face of the mountain, would be to reveal a secret, a power, that was too great, too dangerous, too fundamentally world-altering to be spoken aloud, even here, in this room of newfound, fragile trust. He had to keep his greatest weapons, his most impossible truths, a secret.
So he gave them a mystery instead.
“I have a way,” he said, his voice now a thing of quiet, absolute, and unshakeable certainty. “A method of traversing the mountain that will render us, for the most part, invisible to the guardians below. It is a path of… high risk. It requires absolute precision, perfect timing, and a level of trust that borders on the insane.”
He looked directly at Rosa, and his gaze was a challenge, a question, an invitation. “It will require a partner of exceptional courage, resourcefulness, and… a certain tolerance for the impossible.”
He had offered her nothing. A riddle. A mystery. A promise of a path that did not exist. He had asked her to take a blind leap of faith, to follow him into a darkness that he refused to illuminate.
He had given her every reason to refuse, to call him a madman, a charlatan. And he waited, the fate of their entire, impossible quest now resting not on a plan, but on a single, fragile, and utterly, profoundly illogical, act of pure, unadulterated trust.
Rosa’s mind reeled, struggling to process the sheer, breathtaking audacity of the man before her. He was not just proposing a solution; he was proposing a miracle, a black box of a plan that he refused to open. He was asking her to stake her mother’s life, the very future of her house, on a riddle. On a whispered promise of a secret, impossible path.
Her entire life had been defined by logic, by data, by verifiable facts. She did not deal in mysteries. She did not trade in faith. And yet… the absolute, unshakeable certainty in his eyes was a data point in itself, a variable she could not dismiss. She was a strategist, and a good strategist knows that sometimes the most illogical-seeming move is the one that changes the entire board.