Li Yao did not return to the outpost. He became a permanent fixture at the edge of the Void Corridors, a solitary figure sitting in the lotus position upon a fragment of stable rock, surrounded by the screaming chaos. He was a gardener tending to a universe-sized bonsai tree, pruning one twisted branch at a time.
His days fell into a new rhythm. He would focus on a single, specific tear in the Weave—a place where Gravity had become repulsive, or where Time looped in a one-second knot. He would meditate, feeling the "pain" of the broken law, the way its intended function was frustrated and distorted. Then, with infinite patience, he would graft a thread of his void essence, acting as a conceptual splint, and guide the broken ends to re-knot.
Each repair was microscopic. Mending a tear the size of a handspan could take a week of concentrated effort. The scale of the Corridors was astronomical. It was like trying to empty an ocean with a teaspoon.
But the teaspoons added up.
After a year, a patch of space the size of a small village around him was stable. The light was normal, the laws functioned, the air was still and quiet. It was an oasis of reason in the desert of madness. The outpost guardians, who had watched him with skepticism, now looked upon him with a reverence bordering on worship. They began calling the stabilized zone "The Warden's Garden."
Commander Goran would visit the edge of the stable zone, never daring to step inside for fear of disrupting Li Yao's work. "The rate of expansion... it's slowed," he reported one day, his voice thick with emotion. "For the first time in a millennium, the Corridors are not growing. They are holding at their current border. You are not just healing the past; you are stopping the bleeding."
Li Yao merely nodded, his focus already on the next frayed thread, a nasty tangle where the Laws of Identity and Reflection had become cross-wired, creating an infinite hall of mirrors that trapped light and thought.
His work was not without cost. The constant, intimate contact with raw, broken reality was etching itself onto his soul. He saw the scars of ancient cataclysms—battles between long-dead Sovereigns that had sliced through the Weave, the birth of unstable primordial laws that had torn themselves apart. He was not just a healer; he was an archaeologist of cosmic trauma.
During his meditations, he began to see visions. Echoes of the events that had caused these wounds. He saw the Chaos War, a conflict that had raged before the rise of mortals or immortals, when primordial beings of Order and Entropy had clashed, their battle scarring the foundation of Tai Xuan World itself. The Void Corridors were not a natural phenomenon; they were the lingering battlefields of that first, terrible war.
This changed everything. He wasn't just fixing random decay. He was healing wounds inflicted by a conscious, malevolent force. The principle of anti-existence he felt wasn't passive entropy; it was the residual venom of a defeated enemy, still poisoning the Weave.
One day, as he was mending a particularly deep tear that bled a cold, grey light, he felt a presence. It was not a living being, but a memory trapped in the wound—a shard of consciousness from one of the ancient combatants.
WEAVER. The thought was dry, dusty, and vast, like a desert wind. YOU SEW THE GASHES OF THE OLD WAR. YOU SERVE THE TYRANNY OF ORDER.
Li Yao did not break his concentration. "I serve balance. Order, when it becomes tyranny, must also be balanced. But this," he pushed his will against the cold, resisting presence in the wound, "this is not balance. This is spite. A ghost trying to burn down the house because it lost a room."
THE CHAOS WAS FREE. THE LAWS ARE CHAINS. YOU ARE A JAILER, MENDING THE BARS.
"The chains are what allow the song to have a melody," Li Yao countered, his spiritual voice calm. "Without them, there is only noise. I am not a jailer. I am a composer, ensuring one instrument does not drown out the entire orchestra."
He focused his will, and the graft of void essence he was placing began to pulse with a new intention—not just repair, but purification. He pushed the lingering consciousness, the ghost of the chaotic being, out of the Weave. It was like squeezing pus from a wound.
The grey light in the tear brightened, becoming a clean, white scar. The presence vanished with a silent shriek of frustration.
The repair was complete. This one was different. It felt permanent. The anti-existence had been cleansed, not just patched over.
He had developed a new technique: Purifying Weave.
He stood up, looking back at the outpost. The "Garden" around him was now the size of a city. He had been working for a decade.
Wei Feng had arrived from the Nexus Cloud Peak, summoned by Goran's increasingly awestruck reports. He stood beside the commander, watching Li Yao.
"He's not just fixing it," Wei Feng whispered. "He's… improving it. The laws in the stabilized zone are more resilient, more harmonious than they were even before the Corridors formed. He's not restoring the old Weave; he's creating a new, stronger one."
Li Yao walked towards them, his steps light but his presence immense. He had aged not in body, but in spirit. His eyes held the patience of geological eras.
"The Corridors are a symptom, not the disease," Li Yao said without preamble. "The disease is a lingering spiritual infection from the Chaos War. I can heal the wounds, but the infection will continue to create new ones unless its source is found and treated."
Wei Feng's eyes widened. "The Chaos War… that's a myth! A creation story!"
"The deepest scars tell the truest stories," Li Yao replied. "The war was real. And we lost the records of it, perhaps because the wound to reality was also a wound to memory. The Void Corridors are a amnesiac's nightmare, repeating the trauma endlessly."
He looked past them, towards the serene, stable space he had created, and then to the chaotic storm beyond.
"My work here is foundational. I will continue to heal, to build this bastion of stability. But the council must know. The balance is threatened not just by internal conflict, but by an external, historical enemy we have all forgotten. A enemy that does not want to win a war, but to unmake the battlefield itself."
He had come to the edge of the world to mend tears in reality. He had discovered they were battle scars. The role of Warden had just expanded from keeping the peace to preparing for a war everyone else had forgotten was still being fought.