Chapter 17: Sky-Drum Heartbeat
The first beat was not a sound. It was a pressure change.
A shockwave of dense, humming air rolled out from the great drum, flattening the grass in a circle. Feng stood before the platform, his clothes whipping in the sudden wind. The air smelled of ozone and charged stone.
The second beat came. BOOM.
This time, the sky answered. A single, jagged fork of lightning lanced from the clear night down to the drum's hide, making the runes blaze with white-blue light. The thunder that followed was the drumbeat's echo, a physical force that hit Feng in the chest.
The Storm Khan watched from his throne, his storm-Qi resonating with the drum. This was his symphony. His tribulation.
The third beat. BOOM.
Now, the pressure became intelligent. It wasn't just noise. It was a will—the will of the storm, channeled and focused by the drum's ancient magic. It pressed against Feng's spiritual sense, demanding submission. It was a pure, overwhelming force of heavenly authority, the kind that shattered lesser cultivators' minds.
Feng's knees bent slightly. His new, stable nexus of power shuddered. This was not a tribulation of poison or rage. This was raw, elemental power. Power with intent. How did one consume authority?
The fragment hummed, analyzing.
TARGET: CONCENTRATED STORM-WILL. CLASSIFICATION: HEAVENLY TRIBULATION (LOW-MID TIER). NATURE: DOMINION, SHATTERING, PURIFICATION.
WARNING: DIRECT CONFRONTATION WILL RESULT IN SPIRITUAL DISINTEGRATION.
PROPOSAL: RESONANT DISSONANCE.
Resonant dissonance. Not fighting the beat, but singing a different song in the same space.
The fourth beat. BOOM.
Feng stopped trying to resist the pressure. He closed his eyes and dove into the memory of the dragon's dream. He didn't recall the rage. He recalled the scale. The immensity. The geological patience that made a storm look like a fleeting sigh.
He let that sense of ancient, indifferent vastness fill his own aura. He was not a man standing against a storm. He was the deep earth the storm broke upon. He was the empty sky that contained it.
The pressure lessened. It no longer sought to crush something small. It now flowed around something that pretended to be a mountain.
The Khan's eyebrows rose. Interesting.
The drumming changed. The Storm Priest, a wizened old man with lightning-scarred hands, began a complex rhythm. Boom-ba-boom. Boom-ba-boom.
With the rhythm came a new attack. Not just pressure, but vibration. A specific, soul-shaking frequency that sought to find the natural resonance of Feng's bones, his meridians, his dantian, and shake them apart.
It was like being inside a giant bell as it was struck.
Feng's teeth rattled. His vision blurred. He felt his own Qi beginning to vibrate in sympathy, a dangerous harmony that would lead to internal rupture.
He couldn't mimic this. He had to break the harmony.
He remembered the Sky-Silver shard. Its pure, cleansing note. He had corrupted it, but he still held its ghost. He focused on that memory of purity, and then, deliberately, he soured it with a thread of the Blight-Wood's discordant rot. He created a spiritual note that was neither pure nor corrupt, but a jarring, ugly clash of both.
He emitted this note from his core, not as a shield, but as a cacophony.
The resonant vibration seeking to shatter him met this ugly, conflicting frequency. The perfect harmonic was disrupted. The vibration skittered, lost its focus, becoming just noise again.
Feng coughed, a trickle of blood from his nose. Forcing that clash had strained him. But he was whole.
The Storm Khan leaned forward, his grin widening. This was better than he'd hoped.
"Now!" he roared to the priest. "The Heartbeat!"
The old priest's eyes glowed with lightning. He raised both mallets high and brought them down in a simultaneous, earth-rending CRACK.
BOOOOOOM.
This was not a beat. It was the storm's heart kicking.
The world turned white. Not with light, but with pure, concussive force. The platform beneath the drum cracked. Every yurt in the camp shuddered. Lin and Kael, watching from a cordoned area, were knocked to their knees.
At the center, Feng was hit by the full, undiluted tribulation of a thunderstorm's primal fury. It was not trying to break him. It was trying to rewrite him. To stamp the imprint of lightning onto his soul, to make him a child of the storm, subservient to its will.
His defensive aura was blown apart like smoke. The vibration defense was useless. This was a direct infusion of heavenly law.
For a moment, he was lost in the white. He was a scrap of paper in a hurricane.
Then, the fragment, deep within, reacted not with a strategy, but with instinct.
It opened.
The void at the center of Feng's being, the hungry principle that had consumed a stalemate, yawned wide. It did not try to block the storm's heart. It did not try to resist it.
It invited it in.
The terrifying influx of storm-will, lightning-essence, and crushing pressure poured into Feng—not through his meridians, but through a spiritual hole that suddenly existed where his core should be.
He was not a container. He was a drain.
The white fury rushed into the void. And the void began to digest.
It was agony of a magnitude he had never known. This was not eating poison or rage. This was eating a natural law. It was like trying to swallow the ocean. His spiritual body felt like it was being stretched across the sky, torn by winds, scorched by lightning.
But he held on. He held the void open by sheer, desperate, screaming will.
The drum beat again. BOOM. More power flooded in.
And again. BOOM.
He was no longer standing. He was on his hands and knees on the hard earth, his body convulsing, veins standing out like purple ropes on his skin and neck. Light leaked from his eyes, his mouth, cracks in his skin. He was a cracked jug overflowing with a typhoon.
The Storm Khan stood up from his throne, his amusement gone, replaced by stark awe. "He is not resisting... He is drinking it. By the Eternal Sky..."
Lin watched, her hand over her mouth, horror-struck. This was not a contest. This was a suicide.
Kael stared, his earlier greed completely erased by primal terror. "He's going to explode..."
Feng felt the explosion coming. The void could process anything, but it needed time. This was a flood. He was going to be erased from the inside out, not by the storm, but by his own desperate hunger.
He needed to offload. To transform. Now.
Through the pain, he grasped for the newest tool in his arsenal—the principle of Binding he'd taken from the spearman's seal. The power to impose order.
He didn't try to bind the storm. He tried to bind the void's consumption.
He forced the binding principle into the chaotic digestion process. He couldn't stop the flood, but he could channel it. Shape it.
In his mind's eye, he imagined a forge. The void was the furnace. The storm's heart was the ore. The binding principle was the hammer.
BOOM. More ore.
BOOM.The furnace roared.
He swung the hammer.
Inside him, a brutal, cosmic smithing began. The raw, chaotic storm-essence was pounded, not into submission, but into a new shape. A shape that fit him.
It wasn't lightning affinity. It was devouring lightning. A lightning that didn't purify or shatter, but that consumed energy on contact. A storm that didn't rage, but that ate sound and light.
The drumbeats came slower now. The priest was tiring. The storm's heart was being drained.
Feng pushed himself to his feet. His body was a map of glowing cracks, like heated porcelain. But he was standing. In his right hand, sparked not lightning, but tiny, black vortices that crackled with silent, dark energy.
He looked at the Sky-Drum. He looked at the Storm Khan.
He took a step forward. Then another.
The priest, eyes wide with fear, beat the drum frantically. BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
The power came. Feng kept walking. He didn't open the void wide. He let the storm-will wash over him, and his new, forged nature ate the part of it that tried to harm him, integrating the rest into the storm-forge still raging inside.
He reached the base of the platform. He looked up at the great drum.
He raised his hand, crackling with void-lightning.
He did not strike the drum.
He touched it.
The moment his fingers brushed the ancient, thunder-charged hide, he unleashed the full, chaotic process inside him—not outward, but into the drum itself.
He fed the drum a taste of its own power, processed through his devouring forge. A storm that ate itself.
The drum gave one final, agonized THRUM, a sound that was both a beat and a scream. Then, the runes flashed once and went dark. The hide sagged. The immense spiritual pressure vanished.
Silence.
A deep, ringing, absolute silence heavier than any sound.
Feng lowered his hand. The cracks on his skin faded, leaving him pale, trembling, but whole. In his dantian, the storm was gone. In its place was a new, thrumming core of power—a volatile, hungry energy that was both his and not his. Storm-Devouring Qi.
He turned to face the Storm Khan.
The entire Horde held its breath.
Jargal, the Storm Khan, stared at the dead drum, then at Feng. His storm-Qi was quiet, humbled. He slowly placed his humming saber across his knees again.
"You did not survive the Sky-Drum," the Khan said, his voice quiet in the vast silence. "You consumed it. You are not a ghost. You are a maw."
He stood. "The toll is paid. Not just for passage. You have taken a piece of the Horde's soul. That creates a debt. Not of coin. Of blood. You are marked by the Steppe now, Feng. Where you walk, the storm will follow. And one day, I will come to collect what you have eaten."
It was not a threat. It was a promise. A statement of fact.
Feng nodded. He understood debts.
He walked back to where Lin and Kael stood, stunned. He didn't look back.
The Horde parted for them, their eyes wide with a mixture of fear and reverence. They had seen a miracle and a monster in the same skin.
As they walked out of the camp, into the predawn grey, the first true rays of sun touched the eastern steppe.
Feng walked, his new storm-devouring core simmering inside him. He had paid the toll. He had passed through.
And he had gained a new, terrifying hunger. One that craved not just earthly tribulations, but the very music of the heavens.
The Steppe Ghost had become the Storm-Eater. And the world was his next meal.