"Ok, Master." Lin Feng gave the helpless Ouyang young master one last shove and let Fatty haul him toward the waiting elders.
The Third Elder snatched the boy away with a growl. "You can go now, Lin Feng."
Lin Feng flicked his wrist and melted into a streak of light. By the time the elders had muttered a few startled words, he was gone.
The First Elder lowered his communication talisman and turned to the sect master. "Call an urgent council of elders. There are signs the Devil Sect's seal is weakening."
"On it." The sect master's face tightened as he activated the talisman.
---
Word spread fast. By mid-morning a steady trickle of curious disciples had gathered around Lin Feng's courtyard.
"Is that—Lin Feng?" someone whispered.
"God of Death, and only a Xiantian realm expert?" another replied with equal parts awe and disbelief.
A young man stepped forward and removed his mask. "My name is Wang Yu. Core disciple—ranked twenty-fifth." He bowed with practised arrogance.
Lin Feng glanced up from where he had been rolling his sword intent through his meridians and did not bother to stand. He did not care for introductions.
"I came to invite you to join the Wang Faction," Wang Yu said, eyes flicking to the spatial ring at Lin Feng's hip. "Merit, position—second-in-command immediately. Benefits you can't refuse."
Lin Feng rose slowly, weight shifting into the qi, dantian humming. He considered the offer for half a breath and smiled without humor. "Not interested. Fatty, let's go in."
Wang Yu's expression collapsed into a red scowl. Rejection in public was a humiliating wound; he flared, and the air around him thickened with legend-grade pressure.
"You'll give me face," he spat.
Lin Feng's palm brushed his sword hilt. He did not flare his intent, but the hairs on those nearby necks prickled anyway—the sort of warning you only get from someone who has already learned to move outside of optics.
Wang Yu launched first, a savage lunge that combined footwork and whole-body torque to drive his qi out along the line of attack standard legend-grade mechanics meant to overwhelm an opponent at range.
Lin Feng moved like water finding an opening. He sank his weight into the outside leg, rotated the hips, and executed the short inside step that neutralized Wang's leverage. His hand closed on Wang Yu's jaw with the heel of his palm; the strike rode the opponent's own forward momentum, passing energy back into the earth.
PA — Wang Yu's head snapped back; his teeth went with it. He was airborne and then down, stunned, spit and blood painting the grass.
"Fatty, tie him to the tree," Lin Feng said casually, voice the same as ever. His internal channels were soothed, but they pulsed like a ready spring—combat-primed, not arrogant.
The courtyard filled with astonished murmurs. A Heaven Realm warrior had reduced a legend-grade core disciple to a heap of broken pride with two palm strikes. Rumors moved faster than light: Lin Feng slapped Wang Yu out of prestige. Lin Feng is not to be trifled with.
---
A different urgency threaded through the rest of the sect. The elders convened, faces carved by worry and anger.
"A section of the Devil Sect seal has been fractured," the First Elder announced. "We have sightings of legend-grade incursions. War is on the horizon."
"What? We designed the seal to hold them for twenty years," the sect master said. "Who breached it?"
"We suspect internal cooperation," another elder answered. "Prepare a thousand disciples and reinforce the border enclaves."
Lin Feng watched and listened. Between his training cycles and short patrols he was not blind to politics, but he preferred direct action. He turned to Fatty and produced a cache of cores and demon-beast fragments collected during his recent sorties—seventy legend-grade cores and one hundred heaven-grade cores.
"Take these and cultivate," he told Fatty. "Store what's useful; sell the rest."
Fatty's eyes glittered. "Boss—you really struck it big."
Lin Feng's hand brushed the sword's hilt. The blade had grown quieter lately; the voice within his weapon—an old, hoarse thing that sounded like wind through bone—had begun to speak more often.
"Some of the sword has returned to its true shape," the voice said one evening as Lin Feng meditated. "Blood and battle coax it. When the sword drinks the world, it remembers."
"I don't want to spend my life killing," Lin Feng muttered, though even he felt something cold brightening in his chest at the thought of reclaiming the sword's lost form.
"There are other ways than slaughter," the voice admitted. "But you do not yet have the lineage to unlock them. Wait until the Legend realm. For now, killing is an accelerant."
Lin Feng exhaled, and for a moment the person within the sword struck him as an impatient tutor. "What new ability now that I'm in the Heaven Realm?" he asked aloud.
"The sword has a realm," the voice answered simply. "A pocket: storage, shelter, and more. When you are ready, it will take you with it." The idea of a world inside steel made Lin Feng's mouth twitch. A place of his own beside the endless marching maps of his ambitions—tempting.
---
Over the next days, word of the seal breach spread beyond the sect. Elders moved men into defensive formations. Apprentices sharpened blades and ran qi forms until night blurred into day. Lin Feng trained too, but differently: he refined the weave between sword intent and battle intent, practicing the small, real things—footwork that saved inches, breath control that kept a strike from spilling, and chi redirects that made whole-arm attacks snap like whips when they missed.
When he taught Fatty a basic energy seal to close a bleeding meridian, the younger man's hands shook with gratitude. Lin Feng only nodded. War, he understood, was not a single moment of glory. It was patient attrition. It was training—hour after hour—to make the difference between the lucky and the prepared.
Outside the courtyard, Wang Yu hung from the tree, face chalky as he glared at Lin Feng. Pride bruised, status damaged, he schemed. Lin Feng did not care—his eyes had already moved forward, to maps, to patrol routes, and to the soft inward hum that told him the world inside his sword waited patiently for the day he would return it to its full, terrible shape.