THE BOY THEY CALLED A JINX BECAME THE SUPREME CULTIVATOR

4 - ANOMALY II

The phantom of his brother crouched down to his eye level, the smug expression never leaving his face for a second.

"Breathing at the bottom of the ocean is just a slower way to die, little brother."

"Give it back," Zhentian demanded, fighting the overwhelming urge to claw at his own empty chest.

"It belongs to the Azure Dragon Hall now," the illusion whispered back smoothly.

"It belongs to me," Zhentian snapped, the raw anger finally burning through the hazy fog of his delirium.

He focused all his remaining willpower on that burning hatred, using it as a solid anchor to tether his fracturing sanity.

The memory of Mo Wudi’s victorious sneer became a branding iron in his mind, searing away the creeping urge to simply close his eyes and give up.

The golden lanterns of the hallucination shattered into a million tiny fragments, dissolving back into the freezing black currents.

He was alone again in the crushing darkness, drifting downward inside the strange liquid barrier with nothing but his own thoughts.

He repeated his final promise over and over in the silence of his own mind, ensuring the vow was carved into whatever was left of his humanity.

He would make them regret leaving him awake for the extraction, no matter how long it took.

He would crawl out of this abyss if he had to carve steps into the trench walls with his bare, bleeding hands.

The phantom pains still racked his body with every heartbeat, but he welcomed the agony now.

The pain proved he was still alive, and as long as he was alive, he could still seek vengeance.

Hours or perhaps days could have passed in that suspended plunge, blurring his sense of time into an endless agonizing stretch of dark water.

The sudden violent deceleration of the cocoon jolted him out of his feverish thoughts without warning.

The protective pressure around him rippled violently, vibrating with a deep resonant hum before it simply burst apart like a popped bubble.

He slammed heavily into the ocean floor, his injured shoulder taking the brunt of the impact against a bed of jagged unforgiving debris.

The protective barrier was gone entirely, exposing him instantly to the crushing, freezing reality of the abyssal trench.

He forced his eyes open, staring into a terrifying suffocating blackness that seemed to swallow all hope of light.

The ground beneath him was not soft sand, but a thick freezing mud littered with massive petrified bones of ancient sea beasts.

Every tiny movement sent a spike of white-hot agony radiating from his collarbone and his hollow chest.

He gritted his teeth, refusing to lay there and bleed out in the dark like a discarded piece of trash.

Digging his uninjured hand into the freezing mud, he slowly began to drag his broken body forward across the jagged bones.

He did not know where he was going, only that staying still meant surrendering to Mo Wudi's victory.

His fingers scraped against something sharp, tearing the skin on his knuckles, but he merely adjusted his grip and pulled himself another inch.

The silence of the trench was absolute, heavy enough to make the rushing of blood in his own ears sound like a roaring waterfall.

He pulled himself forward again, his breath hitching as his broken collarbone ground against itself with a sickening crunch.

He needed to find shelter, or a heat source, or anything that would keep his core temperature from dropping further into hypothermia.

His hand slipped in the mud, sending his chin crashing into a smooth curved surface that felt like a massive ribcage buried in the muck.

He lay there for a moment, letting the wave of nausea pass before trying to lift his heavy head.

The darkness was absolute, offering no hints about what kind of graveyard he had just landed in.

Then a sound cut through the heavy water, stopping him dead in his tracks.

It was not the mindless clicking of a bottom-feeding predator, nor the shifting of tectonic plates deep beneath the crust.

It was the slow deliberate scrape of a blade being dragged against stone, echoing from somewhere just a few yards away in the pitch-black abyss.

Zhentian froze, his muscles tensing as he tried to locate the source of the noise while keeping perfectly still.

He held his breath, straining his ears against the crushing silence to pinpoint the direction of the threat.

The scraping sound stopped, replaced by the faint rustle of heavy fabric moving through the dense water.

"You are making an awful lot of noise for a corpse," a gravelly ancient voice echoed through the dark.

The voice carried a weight that made the surrounding water tremble, vibrating deep within Zhentian's hollow chest.

"Who is there?" Zhentian asked, his voice coming out as a raspy croak that barely cut through the freezing current.

"Someone who appreciates quiet," the voice replied, the tone flat and devoid of any warmth or concern.

A faint spark of blue light flared in the darkness, illuminating the outline of a figure sitting cross-legged on a pile of leviathan skulls.

The blue light revealed a face weathered by centuries of harsh living, covered in jagged scars that told stories of countless battles.

The man wore tattered dark robes that blended perfectly into the surrounding shadows of the trench.

He did not look like a savior, nor did he look like a friendly hermit willing to help a wounded traveler.

He looked like death sitting patiently on a throne of bones, waiting to collect his next due.

"And you are ruining my peace," the man added, lowering a rusty blade to his side.

"I am not dead yet," Zhentian grunted, forcing himself to prop his upper body against the mud using his good arm.

"A temporary condition," the old man replied, picking up a piece of whetstone to resume sharpening his blade.

"Most things that fall from the sky melt before they reach my roof, so you are already an anomaly."

"I guess I am stubborn," Zhentian said, wincing as a sharp pain shot through his broken collarbone when he shifted his weight.

"Stubbornness does not heal severed meridians," the stranger noted, his sharp eyes catching the faint traces of blood leaking from Zhentian's chest.

"You have been hollowed out, boy, left with nothing but a shell."

"Someone took what belonged to me," Zhentian admitted, refusing to show any weakness in front of this unknown threat.

"People take things all the time in the world above," the man said, scraping the stone down the edge of his weapon with a steady rhythm.

"The real question is what you intend to do about it now that you are sitting in the mud with broken bones."

"I am going to get up," Zhentian stated, planting his hand firmly in the dirt and gritting his teeth against the pain.

"And then I am going to climb back up there and kill him."

The old man paused his sharpening, tilting his head slightly as he regarded the bleeding boy with a critical eye.

A dry humorless chuckle escaped the man's lips, drifting through the dark water and fading quickly into the silence.

"You cannot even stand, let alone climb a thousand miles of vertical trench to exact your little revenge," the stranger pointed out.

"Watch me," Zhentian spat, fighting through a wave of dizziness to push himself onto his knees despite his failing body.

"My name is Ye Canghai," the old man finally offered, setting the whetstone down on the skull beside him.

"And if you pass out right now, I am going to leave you here for the blind crawlers to eat."