Part Two
The formation descended without visible force.
Pressure did not slam downward.
It erased.
Sound dulled.
Wind ceased.
Lantern flames froze mid-flicker.
Even breath felt distant.
Stillness.
True stillness.
The formation sought fluctuation.
Any deviation in rhythm.
Any surge of emotion.
Any fragment of resistance.
Disciples leaned forward unconsciously.
This was no ordinary diagnostic array.
This was suppression architecture.
Zheng Wen Te closed his eyes.
The plaza vanished.
He stood alone in silence.
Memories surfaced immediately — not summoned, but triggered.
His children's laughter.
The emptiness of his house.
The humiliation under the giants' gaze.
Lian turning away once, long ago.
Pain pressed inward.
The formation tightened.
It expected fracture.
Expected collapse.
Expected him to suppress.
Instead—
He breathed.
Not to control.
To acknowledge.
"I am not separate from what I have endured," he whispered.
The formation pulsed violently.
Runes flickered.
Cracks appeared in the outermost ring.
On the platform, two elders stiffened.
"That is not suppression," one murmured.
"No," the central elder replied quietly.
"It is absorption."
Within the stillness, Zheng Wen Te did not fight the pressure.
He allowed it to pass through him.
Pain became weight.
Weight became grounding.
Grounding became stability.
The formation, designed to eliminate instability through compression—
Found nothing to compress.
Fluctuation decreased.
Not because emotion vanished.
But because it harmonized.
The second ring cracked.
Gasps spread across the plaza.
Lian's hands trembled at her sides.
Not in fear.
In recognition.
He was not surviving the trial.
He was redefining it.