THE VOID THRONE

CHAPTER 4

The System explained things the way a good friend explains things — clearly, without making him feel stupid for not already knowing, and without making it more complicated than it needed to be.

Void Cultivation, it said, was different from everything else.

Normal cultivators — the ones with fire roots and water roots and all the rest — filled their meridians with elemental Qi. They pushed power in. They built it up. They added more and more until they were strong enough to do what they wanted to do.

Void Cultivation was the opposite.

Instead of filling, you emptied. You made the space inside you so clean and so quiet and so perfectly hollow that spiritual energy — the energy that exists everywhere in the world, in the air and the ground and the sky — had no choice but to flow in. The way water always, always flows into any hole it finds. The way wind always moves toward empty space.

You didn't push. You made room.

And then the world filled you.

It sounds simple, the System said. It isn't. Nothing worth doing is. The first step is learning the Seventeen Void Breathing Patterns. They will change the shape of you from the inside out. They will take time. They will hurt a little. You will probably pass out at least twice and wake up with blood on your face and feel ridiculous.

That's normal. Just get up and start again.

The only way to fail at this is to stop.

Wei Liang thought about that.

"How long will it take?" he asked.

Longer than you want. Faster than you think. It depends entirely on you.

"Will I actually be able to fight? To cultivate? For real?"

Wei Liang, the System said, and there was something warm in the way it said his name, you are going to do things that people in this region haven't seen in four thousand years. Yes. For real.

He breathed out slowly.

"Okay," he said. "Let's start."

The first pattern took nine nights.

He practised after the last lamp in the dormitory corridor went dark. He sat cross-legged on his mat, closed his eyes, and followed the breathing rhythm the System showed him — slow breath in, hold it, let it out in a specific careful way, and while doing that, try to imagine the inside of his chest as a glass bowl. Empty. Open. Clean.

Night one — nothing happened.

Night two — nothing happened.

Night three — he fell asleep sitting up and woke face-down on the mat with blood dripping from his nose onto the floor. He cleaned it up, sat back down, and started again.

You fell asleep, the System observed.

"I noticed," Wei Liang said.

Try again.

Night four, five, six — still nothing. But the nothing started feeling different. Like the emptiness was getting more real each time. Like he was getting better at finding it even if he couldn't hold it yet.

Night seven — he held it for thirty seconds. When it slipped away there was a sensation like a cold finger tracing gently down the inside of his chest. Like something had almost happened.

He went to sleep at sunrise. Swept floors four hours later. Said yes, Senior Brother to Fang in the corridor when Fang made a comment about his mop technique. Ate cold rice. Did the whole thing again that night.

Night nine.

He was crossing the eastern courtyard in the afternoon, carrying two full buckets, thinking about Pattern One, when something moved inside him.

It was small. It was thin — thin as a single thread of spider's silk, barely there at all. Cold and clean and quiet. Moving along a pathway inside his body that nothing had ever moved along before. Like a river finding a channel that had been carved and waiting for ten years and was finally, finally getting its water.

He set the buckets down very carefully.

Pressed one hand to his chest.

Felt it.

Still there. Still moving. Tiny and real and completely his.

There it is, the System said softly. Just those three words, like it didn't want to say anything loud enough to break the moment.