Lin Huang sat cross-legged beneath the Bodhi tree, breath sinking and rising in a steady tide as leaf-filtered sunlight danced across his face. The morning wind smelled faintly of dew and bark. An air of serenity around him.
Then, like a fault line ripping open, a terrifying aura surged—vast, crushing, a pressure as if the sky itself were loosening its bolts. His eyes snapped open.
It felt like it came from the teacher's side of the dojo, he thought, a sliver of confusion crossing his features. "From the teacher's… quarters?" he muttered, still unsure.
At that exact moment, Wang Chen looked up. Their gazes met.
Lin Huang froze. Something immeasurably heavy lay behind the teacher's eyes—cold and vast, like a black tide about to break. For a heartbeat his mind went blank, thoughts erased by sheer gravity.
Only after another breath did he find his voice. "Teacher… what was that terrifying aura just now? For a moment it felt as if the world was collapsing…"
He wanted to say more, to give shape to that suffocating pressure, but the words crumbled before they formed. Nothing he knew could hold it.
Wang Chen's eyes shook for a fraction of a second. He had expected Lin Huang to sense anything touching the Tower. Then, remembering the boy's Great Dao destiny—whatever that truly meant, though it could only be good—his expression smoothed.
"Teacher was just practicing a simple technique. No big deal," he said lightly. "Thankfully, you warned me this time. Otherwise, I might have gone overboard."
Hearing that, Lin Huang drew in a sharp breath of cold air to steady himself. A simple technique could cause such a commotion…?
Wang Chen, as if the matter were dust on the sleeve, closed his eyes and sank back into stillness.
A beat later, a ripple of strangeness threaded through his mind. Memories—no, structures of understanding—were planted in his head like a seed taking root. They spread quickly, pushing pale shoots through his sea of consciousness, roots spearing deep.
"Status," Wang Chen said quietly.
[Name: Wang Chen]
[Lifespan: 25/35]
[Race: Mortal]
[Cultivation: Rank 4 Qi Refining Realm]
[Talent: Tower of Infinite Enlightenment (Divine), Indomitable Will (Unique)]
[Abilities: Sword Heart (Infant stage)] [Techniques: Three Turn Sword Style] [Potential: Miserable (Raise one Qi Refining disciple to improve potential)]
Magical Skills: Doomclock (Rare)
Everything was as before—yet a new category had appeared, cold and unmistakable.
He focused. The dojo peeled away. In the void below him, a colossal clock unfurled, so vast it seemed to shoulder the world. Its face was wrought of shadowed brass and dead starlight, and from it bled a chill so deep it felt like time itself had teeth. Even death could not slip its grasp.
The gigantic hand moved with an iron tick, and the space in front of it folded like paper. Wang Chen's vision twisted. He forced a long breath, to calm his heart.
Illusion, he told himself. The moment his will settled, the dojo stitched itself back together around him.
Understanding flowed. He could set a timer of death on anyone weaker than himself. When the set time arrived, the target would die. If that were all, it would be merely vicious, not worthy of the Tower. What made it terrible was the nature of that death—almost absolute. Almost. Someone more than two realms above him could still defuse the timer.
Enough. He let the knowledge sink and closed his eyes again. On the surface he might look composed, but inside he was scraped raw. A year of fighting without a single day of rest left scars you couldn't see.
Without noticing, he slipped into a deep, restorative meditation.
Across the open ground, Lin Huang opened his eyes once more despite himself. The sensation from earlier lingered, a phantom weight on his lungs. When he glanced at Wang Chen, it was like staring into an all-devouring black hole. He had felt something like this only once—when mysterious elders in the past tried to take him as a disciple. Back then he still possessed his innate sword bone, and pride had been a shield. He had waved them off, unwilling to bow to "random old men."
If he had accepted… would he be here now, wounded and adrift?
The thought churned up, bitter as old tea. Lin Huang forced it down and shook his head. What was he thinking? Lingering on the past was a coward's habit.
He drew in a breath and closed his eyes again.
Moments later, he sighed and opened them. Too many splinters of thought crowded his mind. No focus. No edge.
Time passed in quiet degrees. In the blink of an eye, dawn stretched into day.
Wang Chen remained seated as if turned to stone, breath thinned to nothing.
Lin Huang did not disturb him. Experts sometimes meditated for days. He had even heard of seniors who sat unmoving for years, waking only when their sect or clan grazed the cliff-edge of ruin.
He did what he'd been told: a ten-kilometer run, a hundred push-ups, and a hundred sit-ups. Even injured as he was yesterday, such things were child's play.
He didn't understand why the teacher would assign such mundane drills. Puzzlement filled his head, but he obeyed.
After the small workout, he cleaned the dojo from gate to garden, careful and thorough. By the time he was done, the sun had climbed into the open sky. Under its schorching rays, his figure took on a quiet radiance.
A small group of young men and women heading toward a nearby dojo stole glances in his direction, their eyes filled with confusion as though they were seeing the dojo for the first time. Lin Huang ignored them and made his way for the library. For all its humble face, the Phoenix and Dragon Dojo was not small. It held four areas: the training hall, the library, the open ground, and the little garden where the Bodhi tree grew.
The library sat opposite the training hall.
Lin Huang remembered the teacher's instructions from yesterday. He didn't comprehend the intent, but he refused to disappoint his master on the very first day. After sweeping the main gate, he went straight to the stacks, stopping before the first shelf he came to.
From the outside, the library looked modest. Inside, the books ran like river water—too many to count.
Not wanting to waste time, he plucked a book at random and opened it without expectation. The cover bore four simple words: The World Around Us. A woman in a strange white suit stared out, a glass tube held between careful fingers.
His hopes were low. The writing inside was plain to the point of lifeless, as if a machine had arranged the words. Yet the paper cut his expectations in half—it was astonishingly thin, whisper-light compared to the thick manuscripts he was used to.
Still, he wasn't impressed. Cultivators had long since moved to spiritual slips for storing knowledge.
He skimmed a line—then froze. He couldn't understand it. At all.
He leaned closer. Pain prickled behind his eyes, a pressure like a headache blooming from nowhere. He gritted his teeth and persisted.
Sweat beaded along his brow. His hands trembled despite himself.
Still Lin Huang comprehension isn't to be underestimated.
Five minutes crawled by. At last he parsed the first sentence: "Do you know what the world around us is made of? Countless small particles called atoms…"
The words clicked, and the world tilted. Lin Huang's vision went white. He crumpled forward and hit the floor with a soft, graceless thud.
Silence settled once again.
In the third hour of the afternoon, Wang Chen's eyes opened. He rubbed his temple; the ringing in his head was now only an echo. Better. Manageable.
His gaze slid outward, cutting through distance until it landed on Lin Huang sprawled on the library floor, a book splayed beside him.
Asleep, by the looks of it.
Instead of disappointment, a faint smile tugged at Wang Chen's mouth. Indeed, no matter the world, a textbook had the uncanny ability to put anyone to sleep.
He glanced over the shelves with a soft exhale. He had gathered these books in his past life, one by one, so that the kids who came to train could keep pace with their studies. If their grades fell, parents would pull them out without a second thought. When it was needed, he had even tutored those who struggled.
strangely for some reason they had appeared here, at first he had frowned and was even anxious but after some thought he attributed it had something to do with his transmigration.
thinking about such things would lead him nowhere as such he stopped thinking about it.
He stretched, easing the stiffness from his limbs. The light drifted, warm against the floorboards.
Then his eyes narrowed. A thread of hostility tugged at the edge of his senses—distant, but sharp.
Blood Fang Gang? Possibly. He wasn't sure.
Curiosity flickered. If there were Blood Fang fools nosing around, he could also test his new skill.
He rose without a sound.