The nights grew longer. The days blurred into gray.
For three months, Lin Tianhai vanished into silence. While the clan feasted, while cousins drank and sparred, he remained in the broken courtyard, a shadow hammering himself against the wall of fate.
His training was madness.
He pounded fists into wooden posts until his knuckles split and blood painted the grain. He forced his body through stances until his legs swelled like tree roots, trembling yet unyielding. He circulated qi along the fractured lines of the Bloodline Resonance Sutra, again and again, until blood seeped from his nose, his ears, even his eyes.
Some nights he collapsed face-first into the dirt, lungs burning, body convulsing. His mother would find him there, trembling hands dragging him inside. She begged him to stop, begged him to live quietly. But when he awoke, he would only smile faintly and say, "I will not let you kneel again, Mother. Not before them. Not before anyone."
And so he continued.
The Sutra was merciless. Its diagrams were broken, its instructions cryptic. It did not speak of dantian or meridian cycles in ways the clan understood. Instead, it whispered of resonance, of drawing not from the ancestors' strength but from the echoes of those yet unborn. Tianhai studied every line until the characters imprinted behind his eyes. He meditated until his blood hummed like a drum.
Sometimes, in the haze of exhaustion, he heard voices—shadows of the future. He saw warriors standing in oceans of corpses, his blood flowing in their veins. He saw fists that shattered mountains, blades that split the skies.
This is your bloodline, the Sutra whispered. Not bound to the past, but to what is yet to come.
It was this vision, this impossible promise, that kept him alive.
The clan noticed his absence only with laughter. "The cripple hides in his hole," cousins sneered. "Perhaps he's finally learned to stay where he belongs."
Let them laugh. While they mocked, Tianhai broke his body a thousand times and reforged it with fire.
The first winter storm struck on the ninetieth day. Snow blanketed the estate, the world hushed under white silence. In the courtyard, Tianhai knelt bare-chested in the snow, steam rising from his body. His skin was purple with bruises, his breath ragged, his chest heaving as though each inhale carved his lungs raw.
The Sutra lay open before him, the pages wet with melting snow.
Blood is the root. Resonance the bridge.
He forced the cycle one last time. Qi screamed through his meridians, tearing them open like blades dragging through flesh. Pain blinded him; blood gushed from his nose and ears. He nearly blacked out.
But then—
Something clicked.
The scattered fragments of the Sutra aligned in his mind, like stars forming a constellation. His blood roared, pounding like war drums, and qi surged—not as a trickle, but as a torrent. It flooded his dantian, coiling, compressing, condensing—
And then it exploded outward.
The snow around him burst into vapor. The wooden posts in the yard rattled as though struck by a giant's hand.
Tianhai's eyes snapped open. His body trembled violently, but within his chest burned a steady flame. He felt it—solid, undeniable. The First Realm of Qi Refinement.
A laugh tore from his throat, raw and hoarse. He lifted his fist, clenched it, and the air seemed to thrum in answer. His bloodline had awakened—not through the clan's sutras, not through mercy or pity, but through his own fury and pain.
Inside, his mother rushed to the door, eyes widening at the steam rising from his body. She pressed a hand to her lips, tears streaming down her face. For three months she had lived in dread, fearing he would destroy himself. Now, for the first time since Yulong's death, hope sparked in her eyes.
Tianhai rose to his feet, swaying, every muscle screaming. He looked at his mother, his face pale but his gaze sharp as steel.
"Mother," he said, voice steady despite the blood at his lips. "I swear… you will never bow to them again. Not while I live."
The snow fell harder, but the cold could no longer touch him.
Within the forgotten courtyard of the cripple, a storm had been born.