Morning haze rolled over the Azure Flame Sect, and the mountain winds carried the scent of pine and ash. Disciples shouted in the distance as they trained atop stone platforms, their Qi arts lighting the sky in flashes of color. But Li Shen moved through it like a ghost.
Unseen. Unbothered. A thread that had already pulled itself from the tapestry.
He no longer needed to test his ability. He had spent each of the last six nights meditating beneath the old bell tower, surrounded by the rusting skeletons of war relics. And each time, the threads grew clearer.
Qi. Heat. Pressure. Causality.
Emotion.
Now, he had begun to hear something stranger.
Whispers.
Not voices. Not thoughts. Intentions—buried deep within certain threads. When he focused, when he traced a thread far enough, it wasn't just a force... it had a shape. A pull. Like each thread remembered what it was meant to do.
Today, he tested that theory.
He entered the Pill Garden at dawn, an off-limits zone reserved for alchemists and inner court elders. Most wouldn't dare. But Li Shen had already mapped its patrol rotations, analyzed the cultivators' Qi signatures, and memorized the pressure layouts of every spirit formation guarding the doors.
At the back of the garden, behind a cracked incense burner shaped like a serpent's fang, was a sealed apothecary vault. A place where unfinished or failed elixirs were discarded—not because they lacked power, but because they were unstable.
He wasn't there for the pills.
He was there for the thread left behind by something that should not have existed.
A cursed lotus, bred by mistake from Voidroot and Vermillion Core flowers. An anomaly.
Inside the vault, among shattered jars and scorched herbs, Li Shen found it.
The lotus had withered long ago, but its presence remained like a stain on space. The thread hung low, shimmering faintly in the dim light, its color a sickly, iridescent green.
He reached out—not to sever it, but to follow it.
The moment he touched it, his breath hitched.
It was a thread of negation. Not decay. Not corrosion. Erasure. It devoured cause and effect itself. It had once belonged to a living thing, yet it retained no memory of blooming, no cycle of birth or death. It had been cut from reality before its pattern ever finished forming.
Li Shen's hands trembled slightly. Not from fear.
From awe.
"There are threads even time cannot trace."
He backed away. He would not weave with this yet. Not until he understood what it meant. Not until he could anchor it.
But he had confirmed something vital—threads could not only be severed or pulled.
They could be stored. Stolen.
He whispered into the space around him, not caring if anyone heard.
"I am not cultivating power. I am cultivating rules."
That night, as he meditated beneath the old bell tower, he noticed a thread moving toward him.
Not from the world—but from the loom.
Though it was gone, it still existed within him. Deep inside his dantian, hidden beneath the shattered framework of his abandoned spiritual root, the loom had left behind a single black thread coiled around the core of his being.
Tonight, for the first time, it pulsed.
Something had noticed what he'd done.
And it was waking up.