Chapter 1: The Last Shovel
The sound was the same as every day for three years. The crunch of wet earth. The wheeze of starving lungs. The rain that never stopped on the north slope of the Discarded Peak.
Xiao Feng's hands were not hands anymore. They were tools of bone and scar tissue wrapped in muddy skin, gripping the splintered shovel handle. He dug. The grave was almost six feet. It had to be six feet. Overseer Ma's rule was absolute.
"Deeper, you gutter leavings!" The voice boomed from under the oiled canopy. Overseer Ma sat on a carved stool, a cup of steaming spirit tea in his hand, untouched by the downpour. "This one was touched by the Blood Rot. You want his ghost clinging to your soul? Dig until your arms fall off!"
Blood Rot. A lie. The young man in the burlap shroud had died from a broken neck after falling from a spirit vine. An accident. But declaring a corpse "cursed" meant no funeral rites. It meant his meager spirit stones went to the overseer's pocket. And it meant the Debt-Slaves of the Verdant Dragon Sect dug the hole.
Xiao Feng was a Debt-Slave. His value was less than the shovel he held. His father, a failed alchemist in a mortal town, had taken a loan of seventy low-grade spirit stones for a business that turned to ash. The debt passed to the son. Xiao Feng's life was collateral, his body the interest.
He was seventeen, small and wiry, with eyes that had learned to see nothing. His cultivation was a stagnant puddle at the first stage of Qi Gathering. His spiritual root, assessed by a bored elder, was declared "Shattered Mortal Dust." It was not a root. It was debris.
Clunk.
The shovel hit something that wasn't earth or stone. A hard, resonant thud that vibrated up his arms.
He stopped, the rain dripping from his matted hair into his eyes. The other slaves, four other hollowed-out boys, didn't look up. Their world was only the next shovelful. Overseer Ma was picking his teeth with a silver pick.
Xiao Feng scraped the mud away with numb fingers. It was metal. Black, darker than the pit around it, and cold. A deep, swallowing cold that made his fingertips ache. It was a jagged spike, as long as his forearm, twisted as if it had been torn from a giant's machine.
When his skin touched it, the world glitched.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, his vision was not his own. Lines of searing, corrupted white text scrawled across the rain and mud. DETECTED: CORE FRAGMENT. ORIGIN: NULL. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS. A bolt of pain, clean and electric, drilled from his eye to his tailbone.
Then it was gone. The text vanished. The pain remained, a sharp ghost in his nerves.
He stared at the fragment. It was just a piece of junk.
"You! Dust-Boy!"
Overseer Ma's shadow fell over the grave. Xiao Feng tried to cover the fragment with his foot. A boot slammed into his ribs, knocking the air from his lungs. He crumpled into the muddy wall of the grave.
Ma leaned down and plucked the black spike from the dirt. He turned it over, his lip curled. "Sect scrap. A piece of some broken array core." He tossed it contemptuously onto the pile of soiled tools and the wrapped corpse next to the pit. "Finish this hole. The next one is for the Liu boy who coughed his lungs out last night. You have three more to dig before sunset."
The moment was buried. The strange vision was just exhaustion. Xiao Feng climbed back to his feet, the new ache in his side a companion to the old ones. He dug.
They finished as the last light bled from the sky. Overseer Ma threw half a moldy spirit-cake into the mud before walking back to the warm glow of the servant quarters. The other slaves crawled toward it. Xiao Feng did not.
He waited until their shapes disappeared into the twilight. Then he walked to the trash pile.
The black fragment lay there, half-submerged. It looked dead. But he remembered the cold. The wrongness of that cold. He snatched it, tucking it inside his tattered robe. It felt like holding a winter that had never known sun.
The Debt-Slave barracks were a long, low building that smelled of rot and defeat. He passed the communal pallets, the empty stares of boys conserving energy to breathe. He went to the far wall, to the space under a cracked roof tile where the rain dripped in a constant, maddening rhythm.
He pulled out the fragment. In the gloom, it was nothing.
Despair, a colder and more familiar thing than the metal, settled in his gut. He was a fool. Hoping was the first step to breaking.
A tremor took him. A full-body shudder from cold, hunger, and spent rage. His grip on the fragment tightened until his knuckles turned white. And without thought, without plan, he did the only thing he knew. He pushed the pathetic, feeble stream of his Shattered Mortal Dust Qi into the cold black spike.
The fragment awoke.
It did not absorb his energy. It devoured it. A yawning, infinite hunger sucked every drop of Qi from his dantian in an instant, leaving a vacuum of pain so profound he saw stars. He gasped, sagging against the wall.
Then, the spike cracked.
A hairline fracture appeared on its surface. From within seeped not light, but an absence—a thread of absolute void. It ignored his flesh, his bone, and shot straight into the center of his mind.
The universe broke.
REBOOT.
HOST IDENTIFIED. ERROR. CORRUPTED ENTITY.
CULTIVATION FOUNDATION: ZERO. FATE: NULL. PROGNOSIS: TERMINAL.
ADAPTIVE MEASURES ENGAGED. BINDING PROTOCOL: TRIBULATION CONSUMPTION.
WELCOME, ANOMALY.
It was not a voice. It was data etched into his soul with a white-hot brand. Visions, not memories, assaulted him. A celestial engine of impossible complexity, its gears made of sparkling law and destiny—the Heavenly Dao. And he saw a flaw. A single, seeping crack. From that crack, a shard of pure foreign data, a living error, had been ejected. It had fallen through layers of reality, burning through cosmic rules, before embedding itself in the forgotten back hill of a worthless sect.
This shard was in his hand.
The fragment glowed now with an internal amethyst darkness. It was warm. It was ravenously warm.
New text, this time in burning, urgent crimson, branded itself onto his sight.
IMMEDIATE DIRECTIVE: CONSUME TO SURVIVE.
TARGET IDENTIFIED: LOW-GRADE TRIBULATION RESIDUE. DESIGNATION: GRAVEYARD MIASMA. CONCENTRATION: MINIMAL.
METHOD: DIRECT ASSIMILATION. PROCEED? Y/N
He did not understand the words. Tribulation? He was in a leaking shack, not facing heavenly lightning. But the word SURVIVE pulsed like a dying heart. His body was shutting down. The Qi drain had pushed him to the edge.
With the last spark of his will, he thought YES.
The black fragment moved. It did not glow brighter. Instead, it became a vortex. The clinging, sickly energy of the graves—the residual death-chill, the sorrow, the curse that Overseer Ma feared—was suddenly pulled.
It was not a gentle absorption. It was a violent seizure. Thin, almost invisible tendrils of violet energy lashed out from the fragment, spearing the passive, gloomy energy in the air, on his clothes, in his very pores. They dragged it in, shredded it, and forced it down his meridians.
It was agony. It was like swallowing ground glass and acid. It was power.
His empty dantian convulsed, then swelled. Not with the weak, chaotic energy of Shattered Dust, but with a dense, cold, potent force that tasted of soil and endings. The barrier of the first stage of Qi Gathering, which had mocked him for years, shattered.
He broke through to the second stage on the filthy, wet floor.
The process lasted ten heartbeats. When it ended, he was on his side, trembling, drool and rainwater mixing on the packed earth. The fragment was inert once more. The crimson text was gone.
But everything had changed.
The world was in high definition. He could hear the individual rasp of each slave's breath across the room. He could see the individual threads in a spider's web in the far corner. He could feel the slow, dark river of new energy circulating in his body—a cold, efficient current.
He pushed himself up. The bone-deep fatigue was gone, replaced by a sharp, hollow alertness. He looked at his hands. The raw blisters from the shovel were already scabbing over, the flesh beneath pink and new.
A feeling unfolded in his chest. It was not happiness. It was not hope.
It was the cold, clear recognition of a knife finally finding its edge.
First light was seeping through the cracks in the wall. It illuminated the dust, the decay, and Xiao Feng's face.
His eyes, which had held only the dull sheen of surrender, now gleamed with a hard, reflected darkness.
He closed his fist around the black spike. It was no longer a piece of junk.
It was a key. A weapon. A mouth that had just learned to eat.
And he was starving.
NEXT DIRECTIVE: CONSOLIDATE GAINS. LOCATE ENHANCED TRIBULATION SOURCE.
SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 0.0002%.
The path ahead was not a road to immortality. It was a descent into the belly of the storm. Xiao Feng stood, wiped the grime from his mouth, and looked not toward the warm peaks of the inner sect, but toward the cold, unmarked graves outside.
He had dug his last grave as a slave.
Tomorrow, he would begin digging them for other people.