The knife was still in his side.
Xiao Yan looked down at it with the specific expression of someone who had been interrupted mid-thought by something that should have been more significant than it currently felt. The blade had gone in clean — whoever threw it knew what they were doing, or had gotten lucky, which in practice produced the same result.
The thug leader was laughing. The sound filled the restaurant the way bad smells filled rooms — comprehensively, leaving no corner untouched.
"Dead! You're dead, you bastard!"
Jinyao's hands were already moving — golden energy crackling between her fingers with the quality of someone who had passed alarmed and arrived at furious and was now converting the second thing directly into technique.
Lieya was in front of him. She'd moved without deciding to, the War God instinct putting her body between Xiao Yan and the room before her conscious mind had filed the order. Fire affinity burning visible at her gauntlets, the Twin Flame-Thunder energy reading hot and ready through the Codex Eye.
"Xiao Yan," she said, without looking back. Her voice was steady in the way that voices were steady when someone was using everything available to keep them that way. "Talk to me."
He pulled the knife out.
It made a sound. He'd rather it hadn't.
The wound beneath it — Stage 8 Balance Breaker Path, Divine Stage 1 Body, Frozen Origin Physique with two months of foundation work behind it — began closing before the knife had fully cleared. Not instantly. Not magically. The way muscle closed when it had been built properly and had resources to draw on and knew what it was supposed to do.
He looked at the blade in his hand. Cheap steel. The leader had been right about that much.
And then the voice came back.
[Master. I'm back.]
The warmth hit his Sea of Consciousness like sunlight through a window that had been closed for two weeks — immediate, complete, carrying with it the specific comfort of something familiar returning after an absence long enough to notice. He looked inward for a fraction of a second.
Michael had changed.
Not the voice — that was the same, the same dry precision, the same bone-dry assessment. But the presence had form now. Small, sharp-eyed, with the energy of something that had restructured itself at a fundamental level and was wearing the result comfortably. Less like a system managing from a distance. More like something that had decided to be present in a specific way and had chosen that way carefully.
(Michael,) he thought. (You picked a moment.)
[I was monitoring. The moment seemed appropriate.]
(The knife—)
[Is already closing. Stage 8 Body handles worse than that. More pressingly — the Peak Divine Realm fighter in the back of the room is preparing a full output technique. Four seconds.]
(The Merging Skill.)
[You've unlocked it. It integrates the three paths into a single unified output for a fixed duration — not the permanent integration of Michael Mode, but a concentrated expression. Full volume. All three, together, at once.]
(What does that look like?)
[You're about to find out.]
"Do it," Xiao Yan said. Out loud, which made Lieya glance back at him — which was when she saw the wound closing and her expression did something that had several feelings in it arriving at the same time.
The light came up from the floor.
Not a gentle light. The kind that announced something. Gold first, the Balance Breaker's base signature, and then red threading through it as the Heaven-Pulse Thunder Veins hit the Merging Skill's unified channel and the output transformed. The lightning that came off him had always been blue-white — the clean discharge of Thunder Vein cultivation doing what it was built to do. What came off him now was the color of something hotter than fire and older than the technique expressing it.
Deep red. Crackling with a sound that the restaurant's remaining patrons, pressed against the far walls, would later describe as either thunder or something that thunder was trying to become.
The Peak Divine Realm fighter stopped preparing his technique.
Xiao Yan looked at the knife in his hand and set it down on the table with the care of someone placing something that had briefly been relevant and was now not.
"First," he said, and his voice carried the resonance of three paths running at simultaneous output, "your knife didn't scare me."
The wound in his side had finished closing.
"Second." He looked at the room — the Codex Eye at full expression, Merging Skill running through it, turning the space into something he could read completely. Every cultivation signature. Every intent. Every direction of movement before the movement had decided to happen. "You interrupted my dinner. Which I was already having a complicated week about."
He moved.
The Peak Divine fighter was fast — genuinely, appropriately fast for his realm, the kind of speed that made Divine Stage fighters dangerous to everything below them. Under normal circumstances, Stage 8 Mortal didn't outpace Peak Divine. The math didn't work.
The Merging Skill was not normal circumstances.
He crossed the distance before the fighter's technique completed and discharged the red thunder in a single point of contact — open palm, center mass, the three-path unified output focused through one moment of impact. The fighter went backward, hit the far wall, and did not get back up.
The thugs behind him processed what they'd seen for approximately two seconds.
Then the red lightning moved through them in the pattern the Codex Eye had already mapped — not lethal, the Soul Path component calibrating the discharge to the level that produced unconsciousness rather than worse. Twelve men. Seven seconds. The restaurant went quiet with the specific silence of a space where everyone who had been making noise was now horizontal.
Xiao Yan stood in the center of it and looked at his hands.
The red had faded back to blue-white as the Merging Skill's duration ended, the unified output settling into its standard configuration. Michael's presence hummed quietly in the background — present, steady, the restructured version of something familiar that had come back more itself than it had been before.
[Thirty seconds maximum at current stage. Duration extends as the Path advances.]
"Understood."
[Also — Master. The woman at the table to your left has been watching you since the thugs arrived. Her cultivation level is—]
He already knew. He'd felt it the moment they sat down — the cold that his Frozen Origin Physique recognized the way the body recognized something it shared origin with. Not the same. Adjacent. Ice that had been refined to a level his hadn't reached yet, running beneath a suppression veil with the discipline of someone who had practiced not being read for a very long time.
He turned.
The veiled woman at the neighboring table had not moved. Her chopsticks were set down precisely, her posture unchanged, her hands folded in her lap with the stillness of someone who had trained stillness into a discipline rather than a habit.
Behind the veil, he couldn't read her face. But the Codex Eye read intent, and the intent coming from the woman at the next table was complicated. Layered in a way he didn't have a clean framework for yet. Not hostile. Not neutral either. Something that had depth to it — history in it — that the surface reading couldn't fully resolve.
He filed it.
"Are you okay?" Lieya was beside him — the protective stance replaced by the proximity of someone running their own assessment. Her hand moved toward his side before she caught it and stopped herself. "The knife—"
"Closed," he said. "I'm fine."
She looked at him with the expression that said she was still checking and would tell him whether she agreed with his conclusion when she finished.
Jinyao was already surveying the restaurant with the Golden Insight Eye active — reading the unconscious thugs, the damaged wall, the exit points. She picked up her cup, which had somehow survived the entire event without spilling, and drank from it with the calm of someone who had decided that maintaining composure in aftermath was a skill worth practicing.
"We're leaving," she said. "Before the city guard arrives and we spend two hours explaining Peak Divine Realm unconscious thugs to administrators who will have opinions about it."
"Agreed," Xiao Yan said.
He looked one more time at the neighboring table.
The veiled woman was looking back.
Neither of them said anything. The Codex Eye was reading something it couldn't fully translate — the intent complex enough that his current precision couldn't resolve it into clean information. Only the shape of it. Something that had been building for a long time and was currently in the waiting portion of whatever it had been building toward.
He turned and followed Jinyao toward the exit.
The cold followed him out into the street — not literally, not a technique, just the Frozen Origin Physique's lingering awareness of ice that was considerably more refined than its own, present in the room behind him like an aftertaste.
[Nine days,] Michael said.
"Nine days," he agreed.
They walked into the Canghai City evening and didn't look back.