Chapter 3: The Roar of Silence
He ran through the labyrinth of crackling light and shattered stone. The ghostly purple map pulsed behind his eyes, a cold, logical guide through the storm of his own making. His bare feet, toughened by years of neglect, slapped against earth still warm from stray energy discharges. The new power in his veins—a volatile mix of glacial gravesoil and crackling lightning—thrummed with every heartbeat. It was not harmonious. It was a riot held together by sheer, desperate will.
Stage Three. The words echoed in his skull, a maddening mantra. He'd dreamt of this for three years. To feel his Qi not as a feeble trickle, but as a tangible current. Now that he had it, it tasted of ozone and grave dirt, and it had come wrapped in screams.
The shouts behind him grew closer. Lanterns bobbed in the chaotic gloom. "Over there! I saw movement!"
A bolt of raw, undirected energy lanced from a damaged pillar to his left, searing the air. Instinctively, Xiao Feng dove. The lightning missed him by inches, striking the ground and leaving a smoking crater. The proximity wasn't fear; it was a sudden, gut-wrenching craving. The fragment under his skin pulsed, a second heart beating with hunger.
TARGET PROXIMITY: UNREFINED FORMATION LIGHTNING. ASSIMILATE?
No! he screamed internally. The first taste had nearly killed him and painted a target on his soul. Greed now was a death sentence. He forced the hunger down, clenching his jaw until it ached. The fragment's pulse subsided, a sullen, disappointed throb.
He rolled behind a fractured monolith, his chest heaving. The voices were splitting up. Two disciples were heading his way, their conversation sharp and clear in his enhanced hearing.
"—stupid. Who'd break into a lightning field?"
"Debt-Slave,maybe. Heard one went missing from the north barracks. Probably trying to steal a spark-globe to sell."
"Idiot.They'll find his charred bones tomorrow."
The casual dismissal, the assumption of his worthlessness, ignited a familiar, hot coal of humiliation in his gut. But beneath it, a colder, sharper thought formed. They expected a cowering, stupid slave. They expected bones.
Xiao Feng looked at his hands. The Lichtenberg figures were fading, but the skin felt tougher, like tanned leather. The energy inside him itched for release, for direction. He wasn't a disciple with polished techniques. He had nothing but this stolen, violent power and three years of learned silence.
The two disciples rounded the monolith, swords drawn, lanterns held high. They were young, perhaps a year older than him, their faces marked by the easy confidence of those who had never been Debt-Slaves.
"See? Nothing but scorch marks," the taller one said, nudging a blackened stone with his foot.
In that moment of distraction, Xiao Feng moved.
He didn't leap. He uncoiled. The new power in his legs propelled him not with grace, but with the terrifying, inelegant speed of a panicked animal. He was a blur of tattered robes and scarred skin.
He didn't go for the swords. He went for the lanterns.
His hand, charged with a wisp of that cold-grave energy, slapped the taller disciple's lantern. There was no fiery explosion. Instead, the flame died. Not snuffed out, but consumed. The light vanished into his palm with a soft pop, leaving only darkness and a sudden, profound chill that made the disciple yelp and drop the metal frame.
"What the—?!"
The second disciple thrust his sword. Xiao Feng had no skill to parry. He twisted, letting the tip slice a burning line across his ribs. The pain was a bright, shocking thing. But with it came a surge of adrenaline and a darker pulse from his dantian. The wound felt… familiar. A biological tribulation. His body responded almost automatically, the cold energy rushing to the site, not to heal, but to seize. It staunched the bleeding by sheer, aggressive dominance, sealing the flesh with a numb, icy film.
He didn't retreat from the pain. He used its shock to fuel his next move. He lunged inside the second disciple's guard, his forehead smashing into the boy's nose with a sickening crunch.
It was not a fighter's move. It was a gutter brawl move. Learned in the mud behind the barracks over stolen crusts of bread.
The disciple crumpled, howling, hands flying to his face. The first one, now weaponless and half-blind in the sudden dark, stared in shock at the savage, wild-eyed creature before him. This wasn't a furtive thief. This was something feral.
Xiao Feng stood over them, panting, the taste of blood—his and the disciple's—in his mouth. The hot surge of triumph was immediately poisoned by a wave of sickening horror. I broke his nose. I could have killed him.
The taller disciple found his courage, drawing a dagger from his boot. "You're dead, slave!"
The word slave was the trigger. The horror vanished, incinerated by a fresher, more justified rage. As the disciple lunged, Xiao Feng did the only thing he could think of. He focused on the roiling storm in his dantian—the cold, consuming void and the captured lightning—and pushed it down his arm and out through his palm.
He had no technique. No "Celestial Palm" or "Mountain-Shattering Fist." It was a raw, undisciplined expulsion of power.
A guttural, concussive THUMP of air erupted from his hand. It wasn't a beam. It was a shockwave of mingled forces—a wave of chilling nullity that sapped warmth, laced with jagged, sputtering sparks of violet lightning.
It hit the disciple square in the chest.
He didn't fly back. He… stuttered. His charge halted as if he'd run into a wall of frozen tar. His skin paled, his breath fogged in the suddenly frigid air, and then the embedded lightning-sparks crackled over his robe, not burning, but causing every muscle to seize in painful spasms. He collapsed, twitching, teeth chattering uncontrollably.
Silence, save for the crackle of the distant arrays and the second disciple's muffled sobs.
Xiao Feng stared at his own hand. Smoke, cold and electric, curled from his fingertips. He felt drained, a quarter of his newfound Qi spent in that clumsy, brutal outburst.
He had fought. He had won. The feeling was utterly alien. It wasn't glorious. It was terrifying. It was a door swinging open into a room he didn't know how to leave.
The fragment pulsed, a neutral, observing beat.
COMBAT DATA RECORDED. EFFICIENCY: 17%. EMOTIONAL CATALYST UTILIZED: RAGE/HUMILIATION.
WARNING: SECT AUTHORITY ALERTED. MULTIPLE HOSTILES CONVERGING.
The map in his mind flared, highlighting a new, frantic path out—a collapsed drainage tunnel beneath a nearby ruined platform.
He had to move. But first… He knelt by the twitching, semi-conscious disciple. With hands that shook only slightly, he stripped the boy of his outer robe—a simple gray disciple uniform, coarse but whole. He took the pouch at his belt. A handful of low-grade spirit stones, a basic healing pill, a token with a serial number.
He didn't feel like a victor claiming spoils. He felt like a scavenger. The shame was a cold stone in his stomach, but necessity was a colder master. He pulled the robe on over his own tatters. It was too big, but it covered the burns and the scars.
He looked at the two broken disciples. The one with the ruined nose, the other trembling with unnatural cold. A part of him wanted to say something. To apologize. To explain. But what was there to say? I'm sorry I broke you. I had to. They made me into this.
The words turned to ash on his tongue. He was past apologies. He was on a path of consumption, and it started with swallowing his own remorse.
He turned and ran for the drainage tunnel, slipping into the dark, damp earth just as the first flares of powerful lanterns and the shouts of senior disciples filled the clearing behind him.
The tunnel was tight, claustrophobic, stinking of stagnant water and rot. He crawled, the disciple's robe snagging on jagged rocks. The physical exhaustion began to hit, a deep ache in muscles pushed too far. The wound on his ribs throbbed with a dull, icy pain.
He emerged behind the refuse piles of the sect's main kitchens, in the predawn gloom. The sky was shifting from black to bruised purple. He was back in the world of slaves and scraps, but he was no longer just part of it. He was a wolf in stolen fleece.
He made his way to the Debt-Slave barracks by a circuitous route, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. Slipping inside was easy; the door didn't lock. The others were still asleep, or pretending to be.
He crept to his pallet, shucking the stolen robe and hiding it and the pouch beneath the loose board he used as a pillow. He lay down, the rough straw digging into his back. The adrenaline seeped away, leaving a hollow, trembling aftermath.
He could still smell the ozone. He could still feel the crunch of cartilage under his forehead. He could still see the disciple's eyes, wide with shock and then pain.
Tears, hot and silent, tracked from the corners of his eyes into his hair. They were not tears of sadness, but of sheer, overwhelming overload. He had crossed a line. He had stolen power, hurt people, become a fugitive in the only place he had to call home.
A new prompt, in a softer, almost analytical blue text, appeared.
PSYCHOLOGICAL STRESS: CRITICAL. EMOTIONAL RESERVOIR DEPLETED. RECOMMENDATION: PROCESS OR PURGE.
Process or purge. Feel it or eat it.
He was so tired. So sick of feeling. The cold power in his dantian offered an escape—a numb, quiet void. He could feed this storm of guilt and fear and horror into the fragment's maw. He could make himself empty.
For a long, terrible minute, he wanted to. Desperately.
But then he thought of his mother's voice, warm with a love he hadn't heard in years. "My little Feng. Feel it all. The good and the bad. That's how you know you're alive."
He was alive. Horrifically, dangerously, impossibly alive.
He let the tears fall. He let the guilt sit like a rock in his chest. He let the memory of the fight play out, frame by awful frame. He didn't purge it. He held it. He owned it.
The fragment settled, its hunger momentarily quieted, as if observing this strange, non-nutritious ritual.
As the first true light of dawn began to paint the cracked ceiling gray, Xiao Feng finally sat up. His eyes were raw, but clear. The emotional storm had passed, leaving a bleak, hard-won calm.
He had survived the night. He had power. He had enemies. He had a system that fed on catastrophe and a heart that was determined to feel every bloody step of the way.
Overseer Bo would be here soon. There would be questions about the intruder in the Array Grounds. There would be work. There would be pain.
Xiao Feng touched the hidden pouch under the board, feeling the hard edges of the spirit stones.
He was no longer just surviving.
He was preparing.
And when the bell clanged, he stood up with the others, his face a mask of familiar numbness. But behind his eyes, where no overseer could see, a storm of lightning and silence was already planning its next meal.