The rain fell like iron needles.
Each drop that struck the barren earth of the Lin Clan Ancestral Graves carried the weight of a winter that refused to end. The sky was the color of old bruises—purple and black, swollen with malice. In this desolate corner of the world, where even the crows had long since abandoned their watch, Feng Chen knelt in the mud.
His servant robes, once perhaps a dull gray, were now indistinguishable from the filth that caked them. The fabric clung to his emaciated frame like a burial shroud, threads hanging loose where beatings had torn the seams. Water pooled in the hollows of his collarbones. His breathing came in shallow, broken gasps.
The cold was not the worst of it.
No—the worst was the *absence*. The hollow, gnawing void that had taken residence in the center of his spine, just below his shoulder blades. Where once the Heavenly Marrow Bone had resided—that primordial treasure of cultivation talent, the gift that had marked him as a genius before his tenth year—there was now only an ache that never ceased. A phantom pain that sang through his meridians like the dying echo of a shattered bell.
*Uncle Feng Wuji.*
The name itself was poison on his tongue. Three months ago, in the ceremonial hall draped with crimson silk, his uncle had smiled that benevolent smile. Had placed a hand on young Feng Chen's shoulder and spoken words of guidance and care. And then, when the incense had burned low and the elders had retired, that same hand had struck like a viper.
Feng Chen still remembered the sensation—the spiritual needles of pure Qi piercing his spine, the paralysis that had frozen his screams in his throat, and then the *extraction*. The Heavenly Marrow Bone had been ripped from his body with surgical precision, leaving behind only shattered fragments of cartilage and a cultivation foundation that crumbled like sand in the tide.
They had given it to his cousin. Feng Wuji's own son, Feng Tian, who had paraded through the clan compound ever since with the arrogance of one who wore stolen glory.
A boot crashed into Feng Chen's ribs.
The impact sent him sprawling forward into the mud, his palms sinking into the freezing mire. Pain exploded through his chest—at least two ribs cracked, he thought distantly, with the clinical detachment of one who had learned to catalog his injuries.
"Look at this trash!" The voice was sharp with malicious glee. "Still breathing? I'm almost impressed, Cripple Chen."
Zhao. One of the servant disciples who followed Feng Tian like a faithful hound. The man was barely twenty, with a pockmarked face and the cruel eyes of someone who had found power in serving a master more powerful than himself. He wore the green sash of a Body Tempering Layer 7 cultivator—a height that would have been laughable to Feng Chen three months ago, but was now an insurmountable mountain.
"Young Master Feng Tian's boots were *sullied* this morning," Zhao continued, circling the kneeling boy with slow, deliberate steps. "The mud on the eastern path—apparently it touched his hem when he walked past. Do you know whose job it was to clean that path?"
"M-mine," Feng Chen managed to rasp. Blood coated his teeth. The metallic tang filled his mouth.
"Yours!" A second voice joined in. Li, the other dog. Shorter, stockier, with fists like hammered iron. "And you failed. Do you understand what that means for walking corpses like you?"
Feng Chen said nothing. He had learned, in these three months of hell, that words only made it worse. That pleading gave them pleasure, and silence sometimes shortened the beating. Sometimes.
"It means," Li said, grabbing a fistful of Feng Chen's hair and yanking his head back until their faces were inches apart, "that you need a reminder of your place."
The fist came down like a hammer. Once. Twice. Three times. Feng Chen felt his nose break with a wet *crunch*, felt the hot rush of blood pour down his face. The world spun. The rain continued its merciless descent.
"Trash stays with trash," Zhao laughed, and then his boot found Feng Chen's stomach with enough force to lift him from the ground.
He flew backward.
For a single, weightless moment, Feng Chen saw the gray sky wheel above him. Saw the ancient tombstones of the Lin Clan Ancestral Graves, their inscriptions worn smooth by aeons of wind and rain. Saw the edge of the Sacrificial Pit—that forgotten depression in the earth where the clan had once thrown failed ritual items and cursed relics.
Then he fell.
The impact drove every scrap of air from his lungs. He landed hard on something sharp and unforgiving, felt it pierce through the thin fabric of his robes and bite into his shoulder. The world became a kaleidoscope of pain—his ribs, his nose, his spine, the new wound in his shoulder all screaming in a hideous chorus.
"Try not to die too quickly, Cripple Chen!" Zhao's voice floated down from above. "We might come back tomorrow for round two!"
Laughter. Retreating footsteps. Then silence, broken only by the hiss of rain on mud.
Feng Chen lay in the pit, staring up at nothing. The rain fell into his open eyes. He didn't blink. What was the point? In three months, he had been reduced from the clan's greatest talent to its lowest dog. His cultivation was crippled. His future was ash. His body was breaking apart piece by piece.
*Perhaps death would be kinder.*
The thought came unbidden, seductive in its simplicity. How easy it would be to simply... stop. To let the cold take him. To surrender to the void.
His hand shifted.
Something sharp pierced his palm.
Feng Chen hissed in pain—another drop in an ocean of agony—and tried to pull his hand away. But the object was lodged firmly in the mud beneath him, and his movement only drove it deeper into his flesh. Fresh blood welled up, hot against the freezing rain.
*Essence Blood.*
The term surfaced from some half-remembered lesson. Blood from the heart, carrying the fundamental life force of a cultivator. Precious. Potent. Once, his essence blood had shimmered with golden light, proof of his Heavenly Marrow Bone. Now it was merely red.
The blood dripped from his palm onto the object beneath.
And the world *stopped*.
The rain froze mid-fall. Each droplet hung suspended in the air like a crystal bead, perfectly still. The wind died. The distant sound of night insects—the only life that dared inhabit this graveyard—cut off as though severed by a blade.
Silence.
Absolute. Primordial. The silence of the void before creation.
Feng Chen's breath caught in his throat. His eyes, still staring upward at the frozen rain, widened. What—what was—
*Heat.*
It began in his palm, where his blood touched the object. A warmth that was utterly alien in this world of freezing rain and frozen despair. It spread up his arm like liquid fire, not burning but *awakening*—as though every nerve that had gone numb with pain was suddenly remembering what it meant to *feel*.
He forced his head down, muscles screaming in protest, and looked at his hand.
The object was black iron. Rusted, ancient, covered in layers of corrosion that spoke of countless aeons buried in mud and forgotten time. But where his essence blood touched it, the rust was... melting. No—*dissolving*, as though the blood itself was a universal solvent, revealing the metal beneath.
And the metal was not iron.
It was something else. Something that *drank* light rather than reflected it. Something that seemed to contain depths that the human eye was never meant to perceive. Patterns writhed across its surface—not carved but *living*, shifting and reforming in configurations that hurt to look at directly.
The warmth in his arm intensified. Became heat. Became *fire*.
Feng Chen tried to scream, but no sound emerged. The object—no, the *artifact*—was melting. Its edges blurred, became liquid shadow, and then it was *moving*, flowing up his arm like ink in water, seeking, searching, *invading*.
It found the hollow space in the center of his mind.
His Sea of Consciousness.
The impact was cataclysmic. Feng Chen's awareness imploded, sucked inward into that internal space where the soul met the body, where thought became reality. He saw—*felt*—the artifact enter that sacred space, and it was like watching a star fall into his mind.
The Sea of Consciousness, which had been a stagnant pool of murky spiritual energy ever since the extraction of his bone, suddenly erupted. The artifact settled at its center, no longer shapeless liquid but a solid form: a three-legged cauldron, black as the void between stars, covered in ancient script that pulsed with crimson light.
A tripod. A *ding*.
The Myriad-Dao Divine Crucible.
The name appeared in his mind, carved there by forces beyond mortal comprehension.
And then it *spoke*.
The voice was not a voice. It was the grinding of continental plates, the echo of the first thunder at the dawn of time, the whisper of entropy at the heat death of the universe. It resonated in frequencies that human ears could not perceive, yet Feng Chen understood every syllable with crystalline clarity.
**[ MORTAL BLOOD DETECTED ]**
**[ ANALYZING HOST FOUNDATION... ]**
**[ ASSESSMENT: CRITICALLY DAMAGED. ORIGIN TOO WEAK. MERIDIANS FRAGMENTED. CULTIVATION BASE: RUINED ]**
**[ RECOMMENDATION: IMMEDIATE TERMINATION ]**
**[ OVERRIDE DETECTED ]**
**[ DIRECTIVE: IMPOSSIBLE CULTIVATION PATH SELECTED ]**
**[ INITIATING SOVEREIGN RECAST PROTOCOL ]**
Feng Chen's body convulsed.
Every muscle locked. His spine arched backward until he thought it would snap. And then the *pain* began—but this was not the dull, familiar pain of beatings and broken bones. This was surgical. Precise. Absolute.
The Crucible was remaking him from the inside out.
He felt his meridians—those channels through which spiritual energy flowed—*ignite*. The shattered fragments that had barely functioned for three months were suddenly ablaze with black fire, and that fire was burning away the damage, cauterizing the wounds, *forging* the pathways anew. The pain was transcendent. It was the pain of rebirth through annihilation.
His broken ribs began to move.
Feng Chen screamed soundlessly as bone fragments realigned themselves, guided by invisible hands. He felt each piece snap into place with sickening clarity—*click, click, click*—like a puzzle being assembled by a master craftsman who cared nothing for the comfort of the canvas.
His spine straightened. Vertebrae that had been knocked askew were forced back into alignment with vertebrae-cracking pressure. The hollow ache where his Heavenly Marrow Bone had been remained, but something else was filling that space now. Not a replacement for what was lost, but a foundation for something *new*.
And then the impurities came.
Black, viscous liquid began to seep from every pore of his skin. It stank of decay and corruption, of three months of accumulated poison and the fundamental weakness of a mortal body. The Crucible was *purging* him, scrubbing clean the vessel that would house its power. The liquid pooled beneath him, mixing with the mud and rain, and still it came.
Feng Chen felt himself being hollowed out. Felt the Crucible reach into the deepest recesses of his flesh and *squeeze*, extracting every drop of impurity like wringing out a filthy rag.
**[ BODY TEMPERING LAYER 1: ACHIEVED ]**
The declaration rang through his Sea of Consciousness, and with it came a rush of vital energy. His muscles, which had atrophied during months of starvation and abuse, suddenly swelled with new strength. Not much—he was still painfully thin, still wounded—but the difference was night and day compared to the weakness before.
But the Crucible was not done.
**[ DETECTING RESIDUAL SPIRITUAL ENERGY IN LOCAL ENVIRONMENT ]**
**[ ABSORBING... ]**
The graveyard itself seemed to *shudder*. Feng Chen felt currents of Qi—invisible to mortal eyes—converge on his position. The Sacrificial Pit, filled with discarded ritual items and cursed relics, was a stagnant pool of ancient energies that had nowhere to go. The Crucible created a vortex, a spiritual black hole, and drank deeply.
**[ BODY TEMPERING LAYER 2: ACHIEVED ]**
More impurities expelled. His skin, which had been sallow and bruised, began to take on a healthier pallor beneath the coating of black filth. His breathing, which had been shallow and pained, deepened.
**[ BODY TEMPERING LAYER 3: ACHIEVED ]**
The transformation stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
The vortex of energy ceased. The black fire in his meridians banked to smoldering embers. The Crucible in his Sea of Consciousness settled into stillness, its crimson script fading to a dull glow.
**[ RECAST COMPLETE ]**
**[ HOST STATUS: STABILIZED ]**
**[ WARNING: CURRENT REALM INSUFFICIENT FOR FULL CRUCIBLE ACTIVATION ]**
**[ DIRECTIVE: SURVIVE. GROW STRONGER. DEVOUR. ]**
The voice faded.
The world unfroze.
Rain resumed its descent, washing the black impurities from Feng Chen's skin. The wind picked up, cold and cutting. The insects began their night songs once more.
Feng Chen lay in the Sacrificial Pit, chest heaving, covered in mud and blood and the residue of his own purged weakness. But he was *alive*. More than alive—he was *whole* in a way he had not been since the extraction.
He raised his hand before his face. The wound in his palm had closed, leaving only a thin white scar. His fingers, which had trembled with weakness for months, were steady.
Slowly, testing each muscle, he pushed himself to his knees.
Then to his feet.
He stood. The rain fell on his upturned face, washing away the blood from his broken nose—which, he realized with distant surprise, was no longer broken. His ribs no longer screamed with every breath. The hollow ache in his spine remained, but it was a *clean* pain now. A reminder, not a crippling.
Footsteps approached the edge of the pit.
"Hey, Li, you think the trash is actually dead this time?" Zhao's voice, still carrying that edge of cruel amusement.
"Who cares? If he is, we'll just tell them he tripped and fell. Not like anyone in the clan will—"
Li's words cut off abruptly.
Feng Chen looked up.
The two servant disciples stood at the rim of the Sacrificial Pit, staring down with expressions that shifted rapidly from amusement to confusion to... fear.
Because Feng Chen was standing. Because his eyes, which had been dull and lifeless when they threw him down, now held a *light*. Not the warm gold of his youth, but something else. Something cold and ancient and utterly merciless.
"Impossible," Zhao breathed. "You were—we broke—"
Feng Chen smiled. It was not a kind expression.
Li, perhaps sensing the change on some instinctive level, reached for the blade at his waist. "You dare look at us like that, cripple? I'll—"
He leaned over the edge, reaching down to grab Feng Chen's hair and drag him back to the mud where trash belonged.
Feng Chen moved.
His body blurred—a streak of motion that defied the eye. One moment he was standing at the bottom of the pit. The next, his hand was wrapped around Li's outstretched wrist, gripping with fingers that had become iron.
Li's eyes went wide. "What—"
The sound of breaking bone was very loud in the rain.
Li screamed.
Feng Chen released him, and the servant disciple stumbled backward, clutching his shattered wrist. Zhao stared, frozen in shock, as the boy they had beaten and humiliated climbed out of the Sacrificial Pit with fluid grace.
"Next time," Feng Chen said softly, his voice carrying a weight it had never possessed before, "you will kneel when you address me."
He walked past them, leaving two servant disciples trembling in the rain, and headed toward the distant lights of the Lin Clan compound.
The path of a billion miles had begun.
And it started with blood.
---
**[ Divine Crucible - Initialization Complete ]**
**Host:** Feng Chen
**Realm:** Body Tempering (Layer 3)
**Physique:** Unawakened (Requires "Blood of 100 Beasts" to unlock Tier 1)
**Current Technique:** None (Analyzing local environment for "flawed" manuals...)
**Status:** *"The path of a billion miles starts with the first drop of blood."*