The world was a roaring, tumbling cacophony of red mist and shattered stone. Li Tian fell, the wind hammering the breath from his lungs. The Alpha's enraged bellow echoed from above, mingling with the shriek of tearing rock. He twisted in the air, a leaf in a storm, his mind a singular point of focus: survive the impact.
A jutting rib of rock flashed past. He angled his body, his shoulder taking the brunt of the blow. Skin tore. Agony flared. But it spun him, slowing his descent. His outstretched fingers snagged a hanging, root-like vine. It held for a heartbeat, then ripped from the wall with a sickening tear. But it was enough. He glimpsed his target: a slanted, muddy shelf jutting from the gorge wall twenty feet below.
This was the moment. There was no room for error.
As his feet slammed toward the shelf, he didn't brace. He opened. A coin-sized devouring vortex formed at the sole of his right foot, aimed not at Qi, but at the raw, kinetic force of the fall.
The backlash was instant and blinding. White fire shot up his calves. His knees jolted with a force that made his vision flicker black at the edges. But the technique worked. The brutal, bone-shattering impact was reduced to a brutal, joint-wrenching jolt. He crumpled, rolling across the muddy stone, every nerve screaming, but alive. Alive.
He pushed himself up, his body a symphony of fresh pain layered over the old. The Red Gorge was a narrow, vertical wound in the world. The walls wept a thin, iron-scented condensation. A thread of crimson water, no wider than his hand, traced the floor, hissing softly where it touched the stone. He stumbled to its edge and knelt, splashing the acidic water on his torn face and hands. It stung, but it was clean. He focused, cycling the Heaven Swallowing Art in a tiny, controlled loop, bleeding the fresh hostile Qi from the impact into the wet gravel beneath him. The pain receded from a shriek to a manageable throb.
From high above, the rhythmic thump-thump of ape chests answered each other. And beneath that, a subtler sound: tap… tap… the deliberate dislodging of pebbles. He looked up, but the mist hid everything except shifting silhouettes. Human hands were still guiding his fate.
A new threat descended. Not the Alpha, but a larger, more scarred ape—an Enforcer. A thick white scar ran over one milky eye, and its forearms were a roadmap of old battles. It moved down the wet rock face with a grim, deliberate purpose.
The fight was a brutal game of vertical chess. The ape swiped with claws that scraped grooves in the stone. Li Tian used the wall, pushing off with two quick steps upward before dropping past the beast's blind side. When a glancing blow caught his guard, he devoured a single, hair-thin thread of the force. The familiar, hot-needle pain lanced his arm. He immediately dropped and pressed his palm to the gravel, visualizing the bleed-off not as a straight line, but as a tight, outward spiral. To his shock, the dispersing pain seemed to lessen faster, the hostile energy scattering more efficiently. A small refinement, born of desperation.
Vent in a spiral, not a line. The thought felt like his own, yet carried the weight of ancient experience. The ring on his finger was warm.
High above, a robed silhouette pressed a palm-sized "shove" talisman against a precariously balanced boulder. "Herd him left—toward the hole," a whisper was lost in the mist. The boulder tipped, then fell.
Li Tian sensed the shift in the air a second before the shadow engulfed him. He threw himself to the right as the massive rock smashed the spot where he'd been standing, exploding into shrapnel. The timing was too perfect. Herders. The word solidified in his mind.
The Enforcer ape, cornering him against a slick, concave section of wall, saw an opportunity. It committed to a powerful, two-fisted overhead smash. Li Tian feigned a slip in the mud. As the ape's fists cratered the stone where he'd been, he used the rebound, kicking off the wall. In the microsecond of the ape's imbalance, he devoured a whisper of the shockwave traveling up its arms. He stole not power, but stability. The ape staggered. Li Tian's counterstrike was simple and brutal—a short, sharp punch to the jaw, fueled by every ounce of refined Qi he possessed.
The ape reeled back, roaring, and grabbed his leg. Without hesitation, Li Tian jammed a splintered, thorn-covered root he'd snatched from the ground into the beast's gripping palm. The ape bellowed in surprise and pain, its grip loosening. Li Tian hammered the side of its head with a rock. The creature stumbled backward, crashing to one knee in the acidic stream. Steam rose as the water bit into its hide. A final, desperate throat punch with the rock's sharp edge ended the fight. He didn't wait to extract a core. He immediately pressed his hands to the ground, performing the new spiral bleed-off. His body trembled with exhaustion.
A cooler draft of air drew his eye. A low cave spur, half-hidden by hanging moss, yawned in the gorge wall. Inside, the air held a metallic tang. Faint, time-smoothed glyphs were carved around the entrance. Deeper within, a thumbnail-sized shard of dark metal embedded in the wall glinted with a faint, star-like light. The ring pulsed, a clear, guiding warmth.
He pocketed the star-metal shard, its coolness a strange comfort. The Alpha's roar shook dust from the ceiling. Shadows moved at the gorge's rim—both simian and human. The cave was a refuge, but also a potential tomb.
He slipped inside, the relative silence a relief. But the sound of skittering pebbles followed him. Someone was coming.
A sharp, sizzling crack echoed from the entrance. A human-thrown explosive talisman detonated at the cave mouth. The world dissolved into thunder and falling rock. The entrance collapsed, sealing him in utter darkness.
Then, from the deep black ahead, dormant formation lines flickered awake, tracing the walls with veins of cold, hungry starlight.