2026-06-06 02:29:30The rain over the Azure Sky Sect didn't just fall it screamed.
Lightning ripped through the midnight sky, illuminating the grand, jade-veined peaks like jagged bone. High atop the mountain, inside the private sanctuary of the Crown Disciple, a feast was ending. Red candles guttered in the wind. The scent of sweet lotus wine filled the air.
Li Xuan sat at the mahogany table, his chest bursting with a golden, liquid warmth. Tonight was the eve of his Core Formation. By dawn, he would condense the legendary Pristine Jade Core, securing his place as the strongest genius in a thousand years. He would conquer the skies.
"To your ascension, brother," a voice said smoothly.
A heavy silver cup clinked against his own. Standing across from him was Mo Fan, his sworn brother. They had bled together in monster-filled rifts, shared secrets, and sworn to conquer the heavens side-by-side.
"I couldn't have reached this step without you, Mo Fan," Li Xuan smiled, raising the cup and draining the sweet wine in one deep swallow. "When I enter the Higher Realms, you come with me."
Mo Fan didn't smile. He set his cup down with a slow, heavy thud.
"No, Li Xuan," Mo Fan whispered, his voice suddenly dropping into a freezing, unfamiliar tone. "Only one of us is going up. And it’s not you."
Li Xuan frowned, trying to stand up. "What are you—"
Suddenly, his knees turned to water. A terrifying, icy paralysis exploded from his stomach, instantly racing through his veins like liquid lead. His heart seized. He crashed heavily against the mahogany table, sending silver plates and wine cups shattering onto the floorboards.
He couldn't move a single finger. His spiritual energy was completely locked.
"The... the wine..." Li Xuan gasped, blood leaking from his lips as he glared up through his wild black hair. "You... poisoned me?"
"It’s called God-Numbing Powder," a soft, mocking laugh echoed from the shadows of the doorway.
A beautiful young woman in pristine turquoise silk robes stepped into the room. It was Ning’er—the daughter of the Grand Sect Master, and Li Xuan’s fiancé. The woman he had loved more than his own life.
"Ning'er..." Li Xuan choked out, his chest tightening in agony. "Why?"
Ning’er walked past his paralyzed body without a single drop of pity in her cold eyes. She stopped next to Mo Fan, casually sliding her delicate hand into his arm, leaning her head against his shoulder.
"Why?" Ning’er sneered, looking down at Li Xuan as if he were a worm in the dirt. "Because you are too bright, Li Xuan. As long as you exist, Mo Fan is nothing but a shadow. The elders only see you. The resources only go to you. But tomorrow, that all changes."
Mo Fan drew a long, gleaming silver dagger from his sleeve. The blade was etched with dark, soul-consuming runes.
"Do not hate me, brother," Mo Fan smiled, his eyes flaring with a manic, toxic jealousy. "Your Pristine Jade Core hasn't formed yet, but your dantian is already pure jade. If I take the raw shards of your core and refine them into my own body, my talent will triple. You’ve given me everything else... just give me this one last thing."
"No... STOP!" Li Xuan roared in his mind, but his paralyzed throat could only let out a pathetic, gurgling wheeze.
Mo Fan didn't hesitate. He raised the dagger and drove it violently straight into Li Xuan’s lower stomach—the exact center of his spiritual foundation.
SQUELCH.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
A scream of pure, unadulterated agony tore out of Li Xuan’s lungs, echoing through the thunderous storm outside. The soul-consuming dagger didn't just cut his flesh; it pierced straight into his glowing, crystal-clear jade dantian.
Mo Fan twisted the blade with brutal force.
CRACK.
Inside Li Xuan’s body, a sound like a shattered mirror resonated through his soul. His pristine jade core was systematically smashed into a thousand jagged, glittering pieces. The boundless spiritual energy he had gathered over ten years of brutal training exploded outward, leaking out of the fatal wound like a fountain of glowing green blood.
His veins withered. His cultivation base disintegrated. He was completely gutted.
"Beautiful," Mo Fan laughed, using a glowing magical talisman to catch the leaking, radiant jade shards floating out of the wound, sealing them into a velvet pouch.
Li Xuan lay in a massive pool of his own blood, his vision blurring, his breathing shallow. His body was completely broken, his foundation ruined forever. He was a cripple. Less than a dog.
"Throw him into the Abyssal Wasteland," Ning’er said carelessly, wiping a stray drop of Li Xuan's blood off her cheek. "Let the wild beasts chew on his bones. Tomorrow, we announce that Li Xuan suffered a cultivation backfire and died."
Two heavy-handed guards dragged Li Xuan’s bleeding body out into the freezing rain, throwing him over the jagged cliffs into the dark, mThe Abyssal Wasteland was a place of garbage and dead bodies.
Li Xuan lay face down in the freezing mud, the heavy rain washing the blood from his tattered grey robes. His body was freezing. His heart was slowing down. He was dying.
Inside his stomach, his ruined energy center was a dark, empty void full of hundreds of jagged, broken jade shards. The pain was unendurable—every time he took a breath, the broken pieces of his soul sliced into his own flesh.
I trusted them... his mind screamed through the darkness of his fading consciousness. I loved them! Mo Fan... Ning'er... if I survive this... I will tear the sky apart to make you bleed!
Suddenly, as his heartbeat gave one final, weak thump, a drop of his absolute, venomous hatred splattered against the broken jade pieces inside his body.
The shards didn't dissolve.
Instead, the hundreds of razor-sharp jade fragments suddenly flared with a terrifying, forbidden dark emerald light. They began to rotate violently inside his ruined stomach like a spinning meat grinder.
A natural law of the universe states that a broken core cannot hold energy. But as the raw, chaotic spiritual energy of the stormy night rushed toward his dying body, the jagged glass shards didn't leak it out—they aggressively grabbed the energy, grinding it into lethal, fragmented razors of pure will.
Li Xuan’s eyes snapped open.
They weren't human anymore. They were two glowing, blinding pools of emerald light, completely devoid of mercy.
FROOSH!
The mud around him instantly shattered into dust as an invisible, sharp pressure exploded outward from his broken torso. He didn't have a peaceful flow of Qi anymore. He had a hurricane of broken glass tearing through his own veins.
Suddenly, a low, hungry growl echoed from the bushes.
Three massive, red-eyed Abyssal Wolves stepped out into the rain, their jaws dripping with saliva as they looked at the "dead peasant" on the ground. The alpha wolf lunged forward, its yellow fangs aiming straight for Li Xuan's throat.
Li Xuan didn't run. He didn't have a sword. He simply slowly raised his hand, a cold, deathly smile stretching across his bloody face.
"They think I am broken," Xuan whispered, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, multi-toned echo. "They don't understand... a perfect mirror only reflects the world. A shattered mirror cuts it to pieces."
He flicked his finger.
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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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