The night stretched on, slow and cold. Lin Yuan remained beneath the shattered lantern until the mist began to lift and the first threads of gray light spilled across the cracked stone streets. Morning in Broken Sky City was not gentle. It arrived with shouting vendors, rattling carts, barking dogs, and the slap of wet feet in filth. Life stirred in the slums not because the people were ready, but because they had no choice.
He had slept little, if at all. His body dozed in fragments, twitching from exhaustion, but his mind was too loud, too full. The words from the Dark Demon Cultivation Path echoed inside him like wind whispering down an endless canyon. Not in any dramatic way. There was no voice. No hallucination. Just thought—deep, raw, and new. He hadn't thought this way before. Not like this.
And something subtle had shifted.
He noticed it when he stood.
His legs trembled, weak from cold and hunger, but his mind felt... still. Not calm, not peaceful. Still. Like a pool of water after a stone had sunk and disappeared.
He picked up the book carefully, wrapped it in the dry inner folds of his robe, and tucked it into the loose cloth sash around his waist. It was heavy—not in weight, but in presence. As if something old and unwilling to be known now lived within his arm's reach.
As he moved through the back alleys toward the city's lower market square, the world looked the same—but felt different.
The faces he passed were familiar: the old blind woman who coughed blood into rags, the crippled beggar boy who hadn't grown an inch in three years, the merchant's apprentice who kicked stray dogs when his master wasn't watching. All of them going about their routines, trying to survive.
Yet to Lin Yuan, they now seemed... trapped. Not in chains or prisons—but in patterns.
He had been the same. Day after day, chasing crusts, bowing, muttering thanks for moldy rice, curling into corners and praying not to be kicked. And when he wasn't doing that, he was waiting. For what? Death? A miracle? Something kind?
That version of himself still existed—but he could feel it fading. Slipping away. And not because he'd gained power because he had nothing. No spirit root. No cultivation. Not even food.
But still something inside him had begun to watch. A second self, distant and unblinking, staring at the world with quiet clarity.
He arrived at the lower square just as the morning crowd gathered. The noodle vendor was already yelling prices, flies buzzing around the broth pot. A pair of sect guards loitered near the fountain, their green robes shining with embroidered lotus crests. One of them held a red-tasseled whip. Decorative, but very real.
Lin Yuan knew how to avoid them.
He moved past without meeting their eyes and reached a shaded alley behind the butcher's stall. There, wedged between crates of bones and rotting vegetable skins, he crouched low and pulled the book out again.
No one saw him. No one cared.
The next section of the text was harder to read. The calligraphy twisted inward, almost alive. He ran his finger beneath the lines as he read, his lips moving silently.
"Before Qi is stirred, the marrow must awaken. The bones must remember their shape before the heavens chained them. Meditation is not silence—it is stillness so complete that desire suffocates within it."
He didn't fully understand. But that didn't stop him.
He sat cross-legged, spine straight. Eyes closed. Breath held.
Still.
At first, all he felt was discomfort. The wet stones beneath him. The ache in his ribs. The noise of the market. But he did not move.
Time passed.
Slowly, the noise blurred.
He wasn't calm. In truth, his thoughts were chaotic—but a layer beneath them remained untouched. That stillness he'd felt earlier had not been fleeting. It was there, waiting, like a room he could enter if he simply turned the right corner. then for a moment—only a moment—he felt it.
A flicker.
A pulse.
Not in his body, but somewhere deeper. In his bones. A thrum that was not breath or blood. Something older.
Then a sharp knock shattered it all.
"Oi! Filth rat!"
Lin Yuan's eyes snapped open. The butcher's apprentice stood over him with a bucket of bloody water.
"You think you can meditate in my alley? Piss off before I skin you with the pigs!"
The boy laughed at his own joke, raised the bucket— and threw it.
The filthy water splashed over Lin Yuan's chest, soaking his robe, drenching the book beneath.
But surprisingly he didn't move, didn't curse, nor he tried to speak.
Instead he just stared. so intense the boy hesitated. Just for a breath. and it was enough.
Lin Yuan stood, slowly, dripping. And without saying a word, he turned and walked away.
Not because he was afraid. But because the words of the book whispered again behind his ears.
"The weak respond. The devourer observes. When the time comes, the world will burn without needing your rage."
The blood-wash soaked into Lin Yuan's robe as he walked, a trail of pink droplets following him down the alley. Flies buzzed at his heels. The stench clung to his skin, but he didn't react—not to the filth, not to the cold, not even to the laughter still echoing behind him.
The boy from the butcher's stall would forget him within minutes.
But Lin Yuan would not forget the boy.
Not out of hatred.
Because the hatred still required some belief in fairness. A sense of having been wronged but Lin Yuan felt neither. What settled in his chest wasn't rage or shame—it was a kind of clarity, sharp and hard like frost forming along the edge of a blade.
This world didn't punish cruelty. It rewarded it. Those who kicked the weakest were seen as strong. Those who bowed and endured were forgotten. And now that truth no longer crushed him.
It simply made sense.
He turned into an abandoned courtyard near the western wall of the city. The place had once belonged to a carpenter, or so the rumors went, before the man vanished one night and the sects sealed off his property. No one dared claim it. Even beggars avoided it, saying the place was cursed. but Lin Yuan didn't believe in curses—not the kind whispered by drunks, anyway.
The courtyard gate was broken. Weeds covered the stone path. A crooked plum tree leaned against the crumbling eaves of the house. Inside, dust coated the old boards, and cobwebs hung like funeral banners. But it was quiet.
And it was empty.
He made his way to the center of the courtyard, where a half-collapsed meditation platform sat beneath the open sky. There, he sat again, cross-legged, with the book laid out before him to dry in the weak sunlight. The pages were damp, stained now with butcher's runoff—but still legible.
He opened to the next section.
This one had no title. Just an image—a sketch drawn in angry, jagged ink. A figure seated in meditation, but with its bones exposed. Not through injury, but through transformation. The skin and flesh weren't torn—it was as though the body had simply faded, revealing what had always been beneath. The marrow, the spine, the ribs—glowing faintly, like embers in ash.
Lin Yuan stared at the image, heart slow. A strange thought crept into his mind, one that made no sense yet demanded his attention:
What if the soul was not in the heart or mind—but in the bone?
He didn't know where the thought came from. The book didn't say it directly. But it felt true, like a forgotten memory rising to the surface.
He placed his hands on his knees, closed his eyes, and let his breath even out again.
The city's noise was distant here. The sect drums still echoed from the upper tiers. The cries of hawkers drifted faintly through the streets. But all of it seemed to float outside the shell of his body, separate from the core of his awareness.
He began to count his breaths.
One.
Two.
Three.
By the fiftieth, something shifted.
He wasn't asleep. He wasn't dreaming. But the boundaries of his flesh—his skin, his bones—began to blur. Not literally. Not with any glowing aura or mystical light. It was subtler than that. Like the shape of his self was no longer fully within his body.
A buzzing began behind his ears. Not sound, not pain—just a pressure. Then heat.
From his spine.
It spread slowly, like fire lit with damp wood. Crawling through the marrow, curling through his ribs and neck. His breath hitched—but he didn't break the stillness. He let it happen.
"To awaken the marrow is to remember the death that shaped the living."
The line appeared in his mind—not remembered from the page, but as if the book had written itself into his bones.
The heat grew.
Not unbearable. But undeniable. As though his skeleton had become aware of itself for the first time, as though it was no longer just a support—but something alive.
Then it stopped.
Suddenly.
The heat vanished, the buzzing disappeared. and the air around him was still again.
He opened his eyes but nothing had changed.
No light. No aura. No golden signs of breakthrough.
But his body felt different. Not stronger. Not faster. Just… aligned. As though a lock had shifted inside him, and something unseen had clicked into place.
He stood, slow and steady.
The blood-stained robe clung to him, heavy with dried filth.
He took it off. Stripped it from his shoulders and let it fall to the cracked earth.
For the first time in years, his skin touched open air with no barrier, no cover. He stood shirtless beneath the cold sun of morning, thin and scarred and silent.
He didn't shiver.
He didn't look back. and he decides from this day onward, he would not beg.
Not because of pride.
Not because he deserved more.
But because he no longer believed in the rules of this world.