Wang Ben jolted awake, his heart pounding.
The dream was fading already, fragments of impossible things scattering like smoke in wind. Metal towers reaching toward alien stars. A void that stretched for eternity. Waves of light that wasn't quite water tearing at a self that wasn't quite his soul.
And faces. So many faces.
All of them gone.
He lay there in his narrow bed, breathing hard, waiting for his pulse to slow. The tiny room was still dark; dawn hadn't yet broken over Redstone City. Through the paper screen window, he could see the faint glow of the eastern horizon, tinting the world in shades of gray.
Just a dream, he told himself. Just another one of those dreams.
They'd been happening since he was three years old. His parents had taken him to see Elder Wang Mingzhe when he was five, after he'd woken up screaming about "dying stars" and "hungry darkness." The elder had examined his meridians, checked his cultivation foundation, even consulted the clan's ancient texts on soul defects.
Nothing.
"The boy is perfectly normal," Elder Wang had declared. "Perhaps too much spirit beast meat in his diet. Some children have vivid imaginations."
His father had looked relieved. His mother had looked skeptical. Wang Ben had learned to keep the dreams to himself after that.
But they'd never stopped.
Sometimes they were about cultivation, techniques he'd never learned, insights into the Dao that he couldn't possibly understand at early-stage body refinement. Sometimes they were about... other things. Stranger things. Machines that thought. Stars that burned cold. Battles that spanned the void between worlds.
Nonsense. All of it.
Wang Ben sat up, rubbing his eyes. His small room looked back at him in the pre-dawn gloom. A narrow bed. A wooden chest for his clothes. A single shelf with his cultivation manuals, basic clan techniques that every young clansman received. Beside them, two worn notebooks filled with formation diagrams in his grandfather's precise hand, brought back from Ironforge City after the old man disappeared. His mother had pressed them on him the week after the beast tide, pulling them from her own chest without a word. He couldn't read most of the notation, but he kept them anyway.
The diagrams were arranged in a strange order, moving from simple to complex in a sequence that only made sense if someone already knew where you were headed. The notations had the quality of instructions rather than records, as if whoever made them had assumed a student would arrive eventually.
Tucked behind the notebooks, a pair of small forging tongs and a short hammer rested against the wall, their handles worn smooth from years of use. Li Cheng had been a forger before he ever touched formation work, and the tools still carried the faint scent of quenching oil and hot metal that Wang Ben remembered from childhood visits. He could still picture his grandfather running a thumb along the grain of a bronze fitting, testing the metal the way another man might test the wind, as though it had something to tell him. Wang Ben used to trace those diagrams during childhood visits to the Li Clan compound, his finger following lines he couldn't begin to understand.
His father had told him once that Li Cheng used to walk the land for days before drawing a single line. "Your grandfather never built on top of the ground," Wang Tian had said, his voice carrying the quiet respect he reserved for few people. "He built with it." Wang Ben remembered watching once, years ago, when Li Cheng had taken him to a formation site outside the Li Clan compound. His grandfather had crouched down and pressed his palm flat against the bare stone, just holding it there. Wang Ben had fidgeted, waiting.
"What are you doing?" he'd finally asked. Li Cheng hadn't looked up. "Listening. You have to feel what's already here before you go changing things."
He'd stayed like that a long while before he ever picked up his brush. Wang Ben hadn't understood what that meant at the time. He still wasn't sure he did.
His mother had put it more plainly once: "Your grandfather always said you had to listen to the stone before you changed it. That's why his formations held when other people's fell apart."
A bronze mirror on the wall, its surface tarnished with age.
Nothing special. Nothing extraordinary.
Just like him.
From downstairs, he heard movement. His mother, probably, already up to prepare breakfast. The baby, his little brother Wang Chen, just three weeks old, would be waking soon, demanding to be fed with the tyrannical insistence of all infants.
Wang Ben splashed water on his face from the basin beside his bed, trying to wash away the lingering unease from the dream. His reflection in the bronze mirror looked perfectly ordinary. Fifteen years old. Average height for his age. Dark hair pulled back in a simple tail. Brown eyes that held no particular spark of genius.
Early-stage body refinement. Exactly where a moderately talented cultivator should be at his age.
Not too fast, not too slow. Thoroughly, unremarkably average.
He threw on his outer patrol robes, plain gray cloth marked with the small formation-spiral that designated him as part of the Wang Clan. The symbol looked faded, worn from too many washings. Like everything else in their household, it had seen better days.
Nine years, Wang Ben thought as he descended the narrow stairs. Nine years since Father's fall.
The main room of their modest home was already warm, a fire crackling in the hearth. His mother stood by the cooking pot, stirring something that smelled of grain and herbs. She looked up as he entered, the tight line of her mouth easing.
"You're up early," Li Mei said. Her voice was quiet, careful not to wake the baby sleeping in a cradle by the wall. Her hands were tucked into her sleeves, as they always were. Even in summer, her fingers carried a chill she never explained.
Wang Ben had noticed it since he was small enough to hold her hand on market days, that faint cold that never quite went away. He used to take her hands in both of his when they walked, wrapping his small fingers around hers as if he could warm them. She would smile down at him, and he would notice both things at once: the frost that lived in her skin, and the way her whole face softened when he held on. He'd never managed to warm them. He still tried sometimes, without thinking.
"Another dream?"
Wang Ben hesitated, then nodded. His mother was practical about most things, but she'd always taken his dreams more seriously than his father did.
"The same?" she asked.
"Fragments," Wang Ben said, which wasn't quite a lie. "Nothing that makes sense."
Li Mei studied him for a moment, then returned to her cooking. "Your grandfather used to have vivid dreams," she said quietly. "Before he disappeared. He said they were the soul trying to remember things it had forgotten."
Wang Ben had heard this before. His maternal grandfather, Li Cheng, had been an early-stage core formation cultivator, a powerful weapon forger in Ironforge City, two hundred kilometers to the west. He'd disappeared five years ago during a major beast tide, one of hundreds of cultivators who'd never returned.
She never said his dreams had warned him of anything. She just said he'd stopped talking about them, right before he disappeared.
His mother still believed the old man was alive somewhere, injured and recovering. Wang Ben wasn't so sure. Five years was a long time for a core formation cultivator to hide.
"Father's still asleep?" Wang Ben asked, changing the subject.
"He was up late with the baby," Li Mei said. "Let him rest."
Wang Ben nodded. His father, Wang Tian, worked long hours doing formation maintenance for the clan. Basic work that required minimal cultivation and even less skill. The kind of work that paid barely enough to keep a family fed. His mother's cultivation had stalled years ago too, stuck at early-stage qi condensation for so long that no one in the family mentioned it anymore. Physicians couldn't explain the evenness of it, how her cultivation sat perfectly level instead of slowly degrading as stagnation usually did.
Wang Ben had asked her about it once, whether she'd thought about trying a different technique. She'd smiled and said something about the herb garden needing attention, and by the time he realized she hadn't answered, the conversation had moved on. Sometimes Wang Ben caught his father watching her across the room with the quiet attention of someone who had stopped hoping for change.
It hadn't always been this way.
Nine years ago, Wang Tian had been late-stage qi condensation, one of the clan's most promising alchemists. At his peak, he could refine grade-eight pills, work that brought honor to the family and resources to the clan. He'd even possessed a grade-eight Spirit Fire, a treasure that most alchemists could only dream of.
Then he'd tried to refine a grade-seven pill. Foundation establishment level work, far beyond his cultivation stage.
The Spirit Fire had gone berserk. His meridians had burned from the inside. His cultivation had fallen from late-stage to mid-stage in a single catastrophic failure. His alchemy skills had regressed from grade-eight to grade-nine.
Nine years later, he was mid-stage qi condensation, barely maintaining that level. His alchemy was a joke: Grade-nine pills with a three-in-ten success rate, work that even talented teenagers could exceed.
The grade-eight Spirit Fire still sat in his dantian, dormant and unused. Too dangerous to access. Too valuable to remove, even if removal were possible.
A treasure he couldn't use. A reminder of everything he'd lost.
Wang Ben had been six years old when it happened. He remembered his father's screams, the smell of burning flesh, the clan elders rushing to their modest home with healing pills and grim faces.
He remembered his mother's face. Not angry, never angry. Just... resigned. As if she'd always known their good fortune couldn't last.
"Eat," Li Mei said, ladling porridge into a bowl. "You have patrol duty this morning. Your father mixed the herbs last night." On the table beside the bowl, a small cloth bundle sat waiting. Wang Ben unfolded it and found the dried spirit root slices he'd mentioned needing for his training exercises two days ago, already cut to the right thickness.
Wang Ben accepted the bowl, settling onto a cushion by the low table and turning the bowl until the small chip on the rim faced away from him, the same way he always did. The porridge was simple: grain mixed with dried spirit herbs, nothing expensive. But the herb ratios were perfect, each one measured to complement the others with a precision that most grade-nine alchemists couldn't match. His father's hands still remembered what his cultivation could no longer support. Just enough spiritual energy to help with cultivation, not enough to waste resources on an average clansman.
"Where are they sending you today?" his mother asked.
"North patrol," Wang Ben said between bites. "The herb fields by Blackwood Forest. Just watching for spirit beasts that get too close to the gathering areas."
"Be careful," Li Mei said automatically. "The forest has been... strange lately."
Wang Ben looked up. "Strange how?"
His mother frowned, stirring the remaining porridge. "The servants who gather herbs have been reporting odd things. Beasts moving in unusual patterns. Strange shifts in the air. The clan elders say it's nothing, but..." She shook her head. "Just be careful."
Wang Ben noticed her hand slowing on the ladle, the slight tightness in her shoulders that hadn't been there before. She wasn't worried about the forest. She was worried about him and trying not to show it.
"I'm always careful," Wang Ben said, which was true. He had no desire to be a hero. Heroes in cultivation stories always had tragic backstories and incredible talent. He had neither the tragedy nor the talent.
Well, the tragedy, maybe. But tragedy alone didn't make you special. It just made you sad.
The baby stirred in his cradle, making the small squeaking sounds that preceded a full cry. Li Mei moved immediately, lifting the infant with practiced ease.
Wang Chen, named for both the Chen of their clan and the hope of a new morning, blinked up at his mother with the unfocused gaze of the very young. For a moment, the infant's eyes drifted past Li Mei's face and fixed on something near Wang Ben, tracking it with a steadiness that no three-week-old should possess. Then it passed, and he was just a baby again. He was so small, so fragile. A life that had just begun, untouched by disappointment or failure.
"Hello, little one," Li Mei murmured, settling into a chair to feed him. "Did you sleep well?"
Wang Ben watched his mother with his brother, feeling the familiar mix of affection and melancholy. Wang Chen represented hope in a way that Wang Ben never had. A second chance for the family. A possibility that things might be different.
Maybe he'll be the talented one, Wang Ben thought. Maybe he'll restore our family's honor.
It was a pleasant fantasy, though Wang Ben knew better than to expect it. Talent wasn't inherited like hair color or height. The heavens gave out genius randomly, cruelly, without regard for who deserved it or who needed it.
On his way to rinse the bowl, Wang Ben passed the alcove where his father kept his work. Wang Tian was there, already awake after all, hunched over the small table where he mixed herbs. His hands moved through the familiar motions of measuring dried roots into a mortar. Then they stopped. Just for a moment. His fingers hovered over the pestle, not quite touching it, as if they'd forgotten what came next. Wang Ben watched from the doorway, waiting. His father's hands found the pestle again, and the grinding resumed, steady and sure.
But his eyes lingered on a formula pinned to the wall above the table, old and dense with notation, and for a breath his face carried a hunger that had nothing to do with grief. Wang Tian never looked up, and Wang Ben said nothing. Some mornings, when Wang Ben practiced his spear forms in the courtyard before dawn, he would catch his father watching from the window, still and quiet, with the expression of a man standing on the wrong side of a locked door.
"I should go," Wang Ben said, finishing his porridge. "Morning assembly is in half an hour."
"Take an extra spirit stone," his mother said, not looking up from the baby. "For emergencies."
"Mother, I'm just watching herb fields..."
"Take it."
Wang Ben sighed but didn't argue. He retrieved a low-grade spirit stone from the family's modest collection, a small pouch in a locked box that contained their entire liquid wealth. Five low-grade stones remained. His monthly stipend would add five more in two weeks.
Wealth beyond measure, he thought wryly.
He tucked the stone into his belt pouch, adjusted his patrol robes, and headed for the door. As he stepped through the compound gate, the familiar shift passed over his skin, a faint warmth that had nothing to do with the morning sun. The wards his grandfather had laid into the walls years ago still held, steady and constant. Wang Ben had felt that warmth every day of his life, so ordinary he barely noticed it anymore.
"Ben," his mother called softly.
He turned back.
Li Mei was looking at him now, her expression unreadable. She crossed the room and rested a hand on his shoulder, holding it there longer than usual, her eyes searching his face. Then she let go.
"If something feels wrong today," she said, "trust that feeling. Your dreams aren't nothing, no matter what the elders say."
Wang Ben wanted to dismiss it, to say she was being superstitious. But the steadiness in her voice stopped him.
"I will," he said instead.
Redstone City sprawled across the valley like a sleeping beast, its red-clay walls catching the morning light. The city wasn't large by cultivation world standards: maybe thirty thousand mortals, two thousand cultivators, a few dozen core formation experts. But it was home.
The Wang Clan compound occupied the eastern district, a walled complex of training grounds, workshops, and residential buildings. Not as grand as the city lord's palace in the center, but respectable. The sign above the main gate bore the clan's symbol: a formation array stylized into a spiral, representing their specialty.
Wang Ben joined the flow of clan members heading through the gates. In the side courtyard, Grandmother Chen Shuwen was already directing the household servants, arranging the day's tasks with the unhurried precision of someone who had been doing this longer than most of them had been alive. She noticed Wang Ben passing and gave him a brief nod before turning back to her work.
Most were young like him, assigned to patrol duty or resource gathering. The talented cultivators trained separately, receiving better techniques and more resources. Wang Ben was the Patriarch's grandson, but talent mattered more than blood in a cultivation clan. Without it, patrol duty was where you ended up.
He'd long since accepted that.
The morning assembly was held in the eastern courtyard, where about fifty patrol members gathered in loose formation. Wang Ben had gotten there early enough to sit on the roof of the equipment shed for a short while, watching the compound wake up from above. He liked it up there. Quieter than anywhere else in the compound, and nobody bothered looking up. He dropped down before the assembly started and found his usual spot near the back, nodding to the few people he knew by name.
"Wang Ben." A voice at his shoulder.
He turned to see Luo Cheng, another patrol regular who'd started the same year. Luo Cheng was nineteen now, still mid-stage body refinement despite four years of cultivation. Not as average as Wang Ben, but close.
"Luo Cheng," Wang Ben acknowledged.
"North patrol again?" Luo Cheng asked.
"Herb fields."
"Lucky you. I got eastern territory. There's been spotted wolf activity near the boundary stones."
Wang Ben made a sympathetic noise. Spotted wolves were only body refinement-level spirit beasts, but they hunted in packs. Dangerous enough if you weren't careful.
"Attention!" A voice cut through the morning chatter.
Squad Leader Chen stood at the front of the assembly, carrying the quiet authority of a man everyone knew had reached late-stage qi condensation. He was a stern man in his forties, someone who'd reached his limit in cultivation and now served the clan in administrative roles.
"Standard patrol assignments," Squad Leader Chen announced, reading from a scroll. "North sector: Wang Ben, Zhao Yu, Servant Li San, Servant Ma Hong. You'll be covering the herb fields by Blackwood Forest. Report anything unusual immediately."
Wang Ben committed the names to memory. Zhao Yu was another body refinement cultivator, mid-stage if he remembered correctly. The servants were mortals, peasants who did the actual herb gathering while cultivators stood guard.
"South sector: Luo Cheng, Wei Ming..."
The assignments continued. Wang Ben let his attention drift, watching the sky lighten over the compound walls. Another day. Another patrol. Another step in the slow, grinding process of cultivation that would probably leave him at foundation establishment if he was lucky, qi condensation if he wasn't.
Not everyone can be a genius, he reminded himself. Someone has to be average.
The assembly dispersed after Squad Leader Chen finished. Wang Ben made his way to the equipment shed, where he collected his assigned gear: a basic iron spear, a signal flare, a water skin, and a small pack of dried rations.
"Wang Ben?"
He turned to see Zhao Yu approaching, a stocky young man with a friendly face and the confident bearing of someone who'd never known real failure. Zhao Yu came from the Zhao retainer family, one of several sworn to the Wang Clan for generations. His father was a grade-nine forger, which gave the family slightly more status than most servants.
"That's me," Wang Ben said.
"I'm Zhao Yu. Looks like we're partners today." He grinned. "First time on herb field duty. Anything I should know?"
Stay alert, watch for beast signs, don't wander off, Wang Ben could have said. But Zhao Yu probably knew all that already.
"It's usually quiet," Wang Ben said instead. "The real danger is boredom."
Zhao Yu laughed. "I can handle boredom."
The servants arrived: two middle-aged men in worn clothing, carrying large wicker baskets for gathering herbs. Li San and Ma Hong. They bowed respectfully to the cultivators, their eyes downcast.
"Ready when you are, young masters," Li San said.
Wang Ben resisted the urge to tell them not to call him that. He was barely a cultivator, still stuck in body refinement. But to mortals, even a body refinement cultivator was a figure of power and status.
"Let's go," Zhao Yu said cheerfully.
The four of them set out through the northern gate, leaving the city behind as they followed the packed earth road toward Blackwood Forest.
The morning was beautiful, Wang Ben had to admit. Clear sky, gentle breeze, the distant mountains purple against the horizon. Spirit energy hung thick in the air this close to the forest. Not abundant by sect standards, but decent for a frontier region.
"So," Zhao Yu said as they walked, "I heard your father used to be a pretty amazing alchemist."
Wang Ben tensed. "That was a long time ago."
"Still, grade-eight pills at late-stage qi condensation? That's impressive. I heard he even had a grade-eight Spirit Fire."
"He still has it." Wang Ben kept his eyes on the ground ahead. "He just can't use it anymore."
"Oh." Zhao Yu had the grace to look embarrassed. "Sorry, I didn't mean..."
"It's fine," Wang Ben interrupted. "Everyone knows what happened."
They walked in awkward silence for a while. Behind them, the servants trudged along, their wicker baskets creaking softly.
Why do people always bring up Father's glory days? Wang Ben wondered. Do they think it's encouraging? Do they think I don't know what we lost?
The road curved, and Blackwood Forest came into view: a dark wall of ancient trees stretching along the northern horizon. The forest was old, predating the city by centuries. Spirit beasts lived in its depths, some of them powerful enough to threaten even core formation cultivators.
But the herb fields they were assigned to patrol weren't in the forest itself. They were on the cleared land at its edge, where the clan had planted rows of low-grade spirit herbs that thrived on the forest's ambient energy.
"There," Li San said, pointing to a section of fields about a hundred paces from the tree line. "We'll start gathering there, young masters."
"Fine," Zhao Yu said. "Wang Ben and I will split up. I'll take the western edge, you take the eastern?"
Wang Ben nodded. It was standard procedure. The cultivators spread out in a defensive line while the servants worked, watching for any beasts that might be drawn by the spiritual energy of the herbs.
They took up their positions. The servants began their work, moving through the rows with practiced efficiency, identifying mature herbs and carefully harvesting them without damaging the roots.
Wang Ben leaned on his spear, scanning the tree line. Nothing moved except the wind in the branches. Birds sang somewhere in the canopy. A perfectly normal morning.
Mother's worried about nothing, he thought. Everything's fine.
But even as he thought it, an unease nagged at him. A feeling he couldn't quite place. Like the air pressure was wrong, or the light was at the wrong angle, or...
He shook his head. You're imagining things. Too many restless nights.
Time passed slowly. The sun climbed higher. The servants filled their baskets with herbs, nothing valuable, just common spirit plants used in low-grade pills and formation materials. The kind of work that kept a clan supplied with basics but would never make anyone rich.
Wang Ben's mind wandered as he stood watch. He thought about his cultivation, about the body refinement manual he'd been studying. He was close to mid-stage, maybe another month if he worked hard. Then late-stage by the end of the year if he was lucky.
At this rate, I'll be qi condensation by twenty-five, he calculated. Foundation establishment by seventy if everything goes perfectly. Core formation by two hundred if I'm one of the lucky ones.
It was a depressing thought. Two hundred years old and only core formation, if he even made it that far. His grandfather had reached core formation at one hundred and thirty and been considered a genius of his generation.
But at least I'm not going backward like Father, Wang Ben thought, then immediately felt guilty for thinking it.
"Young Master Wang!"
Wang Ben snapped to attention. Li San was waving at him from the herb field, pointing toward the forest.
"Did you see that?" the servant called.
"See what?"
"Something moved in the trees. Something big."
Wang Ben's grip tightened on his spear. He scanned the tree line more carefully, searching for movement.
There. A shadow between the trunks, too large to be a bird, too deliberate to be wind-blown branches.
"Zhao Yu," Wang Ben called, pointing toward the trees. "Something's moving in there."
The other cultivator jogged over, his own weapon ready. "I see it. Could be a stray grazer."
"Could be," Wang Ben agreed. But the movement was wrong, too deliberate for a grazer, too slow for flight.
The shadow moved again, and Wang Ben caught a glimpse of pale fur, too light for any normal forest creature. His heart rate picked up.
"That's no grazer." He barely moved his lips.
Before Zhao Yu could respond, the creature stepped into view.
It looked like a wolf at first glance: four legs, furred body, predator's build. But wolves weren't white like fresh snow. Wolves didn't have antlers growing from their heads. And wolves definitely didn't radiate spiritual energy like a qi condensation cultivator.
"That's a Jade Snow Wolf," Zhao Yu breathed. "Qi condensation level. What's it doing this far from the deep forest?"
Wang Ben's mind raced. Jade Snow Wolves were territorial, aggressive, and far too strong for body refinement cultivators to handle. A single one could kill them both easily.
"Signal flare," Wang Ben said, keeping his voice calm. "We need backup."
"Right." Zhao Yu fumbled for the flare at his belt.
The wolf's head turned, its luminous eyes fixing on them. Its lips peeled back, revealing teeth like white daggers.
And then it started walking toward them.
"Light the flare!" Wang Ben shouted.
Zhao Yu struck the flare and threw it skyward. It burst overhead in a shower of red sparks, the universal signal for danger, visible from the city walls.
Help would come. Eventually.
But the wolf was already moving, and help was a long way off.
Wang Ben raised his spear, knowing it was futile. That thing was stronger than anything he'd ever faced. He might as well try to stop a landslide with a broom.
The wolf's muscles bunched, preparing to charge.
And deep inside Wang Ben's consciousness, in a place he had no awareness of, a presence stirred.
A dormant system, watching. Calculating. Analyzing the threat level and cross-referencing against parameters set fifteen years ago.
Threat Level: MODERATE
Host Survival Probability: 12.4%
Estimated Time to Death: Under two minutes
Assessment: Within acceptable parameters for activation
Processing...
The wolf charged.
And in the depths of Wang Ben's soul, buried so deep that even gods couldn't sense it, a damaged AI opened one digital eye.