Shen Wei had never run this fast in his life, and it still wasn't fast enough.
His body was baseline human. No qi-reinforced legs. No spiritual enhancement to his lungs or heart. Just meat and bone doing what meat and bone could do, which wasn't much when you were crossing a shattered wasteland at full sprint with a bad ankle and two hands that felt like they'd been put through a grinder.
The energy inside him wanted to help. He could feel it pressing against the inside of his skin, looking for an outlet, trying to do something. But he didn't know how to let it. It was like sitting in front of a machine with a thousand buttons and no labels. Push the wrong one and maybe his legs would move faster. Or maybe his kneecaps would blow out. The system's own words kept echoing: output may vary.
He ran the old-fashioned way. One foot after the other. Breathing through his nose because his throat was already raw from the dust.
The Central Rift Zone came into view three minutes later.
He stopped.
Not by choice. His body just refused to go closer. Some part of his brain, the old part, the part that kept ancestors alive long before cultivation existed, looked at what was ahead and pulled the emergency brake.
The Rift Zone was a wound in the world.
There was no better way to describe it. A circle, maybe two hundred meters across, where the ground had simply stopped being ground. The stone, the dirt, the rock, all of it had been peeled back like skin from a fruit, revealing something underneath that wasn't earth. It was dark, but not the darkness of night. It was the darkness of nothing. Empty space where matter used to be, still holding the shape of the terrain like a mold after the casting is removed.
Above it, the sky had cracked. Not metaphorically. Actual lines ran through the air, glowing faint purple, branching outward like veins. Through the cracks, Shen Wei could see something that made no sense. Another sky. Different stars. A sky that didn't belong to this world, bleeding through into this one like ink through wet paper.
The air between the two skies shimmered. Objects floated in it. Rocks. Broken weapons. Bodies.
Some of the bodies were moving.
Shen Wei counted. His system counted faster.
[Life signatures in fracture zone: 19.]
[Decline rate: 1 per 3.2 minutes.]
[Cause: Spatial compression. Subjects are being crushed by overlapping dimensional pressure.]
Three gone since the last reading. Nineteen left. And they were being killed not by beasts, but by the fracture itself. The overlapping dimensions were pressing together like two hands squeezing a handful of sand. Everything caught between them was being slowly ground down.
He could see them now. Cultivators suspended in the shimmering air, some conscious, some not. Their qi barriers flickered around them like soap bubbles, holding back the pressure but shrinking. Slowly, visibly shrinking. When the barriers collapsed, the cultivator inside would be compressed. Shen Wei didn't want to think about what that looked like.
He scanned for Kang and found him near the center. His half-brother hung in the air with his sword drawn, maintaining a barrier that covered not just himself but two others. Grade Seven output, spread across three people. His face was calm but his arms were shaking. The barrier had maybe minutes left.
Elder Shen Tao was further out, closer to the edge. His spirit crane was gone. His robes were torn. He was alone in his barrier, and it was larger and more stable than anyone else's, because Elder Tao was looking after exactly one person: himself.
Shen Wei filed that away for later. If there was a later.
[Warden countdown: 00:09:41.]
Nine minutes. He was burning time just standing here.
The problem was obvious. He couldn't fly. He couldn't project a barrier. He had raw, unfiltered spiritual energy and no idea how to shape it into anything useful. Walking into the fracture zone would mean walking into dimensional compression that was killing Grade Five cultivators. His body, baseline as it was, would last seconds.
Unless.
He looked at his hands. The energy inside him had been recovering during the sprint. Not much. The system put him at 12%, up from 7%. His body was pulling spiritual energy from the environment as he moved, the same unfiltered absorption from before. Slow, but constant.
The fracture zone was saturated with spiritual energy. The cracks in reality were leaking it like a broken pipe leaks water. If he walked in there, his absorption rate would spike.
It might also kill him. Unfiltered absorption at that density could tear his cells apart. The system had already warned him about cellular damage at 340% above baseline. Inside the fracture zone, it might be ten times that.
He thought about Kang. Kang's arms shaking. Kang's barrier shrinking. Kang, who had never lied to him but also never saved him. Who had told him to run toward the cliffs and then stayed with the main force, because that was what Grade Sevens did.
Kang, who was going to die in about four minutes if nobody did anything.
"System," Shen Wei said out loud. Felt stupid doing it, but the blurry line between thought and speech was still blurry, so he figured he might as well commit. "If I enter the fracture zone, what happens?"
The response came not in words but in data, a block of text that appeared in his vision like a medical chart for a patient who was already on the table.
[Scenario projection: Host enters Class 4 Reality Fracture.]
[Ambient spiritual energy density: ~4,700% above standard baseline.]
[Projected absorption rate: Uncontrolled. Meridian-free absorption has no upper limit.]
[Projected cellular damage: Severe to catastrophic.]
[Projected energy capacity: Temporarily exceeds measurable parameters.]
[Survival probability: 11%.]
[Note: Probability assumes Host does nothing with absorbed energy. Active expenditure may reduce cellular overload but introduces additional variables the system cannot model.]
Eleven percent. And that was the optimistic version, the one where he just stood there and let the energy cook him from the inside. If he actually tried to do something with it, the system couldn't even calculate the odds.
He stared at the fracture zone. At the floating bodies. At Kang's shrinking barrier.
Eleven percent was more than zero. And zero was what he'd had his entire life.
He stepped forward.
The pressure hit him immediately. Not pain, not at first. More like the world had gotten heavier. Gravity pulling harder on every part of him at once. His wounded ankle buckled and he caught himself on one knee, grinding his teeth against the weight.
Then the energy came.
If the absorption outside had been drinking from a stream, this was standing under a waterfall. Spiritual energy flooded into him from every direction, pouring through his skin, his eyes, his open mouth when he gasped. It filled him so fast his body couldn't process it. His hands started glowing. Then his arms. Then his chest, visible through his torn shirt, light bleeding out of him like he was a lantern with too much flame.
[Energy reserves: 34%]
[Energy reserves: 51%]
[Energy reserves: 79%]
[Warning: Cellular integrity declining.]
[Warning: Host body temperature rising. Current: 39.4C.]
[Energy reserves: 93%]
His blood felt like it was boiling. Not literally. But close. Every nerve ending fired at once, a sensation so overwhelming that his brain couldn't categorize it as pain or pleasure. It was just too much. Too much input. Too much energy. Too much everything in a body built for nothing.
[Energy reserves: 100%]
[Energy reserves: 114%]
[OVERFLOW DETECTED.]
[Host body cannot contain current energy volume.]
[Automatic redistribution: FAILED. No meridians to redirect flow.]
[Emergency protocol: Vent or die.]
Vent or die. Two words. Very clear.
Shen Wei opened his eyes. He hadn't realized he'd closed them. The fracture zone spread out around him in all directions. He was inside it now, standing on nothing, the void beneath his feet, the cracked sky above. The floating cultivators were scattered around him like insects trapped in amber.
Kang was thirty meters away. His barrier had shrunk to the size of a small room. The two cultivators behind him were unconscious. Kang's eyes were open, locked on Shen Wei, and the expression on his face was something Shen Wei had never seen from his brother before.
Fear. Not of the fracture. Of him.
Shen Wei was glowing like a small sun. Light poured from his skin. The air around him warped and bent. He could feel the dimensional pressure that was crushing everyone else, but it slid off him. Not because he was resisting it. Because the energy inside him was pushing back, raw and uncontrolled, creating a bubble of force around his body that the fracture couldn't penetrate.
He was too full. Overflowing. And if he didn't do something with it in the next few seconds, the overflow would burn him alive from the inside.
Vent or die.
He had to spend it. All of it. Right now.
Shen Wei looked up at the cracked sky. At the seam where this world's reality met the intruding one. At the wound that was killing everyone in this zone.
A thought formed. Simple. Stupid. Probably suicidal.
What if I push it closed?
He'd broken a law. The Law of Weakness. He'd shattered a rule that governed who could and couldn't cultivate. The system had called itself the error the Heavenly Dao couldn't delete. A thing that broke what was never meant to be broken.
If he could break a law, could he break a fracture?
Not with technique. Not with skill. Just with force. Dump everything he had into the crack and see if reality could be glued back together by someone too ignorant to know it was impossible.
[System query detected: Can Host repair a Class 4 Reality Fracture?]
[Answer: No existing framework supports this action.]
[Addendum: No existing framework accounts for Host's existence, either.]
Close enough to a yes.
Shen Wei raised both hands toward the sky. The light inside him gathered, pulled upward by his intent the way it had pulled into his palms before the shockwave. But this was different. The shockwave had been a burst. This was everyth