The Infinite Ascent
Chapter 5: The Price Of Power
They kept whispering it as the embers died.
Koganenosora.
Some spoke it like a prayer. Others like a warning. The square stank of ash and fear; the slain beast still steamed where the golden fire had eaten it hollow. The girl with the battered sword stared at me, lips parted, questions she could not voice burning behind her eyes.
"Are you" she began.
"I'm leaving," I said.
Her jaw tightened. "Where?"
"Up where the sky looks most broken."
Her gaze flicked to the mountain on the horizon its silhouette carved against a ceiling of jagged light. Even now the heavens bled gold through their cracks, and the tallest peak wore that wound like a crown.
"Azure Sky," she whispered. "The sect."
I nodded. The word rolled through the crowd like a ripple fear, hope, old superstition. The Nine Dynasties were dust now, but the Eight Pillars sects like Azure Sky still clung to the bones of order. If there were answers to what I had become, they would be carved into their stones or hidden in their vaults.
The girl pressed a goatskin flask into my palm. "Take this, Stranger." A beat. "Koganenosora."
I didn't correct her. Names are anchors. Tonight, I needed to move.
I stepped past the kneeling, the praying, the recoiling. Past the toppled talisman stones that once warded Shin'ei. At the broken gate, a waystone still hummed a cracked pillar etched with travel runes, its blue core guttering. It had guided caravans before the sky split; now it pulsed like a dying heart.
I touched it. The rune flared, then fizzled. A useless sentinel in a world that had forgotten how to be guarded.
I walked.
The Azure Post Road once glittered with crushed mica and merchant songs. Now it was a thread through a wasteland of shattered irrigation wheels and fields turned to glass by fallen flame. Far off, scavenger banners bobbed along the ridge wolf-tooth pennants of the new warlords. The wind tasted of metal. Everywhere, Skywound motes drifted like snow harmless until they weren't, clumping into things with too many eyes.
With every mile, the sigil at my waist the same one that had blazed in Shin'ei throbbed against my skin. Heat. Cold. Hunger. The system's voice rose and fell with my heartbeat, patient as a chisel.
[Suffer. Endure. Ascend.]
"Is there no other way?" I asked the road.
[There is only the Path.]
I drank from the girl's flask. The water tasted of smoke and tin. When I breathed, the air scraped my throat like sand. Twice I stopped to retch black threads that writhed before fading burnt residue of the thing I'd killed.
By dusk I reached the foothills. Azure Sky rose from terraces of pale stone, its steps climbing through cloud-caught pines. Imperial steles lined the first stair, engraved with oaths to a Heaven that no longer answered. Bells tolled somewhere above flat, out of tune, as if even bronze had forgotten its purpose.
Two outer disciples guarded the broken gate. Their robes were ash-stained; one's bandage had bled through. They looked me over white hair, gold eyes, a stranger walking out of the dead world and flinched despite themselves.
"I seek entry," I said.
"On what grounds?" the bolder one asked, and stared harder when the sigil at my waist flickered.
"On the grounds that I am not done." I met his gaze. "And you are not either."
Something in my voice or the way the cracked sky pooled light in my eyes made them step aside.
Azure Sky had survived the first collapse, but it had not escaped untouched. Training courts spider-webbed with impact scars. Qi conduits thin copper veins along the colonnades buzzed irregularly. The air tasted faintly of ozone and burnt pine. Somewhere a novice sobbed; somewhere else, someone laughed too loudly. People endure in uneven ways.
They led me to the largest courtyard. Disciples circled its edge, whispering, as a senior instructor's bark cut the air into obedience. On the dais stood a young man in immaculate azure silk, aura bright and sharp as noon.
"Report," he snapped at my escorts, without looking at me.
"Found him at the gate, Senior Ryo," one said. "Says he seeks entry."
Ryo turned then, and his eyes went cold. "So the stray finally returns."
The circle tightened. My ribs remembered other courtyards, other stares. Before the world broke, I had stood in places like this and learned what it meant to be less. Some lessons don't die with empires.
Ryo's lip curled. "Kazan, is it? Kazuki? Or should we call you what the peasants do?" He let the name roll like insult. "Koganenosora."
I said nothing. Let a word hang long enough and it shapes the room.
His aura surged cut crystal, disciplined, unmarred by cost. Mine was a fault line under skin, a thing that wanted to eat and be eaten.
He stepped down from the dais. "You don't belong here. Crawl back to the gutter you crawled from."
My hands trembled not from fear, but from the ache still carving lines through my veins. The system pressed like winter glass against my skull.
[Devour his strength. Take what is his. Pay the price.]
I saw it in a flash: his bright qi pulled into me, candle into furnace. I also saw my flesh split to make room.
Two paths. Humiliation in front of those who had already decided my worth or the kind of pain that rewrites a person.
The cracked sky poured its thin light over the court. I lifted my head.
"If I must suffer," I said, "then let it be suffering that builds me."
The stone trembled just a breath, as my aura crawled out of me for the first time, raw and wrong and alive. Gasps clipped the air. Ryo's smirk faltered a fraction.
Pain tore through me pure, clean, absolute. My palms bled, the sigil seared, and the world narrowed to a single iron thread: endure.
[To rise, you must suffer.]
I stepped forward into the hurt.
This Path was never for the gentle. In this sect, on this mountain under a broken sky, every victory would ask for blood I could not replace. But I had already left my name in the ashes of Shin'ei. What was left to lose but what must be given?
I met Ryo in the center of the court and paid.
To be continued…