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The moment Feiyin plunged into the lava's surface, the world turned into a suffocating blur of heat.
The lava was heavier than he expected. Dense, oppressive. It slowed his descent to a sluggish crawl, like moving through thickened syrup forged from liquid fire. Though his water-infused essence qi surrounded him in a protective shell, the reaction was immediate and vicious.
His cloak hissed and crackled.
Water and fire were natural opposites, with water suppressing fire, but the reality was more nuanced. When fire was weak, water quenched it easily. But here, immersed in a primordial pool of pure, essence-rich lava, the scales tipped. Fire, vast and unyielding, overwhelmed the delicate structure of his water-infused qi.
Crackling sound rang across his protective barrier.
Essence qi evaporated in torrents. The outer layers of his shield disintegrated and reconstructed as the heat surged inward. It was like tossing a cup of water into a roaring furnace and expecting it to survive.
Feiyin's brows furrowed in concentration.
"So this is how it feels... when the advantage of elements breaks under absolute quantity."
He stopped channeling water.
Instead, he shifted. Earth-infused essence qi surged through his meridians, dense and steady. The water cocoon dissolved, and in its place came a more stoic, firm barrier. The lava groaned around him, but this time, there was no wild reaction. Earth did not oppose fire. It was its child, and was born from it in the natural cycle of the elements.
As the molten world accepted the change, his descent stabilized. The violent erosion of his qi slowed. The shroud held.
To test the limits of his current condition, Feiyin extended his hand while he was still sinking on the surface. He retracted his earth-infused qi from the fingertips, baring them to the lava's touch.
The heat struck immediately.
His skin reddened as the sweat directly turned to mist. The heat sang up his arm. But it did not cripple him.
He pressed a finger down.
Lava clung to his skin in slow ripples. It tried to devour, to consume, but his body, tempered to perfection and refined by the elements, held.
When he lifted his finger again, it glowed a faint red, like a heated iron.
"It's remarkable what tempered skin can endure. It's still dangerous... but tolerable."
Feiyin stored the information in his mind, then allowed himself to sink deeper, drifting just beside the obsidian pillar he had leapt from. Close enough to reach, should he need to claw back to safety.
He closed his eyes.
Spiritual sense unfurled.
Oscillation sense followed.
The magma around him pulsed with essence. It was fire in its purest, most ancestral form. It didn't roar or explode. It beat like a heart, slow and inevitable, constant and vast.
Feiyin let himself drift in it, letting his spiritual perception sink into the flow. He watched how the fire moved, how it twisted and writhed around the foreign minerals from the falling sediment. He saw how the gases interacted. How pressure built and broke.
Feiyin faintly released the intents he had already comprehended, letting each one unfold in quiet resonance. They hovered around him like memories; earth's stillness grounding his mind, water's flow guiding his perception, metal's structure clarifying edges, and wood's expansion opening his awareness.
He didn't force them. He simply let them exist, each offering a lens through which to feel fire.
Using his oscillation sense, he let the rhythm of the lava imprint itself into his soul. The vibrations of the fire essence struck him, reacting against the pulses of his own elemental intents. Earth welcomed its parent. Wood was consumed. Water resisted in futility. Metal tried to define it, but fire escaped definition.
Through those resonances, he began to understand not just how fire behaved, but why. It wasn't wild for the sake of chaos. It was radiant because it needed to transform. It consumed because that was how it gave birth to the new.
With every subtle clash, every shift of elemental interplay, a deeper layer of truth unfolded within him.
But it wasn't just about understanding fire in isolation. It was about relating to it. Bridging the gap through the others.
He faintly increased the output of the other elemental intents, letting them pulse around him in stronger waves. Not to overpower the moment, but to offer contrast. Earth pressed in patiently, water shimmered in flowing restraint, metal traced structure, and wood pulsed with quiet growth. Through these lenses, he observed how fire reacted; how it pushed, devoured, resisted, or flowed. His oscillation sense mapped the rhythm of each clash, every resonance between essence and element.
Intent layered upon intent, comparison upon comparison.
He wove them like a tapestry in his mind, not to copy fire, but to understand it. To see how it fit into the greater weave. To reach that singular point where fire wasn't just an idea or energy, but a truth he could grasp.
Time passed. Minutes. Hours.
His consciousness thinned, sharpened, expanded.
And yet...
A wall.
It wasn't made of qi. It wasn't a bottleneck. It wasn't even exhaustion.
It was a gap in understanding.
Like reading a book in a language you hadn't yet learned. He could see the patterns, but not internalize them. They passed through his mind like vapor.
Frustration stirred.
He was fourteen, and already held multiple elemental intents that would have made sect prodigies gasp. He had endured with earth, carved with metal, flowed with water, and danced with wood. He was stronger than his cultivation phase would suggest, and had been striving all this time to train, to accumulate knowledge and skills. Yet... he still couldn't grasp this?
Why, when fire had been present at every major turning point in his life?
He clenched his fists.
The old devil.
The cursed man who had split his path, torn him from his family, threatened those he held dear.
Feiyin needed more power, a stronger foundation and realm. Needed alchemy that could overcome the blood parasite. And for that, he had to, no, needed fire.
His pulse raced. Blood rushed in his ears. And somewhere within that frustration... a decision.
"If knowledge isn't enough..."
His eyes burned.
"Then let experience teach me."
With a deep breath, he released the essence qi cloaking his body.
At once, heat.
Unfiltered heat invaded him. His skin reddened to a deep red. His muscles seized.
Lava rushed in to embrace him.
His heart pounded, once, then twice- then faster and faster. Each beat echoed in his ears like a drum, like a warcry. His blood surged, fighting to disperse the heat, to cool his organs, to preserve the vital pathways.
It wasn't just pain. It was movement.
Each beat. Each ripple. Each vibration of the molten world around him.
He could hear them.
Feel them.
Oscillation sense flared to its limits. The hum of fire. The scream of combustion. The whisper of gas bubbles. It was all a song- chaotic, sharp, rhythmless at first...
Then, pulse. Flow. Cadence.
Heartbeat.
The lava breathed. It sang.
And he was within it. Part of it.
The line between pain and perception blurred. The agony became clarity.
His frustration bled into the magma around him, his emotions rippling like molten waves. Fire, more than any other element, had resisted him. Not out of cruelty, but because it mirrored too well the storm within his own heart.
He realized, in that final moment, that fire wasn't chaos. It was passion. The desire to change, to transform, to burn away the old so something new could be born. And that was the part he had been missing.
He had approached fire like a puzzle. But fire wasn't meant to be solved.
It was meant to be felt.
And at last-
The wall in his mind shattered.
Flames bloomed behind his closed eyelids.
Within his mind' eye, a spark.
Then a flicker.
Then a roar.
Fire intent.
A bright red, burning seed coalesced next to the other elemental intents seeds, with each having its own radiance.
And as it ignited within him, Feiyin smiled, even as his skin smoked and his body trembled.
"Thank you," he whispered to the flame around him with a smile as he swallowed the pill in his mouth, his eyes burning with excitement and determination. "Now... let's go for the second round."