The celebration in the main plaza for the hundred victors was a riot of sound and color. Music from spirit-flutes played, senior disciples clapped backs, and the air was thick with the smells of roasting meat and celebratory wine. But Shen Li stood at the very edge of it all, trapped in a private, silent ice storm.
His eyes were locked onto one figure among the hundred.
The muddy, ordinary, utterly forgettable disciple who had stumbled out last, clutching the one-hundredth token. The one the registry clerk had called Lin Feng.
The thread of Void.
It was hidden again now, submerged beneath the bland, muddy, mediocre threads of a lucky coward. But Shen Li had seen it. A tear in the fabric of fate itself. A patch of absolute nothingness that seemed to drink the light and potential from the air around it. And the ancient, bitter watcher had seen it too. That pulse of cold, grim satisfaction from the deep earth had been unmistakable. The watcher had been looking for something. And it had found it.
The backlash is not a person, Shen Li realized, the truth chilling him to his marrow. It's a principle. A cosmic correction. And it has just been delivered to our doorstep, wrapped in mediocrity.
He needed a name, a story. He pushed through the crowd of bustling servants carrying heavy trays. He found the harried registry clerk, now surrounded by disciples verifying their tokens for the next round.
"A moment, honored brother," Shen Li said, bowing his head, his voice the perfect mix of servility and gossipy curiosity. "For the betting pools down in the lower quarters… the last one through. The muddy fellow. He's the talk of the kitchens. What's his tale? A lucky underdog makes for wild odds and big payouts."
The clerk, irritated and busy, didn't even look up from his scroll. "Him? That's Lin Feng. From some nameless village in the Stonemist Hills, west of here. Earth affinity, bottom-grade. Mediocre in every class, clumsy in the practice yard. He got through because he's a rodent. Hid in a stinking mudhole by the stream while the real fighters brawled. Then crawled out and snatched a token from a disciple who'd been knocked cold by a falling rock." The clerk spat to the side in disgust. "No story there. Just luck and the absence of a spine. Now move along, servant."
Lin Feng.
The name was common as dirt. But it was his name. His past life's name. A name buried on a stone altar. That was no coincidence. In the world of threads and fate, there were no coincidences. This was a message. A mockery. A tag placed on the weapon by the hand that forged it.
"Thank you, brother," Shen Li murmured, and vanished back into the human current.
Lin Feng. The void now had a name, and the name was a blade pointed at his own past.
He watched as the hundred disciples, bandaged and fed, were called to order. Elder Wu announced the second phase: the Duels of the Seven Peaks. One-on-one combat. Single elimination. The matches would be held starting at dawn tomorrow on seven floating stone platforms anchored to the peaks themselves, with nothing but a thousand feet of empty, misty air between them and the ground. To yield or be knocked off meant defeat. This was the true test of individual power, skill, and nerve.
Bai Xiaoling received her match assignment on a slip of jade. Her opponent for the first round: a hulking brute named Kang, from the Earth-Shattering Fist school. A straightforward, powerful, predictable hitter. She glanced at the jade, her face impassive. She would dissect him. But her eyes, trained by Shen Li to see patterns and threats, didn't stop there. They scanned the posted roster of the other ninety-nine names. They paused, just for a heartbeat, on one: Lin Feng.
Her thread of Instinct vibrated like a plucked bowstring. She couldn't see the void, but she could feel the wrongness. The unnaturalness of his "luck." She looked up, her stormy gaze finding Shen Li in the sea of servants. He met her look and gave the slightest shake of his head. Not now. Not here.
The message was received. Her jaw tightened, and she looked away, but the seed of awareness was planted.
Shen Li needed counsel. He needed the specialized sight of his unlikely allies.
That night, the moon was a pale smudge behind fast-moving, ragged clouds. The wind had a bite to it, whispering of coming storms. Shen Li stood in the heart of the silent bamboo grove, the epicenter of his secret alliances. He didn't call out. He simply opened his pact-thread to Lian and sent a focused pulse of imagery, sharp as a needle: The hundredth disciple. Lin Feng. The void. The lucky one.
He also made a detour. From a hidden pocket, he took a specific, toxic fungus—a black, wrinkled Ghost-Cap Mushroom. He placed it carefully on a specific, flat rock beside the Alchemy Hall's refuse chute. A signal only one person would understand.
They came.
Lian appeared first. One moment the grove was empty, the next she was simply there, her grey robes blending with the shadows, her small loom glowing faintly in her hands. Her normally serene face was etched with deep concern. "You felt it," she breathed, her mental voice tinged with awe and dread. "I sensed it the moment the gorge gate sealed. A patch of… non-fate. A hole in the Tapestry. It shouldn't be possible."
"What is it?" Shen Li asked, his own voice a low rasp in the quiet.
Lian's fingers plucked nervously at the empty air, as if trying to grasp an answer. "I have only read of such phenomena. In the forbidden, sealed archives of the Divination Hall. They are called Karmic Nulls. Or Fate-Eaters. Beings whose destiny is not merely obscure or unwritten… it is actively erased. They are often created by cataclysmic events that shatter karma, or…," she swallowed, "or they are purposefully woven by the higher mechanisms of the Tapestry itself. They function as universal correctors. They are drawn to places of intense fate turbulence—like scavengers to a wound, or antibodies to an infection. They… simplify. They untangle complex knots by removing one of the threads. Permanently."
Xuan Ji arrived then, soundless as a falling leaf. She had seen the Ghost-Cap. Her jade-green eyes were sharp, having caught Lian's last words. "A corrector?" Her voice was the sound of ice forming. "You mean this 'Lin Feng' is here to kill someone? To assassinate a disciple under the cover of the Trials?"
"Not necessarily to kill in the physical sense," Lian corrected, her brow furrowed in intense thought. "To remove. To negate. If the local Tapestry deems a particular thread—like Bai Xiaoling's, which you so violently rewrote from tragedy to promise—too disruptive, too chaotic, it may deploy a Null to… restore simplicity. To untangle the knot you created. The Null doesn't fight the thread. It makes the thread irrelevant. It makes it un-happen."
A chill deeper than the mountain night seized Shen Li's heart. The backlash wasn't an assassin or a slanderer. It was an eraser. A celestial correction sent to delete his work.
"Can it be fought?" Shen Li asked, his mind already racing, searching for a weakness, a thread to pull in a being made of no-threads.
"His power is antithetical to normal cultivation," Lian explained, her voice grave. "He does not gather Qi, he dissipates it. He does not build skill, he unravels it. He radiates a field of mundane inevitability. In a duel, he wouldn't overpower his opponent. He would make his opponent's techniques fizzle. Their footwork would stumble. Their spiritual attacks would lose potency. Their luck would turn sour. He wins by making the other person… less. By reducing them to their most ordinary, unlucky self."
Xuan Ji's lips drew into a thin, bloodless line. "There are agents—poisons, curses—that can attack fortune, that can cloud the spirit. But if he is a living void… such substances may have no anchor. They may simply… miss."
"We need to see him in action," Shen Li stated, the strategist taking over from the alarmed survivor. "The duels start tomorrow. Bai Xiaoling's first match is in the morning. His is in the third round, if his… 'luck'… holds. We watch. We analyze. We learn the nature of this void."
"And if his nature is to erase her thread from the competition? From existence?" Xuan Ji asked, the question hanging in the cold air like a knife.
Shen Li met her gaze, then Lian's. In his eyes, there was no fear, only a cold, absolute resolve. "Then we break the eraser. Even a void must have a connection to this reality to exist within it. Even nothingness is defined by the something that contains it. We find that container. We find the threads that bind the void to this world. And we cut them."
The silence that followed was heavy with unspoken agreement. The scholar, the poison master, and the chaos-weaver. An alliance against fate itself.
Dawn of the Duels arrived with a sky of hard, flawless blue. It was a cruel, beautiful day for violence.
The Seven Peaks were a breathtaking, terrifying sight. Seven colossal stone spires, their tops sheared off to create wide, circular platforms. These platforms floated a hundred feet from the main cliff face, connected only by long, slender, swaying bridges of rope and weathered wood. Below, a dizzying drop vanished into perpetual, silvery mist. The only rule here was the abyss.
The atmosphere was no longer the chaotic excitement of the gorge. It was electric, grim, focused. This was where individual futures were forged in the crucible of direct combat.
Bai Xiaoling's first match was on the platform of the Third Peak. Her opponent, Kang of the Earth-Shattering Fist, was already there, a mountain of corded muscle. He rolled his shoulders, cracking his knuckles loudly, a confident smirk on his broad face as he watched her approach across the narrow bridge.
"Heard you got your pretty name cleared, little sister," Kang boomed, his voice echoing off the stone peaks. "A shame, in a way. Now I have to break you with a clean conscience."
Bai Xiaoling offered no reply. No banter. She stepped onto the platform, the morning sun glinting off the blue steel of Frostbite as she drew it in one smooth motion. Her thread was a single, taut line of Absolute Intent. She was not here to talk. She was here to pass.
The judge, an Elder hovering on a flying disc nearby, raised a hand. The gong sounded.
Kang roared. He didn't walk; he charged, each footfall making the floating platform shudder. His fists glowed with dense, brown Earth Qi, promising bone-shattering force. It was power and fury incarnate, a classic, overwhelming opening.
Bai Xiaoling did not meet force with force. She flowed.
She used the very first, most basic tactic Shen Li had ever taught her. As Kang's massive fist drove toward her like a battering ram, she sidestepped with minimal movement. At the same time, her boot scuffed the stone, kicking a tiny, loose piece of gravel into the air. It was nothing. A speck.
It flew toward Kang's face.
He flinched. It was an instinctual, tiny reaction. His eyes blinked shut for a fraction of a second. His perfect, roaring charge was broken.
In that fraction, Bai Xiaoling was no longer where he thought. She was beside him. Her blade became a whisper of silver light. She did not aim for his flesh. She aimed for his preparation. The straps of his leather bracers parted with silent precision. The ties of his reinforced armored vest were slit. She cut the laces of one of his heavy boots. She didn't draw blood; she dismantled his readiness.
In less than a minute, Kang stood confused and off-balance. His armor was hanging loose, his bracers falling to his wrists, one boot flapping open. He was still immensely strong, but he felt ridiculous, exposed, untethered. The thread of his Confidence frayed visibly, replaced by Bewildered Frustration.
Then she struck. A single, powerful, precise thrust—not to kill, but to the pressure point on his now-unprotected shoulder. A bolt of numbing cold from her Winter Sword Qi shot through his arm. It went limp. As he staggered, she hooked her foot behind his flapping boot.
She didn't need to push. The massive Kang, off-balance, numb, and humiliated, teetered on the very edge of the abyss. Bai Xiaoling simply leveled the point of her sword at his throat, her expression calm.
"Yield," she said, the word flat and final.
Humiliation warred with the cold reality of the drop behind him. With a strangled snarl, Kang nodded. The judge announced her victory.
The crowd was silent for a beat, then erupted in confused murmurs. It wasn't a glorious, flashy duel of clashing techniques. It was a clinical, almost surgical dismantling. Efficient. Ruthless. Intelligent. It was a new kind of victory, and it unsettled those who expected traditional heroics.
Shen Li, watching from a servant's designated area on the main cliff, allowed himself a single, cold nod of approval. Good. She understands. A fighter is a system of confidence, preparation, and momentum. Break the system.
But his primary focus, his dread and his curiosity, was fixed on the lower, less-crowded platforms.
Lin Feng's first match was on the First Peak. His opponent was a fiery, aggressive spear user named Yan, whose threads blazed with Passionate Fury and Flamboyant Skill. Yan twirled his spirit-spear, creating dazzling arcs of crimson flame in the air, warming up for what he clearly thought would be a quick, showy victory. He looked at the muddy, cowering Lin Feng with undisguised contempt.
The gong sounded.
Yan lunged, his body a blur, his spear a line of fire—the "Flaming Serpent Thrust," a textbook-perfect opening technique.
And then… it fizzled.
It was the strangest thing Shen Li had ever witnessed in a martial contest. The vibrant flame Qi surrounding the spear didn't clash or explode; it simply… went out. Like a candle snuffed by an unseen breath. Yan's flawless, practiced footwork hit a perfectly smooth patch of stone and inexplicably slid, ruining his balance. His battle cry caught in his throat, turning into a choked gasp.
Lin Feng didn't do anything impressive. He looked terrified. He shuffled backwards, his ordinary iron sword held in a clumsy guard. He parried Yan's now-limp and flame-less spear thrusts awkwardly, the blows ringing with mundane, un-energized clangs. He looked like a man who had never held a sword before, surviving purely by accident.
But Shen Li, with his thread-sight wide open, saw the horrifying truth Lian had described.
Lin Feng was a void. As Yan's brilliant, passionate threads of Skill, Fire Qi, and Aggressive Intent approached him, they dimmed. They frayed. The thread of Good Fortune that should have guided Yan's footstep thinned to nothing. The Confidence in his technique became fuzzy with doubt.
Lin Feng "won" in under two minutes. He never landed a strike. On what should have been his finishing lunge, Yan, furious and flustered, tripped over absolutely nothing—his own two feet seemed to betray him. He stumbled past Lin Feng, wildly off-balance, and pitched headfirst over the edge of the platform. He fell into the safety nets below with a startled yell, unharmed but utterly defeated.
The crowd didn't cheer. They didn't boo. A confused, uneasy silence hung over the First Peak. The victory made no sense. It felt hollow. Wrong.
"He didn't fight," Xuan Ji's voice whispered beside Shen Li. She had found him in the crowd, her hood drawn up. "He just… stood there. And the world around him forgot how to be exceptional."
"A passive nullification field," Shen Li murmured, his mind working furiously. "The stronger the fate, the brighter the talent, the more it is dampened in his presence. Against mediocrity, he might actually lose. But against a genius… he is their natural predator."
A terrible understanding crystallized. Bai Xiaoling was a reignited genius, her thread of destiny now shining brighter and more defiant than ever. To a Karmic Null, she wouldn't just be another opponent. She would be a glaring anomaly, a complex knot in need of simplification. A beacon.
The Tapestry was setting its correction mechanism directly against his most important piece.
Lin Feng's second match, held in the afternoon, was a brutal confirmation. His opponent was a graceful swordswoman of the Flowing Water School, her threads a beautiful, intricate weave of Fluid Grace, Precise Control, and Artistic Flourish. The duel was a painful, slow-motion unraveling.
Her elegant, dance-like footwork became clumsy, her steps heavy. Her sword, which usually moved with the sure, beautiful flow of a river, felt sluggish and awkward in her hand. She slipped on a patch of dry, level stone. Her signature technique, the "Nine Ripples Slash," which created overlapping waves of cutting water Qi, dissipated after the first, weak ripple.
Lin Feng, sweating profusely and wearing an expression of constant apology, simply stood his ground. He waved his iron sword vaguely. As the swordswoman struggled to rise from her inexplicable slip, he shuffled forward and poked her shoulder with the blunt tip of his blade.
It was the most undignified, non-violent "attack" imaginable.
Tears of sheer frustration welled in the swordswoman's eyes. Her thread of Confidence wasn't just broken; it was shredded. She nodded, yielding, her spirit visibly crushed. Lin Feng bowed awkwardly, looking embarrassed by his own "victory."
Two wins. Zero displays of skill. Only a spreading, contagious aura of mundane failure and rotten luck.
At the end of the day, as the sun painted the western peaks in blood and gold, the surviving sixteen disciples gathered. Elder Wu, her face unreadable, announced the match-ups for the elite round, to be fought tomorrow.
"Peak One," her voice rang out, clear and cold. "Bai Xiaoling versus Lin Feng."
A different kind of murmur passed through the exhausted, bloodied crowd. Not excitement. It was a low, puzzled, uneasy buzz. The clever, ruthless sword prodigy who dismantled systems against the inexplicable, lucky phantom who unraveled skill. On paper, it was a mismatch. In the gut of every cultivator who understood the profound wrongness of Lin Feng's victories, it felt like a ominous joke. A pairing that violated the natural order.
Bai Xiaoling's head snapped up from checking a bandage on her wrist. Her stormy eyes scanned the crowd and found Lin Feng, who was staring at his dirty boots, wringing his hands nervously. Every instinct Shen Li had honed in her screamed in silent alarm. Her hand fell to the hilt of Frostbite.
Lin Feng finally looked up, sensing her gaze.
Their eyes met across the dusty assembly ground.
For one single, frozen fraction of a second, the bland, nervous, cowardly mask completely fell away.
His eyes were not the eyes of a simpleton or a lucky fool.
They were deep, empty pools. Pits that reflected no light. And in their dimensionless depths, Shen Li—watching with every ounce of his perception—saw a flicker of something cold, mechanical, and utterly devoid of life. The gaze of a gardener looking at a particularly vigorous weed. The look of a tool recognizing the task for which it was made.
Then the moment vanished. Lin Feng's shoulders slumped again. He looked down, shuffled his feet, and turned away, melting into the crowd of disciples.
Bai Xiaoling didn't move for a long moment. Then she turned. Her gaze swept over the spectators, the servants, the cliffs, and finally found Shen Li. Her expression held no fear. It was etched with cold, crystalline understanding. She had seen the void in that glance. She knew. This was no ordinary opponent.
This was the true Trial. Not of skill against skill, but of existence against erasure.
Shen Li held her gaze and gave one single, slow, deliberate nod.
The message was transmitted, clear and grim.
Tomorrow, you do not fight a man. You fight the will of heaven itself. A will that wants you undone. And we must find a way… to make heaven bleed.
To be continued...