Deacon Su's voice, thin and sharp as a shard of ice, echoed across the Outer Disciples' Assembly Courtyard. Hundreds of youths, dressed in the same worn, gray robes as Lin Feng, listened with a mixture of fear and a morbid expectation that chilled the blood.
"The Umbral Ridge Spirit Beast Trial will be held in three days!" the deacon announced, his small eyes sweeping over the crowd as if he were already counting the corpses. "As is tradition, the outer disciples will have the honor of being the vanguard, clearing the outer zones for our more valuable inner disciples."
A tense murmur rippled through the crowd. "Honor." Lin Feng almost snorted at the word. It was a cruel euphemism for "bait." The Umbral Ridge was notorious for its ferocious beasts and treacherous terrain. Outer disciples, with their deficient cultivation and poor-quality equipment, were sent in first to wear down the lesser beasts, trigger natural traps, and, in essence, die in significant numbers so the hunt would be safer and more fruitful for the sect's elite.
"The rules are simple," Deacon Su continued, a barely perceptible smile playing on his lips. "Everything you kill or find in the designated zones will be yours… if you survive to claim it. Those who demonstrate exceptional courage and collection might even attract the attention of the Elders." Another white lie. The attention a crippled or dying outer disciple might attract was, at best, that of those tasked with collecting the bodies.
Lin Feng felt a cold knot in his stomach. Three days. Seventy-two hours before being thrown to the wolves—or rather, the tigers. He observed the faces around him: some visibly paled, others tried to display a bravado that fooled no one, and a few, the most desperate or the most foolish, seemed to see a genuine opportunity. He only saw a slaughterhouse.
The assembly dissolved amidst nervous whispers and a palpable sense of doom. Lin Feng slipped away, wanting to escape the miasma of collective fear. As he walked back to his dilapidated hut, the image of his younger brother, Lin Xiao, surfaced in his mind with painful clarity. The promise made on his deathbed—"Get strong, Gege… live for us both…"—resonated like a mocking echo. How could he get strong? How could he live, when the sect seemed determined to squeeze every last drop from his useless existence?
That night, sleep eluded him. The hut felt like a premature tomb. He tossed and turned on his straw pallet, the memory of the strange vibration in his dantian from the previous night returning again and again. It had been so fleeting, so different from his usual failures when attempting to cultivate. Could it be… something? An anomaly, a deviation from the predictable path toward his death on the Umbral Ridge?
A raw, sharp desperation seized him. He couldn't die like this. Not after surviving the Demonic Plague, not after the promise to Xiao. There had to be something, anything.
Driven by an urgency bordering on madness, he rose before dawn. He wouldn't go to the stables. Not today. He needed answers, or at least, a more significant attempt.
He sought out the most isolated place he knew within the sect's boundaries: a small, forgotten ravine at the foot of the Precipice of Forgotten Beasts, a place even the boldest disciples steered clear of due to rumors of dangerous residual energies and mutated beasts lurking in its depths. It was a gloomy spot, overgrown with gnarled weeds and strangely shaped rocks, where the ambient Qi felt thin and oddly oppressive. Perfect.
He sat on a cold, damp rock, the morning air chilling him to the bone. He closed his eyes, ignoring the frantic beating of his heart. He tried to recall the sensation from the night before, that subtle vibration. He focused, pushing his consciousness toward his dantian, that dead sea of stagnant energy.
For an hour, he felt nothing but the usual frustration. The Qi of Heaven and Earth ignored him. His meridians remained like dry riverbeds. Despair began to gnaw at the edges of his determination.
"Damn it!" He slammed his fist against the rock, the sharp pain a welcome anchor to his growing panic. "There has to be something!"
He tried again, but this time, with a fury born of desperation. He didn't try to gently coax the Qi. He pictured Zhang Fu's contempt, Deacon Su's cruel smile, the impending death in the trial. He let that rage, that fear, that raw need to survive consume him. He pushed his will toward his dantian not as a plea, but as a command, a silent war cry.
And then, it happened.
It wasn't a vibration. It was a tearing.
A sharp pain, as if a thousand red-hot needles were simultaneously stabbing into his lower abdomen, made him cry out. The world vanished in a maelstrom of agony and blinding light behind his eyelids. He felt as if something ancient and vast, something that had slumbered for eons in the depths of his being, began to stir.
A torrential energy, chaotic and primordial, surged from his dantian. It didn't flow; it exploded, flooding his narrow, unprepared meridians with brutal force. It was like trying to channel a raging river through a straw. The pain was unbearable. He felt his meridians creak, threatening to burst. His head throbbed, strange, fragmented visions dancing before his inner eyes: collapsing stars, writhing shadows, a vast, ancient eye observing him from an abyss of pure darkness. He heard incomprehensible whispers, promises of power and threats of annihilation.
The energy was wild, untamed; it wasn't the pure, orderly spiritual Qi the manuals described. This was different. Dark. Powerful. Terrifying.
Just when he thought his body would disintegrate, that his mind would shatter, the wave of energy peaked and then, as abruptly as it had begun, it receded, sinking back into the depths of his dantian, leaving behind a throbbing silence and an all-consuming pain.
Lin Feng slumped sideways, his body trembling uncontrollably. He gasped for breath, cold sweat drenching his robes. It took him several minutes to regain a modicum of coherence. The taste of blood filled his mouth; he'd bitten his tongue.
Slowly, with herculean effort, he sat up. He felt as if he'd been trampled by a herd of Horned Beasts. But beneath the pain and exhaustion, there was something else. A strange… lightness. And a new awareness.
He looked around. The weeds near the rock where he'd sat were withered, their leaves blackened as if touched by an unnatural frost or searing heat. A small crack, fresh and sharp, ran across the surface of the rock he'd struck earlier. He didn't remember seeing it.
The power… it had affected his surroundings.
This was "progression," he realized with a mixture of terror and awe. Not a cultivation breakthrough in the traditional sense, but confirmation that something resided within him. Something powerful. Something dangerous.
He tried to summon that energy again, to feel it, to direct it. But it didn't respond. Only a painful echo remained in his dantian and the sensation of an unfathomable abyss within. He had no control over it. It was like carrying a slumbering beast caged in his guts.
He rose on trembling legs. This was his secret. His only, terrifying hope for the Spirit Beast Trial. If he could unleash that energy again, even for an instant…
As he stumbled away from the ravine, limping and trying to appear as normal as possible, he saw a figure in the distance, near one of the more exclusive training grounds reserved for inner disciples. It was a young woman, her movements fluid and precise as she practiced a sword form. Even at that distance, the intensity she emanated was palpable. Flames danced around her sword, a pure orange-red, the Purifying Fire of a high-level Fire Dao cultivator.
Xiao Lan.
Lin Feng paused for a moment, hidden behind an old tree. He watched her move with lethal grace, every thrust, every parry, imbued with a power he could barely comprehend. She was a world apart from his own desperate, chaotic struggle. She was the embodiment of discipline, of cultivated talent. He… he was a vessel of something primordial and wild.
The sight of Xiao Lan didn't dishearten him as it might have before. Instead, it ignited a spark of grim determination. He couldn't be like her. But maybe, just maybe, his own path, however dark and perilous, could lead him somewhere. The fated encounter wasn't yet upon them, but the awareness of her existence, of that visible pinnacle of power, reminded him of the height of the mountain he somehow had to begin to climb.
The Spirit Beast Trial was in two days. He was still physically weak, and his new "power" was a painful, uncontrollable secret. He touched his dantian, where the echo of the storm still lingered.
The trial would be a slaughter, no doubt. But as Lin Feng walked toward the grim reality of his duties in the sect, a truth he barely understood began to take shape in his mind: he was no longer just empty. He was a vessel of chaos. And chaos, he was beginning to suspect, was a terrifyingly potent form of change.