Chapter 2: The Taste of Fire and Memory
The morning bell clanged, a rusty, hateful sound that tore through the damp air of the barracks. Xiao Feng was already awake, but not sitting peacefully. He was on his knees, fists clenched so tight his nails bit bloody crescents into his palms. His breath came in ragged, controlled gasps.
The cold, dark energy—the Graveyard Miasma—circulated through him, but it wasn't calming. It was a frigid fuel poured onto the banked fires of his rage. It sharpened his senses to a painful degree. He could smell the despair in the sweat of the boy next to him. He could hear the hopeless thrum of every sluggish heart in the room. And with each beat, the memory of the previous night replayed—the electric agony of power, the searing crimson text: SURVIVAL.
Survival. Not thriving. Not vengeance. Not yet. The word tasted like his father's last, blood-flecked cough. It tasted like the sour promise he'd made over his mother's shallow grave. I will live. I will get out.
"Up, maggots!" The door slammed open. Overseer Bo, a mountain of mean muscle and stage three Qi Gathering, filled the doorway. His small eyes swept over them with familiar contempt. "Herb Garden. Now. Old Man Wen needs weeds pulled, and if one Silver-Thorn Root is damaged, I'll peel the skin from your backs."
The other slaves shuffled up, a line of broken puppets. Xiao Feng rose last. As he passed Bo, the overseer's meaty hand shot out, grabbing the front of his robe.
"You. Dust-Boy." Bo's breath smelled of stale garlic and cruelty. "You look… different."
A spike of pure, undiluted terror shot through Xiao Feng's gut, icy and immediate. He knows. He sees it. The instinct to cower, to make himself small, was a lifetime's habit. But beneath the terror, the new energy in his dantian stirred. It didn't rage; it hungered. It saw Bo not as a threat, but as a source of… something. Something chaotic and hot.
Xiao Feng forced his eyes down, letting the old mask of numb submission slide over his face. "The rain was cold, Overseer. I am just tired."
Bo stared at him for a long, terrifying second, then sneered and shoved him away. "You're always tired. Useless. To the back of the line. You get the nettle patch."
The walk to the outer sect's lowest-tier Spirit Herb Garden was a torment of mud and mocking laughter from passing outer disciples. Xiao Feng kept his head down, but his mind was a storm.
He almost saw. They'll always almost see. I have to be smarter. I have to be colder than my anger.
The nettle patch was a special hell. Spirit-Nettles weren't just painful; their barbs carried a weak, numbing venom that made hands clumsy for hours. It was punishment work. As he knelt in the damp dirt, the first stings burning across his knuckles, the frustration boiled over.
Why me? The old, childish wail rose in his throat. Why did father have to dream? Why did mother have to get sick? Why was I born with dust in my veins when others are born with jade?
Tears of sheer, furious self-pity pricked his eyes. He angrily wiped them away with a muddy, stinging hand. The gesture smeared dirt and nettle-venom near his mouth. The taste was bitter, alkaline.
And the black fragment, tucked against his skin under his robes, quivered.
A whisper-thin prompt, in that same steady crimson, appeared at the edge of his vision.
TARGET ANALYZED: LOW-GRADE BIOLOGICAL TRIBULATION. DESIGNATION: SPIRIT-NETTLE VENOM. TOXICITY: MINIMAL. EMOTIONAL CATALYST DETECTED: HATRED (SELF-DIRECTED).
SYNERGY POTENTIAL: LOW. ASSIMILATE? Y/N
Emotional catalyst? The system… it fed on his feelings? His despair, his rage, his hatred—were they just another kind of fuel? The revelation was a slap. It was degrading. It was powerful.
He focused on the seething, directionless hatred in his chest—the hatred for the nettles, for Bo, for his father's failure, for his own weakness. He wrapped that hot, ugly emotion around the cold energy in his dantian and thought, YES.
It was not like the graveyard. This was not a violent seizure. It was a subtle, sickening absorption. The burning, numbing sensation in his hands didn't vanish; it inverted. It was pulled inward, drawn along his meridians toward his dantian. The cold energy there met the venom-tainted emotional pulse and consumed it. The process was nauseating, like digesting poison. He gagged, his body trembling.
But when it passed, his hands were steady. The redness and numbness were gone. The minor, venom-induced disruption in his local Qi flow was smoothed over, assimilated. He hadn't grown stronger, but he had been… cleansed. And the cold energy in his core felt fractionally more present, more attuned to his body.
A grim, humorless understanding dawned. This was his Dao. Not serene meditation on the heavens, but the consumption of all that harmed him. Poison. Curse. Hatred. Misfortune. He would eat the world's bitterness and turn it into his strength.
The work became a brutal meditation. Each sting, each flash of resentment, each memory of his parents' broken faces, was a trigger. He didn't just pull weeds; he practiced. He learned to channel his emotions—the vast, untapped reservoir of three years of humiliation—into the fragment's hunger. He learned to feel the subtle "tribulation" in a petty curse, in a overseer's slap, in his own gnawing hunger.
By midday, he was exhausted not from labor, but from the emotional drain. He felt hollowed out, scoured raw.
"Break! Water at the trough, then back!" Bo barked.
The slaves stumbled toward a stone trough fed by a muddy rivulet. As Xiao Feng cupped the cold water to his mouth, he overheard two outer disciples, their robes clean and whole, chatting nearby.
"—heard the inner sect's Array Testing Ground had a minor containment failure last night. Just a flicker. They say a sliver of rogue formation lightning escaped."
"Probably nothing. Old arrays always leak. Still, the energy there is chaotic. Good for tempering reflexes, if you're stupid enough to get close."
Array Testing Ground. Rogue formation lightning.
The words ignited a different kind of fire in Xiao Feng's chest. Not hatred. Need. A pure, desperate, clawing want. That wasn't low-grade biological tribulation or grave miasma. That was real tribulation energy. Heavenly power, even if just a sliver.
The craving was so visceral it hurt. The black fragment against his skin pulsed once, warmly, in agreement.
The rest of the day was agony of a new kind—the agony of anticipation. He moved through his duties like a ghost, his mind a thousand miles away, scheming with a frantic, focused intensity he'd never possessed. The fragment's prompt was a constant whisper in his mind now, a compass needle pointing toward suffering and power.
As dusk fell and the slaves were herded back, a new plan crystallized. It was insane. It was suicide.
It was his only option.
That night, when the barracks were filled with the sounds of exhausted sleep, Xiao Feng slipped the black fragment from his robes. He held it in the sliver of moonlight coming through the cracked tile.
"You want to eat?" he whispered to it, his voice a raw thread of sound. "So do I."
He focused not on his Qi, but on the tangled knot of emotions in his chest—the day's harvested frustration, the old, deep well of grief, the fresh, sharp hunger for the lightning. He poured that emotional current into the fragment.
It didn't glow. It grew darker, a hole in the moonlight. A new line of text appeared, not crimson, but a deep, volcanic purple.
DIRECTIVE UPDATED. PRIORITY TARGET: UNREFINED FORMATION LIGHTNING.
CAUTION: HOST PHYSICAL INTEGRITY INSUFFICIENT. PROBABILITY OF TERMINATION: 87%.
EMOTIONAL RESONANCE (DESPERATION/AMBITION) DETECTED. RISK ACCEPTED. PATH CALCULATED.
A rough, ghostly map superimposed itself on his vision—a path through the back hills, skirting sect patrols, leading to a crumbling, lesser-used wall near the Array Testing Grounds.
Eighty-seven percent chance of death. The number should have frozen him. Instead, a wild, reckless laugh bubbled in his throat, choked back into a silent hiccup. He was already dead. He had been dead for three years. This was just a new way to burn the corpse.
He moved like a shadow, the fragment a cold brand against his heart. Every rustle of leaves was a guard. Every distant shout was discovery. Fear was a constant, acrid taste in his mouth, and the fragment drank that too, steadying his nerves, sharpening his vision in the dark.
He finally reached the old wall. The air here crackled. He could feel it on his skin, a static charge that made his hair stand on end. Beyond the wall, he could see occasional, erratic flashes of blue-white light against the sky, hear the faint, angry crackle of contained power.
This was it. The source.
Trembling—not from cold, but from a terrifying cocktail of exhilaration and primal fear—he began to climb the broken stones. His heart hammered a drumbeat of live, die, live, die.
Just as he pulled himself onto the top of the wall, a sharp voice cut through the night.
"Hey! What are you—"
A patrol. A young outer disciple, his face alarmed in the moonlight.
Time stopped. The disciple's hand went to his sword. Xiao Feng's mind went blank, then flooded with a single, white-hot, survivalist imperative: NOT NOW.
He didn't think. He acted.
He let go of the wall.
He fell backwards, not into the sect, but into the Array Testing Grounds, tumbling down the inner slope towards the flashing, chaotic light.
The disciple's shout of alarm was swallowed by the rising buzz of raw, untamed energy. Xiao Feng hit the ground hard, the air knocked from his lungs. He looked up.
A wandering tendril of rogue formation lightning, the thickness of his finger, snapped through the air like a blazing whip not ten feet away. It smelled of ozone and obliteration.
TARGET ACQUIRED: UNREFINED FORMATION LIGHTNING.
WARNING: ENERGY DENSITY CRITICAL.
INITIATE CONSUMPTION PROTOCOL?
Xiao Feng, lying in the dirt, his body screaming from the fall, looked at the killing light. He thought of his father's empty eyes. His mother's cold hand. Overseer Bo's sneer. The taste of nettle-venom and hate.
He bared his teeth in a silent snarl, tears of furious defiance cutting tracks through the grime on his face.
YES.
The black fragment erupted. It didn't pull the lightning. It provoked it.
The whip-crack tendril of energy screamed across the distance and speared directly into his chest.
The world became pain. It became white. It became fire in his veins and the smell of his own cooking flesh. It was a thousand times worse than the graves, a million times worse than the nettles. He was being unmade, atom by atom.
But through the agony, a new sensation—a vicious, grinding CRUNCH. The cold, dark energy in his core, now screaming with his own amplified desperation, met the heavenly fire. It did not fight it. It chewed.
It was the universe's most violent digestion. He convulsed, his back arching off the ground, silent screams tearing his throat raw inside. He could feel his meridians burning, repairing, burning again. He could feel his Shattered Mortal Dust root, that worthless debris, being forged in this impossible furnace.
Somewhere, the patrol disciple was shouting for help.
Xiao Feng didn't care. He was a crucible. He was a mouth. He was a boy eating lightning.
And with a final, thunderous snap inside his soul, the last of the lightning tendril was consumed.
The pain vanished, leaving a terrifying, ringing silence. He lay in a scorched, smoldering patch of earth. His robes were burned away across his torso, revealing skin laced with angry, fading red lines like Lichtenberg figures.
He was alive.
He pushed himself up on trembling arms. His body felt… different. Denser. Charged. The energy in his dantian was no longer just cold and dark. It now held a vibrating, barely-contained echo of the lightning—a furious potential.
CONSUMPTION SUCCESSFUL. HOST PHYSICALITY REINFORCED. CULTIVATION BASE STABILIZED AT QI GATHERING STAGE THREE.
WARNING: HEAVENLY BRAND INTENSIFIED. ANOMALY SIGNATURE NOW PALPABLE TO HIGHER-ORDER ENTITIES.
SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 0.5%.
Stage Three. He'd jumped an entire stage in a night. The cost was etched onto his skin and soul.
Boots pounded on the other side of the wall. Voices. "Spread out! Find the intruder!"
Xiao Feng scrambled to his feet, a new, electric agility in his limbs. He didn't run back the way he came. He ran deeper into the Testing Grounds, into the chaotic, flashing dark, the ghost map from the fragment guiding him towards another forgotten gap in the walls.
He ran not with the fear of a slave, but with the desperate, furious joy of a rat that had just swallowed a piece of the sun and lived.
He was branded. He was hunted. He was an error.
He was, for the first time, dangerous.