Dragonblood Chaos Heir

Chapter 14: Chaos Meets Mountain

The world narrowed to the wall of living earth and the calm eye of the storm standing before it.

Elder Tian's Mountain-Crushing Blade wasn't just a technique; it was a declaration. It was the culmination of decades of disciplined cultivation, the unshakable belief that the earth was solid, that power was mass, that order prevailed. It was the mountain itself given motion, and it scorned tricks, shadows, and devouring ghosts.

Lin Feng saw it not as a threat, but as a banquet.

The Chaos Dantian within him didn't spin. It detonated. The vortex became a starving, whirling singularity, its hunger no longer a pull but a scream that echoed in the silent chambers of his soul. The Dragon Emperor's legacy, born from chaos and defiance, recognized a kindred, opposing force, stagnant, arrogant order, and rose to consume it.

Lin Feng didn't assume a defensive stance. He spread his arms wide, as if to embrace the oncoming avalanche.

His palms faced the surging tidal wave of rock and compacted qi.

He didn't try to absorb the physical mass—that would have crushed him instantly. He targeted the energy binding it together, the immense, structured earth-attribute qi that gave the mountain its form and its murderous intent.

Chaos-Stealing Palm evolved. It was no longer a palm strike. It was a Void Mouth.

As the leading edge of the stone fin reached him, a terrifying phenomenon occurred. The solid rock didn't impact. It broke apart, not into dust, but into streams of raw, brown energy that were violently drained away from the structure of the technique. It was like watching a sandcastle hit by a vacuum—the form simply unraveled, its essence stolen.

But the technique was too vast, too powerful. Lin Feng was a man trying to drink a river. The sheer volume of energy flooding into him was catastrophic. His meridians, forged in dragon's blood, screamed in protest. They felt like glass tube hit by a lava flow. Agony, white-hot and absolute, seared through every inch of his being. He felt his skin crack, tiny spots appearing as the uncontrolled power sought escape.

Yet, the Chaos Dantian held. The vortex, now visible as a swirling darkness in his core to any with spiritual sight, convulsed but did not falter. It consumed with a frantic, desperate joy. It broke down the structured earth qi, shattering its rigid alignment, and converted it into raw, churning chaos.

The mountain fin advanced, but it was being eaten from the front. It pushed Lin Feng back, his boots carving twin trenches in the hard clay. Ten feet. Twenty. Stone and earth dissolved into nothingness before him, but the pressure was immense, the weight of a world-view trying to erase his existence.

From the sidelines, Lin Tao watched with stunned, drooling terror. The enforcers cracked. Their patriarch's supreme technique, one that could level a manor house, was being… consumed by a lone, crackling figure who seemed to be burning up from the inside.

Elder Tian’s eyes bulged. His connection to the technique was fading. He could feel the qi he’d poured into it being violently severed, stolen, corrupted. It was impossible. It was an offense against the natural law of cultivation.

"DEMON!" Tian roared, his composure shattering. He poured more qi into the technique, the mountain fin thickening, trying to overwhelm the devouring mouth by sheer, brute volume.

It was the wrong move.

Lin Feng, buried in agony and ecstasy, felt the influx spike. His meridians were at their breaking point. But within the chaos, a principle from the scripture flared: When the River Overflows, Become the Ocean.

He stopped trying to contain it all.

He redirected.

The stolen, chaotic earth energy, now mixed with the dragon's blood vitality and the poison of Blackroot sap and a dozen other stolen essences, couldn't be held. So he didn't hold it. He fired it back.

From the spots in his skin, from his mouth, from his eyes that now blazed with infernal light, a storm of corrupted power erupted. It wasn't a technique. It was a Chaos Burst—a raw, unfocused vomit of everything he'd just consumed, laced with the devouring nature of his own core.

A geyser of black, brown, and crimson energy, shot through with sickly green and silver lightning, shot backward from him, not at Tian, but at the ground at his feet and the air around him.

BOOM!

The explosion was not of impact, but of annihilation. The ground in a twenty-foot radius around Lin Feng didn't crater; it vanished, turned into a fine, lifeless powder that was instantly blasted upward in a swirling maelstrom. The shockwave of chaotic force hit the remainder of the Mountain-Crushing Blade.

The structured earth technique met unstructured chaos.

Order met chaos.

The mountain fin didn't just break; it unraveled at a molecular level. It dissolved into the chaotic storm, adding its mass to the screaming vortex of dust and mad energy that now surrounded Lin Feng, obscuring him from view.

The backlash hit Elder Tian like a physical blow. He staggered back, his dao sword's glow flickering wildly. A trickle of blood escaped the corner of his mouth. His technique had not just been broken; it had been eaten and then used as fuel for a cataclysm. The spiritual feedback was devastating.

Silence, heavy and shocked, fell over the clearing. The enforcers stared at the obscuring, slowly settling cloud of grey dust and fading chaotic light.

From within the cloud, a figure stumbled forward.

Lin Feng emerged. He was a ruin. His clothes were in tatters, his body covered in a latticework of fine, bleeding cracks, like porcelain struck by a hammer. Steam rose from his skin. One eye was swollen shut. But he was standing. And in his one good eye, the swirling chaos had not dimmed; it had crystallized into a cold, absolute focus.

He raised a trembling hand and wiped blood from his lips. He looked at his uncle across the devastated ground.

His voice, when it came, was a raw scrape, but it carried with the weight of the abyss.

"Is that…" he coughed, a speck of black blood hitting the dust, "...all the mountain has to offer?"

Elder Tian’s face contorted with a rage so profound it burned away the last of his calculated demeanor. The boy was broken, bleeding, on the verge of collapse. He had survived by some monstrous, sacrificial trick. But he was spent. Tian could feel it. The chaotic aura around him was guttering, wild and depleted.

"Arrogant wretch!" Tian spat. "You have burned your own soul to defy me! You are a candle at its end! Now, DIE!"

He abandoned grand techniques. He charged, his dao sword becoming a blur of sediment-brown light, aiming to finish this with a single, precise, physical beheading. His 9th Layer Qi Condensation speed was terrifying, closing the distance in a heartbeat.

Lin Feng didn't move. He couldn't. His body was a shattered vessel. But as Tian descended upon him, the sword aiming for his neck, Lin Feng did one last thing.

He smiled. A small, bloody, utterly terrifying smile.

He dropped his final defense. He let the Chaos Dantian, now bloated with stolen power and on the verge of catastrophic collapse, do what it was meant to do.

Convert. And Command.

He didn't have the control to shape a technique. So he shaped the only thing he had left: Pain.

He took the agony of his bursting meridians, the corrosive burn of the chaotic energy, the hollow ache of the dragon's endless hunger, and he focused it all into a single, silent, spiritual SCREAM.

It was not a sound. It was a projection of utter existential negation, forged in the blood pool and tempered in the crucible of a mountain's wrath.

Soul Art: Echo of the Ancient Roar.

Tian’s sword was an inch from Lin Feng’s throat when the wave hit him.

It bypassed his physical defenses, his earth qi, his armor. It went straight into his mind, his soul, his dantian.

He did not hear a roar. He experienced the moment of the Dragon Emperor's fall—the shattering of divinity, the infinite loss, the bottomless, timeless rage. He felt the cold of the abyss that had birthed his nephew. He felt the devouring mouth of chaos turn its gaze upon him.

For a single, eternal second, Elder Tian, the tyrant, the plotter, the man of stone and order, knew what it was to be nothing. To be prey. To be dust before the gaze of a true god.

He froze. His sword trembled, then fell from nerveless fingers, clattering to the ground. His eyes went wide, vacant, filled with a horror that had no name. A thin line of drool escaped his lips. He took a shuddering step back, then another, making a low, guttural, animal whimper in the back of his throat.

The enforcers stared, paralyzed. Their invincible patriarch stood defanged, broken not in body, but in spirit, staring at the bloody, broken boy as if he were the end of all things.

Lin Feng, using the last shred of his will, took one step forward. He looked past the weak Tian to the terrified ranks of Lin clansmen.

"Your mountain," he rasped, the words a death rattle of triumph, "is just gravel."

Then, his body finally gave out. His knees buckled. He collapsed forward into the dust of the clearing he had helped create.

But he did not fall alone. The Echo of the Ancient Roar still hung in the air, a psychic scar on the battlefield. And standing amidst his broken men, a sword at his feet and his mind in ruins, Elder Tian had lost the only thing that had ever mattered to him: his unshakable certainty.

The hammer had struck the shadow.

And the shadow had shown the hammer the face of the abyss from which it was forged.