Chapter 22: The Second Bite
The world was a roaring contradiction inside him.
The stolen storm-pride of the Khan was a wildfire in his meridians—wild, untamed, screaming for dominion. The cold, logical judgment of the Weeping Eye was a glacier grinding against it—silent, absolute, demanding order. They were oil and water in the crucible of his soul, and the devouring void at his center churned them into a volatile slurry.
He stood, panting, between the wounded Khan and the three Enforcers. His hand was slick with the Khan's blood, and his mind was sharp with the Enforcers' icy definitions. He was both predator and prey, storm and silence.
The Porcelain Enforcer assessed the new data. Its painted eye seemed to dilate. "Anomaly exhibits parasitic assimilation. Threat level escalated. Protocol: Sunder."
The two gaunt Enforcers moved in unison, their brushes no longer writing sentences. They painted slashes in the air—SILVER GLYPHS OF SEVERANCE. These weren't meant to define or judge. They were scalpels, designed to cut spiritual connections, to sever Feng from the powers he had just stolen.
One glyph flew at his chest, aiming for the link to the Khan's storm-essence. The other arced toward his head, targeting the ingested Enforcer judgment.
Feng didn't try to dodge. He couldn't, in the confined space. Instead, he did something insane.
He grabbed the contradictory energies warring inside him—the storm's pride and the law's cold order—and he smashed them together.
He used the Khan's indomitable will as a hammer and the Enforcer's unbending logic as an anvil, and he forged a new impulse: DEFIANT SURVIVAL.
He didn't block the severing glyphs. He met them with a barked, guttural syllable that was part thunder-crack, part decree. The sound was a physical thing, a concussive wave of mismatched power that shattered the air in front of him.
The silver glyphs struck the distorted sonic shield and splintered. But they didn't dissipate. The shards, still carrying their cutting intent, ricocheted wildly.
One shard buried itself in the shoulder of a gaunt Enforcer. He didn't cry out. He simply looked down at the spiritual wound, his own power turning against him, and began methodically writing a counter-seal on his own skin.
Another shard shot past Feng and scored a deep line across the Storm Khan's cheek. The Khan flinched, the pain a fresh insult. His eyes, clouded with the horror of spiritual violation, now blazed with renewed, more personal fury. He had been cut by his enemy's weapon, deflected by the ghost he was hunting.
The battlefield was now a chaotic mess of reflected aggression. Perfect.
The Porcelain Enforcer remained untouched. It watched its injured subordinate, then the bleeding Khan, then Feng. Its calculations were failing. This anomaly didn't follow cause and effect. It created chaotic feedback loops.
"Unacceptable variance," it stated. It raised both hands, fingers contorting into intricate mudras. The air around it didn't just grow cold; it grew thin, as if reality itself were withdrawing.
It was preparing a high-order technique, one that would likely cost it dearly but would enforce a brutal, simple solution: ERASE THIS SPACE.
Feng felt it. A gathering nullity. A localized un-making. He had to move. But the Khan was blocking his path to the open canyon, and the two gaunt Enforcers (one wounded) were flanking him.
He had one card left. The devouring sky-script above was still active, still slowly draining everything. It was linked to him, feeding him a trickle. He needed a flood.
He looked at the wounded Enforcer, the one sealing his own shoulder. A weakness.
Feng charged him.
Not with a technique. With pure, desperate speed. The Enforcer looked up, his brush moving to write a defensive character.
Feng didn't let him finish. He tackled him, driving the man to the ground. It was an ugly, graceless move, more brawl than battle. They rolled in the dust and scree.
The Enforcer was stronger, his cultivation base firmer. He pinned Feng, a hand of crushing force closing around Feng's throat. The other hand raised the brush, aiming to inscribe a silencing glyph directly onto Feng's forehead.
Feng couldn't breathe. His vision swam. He clawed at the man's wrist, but it was like iron.
So he used his last weapon. Contact.
He stopped fighting the grip. He grabbed the Enforcer's wrist with both hands, not to pull it away, but to hold it there. Skin on skin.
And through that contact, he unleashed the devouring sky-script's pull, but he focused it, used his own body as a conduit. He didn't just drain ambient Qi. He created a direct siphon from the Enforcer's core into his own.
But he didn't take raw power. He took the Enforcer's technique. The specific, practiced, soul-deep knowledge of the Weeping Eye's silencing judgments. The muscle memory of the brushstrokes, the mental architecture of their formations.
It was theft of a different kind. Theft of skill. Theft of knowledge.
The Enforcer's eyes went wide behind their vacant coldness. This wasn't pain. This was dispossession. He could feel years of drilled discipline, of encoded heavenly law, being ripped from his mind and soul. His brush-hand trembled. The glyph he meant to write fizzled into nothing.
He screamed. A short, sharp, utterly human sound of terror.
The other gaunt Enforcer lunged to help his brother. The Storm Khan, seeing an opening, roared and threw a crackling fistful of condensed lightning at the Porcelain Enforcer, disrupting its mudras, forcing it to defend.
Feng kept draining. He was learning. The Weeping Eye's techniques were intricate, beautiful, and cruel. He saw the logic now. The way they defined a target, then applied the specific "law" that target violated. It was bureaucracy as a killing art.
He took it all. The knowledge burned, a cold fire in his brain, but he swallowed it.
The Enforcer under him went limp, his eyes rolling back, not empty like Observer Seven, but hollowed. A library burned to ash.
Feng shoved the body aside and surged to his feet. He now had the Storm Khan's furious essence and the Weeping Eye's technical archive churning inside him. The two forces, opposed in nature, began to do something unexpected in the pressure cooker of his will.
They began to hybridize.
He looked at his hand. Not at the blood. At the air around it. He thought of the Enforcer's silencing glyph. He thought of the Khan's lightning.
He didn't have a brush. He used his finger.
He drew in the air—a single, jagged, swift character. It was not silver. It was black, shot through with violet lightning.
He wrote the concept: STORM'S SILENCE.
He flicked his wrist, sending the unstable, hybrid glyph at the second gaunt Enforcer, who was almost upon him.
The Enforcer reflexively tried to counter it with a standard nullification stroke.
It was the wrong move. This was not a standard heavenly law. This was a lawless storm given the power of heavenly erasure.
The black-lightning glyph hit the Enforcer's counter-script and ate it. Then, it attached to the Enforcer's chest.
There was no explosion. The Enforcer simply… stopped. All sound from him ceased. The light in his eyes froze. Then, tiny, black-cracked lines spread from the glyph across his body, and he crumbled into a pile of desiccated, silent ash, as if all the motion and sound had been sucked out of him at once.
A technique born of contradiction. A silence that consumed.
The Porcelain Enforcer had deflected the Khan's lightning. It now stood alone, facing the wounded but furious Khan and Feng, who had just annihilated one of its subordinates with a bastardized version of its own art.
The painted eye on its mask seemed to stare into Feng's soul, analyzing the impossible hybrid energy.
"Corruption has achieved synthesis," it intoned, a hint of something like… reverence in its synthetic voice. "The Error is self-evolving. This exceeds all known parameters. The sample must be acquired."
It wasn't talking about killing him anymore. It wanted to capture him. To study him.
The Storm Khan wiped blood from his cheek. He looked at Feng, then at the pile of ash that was an Enforcer. His fury was still there, but it was tempered by a dawning, grudging understanding. This was not a boy. This was a force of nature. A dangerous, hungry ally against a common, arrogant foe.
"The little ghost has teeth," the Khan grunted, his voice raw. "And he bites our mutual enemies."
A temporary, unspoken alliance formed in the charged air. Khan and Error versus Heaven's perfect, porcelain tool.
The Porcelain Enforcer spread its arms. The air around it crystallized into a perfect, geometric lattice of solid light—a Cage of Absolute Order. It began to expand, threatening to encase the entire area, to freeze them in a perfect, immutable prison.
Feng looked at the Khan. He pointed at the expanding lattice, then at himself, then made a ripping motion with his hands.
He had an idea. A terrible, painful idea.
He needed to bite the cage. But he couldn't do it alone. He needed the storm's raw power to crack it open first.
The Khan understood. He gave a single, sharp nod. He planted his feet, gathered the last dregs of his storm-will, and poured it into a single, focused point—the tip of his saber. It glowed like a captured sun, straining against the deadening field.
He roared, and thrust.
A beam of concentrated, furious lightning, the last breath of the Storm Khan's pride, lanced across the canyon and struck the center of the expanding crystal lattice.
The cage didn't break. But it fractured. A web of cracks spread from the impact point, disrupting its perfect order.
Now.
Feng sprinted toward the fractured lattice. He didn't attack it. He jumped into the crack.
He pressed his body against the broken light, where the Cage of Absolute Order was flawed. He opened his mouth, not to scream, but to consume.
He didn't eat the light. He ate the flaw. He ate the concept of broken order. He consumed the very principle of a perfect system failing.
It was like swallowing shattered glass and philosophy. It shredded him from the inside out. But it was a tribulation—a meta-tribulation of systemic collapse—and his Dao was made for this.
The lattice around him groaned. The cracks widened. The Porcelain Enforcer stumbled, a flicker of distortion passing over its mask. Its perfect technique was being undone, not by force, but by a hunger for imperfection.
With a sound like a universe sighing, the Cage of Absolute Order dissolved.
Feng fell to his knees, vomiting light and void. He had taken the second, more profound bite. He had consumed a piece of heaven's perfect law and found it brittle.
The Porcelain Enforcer looked at its empty hands, then at Feng. It had no protocol for this. Its purpose was to enforce order. What did one do when disorder became a predator that ate enforcement?
It made a decision. It turned and, without a word, simply vanished, folding into a shimmer of light and gone. A tactical retreat. To report. To upgrade.
The canyon was silent again. Only the wind, the wounded Storm Khan, and the kneeling, heaving Eater of Tribulations remained.
Jargal limped over. He looked down at Feng, no longer with fury, but with the exhausted respect of one apex predator for another.
"The debt remains," the Khan said, his voice a dry rasp. "You stole a piece of my storm. But today... you broke the teeth of the sky's hounds. That has its own weight."
He sheathed his dead saber. "The steppe will remember this. You are Feng, the Storm-Eater, the Breaker of Cages. My hunt is over. But the sky's hunt for you has just begun."
He turned and walked, unsteadily, back towards his waiting Horde, a king diminished but wiser.
Feng stayed on his knees, the new hybrid power—storm and silence, chaos and order—settling into his bones like a fever. He had survived. He had evolved.
He looked up at the devouring sky-script, which finally sputtered and died, its purpose served.
He had taken two bites from two mighty tribulations. He had tasted pride and law, and forged them into a weapon of defiant survival.
Alone in the dead teeth of the mountains, Xiao Feng, the Error, began to laugh. It was a raw, broken sound that held no joy, only the terrible certainty of a hunger that had just learned how to eat the inedible.
The world had tried to break him with a storm and a cage.
It had only taught him how to eat the storm and shatter the cage.
And he was still starving.