Chapter 16: Steppe Ghost
The wind on the Golden Steppe had a voice. It whispered through the endless sea of grass, a dry, rustling sigh that spoke of empty miles and hidden eyes. The sky was a vast, bowl of hard blue. It felt like being on the bottom of an ocean of air.
Feng walked. Lin and Kael followed, a step behind, flanking. The dynamic had solidified. He was the nucleus; they were the charged particles in his orbit.
They followed the fleeing tribespeople's trail for a day, not out of concern, but because it was a path away from the slaver's known routes. The tribespeople were good at hiding. They left almost no sign. But Feng didn't need signs. He could feel the fading imprint of their fear in the air, a thin, salty tribulation that his senses could now taste.
By the second day, even that was gone. They were alone in the immensity.
His strength had returned in a raw, jagged form. The slavers' violent essence was now integrated, a low, hot coal of aggression banked in his dantian. He felt capable again, dangerous. But the steppe demanded a different kind of strength. Not explosive power, but endurance. Awareness.
Lin was in her element. She read the land like a scroll—the bent grass showing the passage of a herd, the type of dung indicating what kind of beast, the faint disturbances that spoke of human passage days old. She taught through silent example, and Feng learned.
Kael was miserable. He hated the openness, the exposure. He was a creature of alleys and ambushes. He twitched at every distant bird call, his hand forever near his knife.
On the third day, they found the circle of stones.
It was a perfect ring, twenty feet across, made of waist-high, lichen-covered granite. The stones were not natural to the steppe. They had been brought, placed. In the center was a shallow fire-pit, cold and filled with old ash. Carved into the inner face of each stone were runes, weathered almost smooth.
"Shaman's circle," Lin murmured, her voice low with respect. "The Steppe tribes use them for calling rains, speaking to spirits, sealing bargains. We shouldn't be here."
Feng walked into the circle. The moment he crossed the stone boundary, the air changed. The endless wind died. A profound silence fell, broken only by the thump of his own heart. The Qi here was different—older, deeper, tied to the bones of the earth, not the freedom of the sky. It resonated with the earth-aspect he'd gained from the Ghoul-Root and the dragon's heart.
He placed a hand on one of the runes. The fragment stirred.
ANALYSIS: GEOMANTIC ANCHOR POINT. PURPOSE: COMMUNICATION/AMPLIFICATION. RESIDUAL SIGNATURE: TRIBAL ANCESTOR WORSHIP. LOW-GRADE SPIRIT TRIBULATION DETECTED – 'ANCESTRAL WHISPER'.
Ancestral whisper. The tribulation of memory, of obligation, of the weight of generations.
He opened himself to it, just a crack.
A chorus of faint voices brushed his mind. Not words. Feelings. The pride of a successful hunt. The grief of a child lost to winter. The fierce joy of a summer storm. A hundred thousand moments from a hundred thousand lives, all tied to this land, all pressing down with the gentle, insistent weight of a glacier.
It was not an attack. It was an invitation to belong. To add his story to the cairn. To become part of the steppe's endless, cycling memory.
For a second, he was tempted. To let go. To be absorbed into something greater than his lonely, devouring path. To have a people. A history.
Then he remembered his father's empty eyes. His mother's cold hand. The sneer of Overseer Bo. His history was one of being consumed. His people were the Debt-Slaves, the errors, the forgotten.
He was not part of the cycle. He was the thing that broke cycles.
He shut the connection down, forcefully. The voices faded, leaving a faint, melancholic echo.
He took his hand from the stone. The wind outside the circle rushed back in.
"What was that?" Kael asked, eyeing him nervously. "You just... stopped. For a full minute."
Feng ignored him. He looked at Lin. "Which way avoids the tribes?"
She studied his face, then nodded. "North-northwest. The grass is shorter, poorer. Fewer herds. The tribes call it the 'Hungry Ground.'"
They left the circle behind. But the encounter left a mark on Feng. He had felt a new category of tribulation—not violence or poison, but the gentle, crushing weight of belonging. It was a subtler, more dangerous poison. One he wasn't sure he could, or wanted to, consume.
The Hungry Ground lived up to its name. The grass was sparse, the earth hard and cracked. They saw fewer animals, and those they did see were lean and wary. The Qi was thin, starved.
It was here they found the first sign of the Golden Horde.
A standard, planted in a mound of earth. A tall pole topped with a circle of beaten gold, from which hung nine horse-tail tassels, each dyed a different color. Beneath it was a pile of skulls—beast and human, old and new. A territorial marker. A warning.
"Nine Tails," Lin breathed, genuine fear in her eyes for the first time. "That's the personal standard of Jargal, the Storm Khan. His personal grazing lands. We've strayed right into the heart of the Horde's territory."
"We go around," Kael said immediately, already backing up.
Feng looked at the skulls. He could feel the tribulation here. Not just violence. Dominion. The absolute certainty of ownership. The Khan's will was imprinted on this land, a spiritual claim as hard as the cracked earth.
To go around would be to submit to that claim. To acknowledge his law.
His Dao of consumption rejected all external law.
He walked forward, straight past the standard, kicking dust onto the mound of skulls.
Lin and Kael stared, horrified. To disrespect a Khan's marker was an act of war against the entire Horde.
They had no choice but to follow.
They moved faster now, with purpose. Feng wasn't hiding. He was walking a line. He was a bug crawling across a king's map, deliberately tracing a path of disrespect.
It took six hours for the Horde to find them.
They came not with thunder, but with silence. One moment, the horizon was empty. The next, horsemen stood upon it, silhouetted against the setting sun. Dozens of them. They didn't charge. They simply stood, watching.
Then, three broke off and galloped down, their horses moving with an eerie, fluid grace. They wore leather and fur, their faces painted with ochre and ash. Their Qi was the steppe itself—wild, free, and merciless. All were at Qi Gathering stage five or six.
They pulled up in a cloud of dust, surrounding the trio. Their leader, a man with a braided beard and eyes the color of flint, looked them over. His gaze lingered on Lin's spear, dismissed Kael's nervous twitch, and settled on Feng.
"You walk the Hungry Ground," the rider said, his accent thick, his voice like grinding stones. "You pass the Nine-Tail standard. You have no tribute. You have no permission. You are ghosts. Or you are fools."
Feng looked up at him. He didn't speak. He simply let a wisp of his aura leak out—not the dragon's dream, not the Blight-Wood's rot, but the raw, devouring void at his core. The signature of something that acknowledged no authority, not even the sky's.
The lead rider's horse shied, whinnying in alarm. The man's eyes widened a fraction. He felt it. This was no ordinary cultivator. This was a crack in the world.
"The Storm Khan will see you," the rider decided, his voice losing its mocking edge. "Come. Or be dragged."
It wasn't a request. The other two riders nocked arrows to their bows, their intent clear.
Feng looked at the distant camp now visible—a sea of felt yurts like white mushrooms, smoke rising from a thousand fires. The heart of the tribulation of dominion.
He nodded.
They were taken, not as prisoners, but as curiosities. The riders flanked them as they walked into the vast encampment. Thousands of eyes watched from doorways. Children pointed. Warriors touched the hilts of their sabers. The air was thick with the smell of dung fires, roasting meat, and the potent, collective Qi of a nomadic nation on the move.
They were led to the center of the camp, to a yurt larger than a manor house, made of white felt and trimmed with gold. Before it, on a throne of layered carpets and carved bone, sat Jargal, the Storm Khan.
He was not a large man, but he filled the space. His Qi was a visible tempest around him—a swirling maelstrom of wind and lightning affinity, solidly in the Foundation Establishment realm. His eyes held the patience of the steppe and the violence of the storm. He wore a coat of golden scale-armor, and across his knees lay a curved saber that hummed with contained power.
His gaze swept over them, dismissing Lin and Kael instantly. It locked onto Feng.
"A ghost who walks in daylight," the Khan said, his voice a low rumble that vibrated in the chest. "You carry a silence with you. You wear the stink of dead gods and broken earth. Who are you, to walk my land and scorn my mark?"
All sound in the massive camp seemed to cease. Every soul waited for the answer.
Feng met the Khan's stormy eyes. He spoke, his voice clear in the hush.
"I am Feng. I pass through."
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Such arrogance.
The Khan's expression did not change. "To pass through, you must pay the toll. The steppe is not free. The strong take from the weak. What do you have, little ghost, that I might want?"
Feng had nothing he was willing to give. He had only what he was.
He raised a hand, palm up. He focused on the new, stabilized nexus within him. He called not on the dragon's wrath or the Blight-Wood's rot, but on the principle of the void. The principle that had consumed the stalemate.
In his palm, a tiny, perfect sphere of absolute darkness appeared. It was not an attack. It was a demonstration. It was a hole in reality, an eye that looked back at the Khan's storm and saw only potential energy.
The Khan leaned forward, his storm-Qi flaring in response, lightning crackling around his throne. He saw it. Not a technique, but a truth. A Dao that was the antithesis of his own expansive, dominating will.
The crowd gasped, drawing back.
The Khan stared at the sphere of void for a long, tense minute. Then, he threw his head back and laughed, a sound like thunder cracking over the plains.
"Hah! You have nothing to give but a challenge! I like that!" He stood, his saber humming louder. "The toll for passing my land is a contest. Not of strength against strength. That is crude. You show me a hungry silence. I will show you the roaring storm. Survive the Sky-Drum until dawn, and you may pass. Fail, and your silence will be added to my song."
He pointed his saber to the east, where a single, massive drum the size of a yurt stood on a raised platform of earth. It was made of stretched, pale hide, and carved with runes of wind and lightning.
"The Sky-Drum calls the storm's heart," the Khan said, a fierce grin on his face. "It sings a tribulation of endless, pounding pressure. A test of will. A test of essence. Your void against my thunder. Let us see which is hungrier."
It was not a fight to the death. It was a duel of Daos. A cultivator's wager.
Feng looked at the drum, then at the Storm Khan. He could feel the power sleeping within it—a captured fragment of heavenly tribulation.
His hunger, momentarily sated, awoke with a fresh, sharp pang.
He closed his fist, extinguishing the void sphere.
He nodded.
The game was set. The Steppe Ghost would face the Storm's Heart. Not with a sword, but with his soul.
And as night fell on the Golden Steppe, the first, deep, resonant BOOM of the Sky-Drum shook the earth, calling down lightning from the clear, starry sky.