The canyon erupted.
Swords flew from the Azure Mist disciples ahead, not held in hands, but guided by spiritual will—a dozen gleaming blades weaving a net of cutting light. The Stone Sentinel disciples behind them slammed their palms to the ground; the earth rippled and sharp stone spikes shot up from the floor. From above, the Verdant Dragon sect rained down volleys of thorned, poisonous vines conjured from green qi.
It was a textbook, multi-sect suppression maneuver. Overwhelming, coordinated, and utterly orthodox.
Feng didn't wait for it to land. "Disrupt the vines!" he barked, not looking back. He exploded forward, his simple steel blade becoming a blur. He didn't try to block the flying swords. He deflected, each clash of his sword against a spirit-blade a perfectly timed ping that sent the weapon veering off-course, often into the path of another. He was a master of redirection, using the enemy's own force and precision against them.
Ling Xiao, his heart hammering, focused on the vines. They weren't natural plants; they were constructs of ordered wood-element energy, their growth pattern dictated by a formation. He stretched out his Chaos Sensing, feeling for the rhythm of that growth command. He found it—a pulsing, repetitive signal from the Verdant Dragon disciples above.
He couldn't stop the signal. But he could jam it.
He gathered a knot of chaotic energy, not to attack the vines, but to emit a burst of unstructured spiritual noise aimed at the precise frequency of the growth command. It was like throwing sand into a complex gearbox.
The poisonous vines, halfway to their targets, shuddered. Their growth stuttered. Some thorns retracted. Others sprouted leaves instead. They became a confused, harmless tangle that fell limply around Feng, who didn't even flinch.
"Spikes next!" Feng called, already engaging the Azure Mist swordsmen in a whirlwind of steel, his movements efficient, brutal, and shockingly fast. He was a Sea Formation cultivator against Mortal Foundation disciples; he was stronger, but they had numbers and formation. He couldn't afford to be pinned.
Ling Xiao turned his attention to the earth spikes. The Stone Sentinel technique relied on a stable, resonant connection with the ground. He dropped to one knee, slamming his palm against the canyon floor. Instead of sensing, he listened with his chaos awareness for the vibration pattern of their technique—a deep, rhythmic thrum.
He couldn't break their connection. But he could introduce a counter-vibration. He focused, thinking of Shí's lessons on fault lines. He sent a pulse of chaotic energy into the ground, not as an attack, but as a tremor with an irregular, dissonant beat.
The perfectly aligned vibration of the Stone Sentinel technique met his chaotic jitter. The resonance broke. The emerging stone spikes cracked, sheared off at odd angles, or failed to emerge at all, leaving only fractured, unstable rock.
"Good!" Feng grunted, parrying three swords at once. "Now the blue ones—their sword net has a core anchor! Find it!"
Ling Xiao's senses, already stretched, swept over the Azure Mist disciples. Their flying swords moved in unison, a beautiful, deadly dance. But at the center of the net, one disciple—a young man with a focused frown—held his hands in a complex seal. His spiritual energy was the conductor, the anchor point coordinating all the blades.
Ling Xiao saw the pattern. All the sword energies were tethered to that central point like puppets on strings. Cut one string, and one sword might falter. But disrupt the puppet-master…
He didn't have an attack that could reach that far. But Feng did.
"The anchor is the one with the silver brow-chain!" Ling Xiao shouted. "His rhythm peaks every third beat!"
Feng, in the middle of a spin that knocked two swords away, didn't question. He saw the disciple. He heard 'third beat.' As he completed his spin, he planted his foot and threw his sword.
It wasn't a graceful, flying sword technique. It was a brute-force, physical hurl, but it was infused with Feng's dense, angry energy and timed exactly as the anchor disciple's controlling rhythm hit its peak—the moment his spiritual focus was most committed, and thus, most vulnerable to interruption.
The steel blade shot across the canyon like a bolt.
The anchor disciple's eyes widened. He tried to pull a sword back to block, but the disruption in his rhythm caused by Ling Xiao's identification made his control hiccup for a split-second.
It was enough.
Feng's sword smashed through the disciple's hastily conjured qi shield and took him in the shoulder with a sickening crunch. The disciple screamed, his seal shattered.
Instantly, the beautiful sword net collapsed. The flying swords wobbled, clattered against each other, and fell to the ground like dead birds.
Chaos erupted among the Azure Mist disciples. The coordinated attack was broken.
"Now we go!" Feng roared, recalling his blade to his hand with a flick of energy. He grabbed Ling Xiao by the back of his tunic. "Up the left wall! The brown ones are the slowest!"
They broke for the canyon side. The Stone Sentinel disciples, their earth techniques still misfiring from Ling Xiao's disruption, were slow to react. Feng scaled the near-vertical wall in great, bounding leaps, carrying Ling Xiao. Arrows of condensed earth shot after them, but without their formation's full power, they were easy for Feng to bat aside.
They crested the canyon rim, leaving the chaos of the battle below. But not unscathed. A glancing sword slash had opened a cut on Feng's thigh. Ling Xiao felt spiritually drained, his mind aching from the intense, combat-speed use of his senses. And a lucky, wild earth spike had grazed his arm, leaving a deep, burning gash.
They ran until the canyon was miles behind them, finally collapsing in a hidden cave Feng knew of, its entrance concealed by a waterfall.
"You… can fight," Ling Xiao panted, pressing a wad of moss against his bleeding arm.
"You… can think," Feng replied, grimacing as he bandaged his leg with a torn strip of his own robe. "That was more useful." He looked at Ling Xiao with new respect. "You don't just blast. You read. You find the seams. That's rare. Stupidly dangerous, but rare."
Over the next month, their dynamic solidified into a gruff, functional partnership. Feng was a harsh but brilliant teacher. He drilled Ling Xiao not in cultivation, but in combat awareness.
"Forget your chaos for a second," Feng would say, sparring with Ling Xiao using sticks. "Watch my shoulders. My feet. The micro-tension in my grip before I strike. Orthodox fighters are creatures of habit and technique. Their moves have tells. Your job is to see the pattern before the energy even lights up."
Ling Xiao learned to apply his Chaos Sensing and Pattern Reading to opponents. He learned to identify the subtle gather of energy in a cultivator's dantian before a technique launched. He learned that defensive formations always had a 'gate'—a point of spiritual inflow that was slightly more vulnerable. Feng taught him how to move silently, how to mask his presence not with chaos (which stood out), but by mimicking the bland spiritual signature of a non-cultivator.
In return, Ling Xiao helped Feng understand the 'texture' of chaos. He explained, as best he could, how ordered formations felt to his senses—not as solid walls, but as rigid patterns that could be warped.
"So the stronger the order, the bigger the potential 'echo' if you disrupt its base frequency?" Feng mused one evening, sketching formation diagrams in the dirt. "That's… not how any manual would explain it. But it makes a brutal kind of sense."
Their synergy grew. Feng would identify a target's primary technique; Ling Xiao would find its chaotic weak point; Feng would strike there with devastating precision. They practiced on rogue spirit beasts and the occasional overconfident bounty hunter, their teamwork becoming smoother, more instinctive.
One night, after a particularly draining session where Ling Xiao had practiced disrupting a complex water-mirror illusion Feng conjured, the rogue cultivator grew quiet. He stared into the fire, then at Ling Xiao.
"Kid… what exactly happened to you? Before the sects. Before the archive." His flinty eyes were sharp. "Your foundation… it's not just chaos-touched. It's old. And there's something else sleeping in you. Something that makes my own spiritual sense… itch. Like standing too close to a lightning rod before a storm."
Ling Xiao hesitated. The memory of Shí, of the drop of Titan Blood Essence sleeping over his heart, was his most guarded secret. But Feng had shared his own bitter past. And he hadn't turned him in.
"I met… a teacher. In the mountains. Before Li Ming," Ling Xiao said slowly. "He was ancient. Not human. He said he was a Titan."
Feng's breath caught. He leaned forward. "A Primordial Titan? They're myths. Fairy tales sect masters tell to impress novices."
"He wasn't a tale. He was a prisoner. He gave me… a legacy. Before he died."
Feng was silent for a long minute, his face unreadable. Then he let out a low whistle. "That explains it. The unnatural solidity beneath the chaos. The way you absorbed that volcanic backlash and didn't die. You've got a drop of something primordial in you, don't you? Titan blood. Or essence."
Ling Xiao nodded once.
Feng leaned back, a strange mix of awe and grim acceptance on his face. "Well. That just makes you a thousand times more valuable to the Star-Seers. And a thousand times more doomed if we fail." He looked at Ling Xiao with renewed intensity. "We need to get to Silver Lake. Soon. The longer we wait, the more they'll throw at us. And if my old master gets wind that I'm running with a Titan-touched chaos demon… he'll come himself."
The plan was set. They would move in three days, under the new moon.
They didn't get three days.
On the eve of their departure, as Ling Xiao practiced sensing the perimeter alarms Feng had set—tiny, ordered vibrations in threads of qi—his senses screamed.
Not at the alarms. At a new, overwhelming pattern approaching from the south. Dozens of powerful, coordinated auras. Their energy was familiar—it had the same cold, liquid quality as the Silver Lake Sect techniques Feng had described, but magnified, polished to a deadly sheen.
He bolted back to the cave. "Feng!"
Feng was already at the entrance, his face like stone. He could feel it too. "They found us. Faster than I thought." He listened, his jaw tightening. "That's not just a patrol. That's a retrieval squad. Led by a Core Formation elder. My old master didn't just get wind. He sent a message."
He looked at Ling Xiao, all plans gone. The cave, their haven, was about to become a tomb.
The waterfall outside shimmered, not with rainbows, but with a creeping, glacial blue light as powerful silencing and barrier formations slid into place, sealing them in.
A voice, amplified and dripping with false warmth, echoed through the rock.
"Feng, my wayward disciple. You've brought us such an interesting guest. Come out. Let's… talk about the past. And the priceless artifact you've been traveling with."
---
END OF CHAPTER 16