A month passed. The moon waxed and waned, and with its rhythm, Lian's mask became a second skin. He learned the subtle art of human interaction not through participation, but through flawless, predatory mimicry. He learned that a slight downward tilt of the head when receiving his food bowl earned him less suspicious glances. He learned that a slow, ponderous blink was the perfect response to a question he wasn't supposed to understand. He became Lian the Beast, Lian the Simple Giant, a fixture as unremarkable as the village well. The beast of his hatred still coiled in his gut, but it was a quiet, sleeping thing, lulled by the cold lullaby of his ambition.
His days were spent in labor. His nights, in secret cultivation. The sips of power he stole from the world under the moonlight were agonizingly small, like trying to quench a dragon's thirst with dewdrops. But it was not about quantity. It was about control. He forced the warring energies within him—the deep, unyielding Earth-Qi of his forged body and the wild, chaotic Sky-Qi of the lightning he had consumed—into a delicate, spinning vortex within his Dantian. He was learning to balance the mountain and the storm inside his own soul. This torturous discipline sharpened his will into a razor's edge.
The two pieces of information he had overheard continued to circle in his mind: the trade caravan and the sacred grove. The caravan was an unknown, a future event. The grove, however, was here. It was a tangible resource, a place deemed important enough by these weaklings to "waste" men guarding it. In Lian's brutal calculus, anything worth guarding was worth investigating.
His target was the eastern ridge. During the day, he saw the guards—usually two, sometimes three—patrolling the base of the ridge with a bored listlessness. They were not guarding against a man who could walk through the earth itself.
One night, when the moon was a sliver of bone in a starless sky, he made his move. He did not slip from the village; he sank. Lying on his straw pallet, he closed his eyes and focused his will. The packed earth beneath him softened, yielding like water. He submerged himself into the ground, a ghost sinking into its own grave, leaving the surface entirely undisturbed.
He moved beneath the earth, guided by his Primal Sense. It was a strange, muted form of travel. He felt the roots of trees, the scurrying of burrowing animals, and the cool veins of underground water. He navigated by the faint thrum of Qi in the earth, a current leading him towards the eastern ridge. He bypassed the sleeping village and the bored guards without a sound, a phantom swimming through the soil.
He surfaced in a thicket of ferns on the ridge itself, a hundred paces beyond the patrol route. The air here was different. The cloying stench of the village was gone, replaced by a clean, sharp scent of pine and something else… something ancient and pure. The ambient Qi was noticeably thicker, cleaner. The villagers were fools; this place wasn't just sacred, it was valuable.
He moved up the ridge, a shadow among shadows. As he neared the crest, he saw the source of the energy: a small, secluded grove of no more than a dozen trees. But these were not ordinary trees. They were ancient Ironwood trees, their bark as dark and hard as forged metal, their leaves a deep, almost black green. In the center of the grove, a single spring bubbled up from the ground, the water so clear and pure it seemed to glow with a faint inner light. The spring fed a small, perfectly circular pool, from which a gentle, calming mist rose into the cool night air.
This was a Spirit Spring, a natural nexus of refined Qi. The water itself was a treasure, capable of speeding up cultivation and healing wounds. To Lian, who had been surviving on scraps of ambient energy, it was a banquet laid out before a starving man.
He knelt by the pool, cupped his hands, and drank. The water was cold and tasted of stone and starlight. As it entered his body, it was like a cool balm on his chaotic internal energy. The storm in his Dantian momentarily quieted, the warring elements soothed by this pure, grounding force. It was the most peaceful sensation he had felt since his transformation.
As he drank, his Primal Sense, amplified by the purity of the place, flared with a sudden warning.
He was not alone.
He didn't move. He didn't even tense. He simply remained kneeling, a statue of stone, and listened. The sound was faint, almost nonexistent—the soft scrape of a cloth shoe on stone, the controlled breath of someone trying to remain hidden. They were behind him, amongst the Ironwood trees.
"Your thirst must have been great, to drink so deeply from a place you do not know," a calm, familiar voice said.
Lian rose slowly, turning to face the speaker. There, leaning against an Ironwood tree, her form almost completely hidden in the shadows, was Elder Maeve. Her face was unreadable in the dim light, but her sharp eyes glittered with an intelligence that was anything but frail. The faint ember of Qi he had sensed in her before was now a steady, controlled flame, hidden but undeniable. She was not just a village elder. She was a cultivator.
"You are quiet, for a man so large," she continued, her voice losing its gentle, grandmotherly tone and taking on a new, sharper edge. "Quiet and clever. Clever enough to play the simpleton. Clever enough to find this place."
The mask was useless now. Lian let it fall. He straightened to his full, imposing height, the subservient slump vanishing from his shoulders. The vacant look in his eyes was replaced by the cold, analytical gaze of a predator. He did not speak, but the shift in his aura was a language she understood perfectly.
"I have watched you since the day you arrived, Lian," she said, her voice betraying no fear. "I saw the power coiled within you, hidden beneath the dirt and the vacant stare. I knew you were no simple wild man. I did not know what your purpose was, so I waited. I watched." She gestured towards the pool. "This grove is all that remains of my past. It is the reason I endure that… ant hill down below. And you have trespassed upon it."
Her hand, wrinkled and frail-looking, rested on the trunk of the Ironwood tree. As she spoke, the tree's own Qi seemed to respond, a faint pulse of energy flowing from it into her. She was connected to this place, drawing strength from it.
"I will ask you only once," she said, her voice now as hard as the ironwood she touched. "Who are you? And what do you want with my village and my grove?"