The official notice was posted on the sect's assignment board: Disciple Li Yao is undergoing secluded meditation for foundational stability. All regular training and sparring assignments are suspended until further notice.
To most, it was a polite way of saying the sect had given up on him and put him in storage. To a select few, like Zhang Fan, it was a confirmation that Li Yao's strange tricks were a dead-end, a fluke not worth pursuing.
But to Liu Mei, the quiet Mist-Talent girl, it was the most interesting thing that had happened all year.
Her talent was unremarkable but stable. She could store and refine energy, had a slight affinity for the softer aspects of the Earth Law—resilience and patience—and was expected to peak at the Essence Flow Realm if she was lucky. She was diligent, observant, and possessed of a mind that prized understanding over brute force. Li Yao's "emptiness" was a puzzle, and Liu Mei loved puzzles.
She found him two days later, not in seclusion, but precisely where she expected: sweeping the Ancestral Prayer Pavilion with the same deliberate, unhurried rhythm as always.
"Senior Brother Li," she greeted, her voice soft as a breeze.
Li Yao paused, leaning on his broom. "Sister Liu. Shouldn't you be preparing for the tournament? I hear the competition from the Azure Flame Sect is particularly fierce this year."
"The forms are practiced. The energy circulates. Rest is also a form of preparation," she replied, her eyes fixed on him. "I have a question about your defense against Zhang Fan."
"Ah. Most people have statements about it. A question is a refreshing change."
"You did not meet his force. You did not redirect it. You... accepted it. And it died." She tilted her head. "The Earth Law teaches us to be an unmovable mountain. You were not a mountain. You were the space the mountain occupies. How?"
Li Yao studied her. She wasn't challenging him; she was genuinely seeking knowledge. In a sect obsessed with measurable power, her curiosity was a rare treasure. He decided to offer a sliver of truth, a test.
"A mountain is defined by its boundaries—where it meets the sky, where it rests upon the earth," he said. "If you remove the boundaries, what is left?"
"The concept of 'mountain'," Liu Mei answered without hesitation. "But that is philosophy. Cultivation is substance."
"Is it?" Li Yao smiled. "What is a Law but a concept given power by the world? If I can interact with the concept instead of the substance..." He left the thought hanging. He knelt and tapped the stone floor of the pavilion. "This stone is solid because its energy holds a specific, stable form. What if I could suggest to that energy that another form—say, the form of dust—was equally valid?"
He focused, not on the deep void in his dantian, but on the subtle "ripple" of his Empty Pulse Realm. He didn't nullify the stone. He simply... nudged it. He introduced a tiny, localized instability in the Earth Law binding the stone together.
The patch of flagstone under his finger didn't crumble. It didn't glow. It simply softened, its surface becoming as pliable as firm clay for a single breath, before snapping back to its original solidity.
Liu Mei's breath hitched. Her Mist Talent allowed her to sense energy, and what she had just felt was not destruction. It was a temporary, profound lapse in reality. It was as if the universe had forgotten, for a split second, that the stone was supposed to be hard.
"That... is not a technique of the Verdant Mountain Sect," she whispered, her face pale.
"It is a technique of the Unfoundation," Li Yao said, standing. "It is not about building, but about understanding what was there before the building started."
He could see the gears turning in her mind. Her talent limited her ceiling, but her intellect was boundless. She was confronting a principle that existed outside the conventional hierarchy.
"Why show me this?" she asked.
"Because you asked a question instead of making a statement," he said simply. "And because the void gets lonely. It's nice to have someone who isn't trying to fill it with their own assumptions."
He resumed his sweeping. Liu Mei stood for a long time, watching him, the simple chore now seeming like a profound ritual. She had come seeking an answer to a martial technique and had been given a key to a door she didn't know existed. Her path, bounded by the Mist Talent's limits, suddenly felt wider. Perhaps understanding the laws from the perspective of their absence was a form of comprehension her talent could manage.
She bowed slightly, a gesture of respect from one seeker of knowledge to another. "Thank you, Senior Brother."
As she walked away, Li Yao felt a slight shift within his rotating drop of void essence. It wasn't growth, but a refinement. Explaining his path, even in riddles, had forced him to understand it more deeply. His void was not just a personal state; it was a philosophical standpoint that could be communicated, could influence others.
He looked at the assignment board with its notice of his seclusion. They thought they were hiding him away. They didn't realize they were giving him the perfect cover to explore the true extent of his power, and perhaps, to find a rare few who could look at the world not for what it was, but for what it wasn't.
The journey to the peak would be solitary, but it seemed he might not have to walk it entirely alone. And for the first time, he began to wonder what a "Voidless Talent" truly meant in a world governed by the comprehension of Laws. Was he talentless? Or was his talent simply so vast, so fundamental, that it encompassed the absence of all others?