The knock at dawn was authoritative—three measured raps that brooked no refusal.
"Wei'er," his father's voice carried through the door. "Your deviation period has passed. Open this door."
Zǔ Zhòu rose from meditation, quickly checking his appearance. The bloodline concealment technique hummed quietly, masking the worst of the demonic resonance. He'd need to play this carefully.
He opened the door to find Liu Tiansheng in full patriarch mode—formal robes, hands clasped behind his back, Core Formation pressure deliberately leaked to establish dominance. Behind him stood Elder Feng, the family's cultivation instructor, looking skeptical.
"Father," Zǔ Zhòu bowed precisely—not too deep (suspicious) nor too shallow (disrespectful).
Liu Tiansheng's eyes swept the room, pausing at the blood-drawn formations on the walls. "Explain these."
"Stabilization arrays," Zǔ Zhòu replied smoothly. "The deviation was... unusual. I experienced a moment of enlightenment during practice, but my body couldn't contain the insights. These patterns helped channel the excess understanding."
Elder Feng stepped forward, examining the symbols. His frown deepened. "These formulae... they're advanced. Far beyond Body Tempering comprehension."
"That was the problem," Zǔ Zhòu let frustration creep into his voice—the original Liu Wei's petulance, carefully measured. "I glimpsed something beyond my level. Trying to grasp it caused the deviation."
His father's expression softened marginally. Cultivation deviations from overreaching were common among ambitious youth. "Show me your current state."
Zǔ Zhòu circulated his qi, displaying textbook Body Tempering Third Stage energy. But he added subtle improvements—smoother flow, denser quality. The kind of minor advancement that suggested genuine progress.
"Interesting," Elder Feng murmured. "Your circulation has improved. The deviation, while dangerous, seems to have refined your channels."
"Lucky misfortune," Liu Tiansheng said, though his eyes remained suspicious. "You missed three days of training. You'll make them up. Report to the training grounds after morning meal."
"Yes, Father."
They left, but not before his father paused at the door. "Wei'er, deviation or not, missing training without permission is unacceptable. Next time, send word immediately."
"I understand, Father."
The door closed. Zǔ Zhòu waited, sensing their qi signatures moving away. His father's suspicion lingered like a bad taste, but it was manageable. Liu Tiansheng expected disappointment from his third son—minor improvements would be seen as surprising but not impossible.
Morning training proved tedious. Basic forms, spiritual exercises, combat practice against training dummies. Zǔ Zhòu performed at exactly 15% above Liu Wei's previous standard—enough to show improvement, not enough to raise alarms.
"Your stance has improved," Elder Feng noted during sword practice. "The deviation seems to have given you better body awareness."
"I feel... different," Zǔ Zhòu admitted, adding uncertainty to his voice. "Like I understand the movements better, even if I can't explain why."
His brothers were there—Liu Feng practicing advanced techniques with casual excellence, Second Brother Liu Chen (visiting from the academy) working through intermediate forms. Neither paid him much attention beyond cursory greetings.
Perfect. Ignored was exactly where he wanted to be.
Training concluded at noon. Zǔ Zhòu made appropriate excuses about needing to consolidate his insights and retreated to his quarters. But instead of entering his rooms, he took a servant's passage he'd discovered in Liu Wei's memories.
Down he went, through dusty corridors and forgotten storerooms, into the manor's foundation. The Liu family estate was old—built on ruins of something older. Liu Wei had explored these passages out of boredom and perverted curiosity.
But Zǔ Zhòu felt something the original owner had missed.
A resonance. Faint but unmistakable. Like calling to like—the Laughing Demon bloodline responding to something fundamentally wrong with reality.
The sensation led him deeper, past wine cellars and emergency supplies, into sections that predated the current manor. The walls changed from fitted stone to something older—black rock that seemed to drink in light.
"Pre-dynasty construction," he murmured, running fingers along the wall. "Before the current cultivation system was standardized. When experiments were less... regulated."
The resonance grew stronger. His bloodline mark pulsed in response, recognizing something kindred. A wound. A scar. A place where reality had been hurt so badly it never properly healed.
The passage opened into a natural cave system. Or rather, something that looked natural if you didn't understand how space-time injuries manifested. The cave walls twisted in ways that challenged perception—solid stone that seemed to flow, shadows that fell upward, air that tasted of tomorrow's regrets.
And there, in the chamber's heart, he found it.
A temporal scar. One of his 112 children, left behind when the Heavenly Dao had ripped him from his original reality.
"Hello, beautiful," he whispered, approaching the distortion.
The scar manifested as a sphere of absolutely nothing—not darkness, not emptiness, but the aggressive absence of existence. Around it, reality twisted like fabric caught in a thorn. Time moved strangely; dust motes near the scar aged to nothing in seconds while others froze mid-fall.
Zǔ Zhòu extended his senses carefully. The scar recognized him—how could it not? It was made from his essence, his defiance, his consumption of fundamental law. It pulsed with welcoming warmth that would have driven lesser minds to gibbering madness.
"Let's see what you've been fermenting," he said, reaching out to touch the scar's edge.
The contact was electric. Not energy—something far more fundamental. The scar contained fragments of the laws he'd consumed, reality-stuff that had been partially digested before being violently reclaimed. But the reclamation hadn't been clean. These fragments were corrupted, twisted, fundamentally wrong in ways that made them incredibly useful.
Through the connection, he felt the network. All 112 scars, scattered across reality like drops of poison in a clear pond. This was a minor one—barely a puncture wound compared to the major tears—but it was his. His past self's final insult to existence.
"The aftertaste of omnipotence," he said, drawing power from the scar carefully. Too much too fast would destabilize it, possibly alert whatever monitoring systems Heaven had in place. But small sips? Sustainable extraction? That was possible.
The energy that flowed into him wasn't qi, wasn't spiritual power in any conventional sense. It was liquified paradox, distilled impossibility, the essence of things that shouldn't be but were. His Body Tempering cultivation greedily absorbed it, and he felt his flesh strengthen in ways that had nothing to do with normal advancement.
"Oh, this is delicious," he laughed, the sound echoing strangely in the twisted space. "Past me left quite the vintage collection."
He spent an hour mapping the scar's properties. Temporal flow varied between 0.3x and 5.7x normal within a three-meter radius. Spatial dimensions occasionally forgot which way was up. The law fragments contained within included pieces of time, space, causality, and interestingly, a sliver of what appeared to be Heaven's own defensive protocols.
"You're not just a wound," he realized. "You're an infection. Heaven couldn't fully heal because you contain pieces of its own immune system, turned cancerous."
The implications were staggering. Each scar wasn't just a power source—it was a permanent vulnerability in reality's defenses. Holes that Heaven couldn't close without performing surgery on itself.
As he prepared to leave, something else caught his attention. Bones in the corner, ancient and twisted. Someone had found this place before. Someone had tried to cultivate here.
The skeleton was warped—too many ribs, fingers that branched like tree roots, a skull that had grown secondary faces. Whoever they were, they'd absorbed too much paradox without understanding it.
"Amateur," Zǔ Zhòu said dismissively. But he examined the remains carefully. The bones contained trace amounts of successfully integrated paradox energy. This person had partially succeeded before being overwhelmed.
More interesting were the carved symbols on the wall beside the skeleton. Last words? A warning? No—cultivation notes. Someone's desperate attempt to record their discoveries before transformation claimed them.
"'The wound speaks in tomorrow's languages,'" he read. "'Time is optional. Space is negotiable. Identity is..." The rest was illegible, carved by fingers that had forgotten what fingers were supposed to be.
But it confirmed something important. Others could sense the scars. Others had tried to use them. Which meant eventually, others would come looking.
"A problem for future me," he decided, memorizing the location perfectly. "Current me has cultivation to accelerate."
He made his way back through the passages, mind already calculating. The scar's energy would accelerate his cultivation dramatically—what should take years could be accomplished in months. But he'd need to be careful. Too much advancement too quickly would draw unwanted attention.
"Gradual," he murmured. "Sustainable. Let them think I'm a late bloomer finally applying myself."
He emerged from the servant's passage to find his younger sister waiting outside his rooms.
"Third Brother!" Liu Mei said brightly. "Father said you're feeling better. I brought your favorite osmanthus cakes."
She held up a covered plate, smiling with such genuine warmth that it actually took him a moment to respond. The original Liu Wei had truly loved his sister—the emotional echoes were surprisingly strong.
"Mei'er," he said, accepting the plate. "You didn't need to."
"I wanted to. You scared us with that deviation. Elder Feng said you could have died." Her eyes teared slightly. "Promise you'll be more careful?"
He studied her—twelve years old, just beginning her cultivation journey, radiating the kind of pure-hearted innocence that most cultivators lost within their first year. She was perfect. Not for immediate corruption, but for long-term investment.
"I promise," he lied smoothly. "Would you like to share these with me? I could tell you about what I learned during my recovery."
Her face lit up. "Really? Elder Feng never explains things properly."
They sat in his receiving room, sharing cakes while he carefully planted seeds. Nothing obvious—just subtle adjustments to how she thought about cultivation. The importance of personal power. The weakness of excessive mercy. How strength meant you could protect what mattered.
All truths, from a certain perspective. The kind of philosophy that would seem reasonable now but create exploitable flaws later.
"Third Brother," she said as she prepared to leave, "I'm glad you're getting stronger. Maybe now Father will stop being so disappointed."
The casual cruelty of childish honesty. Zǔ Zhòu filed it away for future use.
"Maybe," he agreed. "Thank you for the cakes, Mei'er."
After she left, he sat in meditation, carefully cycling the paradox energy from the temporal scar. It settled into his dantian like molten metal, dense and wrong and powerful. His Body Tempering cultivation solidified, impurities burning away not through normal refinement but through exposure to impossibility.
One scar found. One hundred and eleven to go.
And somewhere in the cosmic machinery, an alarm tried to sound. A warning that reality's wounds were being picked at. But the signal was muddled, confused by the Laughing Demon mark's concealment and the paradox energy's inherent wrongness.
Heaven hesitated, uncertain.
In that uncertainty, Zǔ Zhòu smiled and planned his next move.