Rising cautiously, Qing Yao noticed another anomaly. When she woke, her body felt heavier, not with fatigue, but with presence. Every movement carried weight, as if the earth itself acknowledged her steps. She sat up slowly, placing her palm against the floor.
For the first time in her life, the pressure she always carried did not feel like a burden. It felt like support.
The tall grass in the yard wasn't swaying normally. It was bowed low, not to a wind, but to a presence centered somewhere behind the house, a tangible weight in the atmosphere. Her knees felt a strange urge to bend, a primal need to lower herself, to show deference to the invisible force. She resisted, her jaw tightening.
Qing Chen was already up, moving towards the back door, his hand hovering near the worn leather of his weapon belt. "Sister... do you feel that?" His voice was low, a mix of awe and apprehension.
Qing Yao didn't answer immediately. She was focused on the subtle shift in the world, the way the energy flowed, the inexplicable pull towards the source. Her hand instinctively gripped the hilt of her blade, her eyes narrowing as she tried to pierce the unusual gloom behind the house. Every fiber of her being screamed danger, screamed other. Her knees still wanted to buckle, her body demanding submission to this overwhelming presence. But long years had taught her to stand firm, regardless of the pressure. Her grip on the blade tightened, knuckles whitening.
Qing Chen took a few steps forward, peering around the corner of the house. That's when he saw him. Seated calmly in the dust, bathed in faint moonlight and an even fainter, strange inner glow.
Qing Chen stopped in his tracks, his hand falling away from his belt. He stared for a long moment at the figure, then turned back to Qing Yao, his eyes wide with a sudden understanding that was both unsettling and profoundly true. "He's... not normal, is he?"
Qing Yao hadn't moved from the doorway, her gaze fixed on the same point. The tension in her grip eased almost imperceptibly. The urge to bow had lessened, replaced by a different, more complex feeling, curiosity, wariness, and something akin to grudging respect. She finally answered, her voice soft, almost a whisper against the strange night. "No." There was a pause, a beat where the sheer strangeness of it all hung heavy. Then, she added, her grip on the blade loosening entirely, her shoulders relaxing, "But maybe... maybe that's what we need."
Drawn by an irresistible force, curiosity, concern, or perhaps the sheer magnetic pull of the event itself, they rushed to the back of the house. The sight that greeted them was beyond shocking. Dao Wei was still seated, still glowing with the faint Ember light, still utterly serene. But his body… his body was broken. Fine cracks, hairline fractures, spiderwebbed across his skin, particularly visible on his hands, neck, and face. From these cracks, a thin, viscous, dark crimson substance oozed slowly, staining the dust beneath him. It was a terrible sight, a portrait of profound physical trauma.
Yet, despite the vivid, undeniable evidence of agony, Dao Wei seemed completely at peace. His breathing remained steady, his expression tranquil. The contradiction was jarring, terrifying, and utterly mesmerizing.
Within him, a storm raged. His dried-up Sea of Qi, a desolate wasteland that had frustrated him for days now, shook violently. His dantian began humming, a deep, resonant sound that vibrated through his entire being, echoing the hum of the earth.
He was going to force open everything. Every blocked channel, every sealed potential, every imposed limit. He was tired of being... normal. Tired of the mundane, the constrained. The quiet, patient waiting of the Ember had resonated not just with potential, but with a coiled frustration, a deep-seated refusal to accept limitations that were not his own. He would break himself to remake himself.
The heavens themselves seemed to acknowledge this audacious act. High above, distant stars twinkled erratically, and the faint, shimmering veil that protected the world from the true void seemed to tremble. Within Dao Wei, his Sea of Qi expanded abnormally, somehow reaching out, merging with the vast, Star-filled Void that lay beyond the conventional boundaries of existence. Golden waves of pure, formless energy surged within this impossible space, reaching higher and higher, threatening to engulf everything.
In the heart of this self-created void, the five radiant orbs that represented the foundational forces of his being, or perhaps the remnants of a previous, forgotten structure, began to vibrate violently. Their radiance intensified, shifting from distinct points of light into blinding streams. These streams of concentrated energy, the essence of power and comprehension, converged with terrifying speed, pouring into Dao Wei's consciousness.
Knowledge flooded his mind as a fully formed understanding. Alchemy, formations, weapon refinement, martial arts, the intricacies of the Five-Fold Way, the secrets whispered by the earth and the stars, it was all seared into his soul instantly, completely, as if he had lived through countless lifetimes of study, mastering these arts to their absolute pinnacle. His mind expanded exponentially to contain it all, a universe of knowledge unfurling within his skull.
And then, the final act. The remaining two orbs, the ones holding the most fundamental, elemental power, one exuding pure divine light, the other a well of absolute darkness, shattered in unison. Not with a bang, but a resonant CRACK, like the sound of reality itself tearing. The raw, primordial power of Light and Darkness, the fundamental duality of existence, surged into Dao Wei's Sea of Qi, merging with the surging golden waves and the unfolding knowledge, threatening to overwhelm the fractured vessel that held it all.
Crack!
The quiet courtyard, usually a sanctuary of stillness, became the epicenter of a cosmic storm. Dao Wei sat cross-legged on the ground, hands resting lightly on his knees, the picture of serene focus. Yet, beneath that tranquil surface, something ancient stirred, something vast and terrible that had been lying dormant, waiting for its moment.
The world split open.
His internal landscape, the delicate balance of meridians and Sea of Qi, suddenly felt inadequate, frail. A pressure built, immense and wild, unlike anything he had ever known. It was the force of creation and destruction intertwining, a raw, untamed power threatening to rupture the very boundaries of his being, to scatter his atoms across existence.
Dao Wei's body trembled violently as if shackled to the heart of a thunderstorm. Every nerve ending screamed. His veins seared with a liquid fire that was both agony and exhilaration. His bones sang a high-pitched, cracking song, the sound echoing not in the air, but deep within the marrow. His soul, that ineffable core of self, felt as if it were being stretched thin, pulled apart, devoured from the inside out by an insatiable hunger that was somehow him.
He couldn't hold it. No mortal vessel, perhaps no vessel at all, could contain this.
Crack.
The sound was a deeper, more resonant. A sound like the sky being carved in half by a celestial blade, the heavens bleeding through the jagged seam left behind. It was the sound of a fundamental barrier giving way.
The barrier surrounding his Sea of Qi shattered. It exploded within him, not in a destructive burst of scattered energy, but in the way a millennia-old dam finally gives way to an endless, pent-up ocean. Water surged, a boundless sea that shimmered with seven distinct hues swirling and merging. It was a prism cast directly into the heart of eternity, its facets catching the light of a thousand different dawnings and dusks. Red bled into the deepest indigo blue. Verdant green melted into ethereal violet. Molten gold churned violently into cool, shimmering silver. And at the very center of this roiling, polychromatic ocean, a calm, unyielding embankment of ember light pulsed, gentle yet possessing an impossible weight, an ancient, quiet power.
From the depths of that vibrant, tumultuous internal sea, a familiar figure began to coalesce, rising like a myth from the waves.
"Nyx…" he breathed, the name a soft exhalation lost in the internal tempest.
She was no longer the shadow-clad serpent form of nightmares, the elegant, terrifying Zodiac who whispered portents of doom through the labyrinthine corridors of dreamscapes. Now, she appeared raw, stripped of artifice and terror. Her form seemed woven from the very starlight scattered across the cosmos and the deep, abiding sorrow that clung to the edges of creation. Her eyes, usually pools of inky blackness or cold, reptilian calculation, were wet with something he had rarely, perhaps never, seen reflected there before.
Pure, unadulterated feeling.
They stared at each other across the swirling, multi-colored sea. Just for a suspended moment, an eternity captured in a breath.
Then, she ran to him.
Within the boundless expanse of his exploded Sea of Qi, Dao Wei caught her. He pulled her into his arms, holding her tight, tighter than he had held anything in this life, tighter than was physically possible in the mundane world. He didn't speak. Words, even the most profound, would have felt small, inadequate, incapable of containing the vastness of this moment. This reunion, in the heart of his own being, was deeper than speech, older than language. She had believed him dead, lost to the Endless Abyss. He had felt her absence like a physical splinter lodged deep in his heart, a constant, throbbing ache in his non-existence. In this strange, fragile world they now inhabited, she was a thread of his true self, one of the last things left tethering him to who he had been, who he was becoming.
"Master! I… I couldn't find you…" she whispered, her voice muffled against his chest, a sound like shattered glass and falling rain. "For so long… I thought you were gone."
"I was," he said quietly, his voice resonating not with sound waves, but with the deep hum of inherent power now surging through him. "But I returned."
The void that surrounded them within the Sea of Qi shifted, the vibrant colors swirling gently as if responding to their presence. Time didn't seem to pass here, in this internal realm. Or perhaps it passed all at once, collapsing upon itself. The Sea of Qi stilled slightly, the chaotic currents settling enough to allow his senses to stretch, not outward, but inward, into the abyss of his own fragmented memory, into the echo of the place he had survived.
He had been in the Endless Abyss. Lost to time and space. Two years, he realised, had passed in the waking world since he was dragged into that horrific void.
And in that time, the twin consciousnesses of the Light God and the Dark God, the very beings he was, wrestled with, and ultimately integrated into his core, had done something unexpected. They had sacrificed their last vestiges of divinity in an act of profound, silent protection. They had wrapped their fading consciousnesses around his like a cocoon forged from dying grace, shielding him from the absolute oblivion of the Abyss.