The tumult of flesh, sweat, and extortion of Qīngshí's market died the instant Zhì Yuǎn's boots crossed the narrow alley.
The squeezed limestone walls suffocated the sunlight, guiding the trio into the metropolis's chronic shadows. At the end of the stone corridor, a heavy, worm-eaten wooden door rested clean of sectarian crests or peddler shouts. The smell leaking through the cracks abandoned the cheap cinnabar and oxidized iron of the square; it was the dense odor of dormant paper, rancid sandalwood, and ink dried for millennia. The dust inside floated in a lethargic cadence, settling in the air with the weight of forgotten eras.
Zhì Yuǎn spread his calloused hand against the wood and pushed.
The interior of the Ancient Path shop swallowed the three. Shelves bowed beneath the burden of thousands of leather parchments, bamboo scrolls, and moldy bindings rose to the vaulted ceiling. In the center of the room, behind a low table of polished hardwood, the figure of an elder rested.
The shopkeeper's skin resembled corroded parchment, stretched over the fine, fragile bones of the skull. The man harbored the oppression of the Ninth Mortal Stage — Condensation of the Void — in his own veins, exhaling the static of an exhausted existence, hidden from the world. However, the small eyes sunk in dark orbits shone with excessive vivacity.
The elder's martial intuition swept the shop entrance in the same instant.
The invisible scrutiny collided first with the adolescent in the golden dress. The porcelain cup in the old man's hands trembled millimetrically, the lukewarm tea rippling at the bottom. The millions of newly breached pores on Yù Méi's back operated like a rustic vortex, passively and uninterruptedly sucking the thin, stagnant Qi of the shop, pulling the energy of the air directly into her own marrow. Astonishment boiled in the shopkeeper's irises before the awakening of that raw mythological talent inhabiting the carcass of a child in rags.
Academic greed instigated the old man's instinct to slide toward the two adults escorting her.
The elder's breath locked dry in his trachea.
The calloused intuition of decades of survival crashed against the man in pearl-gray tunic and the woman in dark veil, plunging into absolute void. The hermetic sealing of Primordial Gold locked the temperature and energy of both in an impenetrable cocoon. To the old man's scent, the navy-blue silk woman exhaled the cold of a funereal abyss, and the broad man displayed a physical inertia so anomalous and heavy that the young man's very carnal foundation sounded like a heresy against the Laws of Heaven.
The old man lowered the porcelain cup onto the table.
"The absorption pathways of this girl are a miracle wasted in the dust of the inferior world," the shopkeeper's voice rasped the air like dry leaves being crushed, loaded with genuine wonder, treating them as mere ignorant outsiders. "Her talent swallows the air. Leave her beneath this roof. My shelves will shield her from the city's scum until her foundation reaches the weight necessary to devour the firmament."
Zhì Yuǎn's leather boot crushed the stone floor.
The carpenter's massive inertia advanced one step, grinding the elder's natural oppression by the pure and absolute atmospheric pressure of that refined body. Zhì Yuǎn's large hand descended to the heavy pouch tied to his belt. Rustic fingers fished a single Medium-Grade Spirit Stone and threw it onto the hardwood.
Clack.
The crystalline thud of the mineral spread an asphyxiating fragrance of purest Qi through the hall. Zhì Yuǎn inclined his face slightly beneath the brim of the black hat. The corner of the young man's rigid lips curved in a mild smile loaded with rustic, lethargic humor.
"My sister-in-law is too shy for the vast world, elder. She prefers to live hidden beneath her elder sister's shadow," Zhì Yuǎn's voice vibrated grave, discarding the covetous offer with the weight of raw mineral. The young man pointed his chin toward the immensity of the shelves in the shadows. "But I seek the wisdom of the ages. What does a place like this have to offer to one who seeks to understand his own position in the foundation of the world?"
The old man's small eyes descended to the resplendent stone on the counter and, immediately after, rose back to the outsider. The pride of the Ninth Stage, wounded by having his mentorship rejected so casually, made the elder lean back in the straw chair.
"Did you fail to read the rotting plaque outside, young man? The Ancient Path guards priceless relics," the shopkeeper mocked, voice gaining the dry harshness of scorn. "I have dozens of parchments on how to perfectly position stones on a Weiqi board and ancient treatises on the exact time to boil the leaves of Longjing tea."
The air around the counter plummeted to sepulchral cold in the time of a single breath.
Yù Qíng obliterated the distance with a dry step. The eldest's impatience with the mortals' dawdling and theater materialized as a barrier of black ice. She turned her face to Zhì Yuǎn, abyssal irises shining dangerously over the edge of the dark veil.
"Your sense of humor is exhausting my patience, A-Yuǎn. Silence this man's breath," she hissed, velvety voice overflowing territorial disgust. Immediately after, the young woman's irises bored into the shopkeeper with such heavy murderous intent that the humidity on the ebony table crystallized into thin scales of ice. "Speak quickly, elder. What is the price for the true knowledge shelved in this hole?"
The cartilage of the shopkeeper's neck cracked in a mute choke.
The instinctive chill of predation asphyxiated the old man's bravado. Cold sweat prickled his wrinkled nape upon absorbing in his own marrow the lethal hierarchy of that band: the big man distributed dry smiles and rare mineral, but the veiled woman would freeze the jugular of anyone who made him waste time. The elder pushed the Medium-Grade Spirit Stone back across the counter with a trembling finger, hurriedly collecting his own irony.
"The knowledge on the shelves rejects your silver and the luxury of your stones, girl," the old man grumbled, tone reduced to a harsh warning, pointing his bony hand toward the stagnant depths of the corridors. "It is free. Digging the dust with your own hands is the only toll."
---
The penumbra swallowed the trio as they advanced through the corridors lined with bowed shelves. The smell of dry paper and bone dust saturated the atmosphere.
Zhì Yuǎn stopped before a rustic wooden lectern, illuminated by a solitary beam of light invading the roof tiles. He released the corroded leather clasp of the tome delivered by the old man. The thick pages of The Nine Mortal Realms cracked as they opened, exhaling the roughness of centuries of handling.
To the young man's left flank, Yù Qíng leaned her shoulder against her husband's tense bicep. The young woman's black irises slid through the archaic lines, following his reading in absolute silence. Yù Méi remained one step behind, almond eyes wide before the sea of parchments around, spine rigid beneath the place's static oppression.
Zhì Yuǎn's calloused finger descended through the faded engravings. The text dictated the orthodox foundation of the world.
The manuals described Body Refinement as a calvary of extreme lethargy. The tempering of bones and purification of internal organs demanded excruciating immersions in caustic herb baths for long, rigorous winters. Reaching Condensation of the Void — the 9th Mortal Stage, where gaseous Qi finally liquefied in the Dantian — demanded decades of uninterrupted meditation, absolute asceticism, and the complete banishment of carnal desires to prevent the vital seed from evaporating.
Zhì Yuǎn stopped his finger over the monastic restrictions. The carpenter's pulse beat calm and heavy against the lectern wood.
The young man's mind traced the lethargic parallel with his own biology. The man in pearl-gray tunic blinked slowly, tactile memory pulling the suffocating humidity of the small bamboo cabin. He and the woman beside him had pulverized those decades of physiological bottlenecks in mere months. They had breached their own channels by grinding the friction of flesh, swallowing each other's vital energy and forcing the rotation of a brutal mill of incandescent lead at the apex of lust and pain.
Their foundation displayed monstrous solidity. Before the laws printed in those millennia-old parchments, the organic existence of Zhì Yuǎn and Yù Qíng represented a cosmic heresy. A direct and unforgivable theft from the coffers of the universe.
The rustle of navy-blue silk cut Zhì Yuǎn's concentration.
Yù Qíng inclined her face forward, pale cheek brushing the collar of her husband's tunic. The wife's icy finger descended over the aged paper, resting exactly over the ancestral ideogram that demanded "abstention from carnal desires and purification of the seed" for the success of the mortal foundation.
A low, velvety laugh loaded with pure scorn vibrated in the young woman's throat. The macabre sound openly mocked eras of orthodox suffering. She rubbed her own full breasts against the man's arm, instinctive possessiveness radiating a wave of dense, profane heat that contrasted violently with the pavilion's academic frigidity.
Dozens of steps away, the old shopkeeper watched the scene submerged in the shadows of his straw chair.
The elder's opaque irises gained a sharp gleam of genuine curiosity. He had abandoned the great Sects in the past precisely because of the asphyxiating tedium of that blind orthodoxy the visitors now ridiculed. Peasants would tremble with reverence upon discovering the immensity of the mortal staircase, but those two seemed to evaluate the untouchable book as if analyzing the project of a house infested with termites.
The old man supported his bony hands on his knees, projecting his rustic torso out of the penumbra.
"The ink of these manuals tends to crush the hope of the children of the outside world," the shopkeeper's voice echoed harsh, yet loaded with sharp fascination. "The mountain of cultivation is a slaughterhouse, and the bones of those who try to climb it without the cauldrons of a Sect line the valleys. However, you laugh at the millennia-old restrictions as if they were cheap jokes. Who was the old monster that guided the expansion of your meridians outside the manuals?"
Silence reigned in the clearing of books.
Zhì Yuǎn closed the great leather tome in a single movement. The dull thud of the book colliding against the lectern asphyxiated the echo of the old man's voice. The inertia of the immense silhouette turned slowly, face sunk in the darkness of the black hat brim.
"No patriarch wasted breath on us, elder," Zhì Yuǎn's reply sank into the shop with the weight of an anvil plummeting in the dust. The rustic, lethargic voice exhaled unshakeable coldness. "We ourselves crushed the bottlenecks and forged our bones in the dark."
The old man blinked, breath locking for a millisecond in the desiccated trachea.
The revelation inflamed a spark of pure, bitter admiration in the elder. Creating one's own path without the support of ancestral clan matrices meant defying organic death every day. Those two had turned their backs on the hypocrisy of the sects and ground mortality with their own hands. The shopkeeper opened a wrinkled smile, revealing faded gums, reverence for the heresy shining on his face.
"A splendid atrocity against the heavens…" the old man whispered, curiosity igniting the static of his Ninth Mortal Stage. He rose, dragging felt boots closer to the lectern. "Ignorance is a forge that tends to incinerate those who try to mold their own flesh. How did you circumvent the Qi reflux without the dynasties' unguents? What is the hidden method of your foundation?"
Zhì Yuǎn's boot crushed the floor planks. The atmosphere around the carpenter plummeted to a lethargic, asphyxiating weight, the young man's posture raising an insurmountable wall between their knowledge and the world.
"Our forge belongs strictly to the sheets of our bed, shopkeeper," Zhì Yuǎn's refusal tore the air, dry, absolute, and loaded with lethal possessiveness. "The method that sculpted our flesh breathes and dies beneath our roof. The knowledge ends here."
The old man halted his steps. The freezing hostility emanating from the veiled woman beside the man confirmed the verdict. The elder blinked, academic enthusiasm retreating before the lead barrier, and let out a hoarse laugh that sounded like crumpled paper. The audacity of those two in refusing to share the heresy only fueled his disgust for orthodoxy even more.
"So be it. The purest secrets are born and rot in isolated tombs," the old man attested, dragging his boots back to the untouched depths of the shop. The creak of a lead vault hidden beneath the shelves echoed in the penumbra.
When the old man returned to the weak light, bony hands rested a single thick parchment bound in black leather on the lectern. The object did not emit the dry sound of paper; the impact sounded dense, as if the leather housed an iron plate.
"Spitting on the rules of the mortal manual is not arrogance, it is the consequence of the evolution of one who has already ground his own flesh," the elder's voice vibrated hoarse, whispering with dark reverence to the past. "The foundation of that rustic book does not serve you. The roof you seek for the dimension of your power does not inhabit the mud of the present. It resides in the eras that died."
Zhì Yuǎn kept his jaw locked. The young man's predatory lethargy assumed command.
The carpenter's large, calloused hand advanced and spread directly over the black leather cover.
In the exact instant Zhì Yuǎn's rustic skin touched the relic, the invisible forge beneath his sternum reacted. The innate Wisdom and Primordial Gold boiling in his veins did not read a simple book. The young man's perception detected a colossal, fossilized, dormant Spiritual Intent (Yi) in the ink strokes for eons. The vacuum contained in the outsider's chest swallowed that intent.
The shock disintegrated reality around.
The wooden table, the smell of dust, and the Qīngshí shop vanished from Zhì Yuǎn's vision, swallowed by a static vortex. The man's consciousness was summarily hurled against the oppressive flow of time, plunging into the dense echo of a Transcendent Era.
---
Zhì Yuǎn's eyes opened in an unintelligible landscape.
The air of the ancient world invading the young man's lungs displayed the density, weight, and texture of pure liquid amber. Breathing did not demand survival effort; breathing was swallowing raw cosmic power. The Qi of that ancestral past flooded the valleys with a thick, silvery mist. Mortal fragility was a biological flaw swept from the ecosystem.
The memory engraved in the ink dragged Zhì Yuǎn's vision upward. The eye of his Wisdom dissected the collapse and ascent of true anatomy through eras compressed into a single visual flash.
The human Dantian shattered its own margins to dominate inner space. The birth of the Sea of Qi.
Zhì Yuǎn witnessed the non-negotiable toll of the first stage beyond mortality. He glimpsed thin foundations raising Fragmented Seas, limited and flawed, whose owners collapsed pathetically when attempting Weaving of the Tides. He saw Stable foundations, sustaining the median elite; and prodigies of Perfected base, who compressed fluid Qi into asphyxiating loops until spiritual gravity collapsed the energy into the third transcendent stage of Solidification of the World — the dense and implacable Inner Star.
But the black parchment silenced the mediocre. The vortex stopped. The ancestral landscape focused on a single solitary figure, seated on the summit of a mountain range that pierced the silvery clouds.
Zhì Yuǎn's Wisdom excavated the name engraved in the gears of time: Tian Long. One of the few myths to reach the unattainable Perfect Sea.
Through the fossilized vision, Zhì Yuǎn observed what the legend beheld in the fourth stage: Resonance of the Laws. The river below lost its liquid state, the wind lost its gaseous property. The entire world stripped bare into an infinite mesh of cords, concepts, and primordial power matrices. The universal Laws that sewed the earth vibrated in pure, crystalline resonance.
However, colossal desolation struck the carpenter's mind.
Tian Long saw every thread. He saw the tapestry of the entire universe flowing in the palm of his hand, but his mind stumbled against carnal ignorance, irrevocably forbidden from deciphering or altering them. The Sea of Qi and the Inner Star were purely hyper-dense batteries of raw force; the rudimentary architecture of both rejected the shelter or comprehension of those Laws. Transcendence was merely the visual constatation of an unbreakable glass cage. The path of the flesh had dried.
But Tian Long's irises blinked.
The lethargic resignation of the ancestral legend vanished. A predatory hunger made Zhì Yuǎn's bones vibrate. The white-haired man raised his face and ignored the colored Laws. He bored his vision into the black, hollow, static space existing between the threads. Into the underestimated void of reality itself. The Fabric of Space.
Zhì Yuǎn's Wisdom dissected the millisecond. Empty space returned the gaze to Tian Long. Through the fissure of that stagnant reality, a deafening echo resounded.
The Call.
The wave stripped of sound or mass swept Zhì Yuǎn's mind with the force of a cataclysm. Every entity trapped in the fourth transcendent stage suffered the same gravitational jolt. The abyss whispered the non-negotiable promise: the glass cage possessed a lock.
Ambition replaced the lethargy of an era.
To open the fissure and answer the Call, the mathematics of the crossing demanded an absurd thermodynamic toll. The mere vision of space was useless without gravitational weight to breach it. The old transcendents needed infinite fuel.
They built the Bridges.
Colossal spatial matrices rose over the continents, forged in black metal and dark green jade. At the core of the world's greatest mountain range, the Great Furnace was ignited. The greed of those legends demanded the vital force of the planet itself as sacrificial firewood.
Zhì Yuǎn witnessed the murder of the world. The Furnace pulled the breath. The plains covered by silvery mist evaporated in furious currents toward the sky. The rivers of crystalline energy dried until the mud cracked into deep scars. The ancestral forests petrified. The ancient transcendents drained the marrow of the ecosystem to feed the gears of their own Bridges.
The firmament yielded.
The sky over the Great Furnace opened in an incandescent wound. The light leaking from the fissure carried an asphyxiating dimensional oppression. The ancient legends abandoned the dying earth, marching in procession into the luminous abyss, guided by the Call, and crossed the cosmic horizon.
Behind them, the scar in the sky closed with the roughness of iron marking cattle.
What remained in Zhì Yuǎn's vision was the hollow shell. The exhausted world. Atmospheric Qi, once dense like liquid amber, reduced to a thin, pathetic thread. Mortal scum inherited a spiritual desert where the Refined Body, which once was the natural awakening of youth, transformed into an unattainable myth, demanding decades of blood baths and carnal torture merely to absorb crumbs before old age rotted the bones.
The shock of the inheritance carbonized the carpenter's consciousness, and the abyss of time shattered all at once.
---
Crack.
The texture of the worm-eaten leather of the book struck violently against Zhì Yuǎn's calloused palm. The smell of rancid sandalwood and dust replaced the asphyxiating weight of the vision. The thin, impoverished air of the Ancient Path shop flooded the man's lungs.
He blinked, breath exiting heavy and hoarse through his throat. Cold sweat pasted the linen on his back.
The young man's left hand throbbed. Yù Qíng's pale fingers crushed the knuckles of his hand with brutal, trembling force, the wife's short nails dug into his thick skin like steel claws. The navy-blue silk woman kept her own shoulder rigidly pressed against her husband's bicep. Wisdom escaped the girl's foundation; the wife's black irises remained blind to the ascension of the transcendents and the murder of the world. But the wife's territorial instinct had felt the void swallow Zhì Yuǎn's soul away from the room, and her hostility demanded anchoring him physically back to the city's filth.
Zhì Yuǎn turned his hand and squeezed his wife's icy fingers, cementing the return.
Dozens of steps away, the old shopkeeper supported both hands on the mahogany counter. Gray tone marked the elder's parchment skin. The living irises of the Ninth Stage monster bored into the figure of the broad man, overflowing the bitter astonishment of one who perfectly comprehended the trauma inflicted by the tome.
"The dead ink swallows alive the unwary who try to read the deep intent of the Ancients," the elder's hoarse voice rasped the funereal silence of the hall, evaluating the sweat on the carpenter's temple. "The lethargy on your face attests to the weight of the fall. You beheld the void they left us."
Zhì Yuǎn released the black cover. The heavy inertia of that body forged in blood and gold returned to his shoulders, the man's mind aligning the mechanics of the outside world to his own heretical foundation. The useless dust he breathed every day now displayed a historical and lethal justification.
"They dried the river and left the thin mud for those who stayed behind," the young man sentenced, voice recovering the lethargic, rustic cadence. Zhì Yuǎn's calloused hand rested over the silver slivers the old man had still not collected. "The scarce water of this city fails to supply the mills of my foundation, shopkeeper. The trash that the auctions of this place sell as miracle was forged in the dust. I need the dense residues. The calcined inheritance of the Furnace."
The old man supported his weight on his own back, leaning back in the straw chair. The toothless smile of the elder carried the sharp cynicism of decades of exile.
"The comprehension of the abyss turns modern treasures into a vulgar joke," the shopkeeper murmured, bony phalanges caressing the counter edge. "The merchants of Qīngshí adorn the trash and demand mountains of gold for it. The herbs and relics that retain the trace of the thickness of the ancient world avoid open tents under the sun. And your spirit stones, however pure they may be, rot uselessly before those who guard these remnants."
Zhì Yuǎn's silence acted as the pure, mute demand for the address.
The old man stretched his bony arm, crooked finger pointing slowly toward the limestone walls of the extreme south.
"The ruins of the Great Furnace reject the shelves of merchants or alleys of this metropolis," the sage revealed, voice plummeting to a harsh, funereal warning. "What remains of the Transcendents' engineering rests buried in the South. The sects that govern the volcanic peaks and sulfur valleys erected their own jade altars directly over the geological skeletons of the ancient Bridges that fell. Their soil bleeds the weight of that dead era. But marching there without the power to crack the sky guarantees a voluntary vacancy inside the incinerator."
Yù Qíng's hand descended slowly along her husband's back, the wife's cold touch tracing his dense vertebrae.
"The South will burn as our hunting slaughterhouse, elder," the young woman hissed, irises overflowing refined disgust for the cowardice of the mortal world. "We will breach whatever dust is necessary."
Zhì Yuǎn gave a dry nod with his chin. The weight of the ancestral revelation fit millimetrically into the thermodynamic hunger roaring in his chest. The compass pointed to the cosmic skeletons, but the man's inertia blocked fanatical precipitations.
The young man's calloused hand collected the untouched silver slivers from the ebony table.
"The South seals our destiny," his grave, unshakeable voice finalized the conversation, broad back already turning from the smell of moldy paper. "But the journey demands heavy supplies forged above the mud. The coffers of Qīngshí will bleed for us first, shopkeeper. The city's grand auction bursts in two days, and our gold has already bought the front-row seats."
The heavy door of the Ancient Path bookstore creaked beneath the carpenter's hand, and the trio plunged back into the stagnant haze of the metropolis, leaving the old monster enveloped in absorbed silence and the ashes of the eras that died.