The sound woke him. Rather the absence of the white noises he'd learned to recognize in the Divine Disposal Grounds.
The spring had stopped dripping. The formations in the first layer had gone quiet, their residual hum cut off like a throat being closed. And somewhere below, past the third layer, past the carpet of broken things, something was breathing.
Tian Jue sat up. The ribs protested. He ignored them the way he'd been ignoring them for three days, the pain filed under known variables and dismissed.
Three days since the Incubator had settled into his void core. Three days of eating corrupted meat and drinking iron water and watching numbers tick upward behind his eyes. He'd mapped the pattern. Physical survival earned steady points. Consuming corrupted material earned more. Pushing into unexplored chambers earned the most. The Incubator valued effort proportional to risk.
Forty-seven had become sixty-three. Then seventy-one. This morning, eighty-four.
The breathing from below got louder.
---
He'd been exploring the deeper sections of the third layer when the silence started. It rolled upward through the disposal ground like a tide. Not sound dying, but sound being eaten. The ambient hum of residual qi in the walls, the faint crackle of half-spent formations, the settling of ancient stone. All of it consumed, piece by piece, until the only thing left was that breathing and his heartbeat.
Tian Jue pressed his back against the carved wall and made himself small. The scientist in him was taking notes. The animal in him was screaming to fight.
The thing came up through the floor.
Not breaking it. Passing through it, the way water passes through sand. A shape more darkness than form, and somehow wrong. It moved like liquid poured sideways. No eyes that he could see. No mouth. But the breathing was coming from it, a wet rhythmic pull that drew the air toward it in visible currents.
Dust stirred on the ground around it. The broken weapons shivered. A jade slip cracked lengthwise, its stored qi draining into the creature's darkness like water into a sinkhole.
Tian Jue held his breath.
The thing stopped. Fifteen feet away. The breathing paused.
Then it turned. Not with a head or a body. The entire shape rotated, a mass of darkness orienting itself toward him the way a compass needle finds north.
It had found him. Not by sight or sound. By the Incubator humming in his chest, a new pulse in a place that had been silent for centuries.
It lunged.
---
He ran. There was nothing else to do.
But his attacker was fast. Faster than anything without legs should be. It flowed across the third layer floor, swallowing broken weapons and technique scrolls as it came. Everything it touched dissolved into its darkness. Not destroyed. Consumed. Tian Jue could hear the faint whine of qi being absorbed, a high keening that set his teeth on edge.
He scrambled up the transition between third and second layer. His cracked ribs ground together. Blood filled his mouth from the tongue he kept biting. Behind him, the darkness surged upward, spreading across the wall like oil on water.
The preserved spirit beasts in the second layer began to twitch.
Not alive. Reacting. The corrupted qi saturating their corpses responded to the creature's pull. A fox with three tails convulsed on the wall. A massive scaled thing shifted in its alcove, dead muscles firing.
Tian Jue threw himself past a row of corpses. The creature hit them instead. The fox-thing dissolved in seconds, centuries of preservation consumed in a breath. The creature then paused to feed on the carcasses.
Buying time. That's what Tian Jue noted. It prioritized closer energy sources.
He climbed. Hands bleeding on rough stone. Past the second layer into the first, where formation scripts covered every surface. The healing array pulsed green, reaching for him, finding nothing. The teleportation circle activated beneath his feet and failed.
But the creature reached the first layer and the formations reacted.
Not to Tian Jue. To the thing behind him.
A purification array blazed white. The creature screamed. The sound was worse than silence. Worse than the breathing. A frequency that lived in the space between hearing and understanding, and it hit him like a physical force.
The formation burned out in three seconds. But those three seconds cost the creature momentum. It shrank. Not much. A fraction of its mass burned away by purification qi too old and weak to do real damage but enough to sting.
Tian Jue filed this away. Formations hurt it. Briefly.
He kept climbing. The walls smoothed out above the first layer. No handholds. No formation shelves. Just vertical stone going up into darkness that used to feel infinite and now felt like a finish line.
His fingers found a crack. He pulled. His ribs screamed. He found another crack. Pulled again. Below, the creature reformed and began its ascent, flowing up the wall like a shadow climbing a candle.
The Incubator pulsed in his chest. Not a notification. Something deeper. His void core vibrated at a frequency he hadn't felt before, and the stone under his right hand felt different. Not softer. More present. As if the wall was acknowledging his grip.
He climbed faster. Not because his body could handle it, but because whatever the Incubator was doing made each handhold feel solid. Certain. Like the stone had been waiting for someone to reach for it.
---
Forty feet. Sixty. The disposal ground's throat was narrower than he'd guessed. The walls angled inward, which made climbing easier and the creature's approach faster. It was ten feet below him now. Close enough that he could feel its pull. The air thinning around his legs, drawing downward, his torn white robe fluttering toward the darkness.
His arms gave out at eighty feet.
Not gradually. All at once. The muscles in his forearms locked, then released, and his fingers opened against his will. For one full second he hung by his left hand alone, the right scraping at stone without purchase, and the creature surged upward.
[Warning: Host physical integrity critical]
[Recommendation: Release. Fall survivable at current height.]
The notification flickered behind his eyes. Cold. Clinical. The Incubator was advising him to drop. To fall back into the disposal ground and let the creature take whatever it wanted from the lower layers while he hid.
He looked up. Light. Not much. A gray line where darkness ended and the world began. Twenty feet above him.
He looked down. The creature filled the shaft below him like rising water. Dense and patient.
Waiting for him to fall.
Tian Jue's left hand began to twitch. His fingers were going white at the knuckles, tendons visible through the skin. Ten seconds. Maybe fifteen before they failed too.
He thought about the crystal that didn't light up. The jade pendant against his chest. Four hundred and nineteen marks on a wall. Garbage doesn't know when to quit.
He reached up with his right hand to find stone. Tian Jue gripped it with fingers that had no strength left and pulled himself up as much as he could.
Something cracked in his shoulder. Something tore in his side. He gained a measly three feet.
The creature lunged. Its edge caught his ankle and the cold went through him like a blade made of nothing. Not pain but absence. The sensation of something being taken from a body that had nothing to take.
The Incubator flared. Hot and sudden in his chest, a burst of purpose that pushed back against the creature's pull. The darkness on his ankle hissed and retreated.
Tian Jue gained another foot. Two. Five.
His hand hit grass.
Real grass. Warm dirt and root systems and the smell of air that hadn't been recycled through ancient stone for centuries. He hauled himself over the rim with both arms, dragging his legs clear of the shaft, and rolled onto his back.
The creature stopped at the edge. Twelve feet down, its darkness pressed against the rim of the disposal ground like a hand pressing against glass. It couldn't leave. The ward keeping things out also kept things in.
It breathed at him once. Heavy. Hungry. Then it sank back into the dark.
---
Tian Jue lay on his back in the grass. The sky was gray. Overcast. But it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
His body was a catalog of damage. Cracked ribs, torn shoulder, bleeding hands, bitten tongue. The ankle the creature had touched was numb and cold, sensation returning in slow pins. Every breath was a negotiation between his lungs and his broken bones.
The void core pulsed. Steady and insistent, like a second heartbeat. The Incubator had been tracking everything. The flight, the climb, the refusal to drop, the moment at the rim when he'd chosen twenty more feet over survival.
The number behind his eyes had changed. He could feel it without looking. The way you feel a pot about to boil, a tension in the air before the event.
He looked.
[RESONANCE THRESHOLD REACHED: 100/100]
[First Godseed Acquisition: INITIATING]
[Scanning available conceptual domains...]
Something was building inside his void core. Not the Incubator. Something the Incubator was making. Assembling. Growing from the accumulated weight of nine days of survival behavior compressed into a single point of purpose.
Something hungry.
His void core cracked open, and for the second time in a week, Tian Jue's world went white.