When the qi lit inside my ribs it was not like the slow warming of training. It was a fracture. The Phantom Emperor's qi did not drip — it forced. It hammered at the raw channels in my chest, insisting on new conduits, carving roads out of stone. My breath shortened with each expansion. The pain was a living thing.
They had sealed those qi paths intentionally — not to deny me, but to prepare the future holder for the ordeal. I felt the first shift as a cold needle at the base of my skull. It traveled down like silver fire, opening a vein in my spine I had never known. Muscles convulsed. My limbs twitched with phantom memory — reflexes and stances I had never trained. The Phantom Emperor's legacy rewired me.
I tore free a gasp and grabbed the pedestal as if the stone could steady me. It did not. The qi rolled through my shoulders and ribs, and with each surge a new channel bloomed: finer, then larger, then a whole lattice hot with potential. The pain was beyond agony — there was a recognition in it, like birth and burial at once.
Six hours passed in a blur. My mind left and returned like breath through a tide. Once, I saw my childhood house across the clearing and heard Father laugh. Once I smelled the sweet bread from my mother's table. Then the pain would flare, and the scenes would shatter.
When I woke, nausea and rawness still clung to me, but the world felt reorganized. My mana—my old Void currents—answered me like a familiar friend, but there was an added depth, a third tone. I flexed my fingers and felt the hum of Ethereal threads: the plateau I'd first tasted during battle with the wyvern had not been a foothold; now it sang true: peak of the Ethereal Lord Realm sitting like a crown of cold flame on my shoulders.
But the change in my qi was more astonishing. The channels the Emperor had forced open now flowed with a density that could have belonged to emperors themselves. The breath of my qi now traveled with the weight of mountains; when I pushed it, I felt the same clarity as my mana — the tactile power of true cultivation. Staggering to my feet, I felt the last jolt: my qi had reached the peak of the Desolate Lord Realm.
Dual path.
The words rolled around my skull like thunder. Part of me laughed — a raw, incredulous sound. Another part of me wept. I had trained to shape mana my whole life; qi had been a mystery, something my father respected but never forced on me. Now both flows lived inside me, braided and angry.
I stumbled to the shelves. The Phantom Emperor had been merciful in the way authors are merciless: he'd left manuals and practice scrolls for both disciplines. For qi there were leather-bound treatises with diagrams of breathing circuits, bone positions, and meditative postures designed to tune a cultivator's marrow. For mana there were incantations and phrasing, keys to tether one's flame to will.
My first attempts at qi arts were clumsy. My hands trembled when I tried the grounding cycle the book asked for; my breaths were too shallow. The qi refused my orders at first, like a new army testing a commander. But the Emperor's instructions were precise and cruel in their economy: hold for three breaths, release in a spiral, twist the core to the left, thread the outer vessel. I followed. Slowly, the qi unspooled under my hand like silk.
Alex watched at first, quieter than I had ever seen him. He offered pointers from his reading — spatial analogies that made the new positions easier to map in my mind. The two disciplines began to speak to one another; when I coordinated a qi push with a mana channel, the effect was… staggering. A mana blade suffused with qi tremors felt heavier, like a physical weight that could cleave stone.
We practiced for days inside that sanctum. Days measured by breaths and sparks, not by sun. Alex built anchors — tiny spatial wells — to help me drain excess energy safely during reaction drills. I trained in the echo halls, slamming qi into resonance chambers to learn how my internal muscles could amplify or dampen mana. I took knocks — many — I broke ribs or wrenched shoulders, and each injury taught me how to thread one power into the other without rupturing myself. The Phantom Emperor had made sure the lessons were brutal and inevitable.
When I finally stood and raised a twin current — qi underlaid with a lattice of mana — it felt like lifting two mountains at once. The Ethereal threads wrapped around the qi, tempering its edge; the qi steadied the mana, lending it weight. I tasted a new kind of strength: one that could rend the sky and then heal the ground it tore.
That feeling settled into me, not as a thunderclap but a long, slow dawn. I walked toward Alex, who had already sketched glyphs in the air that left faint cosmic after-images. We did not speak. We did not need to.
Later, as we trained side by side under the cathedral-like vaults of the mountain, I felt the gravity of the choice we'd made: wield both paths and remain human, or let either path consume you. The Phantom Emperor's echo had warned us, but it was one thing to hear and another to endure the discipline. We would endure.