The transfer ended not with a jolt, but with a seamless integration into silence. The featureless white hallway was worse than the cave. Here, the suppression was ambient, woven into the very walls. The chains around Ling Xiao hummed softly, their runes drinking the dregs of his chaotic energy like leeches. He felt hollowed out, muffled. Beside him, Feng hung limp between two Silver Lake disciples, his face pale, blood dried at the corners of his mouth.
Elder Lin led the way, his footsteps silent on the smooth floor. Doors hissed open at his approach, revealing glimpses of a clinical nightmare.
Through observation windows, Ling Xiao saw cells. Not dungeons, but clean, white rooms. In one, a young woman with hair like living flame paced endlessly, but her fiery locks were dull, constrained by a glowing silver net that covered her head. In another, a man whose skin shifted through rock-like textures sat motionless, his body partially transformed into a statue of himself. A collar identical to Ling Xiao's gleamed at his throat.
They passed a larger chamber labeled Extraction Bay. Inside, a creature that might once have been a forest spirit—a being of tangled wood and vibrant moss—was strapped to a table. Pipes and needles of crystal were inserted into its body, siphoning off streams of green-gold energy that flowed into collecting orbs. The energy, visibly chaotic and wild, was being forced through a lattice of silvery light. On the other side, it emerged as a thin, pale, orderly stream. The process was slow, and the spirit's eyes were open, staring at the ceiling with dull agony.
"Purification in progress," a calm, recorded voice announced. "Chaos-to-order conversion efficiency at 37%. Subject vitality declining. Recommend increased nutrient infusion."
Ling Xiao's stomach turned. This wasn't just study. This was refinement. They were turning living chaos into orderly fuel.
Elder Lin noticed his gaze. "A necessary process. The raw material is volatile. We render it safe, usable. The energy produced here powers the facility's deeper research. A beautiful circularity, don't you think?"
They reached a central hub. A massive, circular emblem was inlaid on the floor: a seven-pointed star within a circle, rendered in silver and blue. The symbol of the Star-Seer's Alliance.
"You…" Ling Xiao rasped, his voice strange to his own ears under the collar's suppression. "You work for them."
"With them, child," Elder Lin corrected, a hint of pride in his voice. "The Silver Lake Sect is a proud contractor for the Alliance's Planetary Stabilization Directive. Our 'Order Supremacy' research is a key pillar. They provide funding, celestial data, and… acquisition support." He smiled thinly. "Your arrival at my doorstep was most fortuitous. They were content to hunt you. We will understand you."
They were deposited in a holding cell—a white cube with a drain in the center and no visible door. Feng was chained to one wall, Ling Xiao to the other. The disciples left. Elder Lin gave them one last, appraising look.
"Rest. Processing begins in six hours. Your chaos will be measured, mapped, and then… gently corrected." The wall shimmered, and he was gone.
Silence pressed in, broken only by Feng's ragged breathing.
"Feng?" Ling Xiao whispered.
After a moment, Feng's head lifted. His eyes were bloodshot, but alert. He'd been feigning worse unconsciousness. "Listen," he hissed, his voice a pained scrape. "No time. They monitor everything. But the suppression fields… have a rhythm. For maintenance. Every three hours, for ninety seconds, they dip by 0.3%. Too small for them to notice. Too small for you to break free."
"Then what's the point?"
"The point is… it's a flaw. In their perfect order." Feng coughed, a wet sound. "My backup plan. I never thought I'd need it here. There's a man. In the waste processing sector. Name's Goran. He's not a cultivator. A mechanic. He… owes me. Hates the sects. He can get a message out. To a contact. Someone who might… might be able to hit this place."
Hope, frail and desperate, flickered. "How do I find him?"
"You don't. I do." Feng's eyes met his, fierce and final. "When the field dips next, I'm going to burn the last of my core. Create a disturbance. A big one. It'll draw every guard in this sector. In the chaos, you use that tiny dip—use your senses, kid—to slip your bonds. Just the chains. The collar… you'll have to keep. Then you run. Left out of here, third junction, down the service ramp marked 'Hydraulic.' Follow the smell of ozone and rot. Find Goran. Tell him 'Feng says the lake is poisoned.' He'll know."
"You'll die," Ling Xiao said, the words cold and hard in his throat.
"I died when they killed my brother," Feng said, his voice suddenly quiet, tired. "I've been running on spite ever since. This? This is a good use of spite." He managed a grim, blood-stained smile. "You're the answer, remember? Not to their questions. To better ones. Don't let them turn you into a battery."
The hours crawled by. Ling Xiao tracked time by the nearly imperceptible ebb and flow of the suppression field. He felt it, just as Feng said—a minuscule, rhythmic weakening. His Chaos Sensing, though stifled, could still detect the pattern.
Feng prepared, gathering the shattered pieces of his cultivation base, wrapping his pain and fury around them like a fuse.
The moment came. The field dipped.
Feng's eyes snapped open. No final words. He just nodded once.
Then he burned.
Light—not the cool blue of Silver Lake techniques, but the angry, white-hot light of a soul detonating—erupted from him. The chains holding him vaporized. The walls of the cell screamed as they deformed. The suppression field wavered violently as Feng's self-immolation overloaded local sensors. Alarms blared, deafening. "CONTAINMENT BREACH! SECTOR 7! MAXIMUM SECURITY RESPONSE!"
Through the blinding light and screaming metal, Feng's voice found Ling Xiao's mind, a final spiritual whisper fraying at the edges: "The lake is poisoned. Now RUN!"
The light died. Where Feng had been, there was only a scorch mark on the wall and a fading, defiant warmth in the air.
The cell door, weakened by the blast, was half-melted. Shouts and running footsteps approached.
Ling Xiao acted. The suppression field was still in its dip, chaotic feedback from Feng's blast confusing the systems. He focused every ounce of his will, not on his power, but on the Pattern Reading of the chains. He found the microscopic stress point Feng's explosion had created in the links around his wrists. With a wrench of his body and a tiny, almost useless pulse of chaotic energy, he snapped them.
He was free of the bonds, but the collar remained, a cold, tight band of nullification around his neck. His powers were still a distant murmur.
He stumbled out of the ruined cell into chaos. Blue-robed disciples rushed past him toward the blast site, not noticing the small, chained boy in the smoky hallway. He ran left, as instructed. Third junction. A service ramp, dimly lit, marked with warnings.
He fled down into the bowels of the facility. The sterile white gave way to grimy grey metal, dripping pipes, and the promised stench of ozone and decay. This was the machine heart, ignored by the scholars above.
He found Goran in a nest of whirring gears and leaking fluid, a squat, muscular man with a bald head and arms covered in grime and intricate tool tattoos. He was swearing at a broken energy converter.
Ling Xiao skidded to a halt before him. The man looked up, his eyes narrowing.
"Feng sent me," Ling Xiao gasped. "He says… the lake is poisoned."
Goran's face went still. All the irritation vanished, replaced by a cold, grim understanding. He looked past Ling Xiao, up the ramp, toward the blaring alarms. "He bought it, then." It wasn't a question. He nodded once, a sharp, accepting motion. "Alright. Message received. I can get a pulse out. But kid… you can't stay here. They'll lock the whole place down."
As if on cue, a new, deeper alarm sounded—a resonant, bone-shaking thrum that vibrated through the metal floor.
"FACILITY-WIDE LOCKDOWN INITIATED. ANTI-CHAOS FIELD ACTIVATION IN PROGRESS. ALL SECTORS SEAL."
Huge, cylindrical pillars descended from the ceiling in the main corridors above, each one beginning to glow with a familiar, terrifying silver light—the same nullifying energy as his collar, but on a scale meant to cleanse entire rooms.
Goran shoved Ling Xiao toward a narrow maintenance duct. "In there! It leads to the old coolant tunnels. They might not be fully covered by the field yet. Go!"
Ling Xiao scrambled into the dark duct as metal shutters slammed down around Goran's workshop. He crawled, the sounds of the facility transforming behind him into a tomb of pure order.
Feng was gone. Burned to ash for a ninety-second diversion and a message.
The grief hit him then, in the dark, tight space. Not the quiet sorrow of Li Ming's passing, but a rage so vast and black it swallowed him whole. Feng's bitter smile. His grudging lessons. His last act of furious defiance. Gone. Murdered by the clean, cold men in blue who wanted to unmake the world.
Ling Xiao didn't scream. He shook. Silent, violent tremors wracked his small frame. The emotion was a storm his suppressed chaos couldn't express. It turned inward, a pressure cooker with no release.
He thought of the forest spirit being drained. Of the woman with fiery hair trapped under a net. Of Feng's brother, turned into a puppet for daring to object. Of Shí, imprisoned for epochs. Of his mother, dying in the mud. A chain of victims of order's tyranny.
The pressure built. The collar around his neck grew icy cold, fighting to suppress what was rising.
But this wasn't just chaos.
Deep within his chest, over his heart, the Titan Blood Essence—the drop of gold-violet light Shí had placed there—stirred. It had slept, waiting for his vessel to strengthen. But it was not immune to emotion. It was the essence of a primordial being who had built stars and felt betrayal on a cosmic scale. It resonated with a child's pure, world-ending rage.
The drop heated.
A wave of power, ancient and furious, erupted from his core. It did not flow through his chaotic meridians. It ignited them. The power was not chaotic. It was Primordial. The order before orders. The law before laws.
The suppressive collar around his neck cracked.
Not shattered. A single, hairline fracture appeared in the flawless metal. But through that fracture, a wisp of Ling Xiao's own chaotic energy, now supercharged with Titan essence, leaked out. It was violet streaked with gold.
In that instant, his senses exploded back to life, sharper than ever. He could feel the entire facility's layout—the rushing anti-chaos fields, the scared heartbeats of the imprisoned, the cold, focused minds of the researchers.
And he could feel the fields solidifying, closing in. The tunnels ahead were being flooded with the silver nullifying light. His temporary awakening would be snuffed out in moments, and he'd be trapped, collared, and defenseless.
He was in a sealed duct, in a locked-down facility, with an awakening power he couldn't control and a world of order trying to erase him.
But for the first time, the power inside him didn't feel like a curse, or a gift.
It felt like a promise of vengeance.
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END OF CHAPTER 18