Chapter 21: The First Bite
The vortex hung in the dead sky like a silver wound, silently drinking the world's breath. In the canyon below, the rules had changed.
The Storm Khan felt it first. The familiar, roaring connection to the tempests above grew thin, strained. His magnificent storm-Qi, which usually churned around him like a personal hurricane, now clung close to his skin, a crackling sheath of suppressed lightning. He was a fire suddenly plunged into a vacuum, burning on stored fuel alone.
The Weeping Eye enforcers were next. Their strength lay not in raw power, but in precise, resonant techniques that manipulated heavenly law. Here, under Feng's devouring sky-script, the very laws felt muted, distorted. Their silvery judgment-energy flickered uncertainly.
The playing field was level. And on this level, bloody field stood three powers: the brute force of a storm, the surgical precision of heaven's law, and the waiting, silent hunger in the mountains.
Jargal, the Storm Khan, made the first move. He was a creature of impulse and pride, and the insult of the draining sky was the final straw. With a wordless roar that was more felt than heard in the muted air, he launched himself from the ground. He didn't run up the scree; he jumped, his empowered legs cracking the stone beneath him, propelling him in a golden, crackling arc towards Feng's pinnacle.
He would collect his debt personally. With his hands.
Feng watched him come, a meteor of contained wrath. He didn't move from his perch. He raised the Enforcer's brush, now a dull stick with its borrowed energy spent. It was a gesture, not a threat.
As the Khan reached the apex of his leap, saber raised for a sky-cleaving strike, the Porcelain Enforcer acted.
It did not move. It simply pointed a single, pale finger.
A thread of silver light, thin as a spider's silk and sharp as a monomolecular blade, lanced across the canyon. It wasn't aimed at Feng. It was aimed at the Khan's trajectory. A calculated, perfect interception.
The thread of silencing judgment touched the Khan's storm-Qi.
There was no explosion. A patch of the crackling golden energy around the Khan simply ceased. Winked out. It created a flaw in his aerodynamic shield, a sudden, unnatural vacuum in the flow of power.
The Khan's majestic arc faltered. He twisted in mid-air, his strike going wide. Instead of landing on the pinnacle, he slammed into the cliff face ten feet below Feng, his fingers digging into the rock, his body dangling. Stone shattered under his grip.
He looked down, not at Feng, but at the Porcelain Enforcer far below, his eyes blazing with a new, more personal fury. "You dare?!"
"We dare to enact heaven's will," the Porcelain One stated, its voice calm. "The anomaly is the priority. You are interference. Be silenced."
The other two gaunt Enforcers raised their brushes. They began to write in the air, complex, interlocking silver characters that formed a floating lattice—a Cage of Final Judgment. It floated towards the cliff face, aiming to seal the Khan where he clung, to nullify him completely.
The Khan snarled. He was trapped between the devouring sky above, the cliff at his back, and the sealing cage drifting toward him. A lesser man would have panicked.
He was the Storm Khan.
He let go of the cliff.
He dropped.
But as he fell, he reversed his saber and stabbed it not downwards, but into the cliff face. The humming blade, charged with the last of his concentrated storm-force, bit deep into the rock. And then he detonated it.
A localized thunderclap erupted from the point of impact. The blast wasn't fire and light; it was pure, concussive force and shredded lightning. It served two purposes: it propelled the Khan sideways through the air like a lightning bolt, away from the sealing cage, and it sent a hailstorm of razor-sharp stone shrapnel exploding downwards—directly towards the two Enforcers weaving their cage.
They were forced to break their concentration, their silver lattice flickering as they deflected the deadly stone rain with swift, precise brushstrokes.
The Khan landed in a crouch thirty yards away, his golden armor scorched and smoking, one arm bleeding from a deep gash. He was wounded. But he was free, and his blood was up. He had been attacked by both his enemies now. His world had narrowed to a simple, brutal calculus: kill them all.
The three-way standoff was over. It was now a chaotic, three-way brawl in a spiritual dead zone.
And Feng, from his perch, watched it all. His devouring sky-script was doing its work, slowly draining the combatants, feeding him a trickle of their leaked power—the Khan's fierce pride, the Enforcers' cold certainty. But it was too slow. He needed to act.
The Porcelain Enforcer looked from the wounded, furious Khan to Feng on the pinnacle. It made a decision. It pointed at Feng and spoke a single, resonant word to its companions.
"Terminate."
The two gaunt Enforcers abandoned their attempt to cage the Khan. In unison, they turned their brushes towards Feng. They wrote not a cage, but a Sentence.
Two lines of silver script shot across the canyon, not as attacks, but as declarations. They bypassed physical defense, aiming to inscribe directly onto his soul.
THE ERROR IS KNOWN.
THE JUDGMENT IS FINAL.
The words hit Feng like a physical law trying to rewrite his existence. He felt his own Dao, his devouring core, strain against the imposition. The words sought to define him, to fix him in place as a "known error" so their "final judgment" could delete him.
It was a tribulation of definition. Of being catalogued and filed away.
On the ground, the Khan saw his chance. While the Enforcers were focused on Feng, he charged. Not at them, but at the base of Feng's pinnacle. He couldn't leap again in the drained field, but he could climb. And he could bring the mountain down.
He slammed his saber-hilt into the rock, once, twice, a third time. Cracks spiderwebbed up the stone pillar. The whole pinnacle groaned.
Feng staggered as the rock beneath him trembled. He was under two attacks: one spiritual, one physical. The Enforcers' Sentence was a cold fire in his mind. The Khan's demolition was shaking his footing to pieces.
He had to choose. Which tribulation to consume first?
He looked at the silver words burning in his soul, trying to erase his name. He looked at the cracking stone, trying to erase his body.
He made his choice.
He stopped fighting the Sentence.
He let the words, THE ERROR IS KNOWN. THE JUDGMENT IS FINAL., sink into his spiritual core. He opened the devouring void within him and did not resist their meaning. He accepted it.
Yes, he was an error. Yes, judgment had come.
And then, using the principle of consumption he had refined in the dragon's dream, he began to devour the certainty behind the words. He ate the Enforcers' unshakable belief in their right to judge. He consumed the very concept of "finality" they wielded.
It was like eating a diamond—cold, hard, and sharp. It grated against every part of his being. But his hunger was older than their judgment.
The silver script on his soul flickered, then dimmed. It didn't vanish; it was absorbed. He felt a new, chilling clarity settle in a corner of his mind—a ruthless, logical space that understood law, order, and the power of definitions. A piece of the Weeping Eye's Dao now lived within him, a cold lens through which he could view the world.
He had taken his first bite of heaven's justice. It tasted like frozen mercury.
The two gaunt Enforcers recoiled as one, as if slapped. Their connection to the Sentence had been severed in the worst possible way—not broken, but digested.
At that moment, the Storm Khan struck the base of the pinnacle one final time.
With a sound like a giant's bone breaking, the stone pillar sheared off.
Feng fell.
He didn't try to fly. There was no Qi for that. He twisted in the air, aiming his body. Below him was not the canyon floor, but the Khan, looking up, his face a mask of triumph.
Feng fell towards him like a stooping hawk.
The Khan raised his saber, lightning gathering at its tip for a point-blank annihilating strike.
Feng, still falling, raised the now-useless Enforcer brush in one hand. In the other, he formed a claw. He wasn't aiming for the saber. He was aiming for the Khan's face, for his storm-furious eyes.
But he never reached him.
The Porcelain Enforcer moved. It had calculated the trajectories, the timing. As Feng fell past a certain point, it wrote a single, simple character in the air: "HALT."
A plane of solidified silence snapped into existence between Feng and the Khan.
Feng hit it.
It was like hitting a wall of frozen time. All momentum, all sound, all kinetic energy was nullified on contact. He didn't bounce. He just... stopped, suspended in mid-air for a single, impossible second, a hand's breadth from the Khan's lightning-tip.
Then the "halt" plane vanished.
Feng dropped the last few feet, landing clumsily at the Khan's feet. The Khan, startled by the Enforcer's interference, hesitated for a fraction of a second.
A fraction was all Feng needed.
He was on the ground. At close quarters. Where the Khan's storm-saber was less effective. Where Feng's stolen beast-agility and close-in devouring touch were king.
He didn't stand up. He lunged forward from his knees, his hand shooting out not for a lethal blow, but for the Khan's bleeding arm—for the open wound.
His fingers touched blood and torn flesh.
And he fed.
He didn't drain Qi. He drained essence. Through the blood, he consumed the Khan's indomitable pride, his connection to the steppe, the very core of his storm-will that made him a Khan.
It was a violation more intimate than any sword thrust.
Jargal, the Storm Khan, screamed. It was not a scream of pain, but of utter, profound violation. He felt a part of his soul, the part that knew he was lord of the wind and thunder, being ripped away. His storm-Qi, already weakened, guttered like a candle in a gale.
He stumbled back, his face ashen, his eyes wide with a horror deeper than death. He looked at his own hand, the lightning around it sputtering and dying.
Feng rose to his feet, his own eyes burning with a stormy light that was not his own. He had taken a bite of the storm's heart. He felt the Khan's pride and dominion churning inside him, a wild, untamed power that fought against the cold Enforcer logic he'd just consumed.
He stood between the wounded, soul-sick Khan and the three calculating Enforcers. Blood dripped from his hand—the Khan's blood.
He had taken a bite of heaven's law and a bite of the steppe's fury. They warred inside him, a storm of contradiction.
He was no longer just hungry.
He was feral.
He looked from the Khan, who was clutching his arm as if it were a foreign object, to the Porcelain Enforcer, whose painted eye seemed to be analyzing this new, unpredictable variable.
Feng smiled. It was a smile with too many teeth, lit by stolen lightning and cold judgment.
The first bite had been tasted. Now, it was time for the main course. And he would decide who was on the menu.