"A sword unsheathed by truth cleaves no storm."
The wind shifted.
Not the thunderous gusts of the physical storm that encased Thunderclad Basin—but something subtler, deeper. The mist thickened, swirling into a silver wall that blurred the sky and concealed the surroundings. Su Mengtian stood still in the center of the shattered stone arena, his muscles still tensed from the earlier battle with the Tempest Fang Bear. Blood dried along his arms, but his breathing had already steadied.
Commander Fei Wu did not speak. He merely raised one hand from his perch on the jagged cliff ledge high above. With a sharp gesture, the second trial began.
The wind peeled back the veil of mist.
Su Mengtian blinked as the world reshaped around him.
He stood in a ruined village, scorched and broken. The smell of smoke, iron, and charred wood filled the air. Thunder echoed above, but no lightning came down. Instead, from behind the remains of a collapsed shrine, a scream rang out.
He sprinted toward it instinctively.
What he found made his breath catch.
"Senior Tianyuan?" he whispered.
A man with familiar white-streaked black hair knelt on the ground, bloodied and half-buried under rubble. He had once been an instructor at Crimson Sky Academy—an honorable man, someone Su Mengtian had admired deeply. Behind him, a young girl clutched at his sleeve, crying silently. She bore the uniform of a field medic, her robes stained with soot and ash.
But what made Mengtian's fists clench were the half-dozen storm beasts circling in the distance.
He counted them: Windrazor Hounds, known for their speed and coordinated pack strikes. Six against two wounded, non-combatants.
Then, another sound reached his ears.
A metallic hum… from the east. Just behind the debris wall, no more than fifty meters away, lay a cache of refined Thundersteel cores—highly volatile but extremely valuable. The objective of the test. The mission he had supposedly been assigned in this illusion.
"Secure the Thundersteel before the storm surge or fail the mission."
That voice echoed from nowhere—but it was unmistakable.
Commander Fei Wu.
Su Mengtian glanced from the cache to the wounded pair.
One choice led to victory. The other to sacrifice.
He could retrieve the Thundersteel and leave the two behind—justifying it as duty.
Or he could stay and protect them, risking failure, but upholding the code of every warrior his father and grandfather had ever honored.
The seconds ticked away.
The storm intensified.
He didn't hesitate long.
"Damn the mission," he muttered and rushed toward the injured.
He pulled Tianyuan out with brute force, breaking the rubble apart with wind-infused strikes. The girl gasped as the beasts began to move. Their howls grew sharper.
"Can you walk?" he asked the girl. She nodded, barely.
Tianyuan coughed. "Leave me. Get her out".
"Save it," Su Mengtian snapped. "I'm not choosing between lives. That's not leadership. That's cowardice."
He stood tall, raising his hand.
Blue arcs surged around his palm. The storm spirits answered his call, his Thunder Guardian dragon bloodline flaring to life as lightning snapped through the air.
The Windrazor Hounds charged.
But this time, they were met by a wall of defiance.
He struck with precise, storm-imbued movements—not to kill, but to drive them away. The trial didn't demand slaughter. It demanded protection.
He shielded the wounded pair until the beasts hesitated, then backed away into the mist.
When silence returned, the village vanished in an instant.
Only the basin remained.
Su Mengtian stood alone once more, his breath shallow. His arms were bloodied, his robes scorched at the sleeves.
Above him, Commander Fei Wu finally spoke.
His voice carried clearly through the storm.
"The easy path is rarely the right one. The mission can be redrawn. Integrity cannot."
Then silence.
But something inside Mengtian resonated with that truth. He looked down at his hands—not for the blood or wounds, but for what they had chosen to do.
He didn't regret it.
Not for a second.
And the storm whispered onward, preparing for the next trial.
Commander Fei Wu said "To lead is to feel the weight not only of your own burden—but the unseen struggles of others."
Then the thunder faded.
In its place came a haunting quiet, and Su Mengtian found himself standing not in a basin or storm-wracked battlefield, but in the middle of a long corridor made of translucent stormglass.
Rain pattered against the sides, muffled yet rhythmic. Every few meters, there was a tall crystal mirror, each reflecting not his physical form—but fragments of his memories.
His hands tightened into fists. A strange unease crept in.
"Commander Fei Wu?" he called out.
Silence.
He stepped forward.
The corridor shimmered.
Then the first mirror ignited with pale blue light. A memory surfaced.
He saw himself—aged six—kneeling in the orphanage's back courtyard in Jamshedpur. The caretaker slapped a trembling boy beside him for stealing bread. The boy had stolen it for his younger sister. Su Mengtian had said nothing back then. He remembered watching the scene, gritting his teeth but too small, too powerless to stop it.
The mirror rippled. A soft voice spoke, female, trembling.
"You looked away… because you were afraid."
He moved on, faster.
The second mirror lit.
Now a scene from Crimson Sky Academy: He stood tall during training, having just defeated a fellow cadet in a spar. The cadet—Yi Rong—had been mocked by others for his defeat. Mengtian had said nothing, letting the taunts echo. He hadn't started them—but he hadn't stopped them either.
"You called it discipline. Was it?" the mirror asked.
He scowled and pressed forward.
By the fourth mirror, sweat formed on his brow. The corridor grew colder, quieter. Each step forced him deeper—not into illusions, but introspection. These weren't trials of combat, but wounds of spirit.
The fifth mirror shattered before he reached it.
From the shards stepped a familiar figure.
Su Lingyue. His younger sister.
Only… this was a projection, born of memory. Her eyes shimmered with sadness.
"I waited when you promised you'd come back before the festival," she said, her voice a whisper on wind. "You forgot. You were training, weren't you?"
"I was preparing for our future," he replied, guilt crawling up his spine.
"But I only wanted to see you smile that day."
The words struck harder than any beast's claw.
Behind Lingyue, two more forms appeared.
Su Tianlei—his younger twin brother—silent and fierce-eyed, and Long Xiumei, his mother, whose image wavered like fog and starlight.
"I missed your laughter, Mengtian," she said softly. "You carry the weight of a hundred futures. But will you forget those closest behind you?"
He fell to one knee.
Not out of defeat.
But understanding.
Empathy wasn't about simply acknowledging pain—it was about feeling it, responding to it, honoring it. Leadership without empathy was tyranny masked as strength.
The corridor dimmed.
Then light surged behind him.
Fei Wu's voice came from above like distant thunder.
"You cannot heal what you do not see. You cannot protect those you do not understand."
"You passed."
Su Mengtian stood slowly.
The corridor dissolved.
He returned to the storm basin's center, wind tearing through the air like the beating heart of the trial itself.
He exhaled—and prepared for what came next.