Bai Zixian sat at the foot of a hill, staring at a landscape that looked like it had died centuries ago.
The ground beneath him was grey. Not the grey of stone or ash, but the grey of absence—as if color itself had drained from the earth, leaving behind only the memory of what had once existed. The sky above matched it, a featureless expanse that provided light without warmth, illumination without source.
Nothing grew here. Nothing moved except his team.
Twenty-nine other children were scattered across the hillside, resting in small clusters while they waited for the signal to continue. They looked exhausted—faces drawn, shoulders slumped, the particular weariness that came from days of constant vigilance in a place that wanted them dead.
Bai pressed his palm against the ground and reached for his concept.
Memory stirred within him, responding to his intent. He felt it extend outward, probing the earth beneath his fingers, searching for impressions, for traces, for the echoes of significant events that should have been pressed into every surface of a place this old.
Nothing came back.
Not nothing in the sense of emptiness—nothing in the sense of resistance. The ground refused to yield its secrets, not because it had none, but because whatever had happened here was beyond his ability to perceive. His concept touched something vast and ancient and utterly incomprehensible, and recoiled.
Way above me, he thought, withdrawing his awareness. Whatever this place was, whatever happened here—I'm not strong enough to read it.
The realization was simply information—another data point in the ongoing calculation of survival that occupied most of his waking thoughts.
He knew this place was important. Could feel it in the weight of the air, in the wrongness of the light, in the way reality itself seemed to hesitate at the edges of his perception. But knowing something was important and understanding why were very different things.
For now, understanding would have to wait.
Survival came first.
---
They had been here for twelve days.
The mission briefing had been simple: retrieve shards. They hadn't been told what the shards were, what they did, or why they mattered. Just that certain locations within this dead zone contained objects of value, and that their team was responsible for collecting as many as possible.
The briefing had also assured them the area was devoid of hostile life.
That had been a lie.
Or perhaps not a lie—perhaps simply ignorance. The creatures they'd encountered didn't match anything in the mission parameters. Twisted things, massive and wrong, their bodies composed of materials that shouldn't have been able to support movement. They emerged from the grey landscape without warning, attacked without apparent motivation, and died only after absorbing damage that would have killed a dozen normal beasts.
It took almost their entire team to bring down a single one.
They'd killed three so far. Lost no one—yet—but the fights had left everyone drained, their concepts depleted, their bodies pushed to limits they hadn't known they possessed.
Bai looked down at his own hands—unmarked, unscarred, showing no evidence of the violence he'd participated in.
I'm not weak. Not physically.
Chen Yè had said something about that, once. During one of their early training sessions, when they were still learning what evolution had done to their bodies. The orphan boy had observed their sparring with those calculating eyes and offered an analysis that Bai had filed away without fully appreciating.
"The boost from evolution is consistent. Speed, strength, endurance—everyone gets the same baseline improvement. The difference isn't in what you receive. It's in what you do with it."
He'd been right.
Bai had spent his childhood in libraries and meeting halls, learning politics and history while servants handled anything requiring physical effort. He'd expected to be useless in combat—a scholar's mind trapped in a scholar's body, dependent on others for protection.
Instead, he'd discovered that evolution didn't care about his past. It had refined him the same way it refined everyone else, granting capabilities that had nothing to do with training or experience. He wasn't skilled—his technique was clumsy, his instincts unreliable—but he was fast enough and strong enough to matter.
That was more than he'd expected.
That was enough.
---
The real problem wasn't the monsters.
It was the air.
They'd discovered it on the first day—a tightness in their chests, a growing pressure that had nothing to do with exertion. Breathing had become increasingly difficult, each inhale requiring conscious effort, each exhale leaving them more depleted than before.
By the end of the first hour, two of them had collapsed.
Bai had felt it before anyone understood what was happening. His Memory concept had brushed against one of the fallen children—not reading them, exactly, but sensing the absence that was spreading through their lungs. The air here wasn't poisonous. It simply wasn't air. Something essential had been stripped from it, leaving behind a substance that looked and moved like atmosphere but couldn't sustain life.
Higher stages might not need to breathe. Whoever briefed us probably didn't notice because it didn't affect them.
It was the kind of oversight that got people killed. The kind that revealed exactly how little the system cared about the children it sent into danger.
But dwelling on that served no purpose.
Instead, he'd turned to Vera Lin.
She stood near the center of their formation now, her sharp features tight with concentration. Her concept—Command—radiated outward from her position in an invisible sphere, affecting everything within its range.
"Breathe," she had ordered on that first day, her voice carrying the weight of conceptual authority.
And the air had obeyed.
It wasn't natural. Wasn't sustainable, probably—her concept required constant focus, constant expenditure of whatever energy powered their abilities. But within her range, the air became breathable. Their lungs filled properly. The pressure in their chests eased.
She had been maintaining it for twelve days.
The strain showed in the shadows under her eyes, in the tremor that occasionally passed through her hands, in the way she moved with the careful deliberation of someone managing their reserves down to the last drop. She couldn't extend her range beyond a small area—perhaps twenty meters in any direction. She couldn't rest properly, couldn't sleep deeply, couldn't ever fully relax her concentration.
But she kept them alive.
And Bai kept them safe.
That was the arrangement they'd developed without ever explicitly discussing it. His Memory concept couldn't affect the environment the way hers could, but it could read danger. Could sense when a space had been disturbed, when food had been contaminated, when the path ahead concealed something that would kill them if they weren't careful.
He'd spotted the death traps on day three—subtle distortions in the ground that his concept flagged as significant. He couldn't read what they were, couldn't understand the mechanism that made them lethal, but he could feel the weight of deaths that had occurred there. Something about those patches of ground carried impressions of violence so intense that even his limited abilities could perceive them.
They'd navigated around every one.
He'd tested the food they'd recovered from one of the dead creatures—the meat that their hunters had carved from monsters after the brutal fights that brought them down. His concept had touched the flesh and recoiled from something wrong lurking within it. Contamination, maybe. Poison. Something that would have killed them if they'd consumed it directly.
So they'd searched the ruins of structures they'd passed—collapsed buildings that might once have served purposes none of them could guess—and found remnants of what might have been a kitchen. Cooking methods preserved in tools and surfaces, techniques that Bai's Memory concept could partially perceive even if he couldn't fully understand them.
They'd adapted those techniques. Purified the meat through processes they didn't entirely comprehend. Made it safe enough to eat, or at least safe enough that no one had died yet.
Every step forward was a negotiation with death.
And the two of them—Bai with his warnings, Vera with her commands—were the reason any of them were still negotiating.
---
"We should move soon."
Vera's voice pulled him from his thoughts. She had approached while he was lost in contemplation, her footsteps silent on the grey earth.
"How are you holding up?" he asked.
She shrugged—a slight motion that conveyed exhaustion without admitting weakness. "I'll manage. How much further?"
Bai closed his eyes and reached for his concept again. Not trying to read the deep history of this place—that was beyond him—but seeking something simpler. The impressions of recent passage. The traces of their own journey, and the sense of what lay ahead.
"Close. The last cache should be within a few hours. If nothing goes wrong."
"Something always goes wrong."
"Then we'll handle it."
Vera studied him for a moment, her sharp eyes assessing. Whatever she saw seemed to satisfy her, because she nodded and turned back toward the group.
"Rest for another ten minutes," she called out, her voice carrying without the need for conceptual enhancement. "Then we move."
Acknowledgments rippled through the scattered children. They were too tired for enthusiasm, too worn down for anything beyond grim acceptance. But they responded. They prepared. They would follow when Vera gave the order.
Bai watched them gather their strength and felt something shift in his understanding.
We're not the weak ones. Not really.
The briefing had treated abstract concepts as an afterthought—useful, maybe, but not essential. The real fighters were supposed to be the physical concept wielders, the ones who could manifest fire and ice and force. The abstract wielders were support at best, burdens at worst.
But looking at his team now—at the children who would have suffocated on day one without Vera's Command, who would have walked into death traps without his Memory, who would have poisoned themselves with contaminated meat without both of them working together—Bai understood something the briefing had missed.
Without us, there wouldn't be a mission.
The physical fighters could kill monsters. Could defend against threats, could push through obstacles, could provide the violence that survival sometimes demanded. But they couldn't have lasted a single day in this place without the abstract wielders keeping them alive.
They made sure each team had at least two of us. At least two abstract concepts per group. They knew. They always knew.
We're not the support.
We're the foundation.
The realization settled into him like a stone dropping into still water. He didn't share it—there was no point, not now, not when survival demanded focus rather than revelation. But he filed it away, adding it to the growing collection of truths that the system preferred to keep hidden.
Vera gave the signal.
Twenty-nine children rose from their brief rest and began to move, following her deeper into the grey landscape. Bai walked near the center of the formation, his concept extended outward, scanning for dangers that might be lurking in their path.
The last cache waited ahead.
They would retrieve what they'd been sent to find.
If nothing went wrong.
If.
It was a word that carried more weight than it used to.
---
"Should we continue now?"
Vera's voice cut through the grey silence. She stood a few paces away, posture tense from twelve days of constant focus.
"We've almost got the last batch," she added.
Bai leaned back against a collapsed pillar, the featureless grey landscape stretching endlessly around them. "Let's rest a little more. Rushing won't change anything."
Vera considered him, then lowered herself carefully beside him. For a moment, neither spoke. Her concept, maintaining breathable air, continued to pulse quietly. He wondered how long she could sustain it—and whether they'd finish before he had to find out.
"What do you think those things are used for?" she asked finally.
"The shards?" Bai blinked. "Resources for higher stages, maybe. Something the elders can't produce themselves. Beyond that… I don't know."
Vera nodded. "Wake me at dawn. Let's get this done and return 'home.'"
Home. The word felt hollow. But familiarity—even in a system-controlled compound—was better than the grey nothingness outside.
⸻
In a place that had no readable name, Xīng Hé sat among the remnants of her team. Eight of them remained. Twenty-one were gone. Their lives reduced to rings in her pocket watch—small, silent reminders of all they had lost.
Four months. Four months of navigating a Core Sect district abandoned long ago, surviving against beings that had once been human but now twisted into hostile forms. The outer district had been cleared methodically, costing three lives. The middle section had yielded nothing. Now the inner areas waited.
Xīng Hé traced the district in her memory: five main buildings, barriers dividing the zones, inscriptions hinting at knowledge and power that had once thrived here. The outer district's contaminated residents had been dangerous but manageable. The Core Sect, however, was another matter entirely.
She looked at the eight survivors. They were exhausted, wary, and counting on her. Leadership had chosen her by necessity over time—no arguments, no alternatives.
⸻
End of Chapter 41