Chapter 77: Gazebo
The speed of the Umbral Spectre Footwork Art was blindingly fast—in an instant, Oen Shinae's nape of neck was within smash fist reach.
Miu Tyanh, devoid of mercy, was about to strike a killing blow on the woman, when his vision blurred. And in the next moment, he found himself standing in a dilapidated courtyard!
The courtyard should have been a place of serenity—lush with swaying bamboo, fragrant blossoms, and the gentle murmur of a forgotten stream. But now, it was a graveyard lack of greenery. The trees stood as broken sentinels, their splintered trunks jutting upward like the bones of long-dead giants. The grass, now a withered sea of yellow and black, crunched underfoot as if the earth itself had been drained of life.
Grey vines, thick as serpents, coiled across the shattered stone path, their gnarled fingers creeping over the remnants of a collapsed wall. The tiles beneath were cracked, their patterns fractured into jagged, unnatural shapes—as if something had clawed its way up from below. A sickly mist clung to the ground, swirling lazily around the ruins, carrying with it the scent of damp decay and something fouler—something metallic, like old blood.
At the courtyard's heart loomed a five-meter-tall rockery, its jagged stones jutting from the earth like the teeth of a buried titan. Once, it should've been a place of contemplation, where scholars might sit beneath the shade of flowering trees and compose poetry. Now, the rocks were slick with something dark—not moss, not rain, but a thick, clotting substance that seeped from the cracks like weeping wounds.
At its summit stood the lone gazebo, its once-vibrant red paint now peeled and blackened, as if scorched by unseen flames. The roof sagged under the weight of time, its upturned eaves now broken fingers clawing at the sky.
And there, beneath the rotting canopy, a figure sat.
Motionless. Head bowed.
Its shadow was wrong—too elongated, too still, as if it weren't truly sitting but waiting, its limbs folded in some strange imitation of human posture. The air around it warped faintly, as though reality itself recoiled from its presence.
Miu Tyanh's gaze snapped toward the courtyard gate—a weathered wooden door, half-ajar, its edges splintered as if something had forced its way through. Behind it, the air quivered with faint movement, a shifting of shadows that didn't match the wind.
The longer Miu Tyanh stood there, the heavier the world pressed in. The mist thickened with every breath, creeping like living tendrils, coiling around his limbs with damp, clinging fingers. It wasn't just fog—it was a suffocating shroud, leaching color from the world until only ashen grays and corpse-blacks remained. The air itself felt dead, stagnant, as if this place had been sealed away for centuries, forgotten even by decay.