Snow fell in slow spirals, silent as ash. The small storeroom smelled of damp wood and stale grain, its single paper lantern trembling in the draft from the half-open door.
The man lay sprawled on the packed dirt floor, a widening pool of dark red spreading beneath him. His breath had stopped moments ago.
Li Shen stood over the body, chest heaving. His hands trembled, still clutching the chipped kitchen knife slick with blood.
For a long moment, he simply stared. The cold seemed to fade; the world narrowed to the sight of the man's still form.
The first sensation was heat — a slow, coiling warmth in the pit of his stomach, faint at first, then growing heavier. It rolled through his belly in quiet pulses, settling like molten metal in his core.
Then came something stranger.
It started as a dull pressure at the base of his skull, then sharpened into a prickling ache. Colors danced in his vision, and the lamplight seemed to dim.
A soundless rush of images burst behind his eyes — fleeting, confused, impossible to grasp.
A boy running barefoot through a muddy alley.The clang of a wooden training sword against a post.A tall man with a scar under his left eye barking orders in a dim hall.A thin-lipped girl laughing on the edge of a lotus-filled pond.
The images came faster, overlapping, too quick to hold. Li Shen gasped and staggered back until his shoulder struck the wall. The knife clattered from his fingers.
Then the images shifted — blood-soaked snow, a scream cut short, the sickening weight of a blade biting into flesh. A shadowy figure in black iron armor pressing forward in a storm of blades.
And a name. Clear, cold, and foreign in Li Shen's mind.
Guo Wei.
The pressure in his skull eased, leaving him trembling. But the memories lingered — faint outlines etched into his thoughts, as if someone had taken a chisel to his mind and carved new shapes into it.
He could still feel the weight of a curved blade in his hands, still recall the way Qi had once flowed through another man's meridians, as if he had trained for years.
And yet… these were not his memories.
Li Shen's breathing slowed. The warmth in his belly remained, steady and undeniable. He closed his eyes and reached inward. To his shock, he could see it — or at least sense it — a dim, spinning ember deep within him.
His dantian.
A place he had been told he could never open.
But now, threads of energy flowed from it, brushing against the edges of his limbs, faint but alive.
He opened his eyes, staring down at the body.
"What… are you?" he whispered — though the answer was clear.
Guo Wei had been a Qi Refining Second Layer cultivator. That man's Qi — and some part of his self — now rested in Li Shen.
Something like this wasn't supposed to exist. Cultivation was cultivated; it could not be taken. Not like this.
And yet here he stood.
A sound at the door snapped his attention away.
The sliding door banged open, letting in a gust of cold air. Two outer-sect guards stepped inside, gray-robed and sharp-eyed. Both carried short spears and bore the Cloud Piercing Sect's outer badge on their belts.
Their eyes swept the room and froze on the scene — Li Shen, the knife on the floor, the dead man.
The shorter guard stepped forward. "What happened here?"
Li Shen dropped to his knees, lowering his head until it nearly touched the dirt. He forced his voice to shake.
"Senior brothers… he—he broke in. Killed one of the servants outside… came for me. I don't remember how… the knife… I just—" He let the words dissolve into stammering.
The taller guard crouched by the corpse, turning the body slightly to reveal the black-iron insignia on its shoulder. His lips curled.
"Black Iron Sect," he spat. "That explains it. The raid last night must have scattered some of them into the outer valleys."
The shorter guard grunted. "We'll take him to the elder. You — get back to your work."
Li Shen bowed low, hiding the strange calm behind his eyes. They didn't suspect. To them, this was the luck of a cornered mortal.
He stepped past them into the night. The snow bit at his cheeks, but the cold seemed distant now, dulled by the faint hum of Qi coursing through him. His breath didn't fog as heavily as before.
Each step felt lighter. His senses seemed sharper — the crunch of snow beneath his feet, the distant drip of melting ice from a roofbeam, even the faint scent of pine carried on the wind.
When he reached the servants' bathhouse, he slipped inside and barred the door.
Steam still hung faintly in the air from the day's washing. Kneeling on the smooth planks, Li Shen closed his eyes and focused on the ember in his core.
He willed the Qi to move. It resisted at first, sluggish and unfamiliar — but then something shifted.
A memory surfaced.
A man's voice — Guo Wei's — murmuring a breathing rhythm, his tone low and certain. The sensation of drawing Qi from the air, guiding it down through the chest, into the dantian, then cycling it through the limbs before returning it to the core.
Li Shen followed it instinctively, and the Qi obeyed.
It tingled along his meridians like warm water flowing through frozen pipes.
His eyes opened, wide in disbelief.
It was real.
The thing he'd been denied since birth was now his.
And all it had cost was one man's life.
He sat there for hours, cycling Qi as best he could, each breath settling the warmth more firmly inside him.
Yet the memories of Guo Wei didn't all come at once. They arrived in fragments — a stance practiced under falling snow, the metallic scent of a forge, the echo of a command shouted across a training yard.
Some pieces made no sense, like a locked door in a dream. But Li Shen could feel them waiting, just beyond reach.
When he finally rose, the sky outside had begun to pale. The snow had stopped, and the wind was still.
He stepped into the early morning light. The air was sharp and cold, but his chest felt hot, his limbs light.
His path was clear.
If talent had been denied to him, he would take it from others.
If power could be stolen, he would steal until none could stand before him.
And if the world learned what he was…
He would cut down the world itself.