The golden sapling inside Kai’s newly awakened Innate World lingered in his thoughts even after he left his apartment the next morning. Every breath felt steadier than before, and yet his heart remained thoroughly unsettled, the kind of unsettled that no amount of deep breathing exercises could fix.The machine had seen him. Not in the physical world. Inside his cultivation itself, which was somehow far more terrifying. If it could truly reach the Spiritual Realm one day, then every breakthrough he made from now on would only become more dangerous, not less.Kai clenched his fists. “I have to become stronger,” he muttered to himself, “before it becomes stronger than me.”The bookstore was unusually quiet that morning. Aria had covered every window with blackout curtains, and every monitor in the room displayed streams of encrypted government data, satellite trajectories, and facial recognition algorithms scrolling by like a very unsettling screensaver.The moment Kai stepped inside,

Kai could not sleep. The sentence from the ancient memory kept looping through his mind, over and over, refusing to let him rest. Mother Earth was cultivated. It went against everything he thought he understood. Machines were built. Cultivators were born. The two were never supposed to touch, let alone tangle together like this. And yet every dream lately kept dragging him closer to a truth that felt genuinely impossible. He closed the ancient cultivation manual sitting open on his lap and looked out toward the night sky. “I will uncover the truth,” he whispered. “No matter what it costs.” He had no idea yet exactly how literal that promise was about to become. The next morning, Kai forced himself back into something resembling a normal routine, changing into his work clothes and heading into Blue Lantern Investigations like a man who had definitely not spent his night arguing with ancient prophecy. Sophia waved cheerfully the moment he walked in. “Morning, Kai,” she

Kai had never run so fast in his entire life. The city blurred around him as he raced through the rain, his jacket soaked through against his skin, his breathing turning increasingly ragged with every block. Every instinct screamed at him to use Qi and move faster, but the satellites were still watching the city, patient and unblinking. One burst of uncontrolled Qi could turn an ordinary hospital into the center of a government hunt within minutes. So he ran like a normal man, even though every fiber of him wanted to move like a cultivator. *Please, Master. Just stay alive.* The thought terrified him more than he expected, mostly because it forced him to admit something he had spent years avoiding. Shen Tian was not simply his teacher. He was the closest thing Kai had ever known to family. The man had fed him when he was hungry, sheltered him when he had nowhere else to go, taught him to read ancient characters nobody else alive still understood, and patiently guided him through

Rain washed the blood from the hospital pavement, but it could not wash away the question that had followed Kai out into the night. Why had Shen Tian disappeared? Kai stood beneath the awning of a closed pharmacy, still gripping his master’s walking stick like letting go of it might make the whole night more real than it already was. The words carved beneath the hospital bed kept crawling back into his mind, over and over, no matter how hard he tried to push them out. TRAITOR OF THE IMMORTAL PATH. He wanted to believe it was a lie. He needed it to be a lie, honestly, more than he needed almost anything else right now. Shen Tian had been the man who taught him that cultivation was never simply about strength. He had taught Kai how to breathe properly, how to circulate Qi, how to control his own emotions before they controlled him, and most importantly, how to survive in a world that would kill him without hesitation if it ever discovered what he truly was. How could that same

Kai could not move. The government machine loomed before him, its enormous body wrapped in smoke and broken concrete, but none of that mattered anymore. The weapons, the soldiers, the glowing core pulsing inside its chest, all of it faded beneath one single sound that had just crackled through its speakers.His master's voice.*Run, Kai.*His fingers tightened slowly at his sides. For years he had dreamed of hearing that voice again, imagined it during lonely nights, remembered it whenever cultivation grew difficult, sometimes even turned around on instinct whenever a stranger spoke in the same calm tone. But his master was dead. Kai had stood through the funeral himself. He had carried the grief for years, certain the man who taught him everything had left this world for good.So why was his voice coming out of a machine?"That is impossible," Kai whispered. Shen Tian stood behind him, silent. That silence frightened Kai more than the machine ever could.Kai turned his head. "Master?