On the fifth, something flickered. The soil beneath him shivered faintly, the echo sharper than before. He stilled his breath, felt the pressure more clearly. A change, but faint. He noted it, set the bone aside.
Sixth and seventh — dead. The eighth stirred again. The sense spread further, a fraction wider, as though the ground's impression thickened. Not strong, but real. He wrote the result in the dirt beside him.
The ninth and tenth failed. The eleventh worked. His pulses ran clearer, the vibrations sharper against his mind.
Three. Out of eleven.
Li Wei stared at the line. If the system was right, he needed five. But he had found only three that answered at all. The others lay dead, useless marks carved into bone.
He gathered the three that worked, set them apart, and studied the lines carved into their surface. None matched the names he had been given. He still had no way to know if they were Liu, Jing, Yan, Xun, or Rui.
But they reacted. That was enough for now.
He sits. The three fingertip bones rest in a triangle on the floor. He keeps them where they are and closes his eyes.
Breath in. Breath out. Bone Whisper turns inward. Qi runs along bone. The sense tightens. Pressure maps across his body. The cave floor answers in faint layers.
He holds the pattern in his mind. Four mind runes sit there now, formed over months. Each is a small mark, exact in stroke and curve. He checks them one by one. Lines hold. No drift. He tests a fifth. The outline forms, then fades. Not yet.
He returns to the four. He brings the breath low. He moves qi through the usual path, slow and even. The triangle on the floor gives a clear lift. The ground reads sharper. The range edges out a little further. Detail improves. Small weights show. Air shift shows. Then the carved bones begin to strain. The lines flicker. He stops feeding them and the effect drops.
He adjusts his breath and lets the four mind runes circulate again. The triangle holds, faint but steady. It is not the surge the system described. No great leap forward. Still, the difference is there: a weight eased from his lungs, sharper feedback from the ground, a little more detail at the edges of his sense. Noticeable, but not enough to change his path. The array feels strained, fragile, as if pressing harder would only break it. He restrains himself, the way one avoids leaning full weight on a branch that is already bending.
He exhales slowly and sinks back into Bone Whisper. Four mind runes pulse faintly, steady as ever. The fifth remains distant.
Three of the fingertip runes working. Without the full set, the array is little more than a crutch. It shows what could be, nothing more.
He lets the triangle fade and sits with the thought. Three runes working, nothing more than a crutch. If the system is right, arrays can carry more than Bone Whisper.
He shifts his focus to Desert Soul Technique. The lines of the system's suggestion return clear: Desert Soul Rune Array. Two sandstone stones. Tet and Resh. Eighty-five percent efficiency. Draw from the remnants of ancient life. Breathe deep, stable, until inner flow matches the desert's weight.
Sandstone was needed, not bone. The outcrop above the cave was the best chance. Weathered slabs, loose rubble, places where softer stone might be buried.
Li Wei called the smaller slave close and gave the order. Search the outcrop. Bring stone that breaks rough, that crumbles under pressure. Stay low. Avoid the open. Return at the first sign of movement.
The slave jerked once in acknowledgement and slipped into the brush. Li Wei listened until its steps faded and silence pressed back in.
It did not stay gone long. Soon the sound of scraping feet returned. The slave came carrying a cluster of stones — dull brown, layered, grains pressed rough together. Li Wei picked one up and turned it in his hand. The surface flaked beneath his thumb, the edges crumbled where the layers split. Sandstone.
The pile held more than one kind. Pieces mixed with quartz, speckled with feldspar, dull seams of clay cutting through the grains. The basin had left its geology bare, and the outcrop carried the remnants of old pressure and erosion. Enough to work with.
Li Wei sorted through the stones, running his thumb over their crumbling surfaces. The system's words were clear: Tet and Resh. But which marks belonged to them, he could not know.
Li Wei gathered eight slabs from the pile and set them out in a row. The three runes that had stirred for Bone Whisper were set aside; the rest, he would test here.
The work was slower than bone. Sandstone flaked with every stroke, crumbling if his hand pressed too hard, breaking if his qi slipped. One after another he cut the runes, careful to keep each line shallow and even. Failures piled at his side — fractured stones, marks lost to splits — until eight were ready. Each bore a different symbol from his papers.
He tested them one by one. Most gave nothing. Qi flowed as before, the Desert Soul Technique unchanged. A few shivered faintly, unstable, hinting at power but falling flat. Only when he set two particular stones opposite each other did the change bite through.
The Desert Soul cycle tightened at once. The air grew dry, sharp on his tongue, his chest filling with a weight like sand but his meridians holding firmer for it. The flow steadied, trimmed of waste. Faster. Sharper. Stronger.
The runes flickered faintly, lines glowing through the dull stone. The slabs strained at once, flaking at the edges, dust spilling free. They would not last long. But the effect was undeniable. The system's promise of eighty-five percent felt real, or close enough.
There was no mistaking it. These were Tet and Resh.
Li Wei set the rest aside and placed the chosen pair before him, one left, one right. He crossed his legs, steadied his breath, and cycled the Desert Soul Technique again. The difference struck hard. Where before the technique had pulled faint threads, now the array opened like a floodgate. Qi poured in faster, sharper, his channels gripped and shaped with far more efficiency.
Hours blurred, then days. He sat with the stones flickering at his sides, each breath a deep draw that made his chest heavy while his marrow thrummed with new strength. The effect did not weaken until his own body began to tire.
When he finally rose, the cave mouth looked different. The pine needles nearest the entrance had lost their shine, a faint curl bending their tips. The scrub no longer stood firm; a few leaves sagged, edges drying as if brushed by drought. Even the bones he had laid in rows seemed touched — not broken, not hollow, but dulled, their surface chalkier than before.
The truth became clear with little doubt. Desert Soul consumed. It drew qi from whatever lay close — plant, soil, or bone — and fed it into him.
Li Wei felt no unease, only certainty. This was a resource, steady if slow. Shrubs and needles gave little, but they were endless. Bones carried more, and the bones of cultivators more still. Wherever he stood, there would always be something to strip.
He brushed dust from his hands, satisfied. A parasite fed so long as it found a host. With Desert Soul, he would never starve.
The faint wilting around the cave wasn't the array's work. The stones only sharpened the flow, made the technique more efficient. What he saw was the Desert Soul Technique itself, laid bare by the boost.
On its own the drain was subtle, so slow he would not have noticed for months. With the array, the signs showed within days — needles curling, scrub sagging, bones losing their depth.
He turned the thought over and came to the same conclusion. As his cultivation grew, the radius would grow with it. The technique was a parasite, and the stronger the host, the larger its reach. Now it touched little more than the ground at his feet. One day it might cover fields, forests, cities.
He felt no hesitation at the idea. The array had given him proof. What began as wilted grass would, with time, become something far greater.
The name of the method lingered in his thoughts. Desert Soul. At first he had pictured sand and sun, some foreign wasteland. But the truth was sharper. Desert was not sand. Desert was absence. A place stripped bare, where nothing lived, nothing grew, nothing fed but what could take from the emptiness itself.
That was the heart of the technique. It did not draw on a desert. It made one. The withering shrubs, the dulled bones, the faint curl in the needles outside — all of it was the first trace of that truth. The Desert Soul created its own desert wherever he sat, and from that emptiness, it sustained him.
Li Wei felt no unease at the thought. A desert spread only as far as the strength of the one who carried it. His was small now, hardly more than a circle around his cave. But with time, with growth, the wasteland would widen. And wherever that desert reached, he would feed.
Days folded into weeks. Li Wei kept to the cave, cycling the Desert Soul Technique without pause. The two sandstone slabs marked with Tet and Resh sat on either side of him, their lines flickering faintly each time he breathed. Fragile though they were, they endured. The array was essential. Without it, the technique would have been sluggish, almost invisible. With it, the flow tightened to its full potential, every cycle eighty-five percent more efficient.
Almost all of the energy came from the bones. The three cultivator skeletons he had laid in rows dulled with every session, their marrow leaking into his frame. The change was subtle, not ruinous — a loss of lustre, a touch of brittleness — but most of their strength remained. Enough to keep feeding him for a long while yet. The scrub outside gave almost nothing — a hint of wilted needles, a few sagging leaves — but compared to the weight of the dead, it was less than a drop in a river.