The sun was a merciless overseer on the Outer Sect training grounds of the Celestial Sword Pavilion. Situated in a broad, flattened valley near the base of the soaring mountain peaks, the area was a testament to the sect's immense power—a vast expanse of polished river stones and resilient spirit grass, meticulously maintained and humming with faint, embedded reinforcement arrays. Yet for all its perfection, it was still the bottom. The sacred peaks where the true disciples trained were a world away, shrouded in mist and aspiration.
Here, the air did not thrum with profound qi but with the gritted-teeth effort of hundreds. The sounds were a symphony of strain: the thud of fists against ironwood posts, the sharp exhales of forms practiced until muscles trembled, the low murmur of incantations repeated into meaninglessness.
Among them, Jin Chen of the Frostblade Clan moved with a sharp, precise fury. His frost-blue robes, once a symbol of his clan's fleeting prestige, were dark with sweat. Each movement of his sword form was technically flawless, a whirlwind of controlled anger. But his eyes, the color of a winter sky, were fixed not on his imaginary opponent but on the distant, winding stairways that led upward. To the inner peaks. To everything he'd been denied.
He finished the form, his boot grinding into the fine gravel as he settled into a meditative stance. He sought the qi, pulling at the thin, scattered energy of the lowlands with a desperate, clawing focus. A tiny wisp, thinner than a hair and cooler than his namesake, answered his call, coiling reluctantly around his core before sputtering out. His lungs burned, his muscles screamed a raw protest, and his palms, pressed hard against his knees, were marked with half-moon indentations from his nails.
A ragged breath escaped him, tasting of dust and failure. His gaze swept across the training ground, a fresh wave of bitterness washing over him. There was the girl from the Vermilion Bird Clan, her hands coaxing a playful flicker of flame. There, a burly disciple from the Black Tortoise sect, his skin momentarily taking on a stony texture. They had been chosen. Their clans meant something. His own, the Frostblade, was a name fading from memory, a mid-sized sect clawing for relevance, and he was its embodiment—sharp, present, and utterly overlooked.
Not a single Inner Sect Elder had glanced his way during the selections. Not even an Outer Sect master had offered a nod of acknowledgment. He was just another face in the striving, envious crowd. His jaw tightened. He envied them all. He envied their mentors, their resources, their certainty.
And then, the murmurs reached him, cutting through his self-pity like a knife. They started at the edge of the grounds, near the path that led down from the higher realms, and rippled inward like a shockwave.
"—did you feel that? Yesterday? From Veiled Silence Peak?" "...like the air itself was sucked away for a moment..." "They say Elder Lan herself took a disciple.A monster." "No,not a monster. A ghost. They say he moves without sound."
Jin Chen's head snapped up, his own frustrations forgotten. Veiled Silence Peak. The domain of the most terrifying Elder.
The whispers continued, weaving a tapestry of rumor. "But that's not the strange part. They say he's never alone." A snort."What, a ghost with a friend?" "No.A shadow. A woman. Always with him. They say she looks like a celestial maiden but carries a child's toy. A rabbit." "A rabbit?" "They say he decimates training dummies with a look,but she walks right up to him and tugs on his sleeve. And he… allows it."
Jin Chen listened, his envy curdling into something darker, more confused. A prodigy of void qi, taken by the Silent Blade. It was a story that should have inspired pure awe. But this detail—the woman, the rabbit—it was wrong. It was a flaw in the narrative, an anomaly that didn't fit the image of the untouchable genius he was already beginning to resent. It was a connection, a vulnerability. And for Jin Chen, festering in the valley of the overlooked, any crack in the pedestal of those above him was all he could think about. His fingers curled into fists again, but now it was not just from effort. It was from the burning need to understand the mystery that walked the peaks far above him.
The thought was a splinter lodged deep in his mind, festering with every labored breath. One week. The words were a bitter chant in time with his pounding heart. One week since the selection had cleaved them all into two worlds: the chosen, who ascended into the mist-shrouded peaks, and the forgotten, who remained here in the dust.
Jin Chen's gaze swept across the bustling training ground, a sea of striving bodies under the hard, flat light of the valley. Every face was a mirror of his own desperation—jaws clenched, brows furrowed, robes stained with effort. They punched, kicked, and meditated with a frantic energy, each one screaming silently for a notice that never came. They were all ghosts already, their struggles invisible to the powers that resided above.
And him? Lin Feng? He hadn't just been chosen. He had been erased from their world entirely.
Jin Chen's hands, resting on his knees, clenched into white-knuckled fists. He hadn't seen him once. Not queuing for the bland sustenance of the refectory, not poring over scrolls in the public archives, not here—not here where the rest of them bled and strained for a sliver of recognition. The prodigy of Veiled Silence Peak didn't need to eat among mortals, didn't need to study common manuals. He had simply vanished into the rarefied air of that sacred pinnacle, taking his inexplicable shadow with him.
How? The question was a razor turning inside him. What alchemy of blood or spirit had granted that boy such privilege? What had he done, what had he been, that was so fundamentally superior to the raw, grinding effort Jin Chen offered every single day?
His eyes lifted again, past the straining forms of his fellow disciples, past the valley's edge, to where the mountains stabbed the heavens. Up there, the air was so thin it was pure qi. Up there, a single word from Elder Lan was worth a thousand hours of their collective sweat. And up there, Lin Feng was undoubtedly receiving lessons that would reshape his very destiny, while they down here practiced the same basic forms until their bones ached.
And for what? To be less than a footnote. To be the backdrop against which his legend was painted.
The greatest injustice, the one that truly poisoned his thoughts, was the woman. The one with the rabbit. Lin Feng hadn't just been granted unparalleled access to power; he'd been allowed to keep his attachment. He'd taken his anomaly with him. That privilege, that blatant flaunting of the rules of ascetic dedication, felt like a personal insult. What did he have that Jin Chen did not? What made him worthy of both ultimate power and human comfort, while Jin Chen had nothing but his name and his frustration?
The murmur of the training ground faded into a dull roar in his ears. He was alone with the acid taste of his envy, a solitary figure in a crowd of the striving, forever looking up at a mystery he could not comprehend and a privilege he could not forgive.
High above him, the sun continued its indifferent journey across the sky, its light falling not only on the striving and the forgotten in the valleys but also on the quiet, ordered places where the consequences of such mysteries were processed into ledgers and logistics.
The air in the Sect Administration Hall was still and cool, smelling of aged paper, polished cedar, and the faint, metallic tang of ink. Sunlight fell in precise, geometric shafts through tall, latticed windows, illuminating dancing motes of dust above a vast sea of scroll-laden desks. At one such desk, Administrator Kho sat, a man whose face was a roadmap of minor bureaucratic frustrations. His fingers, stained a permanent blue-black at the tips, gripped a fine wolf-hair brush, but it hovered, motionless, over the open ledger before him.
The page was a masterpiece of orderly columns: Name, Peak Assignment, Mentor, Realm, Monthly Spirit Stone Allotment. His brush had confidently filled row after row until it reached the source of his current paralysis.
Lin Feng. Veiled Silence Peak. Elder Lan.
The entry was an island of chaos in his sea of records. The first three entries were straightforward, a privilege granted by the most feared Elder in the sect. The fourth was the problem. The column for 'Realm' was a stark, accusatory blank.
Elder Lan's directive, delivered by a chilling, silent glance that had frozen the ink in his well, had been clear: 'Do not classify him.' The words were not spoken but etched directly into his mind with the sharpness of a blade's intent.
But practicality was Kho's religion. How did one process a spirit stone allotment without a realm? The stones were not mere currency; they were cultivation fuel, meticulously calibrated to a disciple's stage to avoid waste or, worse, catastrophic overload. The Meridian Opening quota was a pittance of faintly glowing pebbles. The Foundation Establishment allocation was a respectable handful of steady, pulsing stones. Core Formation would command a small chest of potent, shimmering crystals.
Lin Feng's energy signature during the selection, what little Kho had been able to sense before his spiritual perception had flinched away, had been… neither. It was not the gathering heat of Meridian Opening, nor the solidifying core of Foundation Establishment. It was a void. A silence that consumed the very concept of classification. It was, for a man who lived by ledgers and categories, an abomination.
His brush trembled. To assign the wrong allotment was to risk offending Elder Lan, either by insulting her disciple with insufficient resources or by potentially harming him with an excess his unique cultivation might violently reject. The bureaucratic dilemma was a tight knot in his stomach.
"Do I bother the Sect Leader over this?" he murmured to the silent hall, the words swallowed by the towering shelves of records. The thought was its own special kind of terror. Disturbing Sword Saint Hong Ye himself to debate the minutiae of a single disciple's resource form was a career-ending proposition.
With a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of every scroll in the room, Administrator Kho made a decision. He dipped his brush and, with precise, resigned strokes, drew a single, dark line through the blank space in the 'Realm' column. In the margin, he wrote in tiny, perfect characters: 'Unclassified (Elder Lan Directive). Allotment: Provisional, Tier 0. Manual review required.'
Every month, he would now have to personally assess a form that filled him with a deep, existential dread, a monthly reminder of the one entry in his perfect ledgers that defied all logic and order. He closed the heavy book with a soft thud, the sound final. The system had encountered an anomaly, and his only solution was to create a unique, frustrating exception.
---