Rat's chest heaved as he dragged in a breath of thin mountain air. The world still spun from the Sky Steps trial, legs quivering after that brutal ascent. Around him, a handful of surviving candidates nursed their wounds and shot furtive glances his way. How is he still standing? their eyes seemed to say. A few muttered prayers or curses under their breath. Even Lan Yue, usually steady, regarded Rat with open wonder and wariness.
"The mountain only opens for those it notices," Rat overheard one disciple whisper.
At his approach, the other candidates edged back, giving him a wide berth. He realized with a start that they were avoiding his gaze. It wasn't just exhaustion or respect. It was fear, as if he had become something beyond their understanding. Rat's lips twitched wryly. I'm still me, you know. But after surviving trials that should have killed him, even he felt a strange intensity thrumming in his veins.
[Observation: Mortals avert gaze. Perception of subject's thread intensity: high]
The Codex's cool, colorless script flickered in his vision. Rat blinked away the prompt. Thread intensity? Whatever it meant, it only confirmed what everyone felt, that something about him had changed on this unforgiving mountain.
He turned toward the final trial looming ahead. The Horizon Gate awaited at the far edge of the plateau, a massive stone arch carved into the mountain's side, wreathed in coils of mist. Each breath of the Gate sent clouds billowing, a slow inhalation drawing the mist inward, then a thunderous exhalation blasting wind and dust outward. The Gate was breathing, alive with ancient power.
Rat's heart pounded. This was the last obstacle between him and sect acceptance. One final nightmare. He stepped forward, squinting as the Gate exhaled again and a gale nearly threw him off balance. A taller candidate to his left lost their nerve and rushed ahead, attempting to sprint through the arch between breaths.
"Wait!" Lan Yue tried to warn, but too late. The Gate inhaled sharply. The air itself yanked the hapless runner backward with a panicked yelp. In the next instant, a roar of wind exploded outward. The candidate was flung like a rag doll across the stones, rolling to a stop with a groan. He didn't get up. A hush fell as two stewards ran to drag the unconscious aspirant away.
Rat swallowed. So brute force and luck wouldn't carry anyone through. You have to synchronize with it… or overpower it? He had no strength left for the latter. His fingers brushed the humble token at his neck, an old coin he'd kept from the Basin slums. Just a little farther, he told himself. I didn't crawl out of the gutter to fail now.
As he approached the Gate's boundary, the wind stilled to an uncanny calm, the lull before a great storm. The mist around the arch swirled with expectant hunger. Rat took a final steadying breath.
[Survival probability: negligible]
The Codex offered its bleak prognosis in detached text. Rat couldn't help a cracked grin. "Good," he muttered under his breath, "means I won't have to share the view."
He stepped across the threshold. The air erupted at once.
The wind screamed. Rat screamed back. Between them, the horizon waited, patient as eternity.
A wall of force hit him head-on. It felt like standing in front of a crashing tidal wave. Rat dug his heels in, arms crossed before his face. The gale's howl rose to a shriek, deafening. His bones rattled. Every breath was a battle. The cold tore at his lungs, stealing oxygen. It would have been easy, so easy, to collapse, to let that wind carry him into oblivion. A hundred needles of ice seemed to prick into his skin and settle in his heart.
Then, amid the roar, came the whispers.
Soft voices rode the screaming wind, insinuating themselves into Rat's mind. He couldn't make out the language, if it was language at all. Yet the meaning… he felt it. Temptation, sweet and gentle, weaving through the pain.
Warmth. One whisper sighed of warmth, a mother's arms and soft blankets. Rat saw, in a blink, a hazy vision of a hearth-lit room. Steam rose from a bowl of rice porridge on a wooden table. His stomach clenched; he hadn't eaten since before the trials. The comforting voice promised food. Safety. Just give in, rest, and all this pain will end.
Another ghostly murmur promised peace. Rat's watering eyes almost slipped shut. Peace, he'd never known that. A softer death than the fate awaiting him if he kept fighting. He swayed, the ache in his muscles momentarily dulling as if strong arms were cradling him, easing him to the ground. Would it be so bad to surrender?
Somewhere in his fogging mind, alarm bells rang. Surrender? Was he actually considering it? Rat bit his tongue until he tasted blood, forcing himself awake. The cozy kitchen scene wavered, the warm bowl of porridge vanishing into mist. He bared his teeth into the gale, shouting hoarsely, "I already sold my soul for breakfast. The rest of me's out of stock!"
His ragged laugh was swallowed by the storm, but the act of defiance cleared the cotton from his head. The whispers turned colder. The gentle promises became mocking snickers that dispersed like shredded silk.
The wind's fury redoubled, angry now. Rat was ready. "That all you got?" he growled, choking on the air. The Gate answered. A new gale slammed into him, driving him to one knee. The mist coalesced into shapes, twisted figments of memory. Rat's lone eye widened as figures formed in the swirling fog.
Corpses lay strewn across the ground before him, limp and contorted. He recognized their faces with a jolt of horror. They were him, dozens of Rats lying dead, eyes staring blankly. Here was Rat starved to death at five, clutching a moldy crust. There was Rat beaten and broken in a Basin alley, the gutter water red with his blood. And another, and another, each corpse a fate he narrowly escaped, each reminding him how easily the world could have claimed him. A sour taste rose in his throat.
Among the bodies stood a small, ragged child clutching a little girl's hand, both thin as skeletons. Rat knew their faces too. Old companions from the orphan gangs of the Basin. Children he'd fought to protect… children he'd watched die. Their eyes were huge, beseeching. The girl opened her mouth and a hollow voice poured out, not her own. "Why did you survive when we did not? Kneel. You don't deserve to stand."
And then he saw another corpse…his before he transmigrated into this body. His old memories began bubbling up again in his life prior to this world. What he wouldn't do for a cup of ramen noodles at this moment? How long had it been since he had watched K-Pop Hunters with his nephew and niece? He missed those little monsters most of all.
Rat's heart lurched. Guilt, sharpened by grief, stabbed through his chest. The wind pushed down on his shoulders, an invisible weight. His corpse sat up, turning its blank stare on him. The corpse's hand, cold, impossibly strong, latched onto his wrist, trying to drag him down among the dead. Kneel, the wind hissed. Kneel and join him.
For a moment, Rat's will wavered. His knees trembled, not just from effort. Maybe I should… maybe I should just lie down. His vision swam with tears he couldn't blame on the wind alone. The weight of all those lost, all those he failed to save, pressed on his soul.
A jagged line of text flashed erratically across his sight:
[Warning: Perception overlap. Thread density exceeding threshold.]
The Codex was glitching, its normally orderly script warping into static. The illusions were messing with its senses, with his senses. None of this was real. Or was it? The pain felt real. The guilt was real enough.
Rat squeezed his eye shut. No. This isn't how my story ends. Not on his knees, not in regret. He had clawed his way through too much to quit now. Gritting his teeth until his jaw hurt, Rat forced his free hand to move. He reached up and flicked his old body's forehead lightly, like he was scolding a troublesome child. "Sorry," he rasped, voice cracking. "I don't have time to die today."
His own empty eyes widened in shock. In that split second, Rat ripped his arm free from the corpse's grip and lurched back to his feet. The corpse visions wailed and clutched at him, but Rat stood tall, swaying like a reed in a storm. He refused to kneel.
The wind howled in frustration, and the phantoms of the dead slowly crumbled into mist, blown apart by the gale. The pressure on Rat's shoulders lifted slightly. The illusions had failed to break him.
He could sense the Horizon Gate's fury in every gust, but beneath it, something else, a pattern. The gale wasn't constant; it had peaks and lulls, like… like breathing. Heaven's breath given form. Lan Yue's earlier whisper echoed in Rat's mind: "The mountain only opens for those it notices." Maybe this living Gate would only open for those who could resonate with it.
Resonance. The word twined with a distant memory, Rat dimly recalled a lesson, maybe from the Codex, maybe from a past life, that true power lay not in opposing the world, but moving with it. A rat survived not by wrestling the cat head-on, but by slipping through cracks the cat couldn't follow. Bend, don't break.
He inhaled deeply, steadying his pounding heart. Instead of fighting the wind, Rat closed his eye and listened to it. In… out… a cycle as old as the earth. He began to move his Qi, guiding what little spiritual energy he had in tandem with the rhythm. The next time the Gate inhaled, Rat breathed in slow and deep. When the Gate exhaled with a shrieking gale, Rat let his Qi flow out, with the gust rather than against it. His body trembled on the brink of collapse, but he persisted, matching breath for breath.
The raging wind began to change. What had been a chaotic tempest turned into a dance around him. Each inhale still pulled at his limbs, but now it felt almost like a tug from an elder brother, rough but not malicious. Each exhale pushed against him, but no longer to fling him away. It was testing him, like a firm hand on his shoulders, judging if he would remain upright. Rat fell into a trance of breath and Qi. One inhale. One exhale. His heartbeat synchronized with the pulse of the mountain.
All at once, stillness coalesced in the eye of the storm. Rat opened his eye. The wind was still screaming around him, but in a ring, as if diverted. He stood at the center of a calm sphere no wider than a single stride. The Gate's mist now swirled around that sphere like curious dragons around a pearl. It was embracing him.
With each breath, Rat felt his Qi channels widening, strengthening. The energy of the storm wasn't crushing him anymore; it was flowing through him. Inhale, cool power rushed into his dantian. Exhale, his aura flowed out, twining with the Gate's own Qi. His senses burned with clarity. He could feel every current in the air, every grain of dust suspended in the light. At that moment, Rat understood a new technique, not from a scroll or a master, but written in the rhythm of the world itself.
[Skill Refined: Horizon Flow (Incomplete)]
[Thread Density Rising.]
The Codex lines flashed by, crisp and certain. Rat barely registered them; he was immersed in the strange euphoria of harmony. His ragged breathing had smoothed, each inhale drawing deeper reserves of strength. The pain in his muscles ebbed as warm Qi coursed through his meridians in a brand-new pattern, the beginning of a powerful cultivation art born directly from the Horizon Gate's trial. Incomplete, yes, but his now. Hard-won.
Beyond the arch, the gathered disciples and elders watched in stunned silence. The shrieking winds had quieted to a low, harmonic hum around Rat, as if the Gate was singing with him.
Lan Yue's eyes were huge. She pressed a hand to her chest, feeling the vibration in her own lungs. "He's aligning with it," she whispered, awestruck. No one had ever talked about what lay beyond the Horizon Gate because no initiate ever lasted long enough to see this. Rat stood wreathed in ethereal calm, the storm revolving around him like a dancer's ribbon.
Jin Tao, the brash young cultivator who had mocked Rat at the start of the trials, could only stare in outrage and fear. "That's impossible!" he shouted over the odd quiet. His words rang hollow in the thinning wind. "He's just a gutter rat!" Jin Tao's face was pale, disbelief etched in every line.
Nearby, the sect steward's hands trembled around the token of office he carried. In decades of overseeing entry trials, never had he witnessed the Horizon Gate bow to an initiate. "The mountain… it's accepting him," the old steward breathed, scarcely believing his own words. His mind raced, recalling half-legendary accounts from a century ago. With a shaking voice, he murmured, "The last one to earn the Gate's mark became a Core Elder." His fellow elders exchanged stunned glances. If history was repeating, this filthy, half-dead street orphan was about to receive Heaven's blessing that only sect prodigies ever knew.
Back within the arch, Rat felt a sudden heat ignite in his forehead, right between his brows. It started as a pinprick and grew to a searing brand. "Ah!" He flinched, nearly breaking his breath rhythm. The pain was fierce, but brief. In its wake, a deep thrumming power settled under his skin at that spot, like an ember awaiting kindling.
[Horizon Mark acquired. Function unknown. Awaiting thread stabilization.]
The Codex's text blinked in his peripheral vision, but Rat had no chance to ponder it. The Horizon Gate itself was shining now. High above on the keystone of the arch, ancient carvings glowed with incandescent light. A deep rumble echoed as the Gate took one final breath. Rat sensed approval in that reverberation, as if the mountain itself rumbled, "You have proven yourself."
He let out the breath he'd been holding. His job here was done. Whatever happened next, he had given everything. The Gate exhaled one last time, not a gale but a gentle, slow sigh. A pillar of white light burst down from the arch, engulfing Rat entirely.
The light didn't just blind him; it pierced through him, filling every inch of his body. He felt weightless. Fleetingly, Rat realized his feet were no longer on the ground, he was floating within the column of radiance. He tried to shout, but no sound came out. There was no fear, strangely. Wrapped in that light, he felt safe, as if cradled by giant hands.
The radiance bored into his lone eye, overwhelming his senses. In that split second, Rat's vision changed. The world around him dissolved into a tapestry of glowing lines. He saw a web of fates stretching across the mountain, brilliant threads connecting every living being, every rock and tree, in a shimmering network. Each thread pulsed with possibility. Rat would have gasped if he could; it was the Codex's sight, but far more vivid than ever before, as if the Horizon Gate's power had amplified his ability to glimpse destiny.
Among the countless argent strands, one thread shone brighter, anchored to Rat's own heart. My life's thread… It glimmered a fierce gold, taut with energy. But wrapped around it, like a venomous serpent, was another strand, a thread that glowed black, coiled tight around his golden fate. The black thread pulsed with an ominous light, resisting the brilliance around it. Seeing it sent a chill through Rat's soul. What… is that? Before he could even form the full thought, the vision snapped shut.
The Gate inhaled again, its deepest breath yet, and the luminous pillar recoiled as if sucked back into the archway. The world lurched. With a final whoosh of air, the light and mist vanished into the stone.
When the dazzling afterimage faded, all that remained was silence on the mountaintop. A circle of scorched stone marked where Rat had stood an instant before. Lan Yue's hopeful smile faltered as she scanned the empty space. Jin Tao stumbled forward, eyes frantic, as if hoping to find a charred body. He found nothing, but a slim figure standing in the glow.
High above, the Horizon Gate's carvings dimmed back to cold stone. The trial was over. The mountain had stopped roaring, but it hadn't stopped watching.