Chapter 125: Bell Fragment - Leah
Xiao Qi?
I stare at Christina's corpse.
Her blood flows between the crystal shards, silver and thick, like something alive searching for cracks. Her eyes are still open, pupils dilated, but the corner of her mouth still holds that curve—a smile, as if she knows something I don't.
"Xiao Qi is on Side A," Kael says, his voice coming from the other side of the wreckage. "She's fighting the Moon-Eater. She's not the one trying to open the Door."
"Then why did she say Xiao Qi?"
I don't get an answer.
Because the blood in the wreckage suddenly moves.
Not flowing—gathering. Silver threads crawl from every direction toward Christina's chest, collecting into a sphere. The sphere pulses, like a heart, with something glowing inside.
"Get back!" Kael shouts.
We retreat.
The sphere bursts. Not an explosion—a release. A pillar of silver-white light shoots into the sky, piercing through the castle dome, through the clouds, shooting toward some height I can't see.
The pillar lasts five seconds.
Then it dies.
The castle goes silent. The Night Walkers crouch on the floor, too scared to move. Adrian lets out a weak groan from the next room—she's still alive.
Kael walks to the edge of the crater left by the pillar. There's something at the bottom.
A bell.
Silver-white, delicate, identical to the one that exploded on Adrian's wrist. But it doesn't have the texture of metal. It's something softer, like polished bone—
Biological material.
"A fragment," Kael says. "Xiao Qi's bell fragment. The fourth path she mentioned."
He bends down and picks it up. The moment he touches it, his fingers tremble.
"There's something inside," he says. "A message."
He raises the bell to his ear.
I lean in close.
A sound comes from inside the bell. Not Xiao Qi's voice. Something older, more mechanical—a recording?
"...The Door-change ritual requires two keys..." the voice says, cutting in and out, like a bad signal. "...One is on Side B... One is on Side A... The Side B key is the kin-slaying blade... The Side A key is..."
The voice cuts off.
Kael shakes the bell.
The voice comes back, fainter.
"...The Side A key is... the Gatekeeper's..."
It cuts off again.
I grab the bell and shake it hard. Something rolls inside, like a bead.
"Get the bead out," I say.
Kael tears a piece of fabric from Christina's cloak, wraps it around the bell, and smashes it against the floor.
The bell shatters.
A bead rolls out. Transparent, with silver light flowing inside. Not solid—some kind of energy crystal.
Kael places the bead in his palm.
The bead suddenly glows. Light projects into the air, forming an image—
Not Side A. Not Side B.
The space between them. The void.
A door floats in the void. Two locks hang on it.
One is dark red, engraved with the de Noct family crest.
The other is silver-white, shaped like a pair of wings.
"Two locks," I say. "They need two keys to open at the same time."
The image switches.
It shows the situation on Side A.
Xiao Qi stands in the ruins of the Spiral Spire. Her wrist is bare, the bell gone. She's holding something—a stone? No, it's the early form of another key.
She looks up, toward the void. Her mouth moves, like she's shouting something. But there's no sound.
Then the image switches to Side B.
It shows the castle we're in. But the view rises from beneath the castle, through the stone chamber, through the room with the mummies, through the tunnel—
Finally stopping at the platform.
The giant bat is still sedated. But the anesthetic is wearing off. The black threads in its belly writhe more violently.
And beside it stands a person.
Dr. Chen.
His glasses reflect in the dim platform light. He's holding a scalpel, tracing it across the giant bat's belly.
Not extracting a fragment.
But... helping it be born.
The Dr. Chen in the image turns his head, looks toward the camera. Or rather, looks in the direction the bead is projecting from. The corner of his mouth curves up.
Then he says something. No sound, but I read his lips:
"Thank you for the sedative. The dosage was perfect."
The image fades.
The bead cracks, turns to powder, and slips through Kael's fingers.
I freeze in place.
Dr. Chen.
The fragment isn't on the giant bat.
The fragment has transferred to him. While we injected the anesthetic, while we thought we'd delayed the crisis—
It was using us.
"We've been played," I say.
Kael doesn't respond. He looks out the window. Outside is the human dawn, the single sun rising, the city waking up.
"More than played," he says.
"What do you mean?"
"Christina said the one who really wants to open the Door isn't her. It's 'Xiao Qi.'" He turns to me. "But in the image, Xiao Qi is on Side A, holding the key prototype, fighting the Moon-Eater. She doesn't look like someone who wants to open the Door."
"Then who?"
Kael walks to Christina's corpse. He crouches down, searches inside her cloak.
There's a communicator inside. Not blood-crystal—human electronic equipment. The screen shows the last message.
Sender: Dr.Chen.
Content: Door ready. Key melted. Side B anchor locked. Waiting for Side A sync.
Sent: Three minutes ago.
"Dr. Chen isn't one person," Kael says. "He's an organization. A Side B organization. They want to open the Door, want Side A to swallow Side B—but not for vampires to rule over humans. They want..."
He pauses.
"They want humans to get magic," he says. "For Side B people to enter Side A, steal bloodlines, steal power. The Sweepers and Dr. Chen are probably the same people. Hunting Night Walkers is a cover—collecting Side A biological samples is the real goal."
I process this information.
Sweepers. Dr. Chen. Human world forces. They hunt Night Walkers, study Side A creatures, their real goal is to open the Door—to connect the two worlds, to let humans get magic.
Christina thought she was using them.
In reality, they were using her.
And now, Dr. Chen has the fragment. He's getting ready to let it be born. On the platform. In the heart of Side B.
Once the fragment takes physical form, it will immediately look for the nearest energy source—
The Gatekeeper's anchor.
Adrian's castle.
Or, farther away, the glass tower.
"We have to get back to the platform," I say. "Kill him. Destroy the fragment."
"How?" Kael raises his wrist, still showing burn marks from the UV handcuffs. "Sweepers are outside. The underground passages are sealed. We can't even leave the castle."
One of the Night Walkers slowly stands up.
It's the one Christina blasted away, the one with broken wings. It pushes through the pain, walks to Leah, and lowers its head.
A gurgling sound comes from its throat. Not language, but some meaning gets through.
It turns and walks toward the back of the hall. There's a door there, one I hadn't noticed before, hidden behind the collapsed pillar.
The door leads to the castle cellar.
In the cellar is a vehicle.
Not a human car. A Side A floating carriage, hidden underground on Side B. Dust covers it, but the energy core is still glowing—dark red, blood-crystal powered.
"Adrian's escape route," Kael says. "She really did wait three thousand years."
We climb into the carriage. The Night Walkers don't follow. They stay in the castle, protecting Adrian.
I grip the control lever. The floating carriage shakes, jets of air shooting from the base, lifting it up.
"Which way?" I ask.
"Up," Kael says. "There's an exit at the top of the castle. Straight to the sky."
I pull the control lever.
The carriage smashes through the glass of the castle's upper floor, rising into the human dawn.
Wind rushes in. Sunlight burns my skin. I grit my teeth and speed up.
Below, the city shrinks. Streets become silver threads, traffic like ants.
The glass tower ahead gets closer. The red beacon still flashes.
But my eyes shift farther away.
Toward the direction of the platform.
A column of black smoke rises from there.
Not a fire. Some kind of energy leak.
The fragment.
It's been born.