He stopped counting at forty-seven.
Not because he wanted to. Because something hit him. A ledge, a formation pillar, something hard and angular that caught his hip and spun him sideways. The white robe tore. Pain flared bright and useful. He grabbed at the pillar with both hands and missed, but the impact slowed his fall enough that when he hit the next surface, it broke bones instead of breaking him.
Three ribs on his left. He knew the feeling from a sparring accident two years ago, back when he still thought sparring would matter. Same sharp wrongness when he breathed. Same grinding shift when he moved.
He lay on his back on a stone shelf, staring up at the darkness he'd fallen through. The rim of the disposal ground was somewhere above. How far, he couldn't tell. The darkness didn't offer references.
The jade pendant was warm against his collarbone. Still there. He checked it the way a man checks his pulse. Good. Okay. Still here.
---
The disposal ground wasn't empty. That was the first surprise.
Tian Jue had expected nothing. A pit. A void. Instead, the shelf he'd landed on was part of a structure. Carved walls stretched in both directions, covered in formation script that flickered with residual power. Old formations, half-activated, running on whatever qi had soaked into the stone over the centuries.
He tried to stand. Tian Jue's ribs screamed in protest.
The formations responded to his movement. A healing array in the left wall pulsed green, reached for him, and found nothing to heal. No meridians to mend. No dantian to stabilize. The green light circled him twice, confused, and faded. A teleportation circle on the floor activated beneath his feet. It hummed, tried to lock onto his qi signature, failed, and went dark.
Tian Jue watched the circle die with clinical interest. Formations needed a target. He didn't register as one.
He moved deeper. The carved walls gave way to rougher stone, and the formations grew older. Stranger. A purification array tried to cleanse his blood of corruption. His blood wasn't corrupted. It just didn't have qi in it. The array ran for six seconds, accomplished nothing, and burned out its last reserves.
Everything down here was designed for cultivators. For failed cultivators, broken cultivators, dangerous cultivators. The disposal ground was built to neutralize threats.
He wasn't a threat. He was nothing. And Tian Jue walked through their defenses like they weren't there.
The second layer was worse. Not formations but bodies. Spirit beasts that hadn't survived whatever process brought them here. Preserved by ambient qi, they lined the walls in rows. Some were massive, larger than carts. Others were small enough to hold in one hand. All of them dead. All of them saturated with corrupted qi that would poison any cultivator who touched them.
Tian Jue touched one. A fox-like creature with three tails and milky eyes. The fur was cold but soft.
No reaction from his body. No poisoning. No corruption.
He wasn't a cultivator. The rules didn't apply.
The third layer had no floor. Or rather, the floor was made of broken things. Shattered weapons leaking trace qi. Technique scrolls that radiated pressure. Jade slips containing cultivation methods so flawed or dangerous they'd been condemned. Tian Jue felt nothing from any of it. He walked across a carpet of forbidden knowledge and his Stillborn Core didn't so much as twitch.
Prison and protection. Both at once.
---
Tian Jue established his inventory on what he thought was the first day in the Divine Disposal Ground because panic was useless and lists were not.
Three cracked ribs, left side. Torn white robe. One jade pendant, warm, but otherwise nonfunctional. No food. No water. No visible way up. The walls were smooth stone above the first shelf, and the darkness went up further than he could see.
Water came first. He found it on day two. A spring leaking through a cracked formation stone, filtered by whatever purification array had once been embedded in the rock. The water tasted like iron and something he couldn't name. Flat, dead, like water that had given up on being fresh. He drank it anyway.
Food was harder.
The spirit beast corpses in the second layer were preserved. Edible, technically, if you could handle the corrupted qi saturating every cell. Cultivators couldn't. Their meridians would absorb the corruption involuntarily and it would shred them from the inside.
Tian Jue didn't have meridians.
He cut a strip of meat from the fox creature with a broken blade he'd found in the third layer and ate it cold. The texture was dense, almost chalky from preservation. The taste was somewhere between raw pork and metal filings.
His body processed it without complaint. No corruption. No poisoning. Just protein and calories and the grim satisfaction of not being dead.
By day three, he'd established a routine. Water from the spring at dawn, or what he guessed was dawn. Meat from the second layer, rationed. Exploration of the third layer's debris for anything useful. When he was exhausted or couldn't continue any further, he'd sleep on the stone shelf where he'd landed, using the torn white robe as a pillow.
He stopped counting days after three. The counting felt different down here. Up above, each mark on the wall had been a step toward the ceremony. Down here, there was nothing to count toward.
---
Something had moved when Tian Jue opened his eyes.
Not the formations. Not the preserved beasts. Something else. A broken sword on the third layer floor had shifted two inches to the left while he slept. He was sure of this because he'd arranged the debris around his sleeping area in a specific pattern. Paranoia or precaution. Down here, the distinction didn't matter.
Then, he saw a jade slip he'd set aside was facing the wrong direction. A technique scroll had unrolled halfway. And the air felt different. Thicker. Like something was breathing in the same space he was, displaced and invisible.
He was being studied. He was certain of it. Whatever lived down here had noticed him the way he'd noticed the formations. With curiosity. With assessment.
When he woke up the next day, it, was finally in front of him.
Hovering three feet above him. Not floating. Existing at a height, the way a point exists on a line. It wasn't shaped like anything. Or it was shaped like too many things at once. Angles that didn't connect. Surfaces that curved in directions the eye refused to follow. It hurt to look at. Not pain in his eyes but pain in his understanding, like his brain was trying to parse a language it didn't have words for.
It was the size of a cat, then a cart, then a cat again. Not changing. Just refusing to commit to a scale.
Tian Jue didn't move. He watched it the way he'd watched the crowd at the ceremony. Observing.
Cataloging. What he couldn't understand, he could at least describe.
It noticed him noticing.
The thing pulsed with lights like Tian Jue was suppose to know what it meant. Direct comprehension pushed into his skull like a nail.
ANOMALY DETECTED.
He flinched. They were understanding forced through a channel not built for it.
NO DIVINE ROOT. NO CULTIVATION FOUNDATION. NO QI PATHWAYS.
It circled him. Slow. Measuring. The air bent where it passed, not warping but thinning, as if reality needed a moment to recover from its proximity.
ASSESSMENT: DISPOSAL WASTE.
The thing began to glow. White at first, then something past white, a color without a name that made his teeth ache.
FUNCTION: ELIMINATION.
Tian Jue's remaining good ribs ground together as he scrambled backward. The glow intensified. Heat that wasn't heat, pressure that wasn't pressure. The thing was categorizing him. Garbage in, garbage out. The disposal ground's final function.
He hit the wall, finding no where left to go.
The glow reached its peak. Tian Jue closed his eyes and thought about the jade pendant, about warmth, about Yue Lian in a doorway saying I'm sorry like it meant something.
Then the glow stopped.
He opened his eyes hesitantly.
The thing had changed. Smaller now, or denser, pulled inward like a fist closing around a thought. Its angles had softened into something almost recognizable. Almost purposeful.
SECONDARY ASSESSMENT.
A pause. Long enough for Tian Jue to hear his own heartbeat.
STILLBORN CORE DETECTED. CONFIGURATION: VOID STRUCTURE. NO DIVINE COMPATIBILITY CONFLICTS.
Even a waste disposal unit knows what I am Tian Jue thought.
VIABLE HOST IDENTIFIED.
The thing contracted to the size of a fist. Then a marble. Then a point, bright and absolute, hanging in the air between them.
INITIATING INTEGRATION.
"Wait," Tian Jue said.
Without another warning, it dove into his chest. It didn't care about his objections.
Where the void was. Where the Stillborn Core sat empty and useless and waiting.
Something that was not pain and not pleasure and not anything he had a name for tore through him from sternum to spine. The void in his chest, the nothing that had defined him for eighteen years, was no longer empty.
Something was moving in.