The Correction Tribulation hit at 3:47 PM on a Tuesday.
Lin Yu knew because his phone still worked, barely, and he'd been checking the time obsessively against the countdown in his Karma Ledger. The numbers had been ticking down for three days and he'd watched every hour like a man watching a fuse burn.
[Correction Tribulation: 00:00:00]
[Initiating.]
The sky above Longshan Temple went dark.
Not night-dark. The golden cracks that had webbed across the atmosphere since Convergence suddenly flared white-hot, then inverted. Where they'd been glowing gold they turned black, sucking light out of the air around them. The temperature dropped ten degrees in seconds. People in the courtyard looked up and started screaming.
Lin Yu was already on his feet. Tremor sense maxed out, pushing past his normal forty-meter range through sheer adrenaline. The ground was shaking. Not an earthquake. Something was forming. Materializing. He could feel it assembling itself out of spiritual energy directly above the temple, a mass of vibration so dense it registered like a boulder being lowered from the sky.
"Everyone inside the prayer halls! Now!" Weilin's voice cut through the panic. She'd switched from healer to crisis manager in half a second. Civilians scrambled. The high school kids helped the elderly. Somebody was crying.
The thing finished forming.
It landed in the courtyard with a crack that split three flagstones. Lin Yu's tremor sense went white with input. Massive. Four-legged. A body the size of a delivery van, covered in scales that shifted between deep red and charcoal black. Its head was wrong, too many angles, like someone had started carving a lion and gotten bored halfway through and switched to a snake. Four eyes, two on each side, all of them burning orange.
Taowu. One of the four ancient fiends from Chinese mythology. Chaos incarnate. The legends said it was too stupid to be reasoned with and too stubborn to be killed. The kind of creature that existed purely to break things.
This one had been sent specifically for him. He could feel it. The thing's burning eyes swept the courtyard, passing over civilians, passing over Bearers, and locked onto Lin Yu with the precision of a guided missile finding its target.
[Correction Target: Seal #0]
[Threat Classification: Elite]
"That thing's here for me," he said.
Fatty Chen was already moving, stone skin rippling across his forearms and up his neck. "Don't care who it's here for. It's in my temple."
Sister Hao flanked left, wind blades forming between her fingers. Dex circled right, a blur of speed.
The Taowu roared. The sound wasn't just loud. It carried a spiritual component that hit like a physical force, a wave of raw chaos energy that scrambled Lin Yu's tremor sense for a full second. When it came back online, Chen was already engaging.
He punched the thing in the jaw. Stone fist against scale. The impact sent a shockwave through the courtyard that rattled windows. The Taowu's head snapped sideways.
Then it snapped back and bit Chen's arm off at the elbow.
Not really. Chen's stone skin held, barely. But the force of the bite cracked his granite coating from wrist to shoulder. He staggered back, arm hanging wrong, face white with shock.
Hao's wind blades slashed across the Taowu's flank. They cut, drew dark blood, but the wounds closed almost instantly. Regeneration. The thing was healing faster than they could damage it.
Dex came in fast from behind, kicked it in the back leg. The Taowu didn't even flinch. Its tail whipped around and caught Dex in the chest, launching him ten meters into the temple wall. He hit with a sound that made Lin Yu's stomach flip and slid to the ground. Not moving.
Two combat Bearers down in under thirty seconds.
The Taowu turned back to Lin Yu. Those four orange eyes. Patient now. It had dealt with the distractions. Time for the real target.
Lin Yu's mind was doing the thing it did under pressure. Not panicking. Calculating. The way he calculated exam strategies or historical timelines or the structural integrity of a barricade. Cold, fast, running through options.
Option one: run. The Taowu was fast but might not follow if he left the temple grounds. Problem: it was a Correction Tribulation. It would follow him anywhere. And everyone between here and wherever he ended up would be collateral.
Option two: fight straight up. With tremor sense and soul sight. Against an Elite-class mythological beast that had just manhandled three combat Bearers in half a minute. No.
Option three.
He'd never tried using both fragments at the same time. Not deliberately. The accidental combo in Ch 7, the tunnel-mapping plus soul sight overlap, had happened instinctively. He didn't know if forcing it would work. Didn't know what it would do to his body. Didn't know if Seal #0 could handle the strain.
The Taowu charged.
Lin Yu activated both fragments simultaneously.
The world split. Tremor sense flooded in from below, mapping the courtyard's every crack and structural weakness. Soul sight flooded in from above, painting the Taowu's karma aura in churning red and black. Chaos and destruction and mindless rage, no intelligence, just hunger for disorder.
And where the two senses overlapped, something new appeared.
He could see the Taowu's internal structure. Not just its physical body through vibration, not just its karma through soul sight, but both at once, layered. The spiritual energy that held the beast together had a pattern. Nodes of concentrated power connected by lines of force, like a constellation drawn inside the creature's body.
And one of those nodes was flickering.
Unstable. The system had assembled this thing in a hurry, a rush job built to delete one anomaly. The left rear leg, where a major energy line crossed through the hip joint. The node there wasn't fully formed. If he could hit it with enough focused vibration at the exact right frequency, the whole structure might destabilize.
The Taowu's jaws opened. He could see down its throat. Red light, rows of teeth that didn't follow any biological logic.
Lin Yu dove left. The jaws snapped shut where he'd been standing. He rolled, came up running, circled toward the creature's left side. It tracked him, turning, fast for something that big. But it was built for forward charges, not tight turns. He was faster laterally. Barely.
He needed to touch the weak point. Tremor pulse required physical contact to deliver maximum force. Which meant he needed to get his hand on the left rear hip of a creature that could bite through stone.
"Hao!" he shouted. "I need a distraction! Its face! Three seconds!"
She was hurt, winded, bleeding from a cut above her eye. But she nodded. Raised both hands. Wind blades shot forward in a fan pattern, slicing across the Taowu's face. Not damaging. Just annoying. The creature flinched, turned its head away, four eyes squinting against the cutting wind.
Three seconds.
Lin Yu sprinted for the left rear leg. Slid on the wet flagstones, dropped to his knees, and slammed both palms against the hip joint.
Fragment Weaving. Both at once. Tremor sense identified the exact frequency of the unstable node. Soul sight showed him the spiritual structure to target. He poured everything he had through his hands. A vibration pulse tuned to the precise resonance that would shatter that one flickering point.
The Taowu screamed.
The sound was different this time. Not a roar. A shriek of something breaking apart from the inside. The left rear leg buckled. Energy lines snapped like overstretched rubber bands, chain-reacting through the creature's body. Scales cracked. Dark blood poured from splits in its hide. The orange light in its eyes flickered once, twice.
It collapsed sideways. Lin Yu threw himself clear as half a ton of dying chaos beast crashed into the courtyard stones.
The Taowu dissolved. Not slowly, like the hungry ghosts. All at once. The spiritual energy holding it together came apart in a rush of hot wind and red sparks, leaving nothing but a scorched outline on the flagstones and a smell like ozone and burnt copper.
[Correction Tribulation: Complete]
[Seal #0 status: ERROR (persistent)]
[Next correction: Calculating...]
The system hadn't given up. It would send something else. Something bigger. But not today.
Lin Yu lay on the courtyard floor, staring up at the golden sky. His hands were shaking. Both palms burned where he'd channeled the combined fragment energy. His nose was bleeding. Left eye twitching. Head splitting like someone had driven a nail through his temple.
Weilin's green glow appeared above him. Cool hands on his forehead. The headache eased by about thirty percent. Not gone, but manageable.
"That," she said quietly, "was not just vibration sensing."
He wiped his nose. Blood on the back of his hand. "No. It wasn't."
She didn't ask for an explanation. Not yet. She just healed what she could and moved to Dex, who was conscious now but had at least two broken ribs.
Chen walked over. His stone skin was cracked from wrist to shoulder, arm hanging at a bad angle. He looked down at Lin Yu with an expression that was half respect and half something harder to name.
"You saw a weak point nobody else could see. And you hit it with a technique nobody else can do."
"Got lucky."
"Bullshit." Chen offered his good hand. Lin Yu took it and pulled himself up. "That thing was sent here for you. The system sent an Elite-class beast to kill one unregistered Bearer. Whatever you are, you're important enough to delete."
The courtyard was quiet. Civilians peering out from the prayer halls. Jade Guard members who'd been patrolling the perimeter during the attack staring at the scorched outline on the ground. Zhao Kai wasn't among them. He'd left that morning. But word would get back to him.
Everyone had seen Lin Yu do something impossible.
The era of hiding was over.
[Karma Shift: Others +4, Life +2]
[Fragment Weaving technique: Logged]
[Warning: System attention level — Elevated]
Lin Yu looked at his burned palms. The green glow of the earth fragment pulsed under the scar on his left hand. The cold darkness of the Yan Wang fragment throbbed in his right. Two gods, forced to work together by an error in the system.
Fragment Weaving. That's what he'd call it.
It almost killed him and it was the only reason he was alive.
He was going to need more fragments.