The sky thickened.
Not with clouds. Not with rain.
But with something older, rougher:
the scent of pressure, as if the world had been holding its breath for too long.
Heng Zhen stood upon the stone where he usually sat. But today, his body felt heavy. Not from age, nor from wounds. But because something around him… refused to be still.
Chaosqi.
Hundunqi.
It was beginning to thicken. No longer gathering as directionless mist, but forming a faint vortex on the eastern horizon. A world that had lain silent and wild for fifty thousand years was now stirring. Not because of mankind, not because of war. But because it had realized something not born of it had begun to grow within its own body.
And the world did not like that.
Lu Wen coughed, his breath short. He pointed at the sky. "Why is it… red?"
"That's not light," Heng Zhen said quietly. "That's intent."
Lu Wen stiffened. "Intent… from the world?"
Heng Zhen nodded. "Chaosqi is not just power. It is the world's memory of the first chaos. It carries the remnants of will from when the universe first screamed. It cannot speak… but it can feel. And now, it feels threatened."
"Threatened by what?"
"Silence."
Lu Wen didn't understand. But he didn't ask further.
That day, some people from the north arrived in the valley. They were not ordinary wanderers. Their bodies were marked with crude carvings, bluish-red lines on their arms pulsing, as if something moved beneath their skin.
"We're chasing something," said one of them, a tall man with his hair braided short.
"What is it?" Lu Wen asked.
"The emergence of an unknown energy. Light. Silent. But unwilling to submit."
Lu Wen turned to his teacher. But Heng Zhen only closed his eyes.
He knew. The world was no longer merely stirring it was now searching for the source of its imbalance.
Yuanqi did not seek to dominate the world.
But that very refusal made it foreign.
And in a world born of chaos, something that desires to hold nothing… appears as the most dangerous enemy.
At night, the valley was no longer quiet.
The air felt as though it might crack.
And in the midst of that tension, Heng Zhen sat again — this time, not to listen, but to endure.