Autumn swept down the Jadepine Valley like a sigh from Heaven.
The high trees rustled gold and amber in the wind, the scent of pine resin clinging to the air like old incense. Birds had fallen silent. The wind carried a whisper of oncoming frost, and the last sun of the season bled pale behind the cliffs.
In the shadow of the Weeping Cliff, a boy trudged along a winding forest path, back hunched beneath a bundle of firewood bound with hemp rope. Though just sixteen, Li Yao looked older - shoulders roped with muscle, his hands gnarled like old roots. His skin was tanned and cracked, and dirt clung stubbornly beneath his nails. His breath steamed in the air as he walked.
He didn't stop to rest.
Each step down the mountain trail came with quiet effort, but Li Yao had long since learned to pace his strength. Life in Green Pine Village was a hard teacher. There were no sects here, no grand pavilions or sword-wielding immortals. Only farmers, woodsmen, and the occasional traveling cultivator who looked upon the villagers like ants.
Li Yao, born to a lowly herbalist and a wandering hunter, had no clan name. No bloodline. No spiritual roots.
"He has no cultivation path. He'll never ascend the mountain. Might as well teach him to carry buckets."
That was what the spirit master had declared when Li Yao was five and first tested for meridians. Most children lit the spiritual stone. Even those with weak roots could draw some qi, become servants or outer disciples in minor sects. But Li Yao's stone had remained dark.
The memory stayed with him like a scar.
He remembered standing in the town square, barefoot and shaking, as the villagers whispered behind their hands. He remembered the way his mother's hand trembled as she squeezed his. Her voice had cracked, but she'd smiled and said, "Heaven watches those who strive."
She had died two winters later - cut down by bandits who demanded tribute the village could not pay. The sect that claimed the valley offered no aid. They did not protect rootless peasants.
Since then, Li Yao had lived alone. Worked alone. Studied alone. He chopped wood for coin, bartered herbs for rice, and collected scraps of cultivation knowledge like a beggar scraping crumbs.
Most nights, he didn't dream. When he did, it was of power. Power to keep what he loved safe.
He reached the edge of the village at dusk, depositing the firewood outside the inn in exchange for half a steamed bun and a few copper pieces. The innkeeper, a thick-necked man with a red face, didn't look him in the eye.
Li Yao didn't care. He was used to silence.
Instead of spending the copper, he tucked it into a worn cloth pouch inside his robe. Every coin mattered. Paper talismans. Dust-pills. Spirit manuals—these were luxuries that required years of saving, haggling, and luck.
Tonight, he had something rare.
A scroll.
Not a copy, not a mass-printed pamphlet for low-grade meditation. A real scroll—old, frayed, and water-damaged, but still legible. It was the single most valuable thing he'd ever owned.
He had traded a year's savings for it—everything he had, gathered over months of chopping, hauling, starving when he had to.
The man who sold it to him had been half-mad, or perhaps faking madness. A trader with wild eyes and a crooked smile, who claimed it had come from the ruins of a fallen sect near the Wailing Marsh.
"It's cursed, probably," he had cackled. "Killed half a sect. Nine in ten who try it explode like boiled frogs. But ahh... the one who survives? Hah. The heavens open."
Li Yao had stared at the scroll as it sat between them on a silk cloth already stained with blood.
"Why so cheap?" he had asked.
The trader shrugged. "Who wants a dead man's scroll that only cripples fools?"
The man had vanished the next morning, without a trace.
The technique was called Crimson Meridian Purge.
It was reckless. Dangerous. Possibly fraudulent. Possibly cursed.
But it promised the impossible: forcibly opening spiritual meridians through breath control and extreme internal qi pressure. According to the margin notes, it had a fatality rate of nine in ten. Those with no roots died quickest. Meridians could rupture, organs fail. Sometimes madness took hold before the end.
Li Yao had read it five times. He had tested the breathing rhythm. He had memorized every diagram and symbol until they appeared behind his eyelids.
Tonight, he would try it anyway.
Because what did he have to lose?
His hut was little more than woven straw and packed earth. Smoke from a single candle twisted upward in the gloom. He barred the door, sat cross-legged, and unrolled the scroll once more, smoothing it carefully.
The ink had faded in parts, but the diagrams were elegant—body outlines with red lines tracing paths from dantian to limbs, mimicking the qi flows in true cultivators. The purge method centred on tension: holding one's breath at specific intervals, compressing internal energy through will alone, until a "false flow" ruptured blockages.
It was madness.
But madness was sometimes the door to greatness.
Li Yao set the scroll aside and closed his eyes. He stilled his mind. The world narrowed.
He began.
Inhale. Hold. Contract. Compress.
Exhale.
Repeat.
Each cycle took ten heartbeats.
By the third, sweat broke along his brow.
By the seventh, veins bulged across his arms and neck. His vision darkened at the edges. Pain coiled in his stomach like a hot blade twisting deeper.
I will not stop.
He bit his tongue and pressed on.
The eighth cycle hit like thunder. Something inside him tore. He doubled over, coughing blood into his lap.
Still, he did not stop.
By the ninth cycle, the pain became noise. Every breath was war. His body screamed for air, but he refused it. Qi—thin, dry, and unwilling—scraped along his flesh like shards of stone. He guided it anyway.
Tenth cycle.
He felt it—a flicker. A spark. Like a candle lit in a storm.
One more.
He clenched his teeth. Blood dripped from his nose. His body swayed.
Eleventh cycle.
Then, in his chest, something cracked—not bone, not flesh, but something deeper. Something spiritual.
There was a flash. A soundless explosion inside him.
Then—stillness.
He awoke hours later, shivering.
The candle had burned down to a stub. His tunic clung to him, soaked in sweat. His limbs trembled like old wood in wind. But when he reached inside himself…
There. A thread. Thin as a hair, golden as dawn. Real.
Qi.
True qi.
Not imagined. Not forced.
Real cultivation.
Li Yao laughed. A hoarse, wild sound. Half sob, half triumph.
He had done it.
He, the rootless boy of Green Pine, had opened a meridian.
Not through fortune. Not through talent. Through pain, through will, through fire.
He had stepped onto the path of cultivation.
The path to the stars.