The space between heartbeats stretched into an eternity. Yun Zhao advanced, her footsteps silent on the scorched earth. The Shard of Celestial Purity was no longer hovering; it was held firmly in her grasp, its light a focused, hungry gleam. The air itself seemed to crystallize around her, the very particles of dust and qi freezing in deference to her absolute, chilling intent.
Lin Feng's mind, moments before a frantic storm of calculations and fear, went quiet. This was the end. He had gambled the entire board, leveraged every advantage, and it had not been enough. The chasm between their power was not a gap to be bridged by cunning, but a cosmic void. He looked at the Rust-Steel Mantis. The creature stood its ground, its amber eyes fixed on the approaching threat, its body humming with a low, defiant frequency even as hydraulic fluid leaked from its severed limb stump. There was no fear in their link, only a final, grim resolve. It would fight until its core shattered.
Partners, the thought came to Lin Feng, clean and simple.
His hand went to the pouch at his belt. His fingers closed around the dull-grey stone. It was warm. No, it was hot. A heat that had nothing to do with the surrounding fires or his own feverish skin. It was a deep, internal warmth, like a miniature sun held in his palm.
As Yun Zhao raised her sword, the technique's name a silent prayer on her lips—"[Frostbloom Annihilation]"—Lin Feng did the only thing left to him. He didn't try to block. He didn't try to run. He poured everything he was—his defiance, his will to live, his gratitude for his strange, mechanical partner, the tiny, stubborn spark of qi in his Dantian—into the stone.
And he begged.
It was not a prayer to any god he knew. It was an offering to the cosmos. To the principle of Symbiosis. To the Path he had only just begun to walk.
We are not ready to end. Our song is not finished. Help us.
The world did not slow down. It stopped.
Yun Zhao's sword, mid-swing, froze, a petal of incipient frost forming at its tip. The emerald flames in the defile hung motionless. The dust motes in the air became fixed stars in a stagnant firmament.
Only Lin Feng, the stone in his hand, and the Rust-Steel Mantis existed within the flow of time.
The stone erupted with light. Not a flash, but a deep, resonant pulse that made no sound yet vibrated through every atom in the vicinity. The grey surface became transparent, and within its heart, Lin Feng saw the star-dragon constellations, the phoenixes of plasma, all swirling in a furious, beautiful dance.
The pulse washed over him.
It was not an influx of power. It was an unlocking.
The seed of knowledge the stone had planted—the principles of [Qi-Weave Synchronization] and [Neural-Link Resonance]—bloomed into a terrifying, magnificent fruit. A new technique, a desperate, foundational secret of the Starfall Tamer, imprinted itself onto his soul.
[Spirit-Tech Symbiotic Overdrive].
The principle was simple, its execution bordering on suicidal. It was not a merging of minds, but a temporary fusion of cores. A synchronization so profound that the Tamer and the Beast would become a single, composite entity for a fleeting moment, sharing their energy, their strengths, and their very life force in a multiplicative explosion of power.
The cost? A catastrophic feedback loop. If the resonance wasn't perfect, if the wills weren't perfectly aligned, the resulting dissonance would shred both their Dantians and Spirit-Tech Cores into dust.
There was no time to consider. No time to practice. It was this, or oblivion.
Through the frozen moment, Lin Feng's gaze met the Mantis's multifaceted eyes. He didn't need the neural-link. He projected the entirety of the technique, the glorious risk, the almost-certain doom.
The Mantis's response was instantaneous. Not just acceptance, but a fierce, eager yearning. It was a creature born of fusion; this was its truest, most natural state.
NOW.
Time snapped back into motion.
Yun Zhao's sword completed its arc, releasing a wave of absolute zero cold that flash-froze the air in a spreading wave of crystalline death, aimed to erase both boy and beast from existence.
In that same infinitesimal slice of time, Lin Feng and the Rust-Steel Mantis acted as one.
He didn't draw the chaotic qi of the Wastes. He reached inward, to the very spark of his own life force, to the unique, woven qi he had so painstakingly created. He offered it all, holding nothing back, a total and utter surrender of self.
The Mantis did the same. It opened the floodgates of its Spirit-Tech Core, releasing the raw, potent fusion of biological vitality and stellar energy that was its essence.
Their energies did not collide. They braided.
The [Spirit-Tech Symbiotic Overdrive] took hold.
A dome of light erupted around them, but it was like no light Yun Zhao had ever seen. It was not pure, nor was it chaotic. It was a swirling, living nebula of gold and silver and azure, shot through with arcs of lightning that were both spiritual and electrical. Within it, the forms of Lin Feng and the Mantis blurred, their outlines dissolving into the energy field.
A hum filled the canyon, a note so low and powerful it felt less like a sound and more like a tectonic plate shifting. The frozen wave of [Frostbloom Annihilation] met the edge of the glowing dome and simply… ceased. It didn't shatter or melt; it was unmade, its energy absorbed into the swirling maelstrom.
From within the dome, a shape began to form.
It was a phantom, a construct of solidified light and intent. It had the general, terrifying silhouette of the Rust-Steel Mantis, but larger, more refined. Its form was sheathed in plates of shimmering, hard-light armor, and its scythes were no longer mere alloy, but blazing talons of coherent energy. And at the center of this phantom's chest, where a core would be, was the faint, visible outline of Lin Feng, cross-legged and悬浮, his eyes burning with the same azure fire as the dome, his hands outstretched as if conducting a symphony of power.
This was not a fusion of their bodies, but a projection of their unified spirit—a Symbiotic Avatar.
The Avatar moved.
It was faster than the Mantis had ever been, faster than Yun Zhao's eyes could track. It didn't walk; it phased, disappearing from one point and reappearing in another, leaving a fading afterimage of starlight.
It raised one energy-scythe and swung.
There was no elegant technique, no named form. It was a raw, brutal discharge of their combined will to survive. A crescent wave of hybrid energy—part spiritual force, part destabilized plasma—ripped through the space between them.
Yun Zhao's eyes widened fully for the first time. This was not the power of a Body Tempering realm cultivator and a Tier-2 mutant. This was something else entirely. Something that resonated with a law she did not understand. She brought Shard of Celestial Purity up in a desperate parry.
The impact was thunderous. The pure light of her sword clashed against the chaotic, symbiotic energy. For a moment, they held, a contest of fundamental opposites. Then, with a sound like a galaxy tearing, the Symbiotic Avatar's attack overwhelmed hers.
The crescent wave shattered her defense and struck her square in the chest.
The pristine white robes, woven with defensive formations, flared with blinding light and then dimmed, the fabric scorched and torn. Yun Zhao was thrown backwards like a discarded doll, her body carving a trench in the ground for twenty yards before she slammed into the base of the collapsed engine housing. A spray of blood, shockingly red against her pale skin, misted from her lips. The Shard of Celestial Purity clattered from her grip, its light flickering erratically.
She lay there, stunned, her qi in disarray, her body broken. The absolute certainty in her eyes was gone, replaced by a world-shattering confusion. What… what was that?
The Symbiotic Avatar flickered, its form becoming unstable. The Overdrive had a time limit, and the cost was now coming due. Lin Feng, within the avatar, felt as if his soul were being fed through a shredder. Every cell in his body screamed in agony. He could feel the Mantis's core overheating, its systems screaming in sympathetic pain.
They could not maintain this. They had one shot, and they had used it.
The avatar raised its other scythe, not towards Yun Zhao, but towards the canyon wall above her. With the last dregs of their combined power, it fired a single, precise beam.
The beam didn't cause a large collapse. It targeted a specific, unstable pillar of rock. The pillar shattered, triggering a controlled landslide that poured down, not to crush Yun Zhao, but to entomb her, to seal her within the rubble, buying them precious time.
As the rocks began to fall, the Symbiotic Avatar dissolved. The dome of light vanished.
Lin Feng collapsed to his hands and knees, vomiting violently, his body wracked with tremors. He felt hollowed out, scraped clean. His Dantian was a blackened, painful void. The Azure Pupil was dead and silent behind his eyes.
The Rust-Steel Mantis stumbled, its lights flickering, its movements jerky and uncoordinated. The glow of its core was dim, and the severed limb stump sparked fitfully. The Overdrive had pushed it to the absolute brink of system failure.
The roar of the landslide filled the canyon. When it settled, a fresh mound of rock and debris sealed the area where Yun Zhao had fallen.
Silence returned, deeper and more profound than before.
They had survived. They had wounded a cultivator from the heavens. They had, against all logic and reason, won.
But it was a Pyrrhic victory.
Lin Feng crawled, every movement agony, towards the Mantis. He placed a trembling hand on its scarred carapace. The neural-link was gone, severed by the catastrophic energy expenditure. He could no longer feel its mind, only the faint, distressed hum of its cooling systems.
"We have to go," he rasped, the words tearing at his raw throat. "She's not dead. And that... that signal... others will have felt it."
The pulse from the stone, the eruption of the Symbiotic Overdrive—it would have been a beacon to anyone with the senses to perceive it. The Sky-Spire Sect would not send just one disciple next time.
Using the fallen freighter wall as a crutch, Lin Feng hauled himself to his feet. The Mantis, with a great effort of will, forced itself to stand, listing heavily to one side.
They were a broken boy and a crippled machine, two wounded partners leaning on each other in the aftermath of a miracle they could never hope to repeat.
Together, they turned their backs on the tomb of the Sky-Spire disciple and began a slow, painful limp deeper into the heart of the Rust-Fang Wastes. They left behind their sanctuary, their carefully laid traps, and the shattered certainty of a heavenly envoy.
A new truth now guided their steps, cold and hard and undeniable: the Path of the Starfall Tamer was a path walked on a knife's edge, with heaven's wrath at their backs and the unknown, yawning abyss of the Wastes ahead. Their first trial was over. The long, desperate flight was just beginning.