BANG!!!!
The sound wasn't a crack. It was a wet, visceral crunch that seemed to suck all other noise from the desolate canyon. It was the sound of a jawbone ceasing to be a functional structure.
Lian, the proudly arrogant scion of the Crimson Fang Clan, hit the cracked red earth of the wasteland with a finality that spoke of total defeat. He didn't skid. He just settled into the dust, a broken doll writhing in pain.
Osa stood over him with a neutral calm look. The brown caramel skin of his knuckles was unmarked. His coily dark hair, a defiant crown in the harsh wind, was perfectly in place. The tight black compression shirt and loose grey sweatpants were practical, comfortable, and apart from a fine layer of canyon dust, pristine. He was barefoot, the soles of his feet tough as worn leather, feeling the last tremors of the impact fade through the ground.
Silence held for three long heartbeats, broken only by the whisper of the wind. Then, a wet, gurgling scream of pure rage and pain.
You... you animal!"
Lian spat, the words mangled by the dust and blood in his mouth. Blood and splintered teeth painted his chin. His hands, trembling uncontrollably, flaring with a shimmering, opalescent light—Aethyr.
He was trying to weave a basic healing construct, the "Suture of the Lotus," but the agony and shock made the intricate pattern fizzle and unravel before it could take become something useful.
" No technique... no art... just brute... force! It's... primitive!"
Osa let out a sigh that seemed to carry the profound boredom of the entire afternoon. He looked down, his amber eyes, modelesque and unsettlingly calm, meeting Lian's pain-filled gaze.
"You ran your mouth. You threw the first punch. Or, you know, the first sparkle." He shrugged, a fluid, effortless motion. "You started a fight you couldn't finish. That's a you problem."
He then turned his back, a deliberate and unhurried dismissal, and began to walk away.
"My father will hear of this!" Lian shrieked, the sound tearing from his broken jaw. "The Crimson Fang walks the true path! We weave the fabric of reality itself! We are the future! Your... your brawling is a story for children! A dead myth!"
A shadow detached itself from the canyon wall. Elder Kaelen stepped into the fading light, his face painted a canvas of hardships etched into leathery skin. His eyes, old and deep as a dried-up well, held no surprise, only a profound, weary disappointment. He looked at the sobbing Lian, then at Osa's retreating back.
"He still draws breath,"
the Elder said, his voice the low grind of stone on stone. "A costly mercy. One he would not have afforded you. A living enemy is a future enemy. A dead one is just fertilizer for the next generation."
Osa didn't stop or turn to reply the elder.
"Whatever. His magic battery is still full. His ego's the thing that's broken. He'll live." He flexed his right hand unconsciously, rolling his shoulder in a gesture that was more habit than strain.
Deep inside, he felt it. Not the external, intellectual pull of Aethyr that every other cultivator in this world relied on. That was like trying to negotiate with the universe, to persuade it to do your bidding. What coursed through him was something else entirely. An internal ocean.
It was a roaring, vital, physical force that saturated every cell, every fiber of his being. It was the power he'd spent years, since the Elder had found him, drawing into himself through brutal, repetitive cycles—forging his body into a vessel that could contain a star. They had names for it in the oldest, most fragmented tales scrawled on the walls of dead civilizations and whispered in myths about the first gods: Vital Force, The Breath of Life, The Dragon's Pulse.
The modern cultivators of the Aethyr-weaving sects called it a fairy tale. An inefficient, obsolete fantasy for barbarians and fools.
He knew it by its true name...Ki.
And as the twin suns began to dip below the canyon rim, painting the sky in shades of fire and violet, he felt the familiar, dormant warmth in his chest. The Ember of Heaven he'd inherited from parents he never knew, glowed just a little brighter in response to the fading light. He knew, with a cold, certain clarity, exactly why he could walk this lost, "primitive" path. He wasn't just cultivating a technique. He was awakening a blood-soaked inheritance.
"That's the third son of a clan elder you've put in the dirt this month," Elder Kaelen said, falling into step beside him as they left Lian to his pain.
"The Crimson Fang will not ignore this. They will see it as an unforgivable insult. They will come for us. For this land. For the secret we guard."
Osa glanced at the Elder, a flicker of his humor returning. "Yeah, well. They know where to find me."
A few hours later, under a blanket of stars so thick and bright they looked like a spilled treasure chest of diamonds, Osa practiced. The rest of the fallen Ever Sky Sect's remnants slept in their lean-tos, their dreams full of elegant Aethyr weaves and grand designs. Osa moved in the silence, a ghost of motion.
He began with the foundational form. Sky Fall Style - Heaven's Descent. His body was a sculpture of pure muscle and intent. He dropped, his leg a falling axe, all his weight and the condensed power of his Ki focused into his heel. The kick didn't whistle through the air; it thrummed, compressing the space it passed through. His heel connected with a flat, table-sized rock. There was no flash of light, no shattering explosion of Aethyr.
BAMMMM!!!
Just a deep, resonant CRUNCH that spoke of fundamental physics being overpowered. When he lifted his foot, a web of fractures spread from the point of impact, the rock visibly compacted inward by a full inch. Pure, concentrated kinetic force, delivered without a single thread of external magic.
He flowed without pause into Gale's Kiss, a spinning hook kick. It wasn't the Aethyr-weavers' version, which created blades of sharpened wind. His was simpler. Faster. More direct. His shin cut through the air with such impossible speed and power that it created a temporary vacuum, pulling dust and dry leaves into a whirling vortex behind it.
This was his path. His cultivation base stood firmly on the mortal Realm, tier 3. The peak of the Foundation Establishment. His Ki was dense, a pressurized ocean held within his meridians, waiting for the final, cataclysmic push to break the dam and flood into the Heroic Realm. He didn't need to rewrite the laws of physics. He just had to hit them until they complied.
He was the last disciple of a sect that had been erased from history for a reason. And for this single, quiet moment, the ember in his chest warm and the Ki humming in his veins like a live wire, he was at peace.
The end began not with a sound, but with its absence.
It was a wrongness so profound it was physical, a sudden pressure in the ears. The constant, subtle hum of the world's Aethyr—the background radiation of a living, breathing reality—vanished. It was like the universe had been put on mute. The very air felt dead.
Osa froze mid-kick, his body recognizing the danger before his mind could fully process it, his instincts screaming.
Then He looked up.
The stars weren't just shining; they were writhing, twisting in their fixed positions like things in agony. Then, they began to vanish. Not by being blotted out by cloud or smoke, but by being un-made. A wave of absolute, light-eating, sound-swallowing blackness was sweeping across the heavens, silent, methodical, and infinitely cold. This wasn't a storm. It wasn't an attack. It was an annulment.
Elder Kaelen was at his side in an instant, his hand gripping Osa's shoulder with a strength that belied his age. The old man's face was pale, his eyes wide not with fear, but with a furious, horrifying recognition.
"They've come," he whispered, the words sharp and desperate. "Those bastards, They're are trying to prune the branch."
He shoved Osa hard, towards a deep, dark fissure in the canyon wall that Osa had used for shade but never truly scrutinized. "Go! The path leads down into the deep dark! Do not stop! Do not look back! Do not let it catch you!."
"The others—!" Osa yelled, his laid-back composure incinerated by the scale of the silent horror unfolding above. The void was drinking the sky, and the silence was a roar.
"They are already lost!" the Elder shouted back, his voice cracking with a grief he had no time to feel. He grabbed Osa's face, forcing their eyes to meet. In that ancient, weathered gaze, Osa saw it all—the pride, the failure, the stubborn, desperate hope.
"You are the last ember of a fire they thought they'd extinguished! The final page of a story they tried to burn! So go! And make them choke on it!"
With a final, powerful shove that contained all the love and fury of a dying world, he sent Osa stumbling backward into the waiting, chilling embrace of the fissure.
As he fell, the chill of the deep earth rising to meet him, Osa's last sight of the world above was not of the advancing void, but of Elder Kaelen. The old man turned his back to the fissure, his body erupting with a lifetime of stored Aethyr in a blinding, brilliant, and utterly futile conflagration—a single, defiant star screaming its name into the face of the all-consuming night.
The world was eating them and Osa was now falling straight down its throat.