Volume II Chapter 3
Lin Feng woke to qi in the air.
Not much. But it was there, and he was awake before deciding to be, his body recognizing the familiar texture before his mind arrived.
Lira was sitting on the edge of the bed with her eyes closed.
Cultivating. Consciously this time, not the sleepwalking process of the night before but something deliberate, her posture slightly different, her breathing more controlled. She had woken up and simply begun without waiting for him to notice or approve.
Of course she had.
Lin Feng stayed quiet for a moment. He felt the familiar echo through the Abyss's channel, her core pulsing with the regularity of something still learning its own rhythm. Then he looked away, because watching her without warning seemed like the kind of thing she wouldn't appreciate if she found out.
Through the window, Birnal was already awake. The port had been making noise since early morning.
When Lira opened her eyes he was looking at the ceiling.
"How long have you been awake?" she said.
"Not long."
She looked at him with the expression of someone deciding whether to believe that or not. She stood, rolled her shoulders.
"The coins won't last," she said.
"No."
Lin Feng closed his eyes and reached for the thread of the servant's connection. The quiet presence of something waiting, all its knowledge of Birnal available like a map. He searched for targets, the kind with money and enough history that losing sleep over them wouldn't be necessary.
What came back was the impression of a place. Warehouses in the south port, poorly lit alleys, transactions that didn't appear in any official record.
"We wait until dark," he said. "Then we handle it."
Lira nodded. "What do we do until then?"
"Learn the city."
* * *
They spent the day walking.
It was the most practical thing they could do. Lin Feng used the servant's map as a base and what he saw as correction, learning the difference between the Birnal he remembered and the Birnal that existed now. Some things matched. Others had changed.
Lira walked beside him in silence.
At one corner a vendor addressed her directly, holding some kind of dried fruit and speaking with the enthusiasm of someone trained to seem friendly. She looked at him. Looked at the fruit. Looked at Lin Feng.
"He's selling something," Lin Feng said.
"I gathered." A pause. "What's he actually saying?"
"That it's the best fruit in the south port and that for a beautiful woman he'll make a special price."
Lira looked back at the vendor with an expression that made him take half a step back without understanding why. She kept walking.
"You didn't need to translate the beautiful woman part," she said.
"You asked what he was actually saying."
She didn't respond, but there was something in the silence that was different from irritation. Lin Feng decided not to investigate.
By late afternoon they stopped at a place selling something hot in clay bowls. Lin Feng ordered two, using the servant's Ulatian with the strange fluency of someone who knows the words but hasn't yet found the right accent. The woman behind the counter looked at him slightly sideways but served without commenting.
Lira smelled the bowl before tasting it.
"What is this?"
"No idea what it's called. The servant used to eat here."
She tried it. "It works."
They ate outside on a rough wooden bench, watching Birnal pass. Lin Feng wasn't exactly hungry, he had learned that the Abyss's hunger was different from ordinary hunger, but there was something useful about having something to do with his hands while waiting for dark.
Blink appeared and sat between them without ceremony.
Lira looked at the port. "Where do the ships come from?"
"Everywhere. Ulatio is a large continent. Birnal isn't the biggest port or the smallest."
"And cultivators. Are they common here?"
"Less than in my continent." Lin Feng watched the people passing. "Money here comes from trade. Cultivators exist but they're not the center of anything."
She stayed quiet with that.
When it got dark they went.
* * *
The south port warehouses were older than the rest of the city, dark stone walls with the permanent dampness of decades near water. The alleys between them were deep and poorly lit, the torches sparse enough that the shadows between them were real and thick.
The servant guided them.
There were four men in the wider alley. Three sitting on crates with the relaxed posture of people who know the place they're in well. The fourth leaning against the far wall, apparently asleep.
Lin Feng felt it before he saw it.
Qi. Weak, irregular. Not much. Enough that the difference was visible to someone who knew what to look for.
There's a cultivator.
Lira had stopped beside him. She looked at the group for a moment with her head slightly tilted.
"The one against the wall," she said quietly. "Leave him for last."
"Why?"
"He's killed a lot of people." She didn't elaborate. "He'll react differently when things start going wrong."
Lin Feng looked at the cultivator leaning against the wall. "He has qi."
"How much?"
"Not much. First realm, barely there."
"Even cultivators get pulled in by easy money," she said, dry.
He almost agreed out loud but stayed quiet. He focused on his own shadow.
The problem with the channel in its current state was that the shadow had the quality of something alive that hadn't fully decided how much it obeyed. He formed the instruction carefully, directing it toward the first of the three men on the crates.
The shadow moved.
In the wrong direction.
It crossed the alley diagonally and climbed the side wall at an angle that made no sense with any instruction he had given, making one of the men jump to his feet with a knife in his hand shouting something in Ulatian. The cultivator against the wall opened his eyes.
Damn.
Lin Feng went forward.
The man with the knife was fast but not technical. Lin Feng read the shoulder before the arm, used the second movement as leverage, and put the man on the ground without much effort.
The second was larger and more careful.
The shadow came back and hit him sideways with enough force to put him into the wall and keep him there. Lin Feng looked at it for a second.
So you act when you want.
The shadow on the ground as if it had never done anything.
The third had backed toward the alley entrance, the survival calculations visible on his face. He turned and ran. Lin Feng let him go.
The cultivator was standing.
Smaller than he had seemed sitting down, with the posture of someone who had learned to fight but hadn't learned well enough. He was looking at Lin Feng with the discomfort of someone sensing something was wrong and not being able to name it.
"You don't have qi," he said in Ulatian, genuinely confused. "But you have something."
"I do," Lin Feng agreed.
The cultivator opened his hand and weak qi condensed in his palm. He was about to release it.
Lira moved before he finished forming it.
Lin Feng had watched her evaluate targets before. He had never watched her absorb. It was different from what he had expected. No dramatic movement, no visible shadow. She was simply close to the cultivator suddenly, one hand slightly extended, and there was a moment of resistance in the air, something pushing back, and then there wasn't.
The cultivator made no sound.
The qi in his palm dissipated.
And the Abyss opened in a way that was different from anything Lin Feng had felt before.
Not the opening he knew, the channel receiving something from outside. It was the channel expanding from within, the Abyss going deeper on both sides at once, and what arrived was denser than any ordinary soul. Years of cultivation compressed, the texture of a functioning core, of qi circulating with intention, of a path walked even if badly walked.
The channel expanded once more.
And held.
Lin Feng stood still feeling the new size of what he carried. It wasn't dramatic. It was more like the difference between a room and the same room with a higher ceiling, the same structure but more space to exist inside it. The Abyss hadn't grown noisily. It had simply gone deeper.
The shadow was different.
Not visibly. Still shadow, still existing on the ground as it always had. But there was something in its presence now, more defined, as if before it had been a reflection and now it was something that chose where to fall. Lin Feng reached for the connection and felt the difference, the thread between them responding before he even finished forming the intention.
Lira was standing where the cultivator had been, her attention completely turned inward. Lin Feng waited. He knew that state now, the period right after an absorption when everything arrived at once.
After a moment she let out a slow breath.
"Denser than I expected," she said.
"He had cultivation."
"I felt it." A pause. "It's different from an ordinary soul. More structured." She looked at her hands. "I'll need time to sort out what's useful."
"How much time?"
"I don't know yet." She looked at the alley, at the place where the two men were still on the ground. "We need to go."
They left through the warehouses. Near the exit there were coins on the ground beside one of the crates, gold on the outside with the weight of copper underneath. Lin Feng picked them up without stopping.
They walked back toward the more lit streets in silence. Birnal continued around them as always, indifferent.
At a crossing a man shoved a heavy cart and released a sequence of Ulatian words that were clearly not kind.
Lira turned her head toward him.
Then turned to Lin Feng.
"I understood that," she said.
He waited.
"All of it," she added.
Lin Feng looked at her for a second. Then looked at where the man had already turned the corner. "The bit about the rotten fish was unnecessary."
"Agreed."
She almost smiled. They kept walking, and the night was deep and salt-heavy, and Lin Feng's shadow on the ground moved with a deliberateness slightly different from before, like something that had found the right size for itself.