The grey world was easier to navigate this time.
The vertigo was less intense, the phantom whispers a background hum he was learning to tolerate.
Lin Feng stood in the center of his small room, the black wood tablet cool in his hands.
He ignored the weeping woman and the despondent old man.
His focus was on the third echo, the one that felt like a shard of broken glass.
The swordsman.
He stood in the corner of Lin Feng's room, a translucent figure perpetually trapped in a sequence of frantic, jerky movements.
His form was a mess, overextended lunges, unbalanced footwork, a grip on his phantom sword that was too tight.
It was the physical manifestation of desperation.
Lin Feng took a steadying breath. He had learned from the scribe; passive observation granted understanding.
To truly learn from this one, he would have to do more. He would have to connect.
He focused his will, not pushing energy, but opening a channel.
He reached out with his mind and touched the edge of the swordsman's looping regret.
The world did not just grey out. It screamed.
A torrent of raw, chaotic emotion slammed into him.
—the taste of cheap wine, sour and sharp—
—the jeering laughter of the other disciples, "Drunken Lei! Worthless Lei!"—
—the searing shame of failure, again and again—
—a single, perfect sword stroke, glimpsed in a dream, always just out of reach—
This was Lei, the Drunken Swordsman. A disciple from a century ago who had tried to forge a unique path, blending the fluid, unpredictable movements of a drunkard with the Verdant Cloud Sect's rigid sword arts.
He had been ridiculed, his techniques declared heresy.
He had died alone in this sect, his name a joke.
Lin Feng gasped, staggering under the weight of Lei's humiliation.
It was so much more potent than the scribe's quiet despair.
This was a raging fire of shame and stubborn pride.
He felt the phantom's muscle memory burning into his own limbs, the awkward stances, the wild swings. It was useless. It was failure.
He tried to pull back, to sever the connection, but the echo clung to him, its desperation a hook in his soul.
It didn't want to be forgotten. It wanted to be completed.
'Show me,' Lin Feng thought, the words a desperate plea in the storm of foreign memory. 'Show me the stroke from your dream.'
The phantom's movements shifted. The frantic flailing coalesced.
Lei's form still wavered, still off-balance, but the intent behind the final lunge sharpened.
It was a desperate, all-or-nothing thrust, born from a stumble, putting every ounce of a twisted, off-kilter momentum into the tip of the sword.
It was flawed, suicidal in a real fight… but it was also fast. Unpredictably, deceptively fast.
The knowledge seared itself into Lin Feng's mind: the "Staggering Viper's Thrust."
The connection broke.
Lin Feng collapsed to his knees, vomiting nothing but bile onto the dirt floor.
His head pounded, and his body ached as if he had just practiced the flawed form for a full day.
The metallic taste of another man's failure was thick on his tongue, mixed with the ghost of sour wine.
But the technique was his. A single, complete, if deeply imperfect, martial technique.
He stayed on the floor for a long time, waiting for the tremors to subside.
This power was a double-edged sword. Every gain came with a piece of another's soul, another's pain.
He was building his foundation on a graveyard.
---
The next day, his body still felt heavy with residual fatigue, but a new, grim determination propelled him forward.
He completed his chores with robotic efficiency, his mind replaying the "Staggering Viper's Thrust" over and over.
He needed to practice it. Not in the grey world, but in the real one.
He waited until the late afternoon, when most disciples were in meditation, and slipped into a secluded bamboo grove at the sect's edge, a place he sometimes went to be truly alone.
He found a straight, fallen branch of suitable weight and length.
Holding it like a sword, he fell into the opening stance he had absorbed from Lei's memory.
It felt unnatural, his body protesting the awkward distribution of weight.
He began the sequence leading to the thrust.
His steps were clumsy, his balance precarious.
He looked, he was sure, exactly like the laughingstock Lei had been.
He practiced until his muscles screamed, until the sweat dripped from his brow and his hands were raw.
He was so focused on mimicking the phantom's movements that he didn't hear the approach of footsteps until it was too late.
"Well, well. Look what the wind blew in."
Lin Feng froze, the branch held in a mid-thrust.
It was Brother Hu and his two lackeys. The same ones from yesterday.