The ruins lay beyond the eastern ridge, where the mountains fractured into broken stone and the land itself seemed unwilling to support life.
Li Chen felt it before he saw it.
The Qi there was distorted thin in some places, violently dense in others. It did not flow like a river or drift like mist. It churned, folding in on itself, as though the land remembered something it wished to forget.
By sect decree, the area was forbidden.
Li Chen crossed the boundary without hesitation.
The moment his foot touched the cracked black stone, a chill crawled up his spine. The ember within him flickered erratically, resisting the environment like a wounded animal.
He slowed his breathing.
Ahead, half-buried structures emerged from the earth collapsed halls, shattered pillars, stone inscribed with symbols worn nearly smooth by time. Whatever sect had once ruled here was gone. Not ruined.
Erased.
Li Chen crouched beside a sunken stairway and examined the ground. No footprints. No fresh Qi traces.
Only old bloodstains that never quite faded.
He descended.
The air grew colder with each step. Darkness pressed in, thick and oppressive. His senses strained uselessly, dulled by interference he could not yet understand.
Then he heard it.
A whisper.
Not sound but pressure. As if something brushed against his thoughts, testing them.
Li Chen halted.
He did not retreat.
Instead, he sat cross-legged on the stone and circulated Qi slowly, deliberately, keeping it tight to his core. The whisper faded, replaced by silence so absolute it felt deafening.
He opened his eyes.
In front of him lay a corpse.
The body was intact robes unrotted, skin pale but unmarred. A cultivator frozen in time, eyes wide with terror.
Li Chen's gaze dropped to the man's dantian.
Empty.
Not shattered.
Removed.
Cold spread through Li Chen's chest.
He searched further.
More bodies. Dozens. Hundreds.
All the same.
No wounds. No decay. No souls.
Only hollow shells left behind.
At the center of the underground complex, he found it.
A stone platform etched with a massive formation, its lines carved so deeply they seemed to drink in the dim light. At its heart stood a black obelisk, cracked down the middle, faint symbols pulsing weakly across its surface.
The pressure returned stronger now.
Li Chen approached.
The moment his fingers brushed the obelisk, pain exploded through his skull.
Visions flooded his mind.
A sky splitting open. Cultivators screaming as invisible hands tore their souls free. A voice ancient, calm, utterly indifferent.
"Heaven demands order."
Li Chen tore his hand away and staggered back, blood streaming from his nose and ears. He fell to one knee, gasping.
But amid the agony, something else remained.
Understanding.
This place was not destroyed by war.
It had been cleansed.
By Heaven.
For stepping too far.
Li Chen laughed softly, the sound echoing unnaturally through the chamber.
"So even immortals are disposable," he murmured.
His gaze returned to the obelisk.
He knew, with absolute certainty, that touching it again would change him forever.
He also knew he would not leave without doing so.
Li Chen stood and placed both hands against the cold stone.
This time, he did not resist.
He accepted.
The obelisk cracked further, fragments falling away as a torrent of fractured knowledge surged into him broken techniques, incomplete Dao fragments, and one lingering imprint.
A method.
Not of cultivation.
But of severance.
Li Chen screamed as the formation flared to life, ancient and hungry.
Far away, within Iron River Sect, elders rose in alarm as forbidden Qi surged skyward.
And high above all worlds, Heaven turned its gaze fully upon a single mortal.
The ruins awakened.
And Li Chen crossed a threshold from which there was no return.