The safe house felt like a pool of still water.
Lin Jie sat at the oak table piled high with maps and files, his gaze fixed on the two damaged items on the tabletop.
One was Silence, now reduced to a black brass hilt. The once razor-sharp alchemical blade had been corroded by the Oil Ghost into a puddle of useless scrap. Yet Lin Jie could feel the neural toxin sac from the Ghost Jellyfish still inside the hilt, astonishingly active. It pulsed faintly, as if longing for a new body.
The other was a Japanese sword — Withered Cicada. He had seized it from a Japanese hunter nad Kamiya during the cetery battle in New Orleans. The core material of that blade ca from UMA bone that embodied the concept of Extinction, granting the terrifying ability to forcibly zero out a target’s spiritual nature.
“It’s not dead yet.”
Lin Jie’s fingers stroked Silence’s hilt; that familiar cold sensation traveled along his fingertips.
“You need a new blade.”
He murmured to himself.
Then he rose and wrapped the two damaged armants in an oilcloth.
“I’m going out.” He told Evelyn, who was busy at work, “I’ll be back in half an hour.”
“Going to see the armant blacksmith?” Julian looked up. “There’s a smithy nearby with a good reputation. He knows that old gatekeeper. Here’s the address.”
“Thanks. I’m going to take a gamble.”
Zhang’s Smithy sat at the end of Shuo’e Alley, less than two hundred ters from Su Sanniang’s funeral parlor. Though it was late, the smithy glowed with firelight; the huge bellows sighed like a sleeping beast.
The smith was a bare-chested Chinese old man whose muscles looked carved from rock and whose skin was bronzed by decades of furnace heat. When Lin Jie entered, the man was hamring a glowing horseshoe.
“We’re closed.” The old man muttered without looking up.
“I don’t make farming tools.” Lin Jie set the oilcloth bundle down on a rust-streaked anvil.
“I make weapons.”
When the oilcloth was undone, the two damaged armants, radiating eerie spiritual fluctuations, were revealed. The old man’s hamr froze midair. His cloudy old eyes sharpened when he saw the broken blade of Withered Cicada.
“Heavy malignance.” He set the hamr down and reached out to touch the broken blade. “This is from the Orient. Its ‘spirit’ was forcibly erased — there’s bitter resentnt here.”
He then picked up Silence’s hilt.
“This one’s more interesting. Alive?” The old man glanced at Lin Jie in surprise. “You’re trying to pair two enemies together?”
“Can you do it?” Lin Jie asked. “Forge a new blade from this material to fit this hilt. I want to preserve the toxin sac’s channel and… see if I can fuse so of that sword’s property into it.”
The old man was silent for a mont, drew on his pipe, and blew out a ring of smoke.
“This is a tough job. These two materials hate each other. One is ‘poison,’ the other is ‘annihilation.’ Could blow the furnace.”
“But I owe that old crow a favor.” He exhaled another tobacco ring. “Since you were put in by Su Sanniang, you’re with the old crow.”
“Two hours.”
The old man turned, grabbed the two broken pieces, and threw them into the furnace’s hottest core.
“You pump the bellows beside . Don’t stop.”
The next two hours were a fight against fire and spirit. Withered Cicada’s material was bizarre — instead of lting into molten tal, it turned into a gray-white, rcury-like viscous semi-fluid. It was the personification of Extinction. It resisted reshaping and resisted being changed.
The old smith sweat profusely, his hamr falling like rain. Each strike carried a strange rhythm, as if using vibration to ta the stubborn tal. Lin Jie controlled the heat, channeling the raging furnace to suppress the broken blade’s resentnt.
At last.
With the sizzle of the final quench, a brand-new blade took shape. The old man clamped it with tongs and carefully seated it into Silence’s hollow hilt.
“Click.”
The new blade connected perfectly with the living toxin sac. Lin Jie took the reborn weapon — still a folding knife in form, but the blade’s color had changed. No longer the earlier semi-transparent crystalline look, it now wore a dull, dark gray, like ash after burning. The blade’s surface was covered in fine hamr-forged patterns resembling cicada wings.
Lin Jie pressed the switch. The blade sprang out silently. He grabbed an abandoned iron rod and made a light cut. The rod split into two without a sound.
The cut showed an odd gray-white edge, as if that small piece of tal’s physical properties had been killed in an instant.
And Lin Jie could sense more.
When the blade sliced through sothing, the toxin sac would inject its poison, and the blade itself released an ultra-brief interference wave targeting spiritual flow. This was a weakened remnant of Withered Cicada’s property — Silent Cutting.
Targets slashed by this knife would have the spiritual circuits near the wound forcibly severed for a few seconds. For a UMA, that ant the wound would not clot. For a capable enemy like the Iron Cross captain, it ant he would be unable to use any ability requiring spiritual energy within seconds, even unable to keep grotesque armants functioning.
It was a killer specifically designed to “anti-magic.”
“Good knife.” Lin Jie sheathed it and solemnly saluted the old man. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank . This blade wanted to live.” The smith waved his hand and picked up the horseshoe again. “Go on, don’t keep from hamring.”
…
When Lin Jie returned to Gu Ji Zhai, Evelyn’s assays had just finished. The atmosphere in the safe house was still heavy but now edged with urgency.
Lin Jie placed the newly revived Silence on the table.
“Fixed?” Julian pushed his glasses and studied the gray blade.
“Not only fixed, upgraded.” Lin Jie’s voice was calm. “Now we have a way to cut through its defenses, provided we can get into close range.”
“That chance has to co from this.” Evelyn removed her goggles and pointed to the freshly written report on the table.
“The results are out. This stuff is a mockery of physical law.”
Evelyn tossed the preliminary assay onto the table; the thin sheet slid and stopped before Lin Jie.
“I tested sulfuric acid, strong alkali, and high-voltage discharge.” Evelyn pointed at the report. “The results show this black grease is none of the animal fats we know.”
“It exhibits extrely high viscosity and hardness under intense impact, which is why your bullets slid off.”
Lin Jie skimd the report. Though he did not grasp all the complex theory, the conclusions were clear. The substance absorbed kinetic energy and acted as a perfect insulator comparable to modern technical ceramics.
“And it also has corrosive properties similar to sulfuric acid, capable of rapidly destroying tal.” Evelyn added, still shuddering at the mory of his lted scalpel. “This isn’t sothing that could naturally evolve — it’s more like a deliberately engineered weapon.”
“It’s a congloration of resentnt, and also a product of dark magic.” Julian closed his book and stepped forward. “Su Sanniang’s intel was right. The creature locals call the Oil Ghost is essentially a cursed spirit, but that grease grants it near-invincible defenses in the material world.”
Lin Jie set down a rag and tapped the tabletop rhythmically with his fingers.
“Nothing is truly invincible.” His voice was chillingly calm. “If it’s material, it follows so rules of material exchange. Since that oil is both its armor and the foundation of its existence, we must find a way to strip or destroy that armor.”
“But conventional ans don’t work.” Evelyn spread her hands, frustrated. “Physical attacks slide off, energy attacks are insulated, we can’t even get near it.”
“Then change our perspective.”
Lin Jie stood at the huge blackboard and sketched a crude human outline. He drew a thick circle around it and wrote a big word beside it — Oil.
“We’ve been trying to directly kill the person-or-ghost inside, but the oil blocks everything.” He turned to them. “If this oil behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid, then its state can be altered.”
“When does oil lose its lubricity and fluidity?”
“Freeze it?” Julian guessed, “Lock it solid?”
“We tried the ice plant.” Evelyn shook her head. “This supernatural grease’s freezing point may be extrely low, near absolute zero.”
“Then do the opposite.” A glint crossed Lin Jie’s eyes. “If we can’t freeze it, we can desiccate it, or force a violent chemical reaction to denature it.”
His gaze landed on a corner bag of white powder used for corpse treatnt and desiccation. It was common in Su Sanniang’s funeral parlor — cheap, plentiful industrial raw material.
“Quickli.”
Lin Jie spoke the word.
Evelyn paused, then her eyes lit. As a chemistry expert she imdiately grasped the idea.
“Calcium oxide!” She leapt up and grabbed a handful of the powder. “Quickli is a powerful desiccant and reacts violently with water or moisture in organic matter.”
“That reaction can instantly produce temperatures of several hundred degrees Celsius and will absorb large amounts of water!”
“Exactly.” Lin Jie nodded. “That grease, strange as it is, is still an organic-based fluid and must contain water or so dium that keeps it liquid. If we cover it with vast quantities of quickli, the violent reaction will not only burn it with heat, but, crucially, will destroy the oil’s molecular structure and dehydrate and harden it.”
“Like turning wet mud into a hardened brick.”
Julian grasped the tactical logic. “Once the oil hardens, it loses its slick immunity and its rcury-like flow. It’ll be a turtle trapped in a plaster shell.”
Lin Jie drew a big X over the word Oil on the blackboard and smiled coldly. “We can easily smash the shell and cut its neck.”
It was a bold but logical plan. Compared to expensive alchemical bombs or rare formations, this exploitation of basic chemistry was more feasible with their resources.
“But it’s not enough.” Julian pushed his glasses, still grave. “This creature is cunning; once it senses danger, it will liquefy and escape, like when it slipped into the sewers from the warehouse.”
“If it liquefies and escapes into groundwater or narrow cracks before the reaction completes, all our work is wasted.” He pointed at a passage in a manuscript. “The literature notes that when the Oil Ghost liquefies to move, it generates a special low-frequency vibration around its body.”
“So it relies on that particular frequency to maintain stability and cohesion in liquid form.”
“Frequency?” Evelyn’s face brightened with inspiration. “Yes — frequency.”
“If we use a sound wave that counters or violently disturbs that frequency while it tries to liquefy, we might break the stability of its liquid state, forcing it to remain solid or semi-solid.”
“Sound weapon.” Lin Jie looked at Evelyn. “Isn’t that your specialty?”
Evelyn smiled confidently and picked up the core module of her Echo Goggles. “Even though my goggles are damaged, the audio filtration and amplification array core survived. I can rework it into a directional high-frequency sound emitter. It may lack raw power to injure directly, but it’s more than enough to disrupt its liquefaction.”
“Good.” Lin Jie wrote the second keyword on the blackboard — Sound.
“Quickli to destroy the armor, high-frequency sound to block escape.”
He tossed the chalk aside. “That’s our tactical core.”
“Now we need a suitable place to set the trap.”
“Not an open dock, not a street with many exits.” Julian analyzed. “We need a relatively enclosed spot easy to seal, where we can rig chanisms.”
The three clustered over a Singapore map, eyes skimming the dense streets and buildings. Their fingers traced comrcial districts, squalid slums, and busy port areas before stopping at a remote spot on the upstream edge of the Singapore River.
“How about here?”
Lin Jie’s finger hovered over a black square inked near the Kallang River mouth. “The old ice factory at Kallang.”
“I rember it.” Julian adjusted his glasses. “Two years ago its condensers ruptured and leaked ammonia that nearly killed half the dock workers. The colonial governnt sealed it afterward. Inside are huge ice storage pools and a rusted maze of pipes.”
“And it’s a perfect sealed chamber, surrounded by wasteland, no innocents at risk.” Evelyn added. “Being an ice factory it’s full of recirculation pipes and brine tubes and steam exhaust fans.”
She ntally disassembled the nineteenth-century industrial structure. “If we fill those dried pipes with quickli and get the exhaust fans running, we can create a white storm in seconds.”
“Thick red brick walls and iron roof will lock sound inside,” Julian chid in. “It’ll be an inescapable echo chamber.”
“Exactly what we want.” Lin Jie struck the table with a decisive knock. “That’s the place.”
Outside, the rain had stopped, but heavy clouds still hid the moon, cloaking the city in suffocating darkness.
Over the next few hours the trio displayed high execution. Lin Jie listed required supplies and contacted Su Sanniang for aid. Though she refused direct intervention, providing tons of quickli and so lures was trivial for her. Evelyn buried herself in chanical parts and wiring, disassembling spare radio transmitters and loudspeakers, rewinding coils to build the crucial sound disruptor. Solder fus curled around her.
Julian rehearsed firing, aiming, and trigger control in the corner over and over. He could no longer be the helper hiding behind cover — he needed to be the key firepower to seal the creature’s movent.
At three in the morning a black carriage stopped silently at the abandoned factory by the Kallang River. The air still carried a faint ammonia tang from the old leak, conveniently masking the scents of quickli and human presence.
Lin Jie jumped down, directing Su Sanniang’s n to carry heavy sacks of quickli into the factory. They efficiently filled the dried sprinkler pipes with the white powder and connected a few modified steam blowers to the vents. Evelyn climbed to the factory’s second-floor platform and mounted the assembled sound generator — a large copper-horn-shaped device — onto the railing, aiming it at the giant ice reservoir below. That reservoir would be the tomb they had prepared for the greedy creature.
When everything was ready, Lin Jie stood in the factory’s open central space and surveyed the death trap.
“All set.” He whispered. “Only missing the lead actor.”
“Will it bite?” Julian, on the second-floor sniper perch, sounded worried. “The creature is greedy but not stupid. It has an animal’s instinct for danger.”
“It will.” Lin Jie drew from his pocket a finely made paper effigy dressed in red. Su Sanniang had specially prepared this bait. The effigy wasn’t only lifelike; inside was a strand of a pure-yin woman’s hair extracted by secret rite and her birth horoscope. For the extrely lascivious Oil Ghost, this was like blood to a shark — an irresistible fatal lure.
Lin Jie placed the effigy in the ice reservoir’s center and sprinkled so special aromatic powders. Then he retired into shadow and gripped his Serene Heart.
Ti passed in silence. The river flowed outside; night birds called. All lights were out; moonlight filtered through the broken roof in mottled patches. Lin Jie closed his eyes, cald his breathing, and slipped into the absolute stillness of a hunter. He waited.
He waited for the nauseating stench of rancid oil to return.
He waited for that nightmarish slide to glide toward the white hell they had tailored.
This battle was not only to pass Su Sanniang’s test but to prove that in the horror-filled South Seas, human wisdom and courage remained the greatest weapons.
“It’s coming.”
Evelyn signaled. At the sa ti Lin Jie’s nose twitched. That familiar odor arrived.
With a slimy sound like a slug crossing the floor, a black, flowing figure appeared at the crack of the factory door. It peered in, expressionless yet showing a tangled mix of curiosity and hunger on its faceless head.
It spotted the red paper effigy in the center; greed from the depths of its soul overpowered its caution. The creature emitted a chilling chuckle, liquefied, and slid along the floor toward the fatal bait.
Lin Jie watched the approaching mass and the corner of his mouth curved.
His hand pressed the detonator’s switch.
At this mont, identity reversed.
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