2026-06-06 02:30:54The alpha wolf didn't just run it launched itself like a heavy red-eyed boulder through the sheets of pouring rain. Its jaw split wide, long strings of thick saliva flying from its yellow fangs, aiming straight for Li Xuan’s exposed throat.
Lin Chen no, Li Xuan didn't flinch.
Inside his stomach, the sensation was pure, unadulterated hell. The ten thousand jagged shards of his ruined jade core were grinding against each other like a meat processor. It felt as if a thousand razors were trying to slice their way out through his skin from the inside. The sheer pain would have made a common cultivator faint instantly.
But Li Xuan’s mind was no longer common. It was filled with a toxic, burning ocean of absolute hatred for Mo Fan and Ning’er. That hatred acted like an anesthetic, numbing his nervous system and turning his agony into cold, focused focus.
"You want to eat a God?" Li Xuan whispered, his voice rattling with a metallic, layered echo.
He didn't have a sword. He didn't have a single drop of normal, liquid Qi in his channels. But as he flicked his index finger toward the lunging alpha beast, the dark emerald light inside his chest violently flared.
SHRREEEEEE!
A sound like a thousand mirrors shattering at high speed ripped through the stormy night.
A microscopic, razor-sharp shard of dark emerald energy invisible to the naked eye but carrying the absolute, condensed weight of his broken soul shot from his fingertip. It didn't just pierce the air; it literally tore a clean, empty line through the falling raindrops.
SQUELCH.
The alpha wolf didn't even get to bark. The invisible emerald razor struck its forehead, slicing through its skull, its spine, and its entire muscle structure so cleanly that the beast was instantly split into two perfect, symmetrical halves mid-air. The two bloody pieces of the wolf crashed uselessly into the mud on either side of Li Xuan's boots, its hot blood instantly washed away by the cold downpour.
The other two Abyssal Wolves stopped dead in their tracks, their paws sliding in the mud. Their primitive, monstrous instincts violently screamed at them to flee. The dying mortal they had come to eat had just turned into something infinitely more terrifying than any demon in the wasteland.
Li Xuan slowly dragged himself up from the mud. His tattered grey robes were soaked in blood, but as he stood upright, the hundreds of green cracks across his chest and torso began to glow even brighter, pulsing in sync with his ragged breathing.
Fractured Ascension: Level 1.
The natural laws of the heaven stated that a broken dantian could not hold energy that it would leak out like a sieve. But Li Xuan's broken jade shards didn't try to hold the energy. They reflected it. Every time the raw, chaotic spiritual energy of the stormy night tried to leak out of his wound, it slammed into the jagged surfaces of the shards, bouncing back and forth, multiplying in speed and cutting power until it turned into a lethal hurricane confined inside his flesh.
"My turn," Xuan murmured, his glowing white eyes locking onto the two remaining beasts.
He didn't wait for them to run. He simply took a sharp breath, pulling the freezing storm air deep into his lungs. He didn't use an intricate martial arts form. He just opened his palm and swept his arm forward in a wide, careless arc.
SWOOSH!
A violent wave of fifty dark emerald shards erupted from his palm, flying through the dark like a swarm of glowing green hornets. The razor-sharp energy blades minced through the rain, hitting the two wolves before they could even turn around to fly.
MINCE. CHOP. SLICE.
Within a millisecond, the two massive beasts were completely dismantled, turned into a fine, red mist of blood and bone that splattered across the dark tree trunks. Not a single scrap of meat remained whole.
Li Xuan stood alone in the dark, raining wasteland, surrounded by the minced remains of his first victims. He didn't feel happy; he felt a deep, dark hunger. The fractured jade pieces inside his stomach were still spinning, empty, demanding more energy to grind.
"This wasteland... it's a graveyard for thousands of rejected disciples and dead monsters," Xuan muttered to himself, looking deeper into the pitch-black valley where old bones and rusted weapons lay buried under the mud. "To anyone else, it is a hellhole of trash. To me... it is an infinite mountain of raw material."
Suddenly, the heavy sound of squelching boots came from the path behind him.
A tall man wearing the cruel, dark iron armor of an Azure Sky Sect Outer Warden stepped out from the trees, carrying a heavy iron lantern. He had been sent to verify that Li Xuan's corpse had been properly eaten by the wolves.
The warden stopped, his lantern light catching the bloody halves of the alpha wolf and the tall figure standing in the center of the clearing. His eyes widened in absolute shock as he recognized the wild black hair and the jade-cracked chest.
"Li... Li Xuan?!" the warden gasped, his hand instantly flying to the hilt of his iron sword. "You're still breathing?! Your core was destroyed by Young Master Mo Fan himself! How are you standing?!"
Shen Xuan turned his head slowly, his glowing emerald eyes locking onto the warden’s throat like a physical blade. A cold, bloodthirsty smile crept across his ruined face.
The warden’s heart hammered against his ribs. He was a Level 5 Qi Refining warrior—a trained killer of the outer peaks. But looking into Li Xuan’s white, soulless eyes, he felt an icy, primeval terror that made his fingers freeze against his sword hilt.
"You... you freak! You must have used a demonic forbidden art!" the warden screamed, trying to shake off his fear. He drew his iron blade, channeling his dull yellow Qi into the metal. "Young Master Mo Fan paid me twenty gold coins to bring back your severed fingers as proof of your death! If you're alive, I'll just have to chop them off myself!"
He lunged forward, his blade cutting a yellow arc through the heavy sheets of rain.
Li Xuan stood perfectly still, his tattered robes whipping around his bleeding chest as the dark emerald hurricane inside his stomach roared for its first human harvest.
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The Flavor of Salt and Smoke
The stew bubbled slowly in the heavy iron pot, sending up thick, fragrant plumes of steam that carried the rich scent of root vegetables, fresh herbs, and the savory depth of wild garlic Orem had foraged near the riverbank.Outside, the indigo night deepened, and the quiet stars cast a pale, silvery glow over the porch. The world was utterly still, save for the occasional rustle of the apple tree leaves and the soft scratching of Elian’s pen.Li Xuan sat on the edge of the porch steps, whittling a small piece of scrap pine into a flat wooden spoon. His movements were slow, deliberate, and entirely unburdened by the frantic urgency that had defined his past lives. Every curl of wood that fell to the dirt was a discarded fragment of tension, leaving his hands steady and his mind clear."You've been carving that spoon for three days," Orem noted from his rocking chair, his voice a dry, friendly rasp. The old man was holding his half-finished wooden duck, squinting at it in the dim candlel
The Ink of the Hearth
The afternoon heat settled over the northern ridge, baking the newly turned clay of the irrigation trench until it smelled of dry dust and sweet, sun-warmed earth. They had stopped working shortly after the midday sun reached its peak, retreating from the open fields to the cool, amber shadows of the porch.The traveler—whose name, they learned over a simple lunch of salted bread and water, was simply Master Orem—sat in the corner rocking chair, whittling a small block of soft pine into the rough shape of a sitting duck. The rhythmic shhh, shhh of his pocketknife peeling curls of wood matched the steady scratching of Elian’s pen at the wooden table nearby.Li Xuan stood at the kitchen counter, washing a bundle of freshly harvested carrots in a wooden basin. The water was cold, drawn straight from the deep spring beneath the roots of the ancient apple tree outside."Chapter fifty," Elian said suddenly, his voice breaking the quiet hum of the afternoon. He paused, lifting his pen from th
The Architecture of Morning
Dawn broke over the garden with a crisp, amber clarity, spilling light across the dewy leaves and the newly reinforced thatch roof. Inside the hut, the fire had burned down to a cozy bed of white-grey ash.Li Xuan was already awake. He stood by the open window, breathing in the sharp, clean scent of morning air, watching the silver-winged entities drift lazily between the apple branches. Behind him, the rhythmic, gentle scraping of a pen against paper filled the silence.He turned around. The traveler was still fast asleep on a pallet of blankets near the hearth, wrapped in his heavy coat, snoring softly. Across the room, Elian sat at the wooden table, his brow furrowed in intense concentration, writing by the dim, warm light of the early sun.Li Xuan walked over quietly, leaning against the edge of the table to look down at the page.“And the traveler stayed,” Elian had written in his steady, careful hand. “Not because he was looking for a destination, but because the tea was hot, an
The Sound of a Skillet
The kitchen inside the small wooden hut was sparse, functional, and smelled permanently of dried herbs, woodsmoke, and cast-iron. A single window looked out over the western hills, framing the shifting, bruised-violet ribbon of the aurora as it slowly bled into the deep blue of evening.Li Xuan placed the golden egg on the wooden counter. He stood beside it for a moment, hands resting on the edge of the board, staring down at the shell as if trying to recall a forgotten formula.Elian leaned against the doorframe, watching him with an amused smirk. "It's just an egg, Li Xuan. You don't need to channel your inner strategist to crack it.""You'd be surprised," Li Xuan muttered. "I’ve dismantled complex arrays guarding imperial vaults with fewer existential concerns."He picked up a small, dull kitchen knife, tapped the side of the shell against the rim of an iron skillet, and parted it cleanly. The yolk was a rich, deep amber, sliding into the pan with a soft sizzle as he added a pat of
The First Egg
The chickens, as it turned out, were indeed uncooperative.They were not ordinary chickens, nor were they magical beasts of fire and shadow. They were creatures born from an idle afternoon experiment when Elian had written a paragraph about wanting fresh breakfast ingredients, and the unwritten world—taking his words a bit too literally—had conjured three plump, golden-feathered hens out of a patch of wild daisies.They possessed no cultivation base, but they possessed an attitude of profound entitlement."They hate me," Elian announced, marching up to the porch where Li Xuan was oiling the wooden handle of his hoe. The boy held his left hand protectively, where a small peck mark reddened the skin. "I tried to feed them chopped cabbage, and the big one—the one I named 'The High Chancellor'—looked me dead in the eye and stole my pencil."Li Xuan set down the rag and the bottle of oil, hiding a smile behind his hand. "Well, to be fair, Elian, you did give the High Chancellor a rather po
The Weight of Dry Thatch
The afternoon sun beat down on the southern slope of the roof, radiating a dry, earthy heat that smelled of sun-baked grass and old dust. Li Xuan balanced on the wooden scaffolding he and Elian had built the day before, a bundle of dried reeds resting against his thigh.Down below, sitting on an upturned wooden crate, Elian acted as ground support, handing up the braided willow cords one by one and occasionally shouting advice he had read in one of his storybooks."Make sure the overlap is at least four inches!" Elian called out, shading his eyes against the glare. "Otherwise, the wind gets underneath and lifts the whole section!""Where did you read that, a manual for royal castle architects?" Li Xuan shouted back, though he adjusted the thatch layer according to the boy's instructions."Princess Elspeth’s Guide to Fortified Homesteads," Elian replied proudly, tapping the cover of a book he had left on the crate. "Chapter twelve: Of Molds and Monsoons.""Tell Princess Elspeth that he
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