Only two days. Forty-eight turns of the water clock before the Umbral Ridge swallowed another batch of outer disciples. Lin Feng felt the weight of every falling grain of sand, every second drawing him closer to the slaughterhouse. His body, still aching from the violent surge of energy the day before, was a constant reminder of the strange and dangerous card he now held up his sleeve.
His morning chores in the stables felt different. It wasn't the work itself, which remained just as thankless and foul-smelling, but his own perception. A new, almost feverish alertness sharpened his senses. The neigh of a Horned Beast sounded clearer, the acrid scent of ammonia more pungent. It was as if the brief immersion in that chaotic torrent had wiped away a layer of grime from his senses, or perhaps, it was simply the adrenaline of knowing his days were, literally, numbered.
He managed to avoid Zhang Fu and his gang. It wasn't out of the paralyzing fear of before, though prudence remained his chief counsel. This time, there was a calculated caution to his movements. He slipped through less-traveled routes, kept his head down but his ears keen. He couldn't afford any more physical damage, nor a confrontation that would draw unwanted attention to his already unstable state. On one occasion, he nearly bumped into Li Wei, the most slippery of the trio, near the fodder storage. Lin Feng simply changed direction with a fluidity he hadn't possessed days ago, disappearing into the shadows of an eave before Li Wei even looked up. A small change, an adaptation born of necessity.
That afternoon, shirking his evening duties—an act of rebellion that would have cost him a beating at any other time, but now felt like a vital necessity—he returned to the desolate ravine at the foot of the Precipice of Forgotten Beasts. The air here was still heavy, laden with an unnatural stillness. The withered grass around the rock where he had experienced the awakening remained a silent testament to what had occurred.
"There has to be a way," he muttered to himself, his voice barely audible above the whistle of the wind among the rocks. He couldn't rely on an accidental explosion of energy. He needed to understand, even a fraction, of what now nested in his dantian.
He sat, not on the same rock, but near it. He closed his eyes and, instead of the desperate fury of the previous day, tried to summon calm. He tried to recall the sensation, not the tearing pain, but the instant before, that connection to something vast and primordial. He searched for the path that energy had taken as it surged.
For hours, he found only failure. His dantian was a silent well, or worse, it responded with twinges of residual pain that made him flinch. Frustration threatened to overwhelm him. Had it been just a fluke? An unrepeatable anomaly?
He gritted his teeth, blood welling anew from his lower lip where he'd bitten it unknowingly. "No." It couldn't be. He had felt it. It was real.
He focused again, this time with a cold, almost dispassionate tenacity. He visualized the energy not as a torrent, but as a thin thread, a strand of liquid darkness. And instead of pulling at it, he tried to… invite it. To persuade it.
A dull ache bloomed in his dantian, different from the explosion. It was a growing pressure, as if something dense and heavy resisted movement. He held on. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His body trembled.
Then, he felt it. A thread.
An infinitesimal filament of that dark, chaotic energy slipped out of his dantian, snaking towards his meridians. It was volatile, unstable, like trying to hold a live viper with tongs of ice. It burned, not with heat, but with a coldness that seeped into his bones, a sensation of… dissolution.
The thread of energy traveled down his right arm. His hand began to tremble violently. For an instant, his vision through his right eye sharpened unnaturally; he could see the intricate patterns on a lichen ten paces away with astonishing clarity. Then, the sensation changed. The trembling hand now seemed to vibrate with a contained, destructive energy. He tried to clench his fist and felt as if his bones would crack under an invisible pressure. The energy dissipated as quickly as it had come, leaving him gasping, his arm aching and strangely numb.
The cost was immediate. A wave of exhaustion hit him, and the pain in his meridians intensified, a reminder that he was playing with a fire he didn't understand. But a grim smile touched his lips. He could do it. He could, albeit crudely and at great risk, call upon that energy.
This wasn't cultivating Qi. There was no absorption from Heaven and Earth, no smooth circulation, no refinement. This was an internal struggle, a dangerous negotiation with a force that seemed to have a will of its own, an ancestral will alien to his. He was trying to coexist with the abyss he carried within.
For the rest of the afternoon, he continued his experiments. Each attempt was an agony, each small "success" cost him a portion of his vitality. He discovered that the chaotic energy didn't respond to the cultivation techniques in the manual. It responded, erratically, to his focused will, to his intense emotions, but above all, to a primordial desperation.
In one such attempt, trying to externalize a slightly thicker strand, he lost control for an instant. A pulse of energy, invisible but potent, shot from his hand towards a clump of particularly hardy weeds growing nearby. There was no explosion, no fire. Simply, the weeds, green and full of life a second before, withered at an astonishing speed, their leaves turning gray and brittle, crumbling to dust before his eyes. A complete life cycle, from verdancy to decay, compressed into less than three seconds.
Lin Feng was horrified and fascinated in equal measure. It wasn't just brute destruction; it was a kind of accelerated entropy, a subtle but absolute annihilation. This power was far stranger than he had imagined.
As he contemplated the dust where life had been, he was unaware of a lone figure moving stealthily along the upper slope of the ravine, a considerable distance away. Li Wei, one of Zhang Fu's lackeys, always looking for an opportunity to gain an advantage or information, had decided to explore this forgotten area hoping to find some rare spirit herb other disciples overlooked. He didn't see Lin Feng, hidden by rocks and undergrowth, nor did he understand the cause of the phenomenon. But his rat-like eyes fixed on the circle of suddenly dead and powdered grass in an otherwise relatively green area. It was a strange, unnatural anomaly. He frowned, an expression of puzzlement and dawning suspicion crossing his face. There was no sign of burning, no trace of poison. Just… dust. He filed the strange sight away in his mind, like a disturbing curiosity. The world was vast, and sects, even the humblest, sometimes harbored strange secrets.
Lin Feng, oblivious to the prying gaze, struggled to catch his breath. He realized he couldn't truly control the chaos. But perhaps, just perhaps, he could learn to endure its release better, to direct its initial eruption, if only for a split second. It was a suicidal idea, but it was the only one he had.
He thought of the Spirit Beast Trial. He was still weak by any cultivator's standards. He hadn't advanced a single step in the Qi Condensation Realm. But if he could just unleash a burst of that chaotic energy at the right moment…
He spent the rest of the day practicing just that: drawing out the thread of chaos and trying to "aim" its dissipation, or simply getting used to the violent internal backlash it provoked. He failed most of the time. Pain was a constant. Each attempt was like playing Russian roulette with his own soul. But with each failure, he learned something new about the texture of that power, about the way it twisted his meridians, about the feeling of fundamental wrongness that permeated it compared to the Qi he was supposed to cultivate.
The night before the trial found him back in his secret ravine. He was gaunt, his sunken eyes shining with a feverish light, his body covered in internal bruises that couldn't be seen but screamed with every movement. He had reached the limit of his endurance. One last attempt.
He closed his eyes, letting desperation flood him. The image of Lin Xiao, smiling. Zhang Fu's mocking voice. Deacon Su's cold indifference. The shadow of death in the Umbral Ridge. All of it swirled in his mind, becoming dark fuel for his will.
He called to the chaos.
This time, something was different. The thread of energy that emerged was thicker, denser. The pain was just as intense, but beneath it, he felt a minuscule, almost imperceptible strand of… influence. It wasn't control, not by a long shot. It was as if, for an infinitesimal instant, the beast within him had acknowledged his hand.
With an effort that nearly cost him consciousness, he directed that pulse of energy toward a thick, dead branch jutting out from a nearby tree.
The branch didn't explode. It didn't burn. It simply… unraveled. The wood, already dry and brittle, aged eons in an instant. It lost all its structural cohesion, its color turning a deep, ashen gray, and then, with a silent crackle, it disintegrated into a fine shower of dust that the night wind scattered.
The backlash was brutal. Lin Feng fell to his knees, vomiting a mouthful of dark blood. His meridians howled. The chaotic energy, once released, had scourged him internally before retreating. But a savage, almost demented smile touched his bloodied lips.
It was a weapon. A terribly dangerous, double-edged weapon, one that would likely kill him before any enemy. But it was his weapon. And the nature of his power wasn't just brute force; it was something more insidious, something that touched the very fabric of existence and dissolved it. This was not the path of an ordinary Qi cultivator. This was a breath of fresh, and yet putrid, air, a unique path forged in desperation and primordial chaos.
As the first, pale glow of dawn tinged the eastern sky, Lin Feng stumbled back to his hut. He hadn't reached a new cultivation realm. He hadn't learned mystical techniques from a dusty scroll. He only possessed a secret that burned in his guts, a secret that could be both his salvation and his damnation, and a terrifying understanding of his own potential.
The sounds of the Scarlet Cloud Sect began to filter in: the distant tolling of a bell, the murmur of disciples preparing. The atmosphere was grim, heavy with the tension before the harvest of lives that would be the Spirit Beast Trial.
Lin Feng looked at his hands. They still trembled slightly, not just from exhaustion, but from the residue of the chaotic energy. He was still Lin Feng, the trash disciple in the eyes of the world. But now, he was trash with a hidden, sharp, and venomous fang.
The abattoir awaited. But today, Lin Feng would not be mere fodder. He would be the poison in the beast's maw, the disorder in the orderly slaughter. And perhaps, just perhaps, he would be the one to walk out from among the dead.