The first light of dawn was a pale, hesitant brushstroke on the horizon when Asuta settled onto the floor of his room. The psychic tinnitus from Kuro Gorge—a high, thin ringing in the bones of his soul—had become a constant companion, a reminder of the cost of conceptual warfare. Before him lay the tools of his rehabilitation: the Minoan seal stone, cool and dark in his palm, and the Liangzhu Jade Cong, standing sentinel on a square of undyed silk. They were not weapons, but sanctuaries. Today, he would begin the delicate work of rebuilding the fortress of his mind.
He began with the Seal Stone. Closing his eyes, he allowed the pad of his thumb to trace the physical labyrinth carved into its surface four thousand years ago. Simultaneously, he sent a tendril of his spiritual sense, careful and wounded, into the pattern. He did not seek to solve it. He sought to submit to its logic. The labyrinth was not a puzzle but a path—a single, unbranching groove that wound inward in an endless, non-repeating spiral. It was a cognitive circuit designed by a forgotten genius to impose order on chaos.
The effect was immediate and profound. The chaotic psychic noise that had been bleeding into his consciousness—the low-grade despair of the city's commute, the frantic digital chatter of a million devices, the formless anxiety that hung in the modern air like pollution—was suddenly herded. It didn't vanish; it was forced into the single, narrow lane of the labyrinth. His scattered awareness, frayed and over-exposed like a nerve pulled from its sheath, was drawn into the spiral's inexorable current. The stone was a Focus. It applied a gentle, geological pressure to his mind, compacting the sand of his thoughts into stone. After an hour of silent, meditative tracing, the phantom ringing in his soul's ear ceased. The mental static dissolved into a clean, clear silence. His mind was no longer a room with a shattered window; it was a sealed chamber, quiet and whole.
One wall repaired. Now, the foundation.
He turned his attention to the Jade Cong. He placed both hands palms-down, hovering a hair's breadth above its squared shoulders, feeling the deep, resonant thrum it emitted through the air. It was not a sound, but a vibration—the frequency of deep bedrock, of mountains sleeping for eons, of roots drinking from silent aquifers. He synchronized his breathing with the Divine God Body Sutra's Bone-Forge Respiration, a rhythm so slow and deep it seemed to vibrate the marrow of his newly purified bones. He sought not to overpower the Cong's resonance, but to harmonize with it, to let the earthy vitality of his Layer 4 body become a chord in its ancient song.
The moment of connection was visceral. It was the feeling of a ship, tossed in a light but disorienting swell, suddenly entering the calm, deep waters of a protected harbor. The clear but weightless quality of his spiritual energy, still traumatized and unmoored, suddenly gained density, mass, gravity. The Cong was an Anchor. It did not just calm his spirit; it chained it, lovingly and fiercely, to the unshakable reality of his physical form. His soul-force, which had felt as if it might dissipate like mist, was now rooted deep within the fertile, tempered earth of his own flesh. A profound, immovable solidity settled into the core of his being. He was no longer a flickering candle in a drafty corridor; he was a forge-fire built on stone, its flames steady, contained, and potent.
He opened his eyes. The world was the same, yet perceived through a newly tempered lens—sharp, detailed, and held at a perfect, manageable distance. The Focus and the Anchor worked in sublime tandem: one ordered the chaos of perception, the other grounded the essence of being. They were, by the glorious standards of his past life, humble tools—the spiritual equivalent of a novice's training weights. But on this Qi-barren, spiritually-starved Earth, they were priceless treasures, artifacts of a forgotten sanity. They were the first true wards for his soul.
He spent the morning integrating their use into his cultivation cycle. He found the Seal Stone could sharpen his intent to a laser point during the meticulous stages of alchemy, preventing a single wandering thought from ruining a batch. The Cong could stabilize his raging energy during the most agonizing, joint-splitting holds of the Sutra, becoming the immovable bedrock against which his will could strain without shattering. They were patches, yes, but masterfully applied—a carpenter using seasoned oak to repair a bearing beam.
---
School that day was an exercise in surreal observation. He moved through the familiar halls with his newly quieted and anchored senses. The teenage drama unfolding around him—the whispered gossip, the competitive posturing, the explosive, fleeting passions—seemed like a brilliantly performed but ultimately frantic play. He was an audience member who had just read the script, aware of every trope and cue, feeling a distant, poignant affection for the actors' earnest intensity. He was here, but he was not of it. The divide, he realized with a pang, was growing.
The fracture in his normalcy manifested at his locker after second period. Ken Zuto leaned against the neighboring metal door, but his usual lazy, open posture was coiled with a subtle tension. The easy grin was absent, replaced by a preoccupied frown. Shadows, faint but telling, smudged the skin beneath his eyes.
"Asuta. Got a sec? Not here." Ken's voice was low, lacking its typical buoyancy.
They navigated to a relatively quiet corner of the courtyard, a patch of weak sunlight away from the main flow of students. The spring air still held a winter bite. Ken shoved his hands deep into his pockets, his shoulders hunched.
"Ever since that fever," Ken began, not meeting Asuta's eyes, staring at a crack in the pavement instead. "I've been having these… dreams. Not nightmares. Not really. They don't scare me. They just… weigh a ton."
Asuta's blood, so carefully regulated by his purified systems, seemed to chill by a degree. A psychic imprint. His suspicion crystallized into cold certainty. The Foundation's "non-invasive biomagnetic resonance scan" had been more than a measurement. It had been an intrusion, leaving a backdoor in Ken's nascent spiritual awareness. Or worse, it hadn't created the door, but had opened one that was always there, a latent sensitivity now forced ajar. Ken wasn't merely dreaming. He was perceiving a leak, a psychic effluent from the very epicenter of the anomaly that had been near him—the dragon scale. Its profound, alien melancholy, its epoch-spanning memory of loss, was seeping into the only receptive medium in the vicinity: his best friend's unguarded mind.
"Describe it," Asuta said, his voice carefully neutral, a clinician's tone.
"It's always the same place," Ken said, his own voice taking on a distant, recitative quality. "This huge, flat plain. The ground isn't dirt or rock. It's like… grey ash, but hard. And the sky." He finally looked up, his eyes holding a confusion that was deeply unsettling. "There's a sun, but it's black. Not a hole, not an eclipse. A black disc, hanging there, and it gives off cold. And the whole sky around it is wrong. Like looking through a windshield that's been smashed but hasn't fallen apart yet. All these cracks." He shuddered, a full-body tremor that had nothing to do with the chill air. "It doesn't feel dangerous. It feels… empty. Sad. Like I'm standing in a room where something huge and important used to live, and all that's left is the shape of where it was. And I'm just… waiting. For something that's never coming back."
The description was too specific, too laden with symbolic resonance to be a normal dream. It was a memory-fragment. A psychic snapshot from a dying dragon's consciousness, a vision of its home, or perhaps its final battlefield—a realm scarred by celestial violence. Ken was carrying a ghost in his head.
"Does it feel like it's pulling you in?" Asuta asked, the strategist in him assessing the threat level. "Do you ever feel like you can't wake up?"
"No, nothing like that," Ken shook his head, running a hand through his hair in a gesture of familiar frustration. "I wake up tired, like I haven't slept at all. My head feels… full. Like static. It's messing with my focus, man. I bombed a quiz in Matsuo's class yesterday. I never bomb quizzes. Am I… am I going crazy?"
The raw, unvarnished fear in Ken's voice was a spear in Asuta's chest. This was the collateral damage he had feared—the hidden cost of the shadow war touching the one life he was fighting to keep normal.
"No," Asuta said, and he put as much iron-clad certainty into that single word as he could muster. He placed a hand on Ken's shoulder, feeling the tense muscle beneath the jacket. "You're not crazy. Your brain is processing some residual… neurological feedback. From the fever. It's a known, if rare, post-viral thing." The lie was necessary, a bandage over a spiritual wound. "The brain gets hypersensitive, picks up on stuff it normally filters out. It's trying to make sense of the noise, and it's creating these images."
Ken searched his face, desperate for the lie to be truth. "A known thing? Seriously?"
"Seriously." Asuta reached into his bag, his fingers finding a smooth, dark river stone he'd selected and cleansed the night before. He had spent ten minutes holding it, pouring into it a simple, repeating concept: Stillness. Boundary. Sleep. It was a crude talisman, a child's toy compared to the Seal Stone, but it was a tool. "Here. This is going to sound stupid, but it's an old family trick. My grandfather swore by it for bad sleep."
Ken took the stone, his skepticism battling his hope. It was warm from Asuta's pocket. "A magic rock?"
"A focus," Asuta corrected, his tone gentle but firm. "When you go to sleep, hold it. Don't think about the dream. Don't fight it. Just focus everything on the stone. Feel its weight. Trace its shape in your mind. Imagine it's a… a door. And you're on the right side of it. The dream is just a picture on the other side of the glass. It can't get in." He was giving Ken the most basic principle of psychic defense—the creation of a bounded self. It was the first lesson of any soul-cultivator, delivered as folk wisdom.
Ken turned the stone over in his palm, his expression shifting from doubt to a tentative determination. "Just hold the rock. Keep the crazy on the other side of the… rock-door."
"Exactly. It gives your mind one simple, solid thing to do, so the complicated, weird stuff has less room to move." Asuta managed a small, encouraging smile. "Just try it. What's the worst that could happen?"
"I turn into a guy who talks to rocks," Ken muttered, but he pocketed the stone with a nod. "Thanks, man. You've been… different lately. Full of weird advice and mystery." He tried to summon his usual grin, but it was a weary, fragile thing.
"I'm full of many things," Asuta said, the ghost of his smile turning wry. Mostly ancient terror and forbidden knowledge, my friend.
That afternoon, he went a step further. Under the guise of "a focusing technique that might help with the dream static and those quizzes," he guided Ken to a secluded corner of the school library. On a blank sheet of paper, he drew a simplified, single-path spiral. "Don't look at it as a drawing. Look at it as a road. Your mind is a car. Right now, it's off-roading, hitting every bump and ditch. This," he tapped the spiral, "is a paved highway. When you feel the static, or when you're trying to sleep, close your eyes and imagine driving down this. Nowhere to go. Just follow the road."
Ken, pragmatic and eager for any solution that didn't involve therapy or medication, took to the exercise with a touching, concentrated effort. Asuta watched as his friend's previously scattered and anxious energy subtly began to coalesce, to flow in a directed stream. It was a tiny flame, but it was a controlled burn. The lesson was twofold: a defense against the psychic leak, and an unconscious priming of Ken's latent spiritual awareness. He wasn't just protecting his friend now; he was, in the gentlest, most deniable way possible, training him. Cultivating the first, fragile shoot of an ally who might one day stand beside him, not in ignorance, but in understanding.
---
That night, his own spirit fortified by the Focus and Anchor, Asuta confronted the next great bottleneck of the Divine God Body Sutra: Layer 5, Organ Purification. The heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, spleen—these were not mere biological filters and pumps. In the esoteric anatomy of cultivation, they were the Five Elemental Palaces, the body's internal alchemical workshops where essence was refined, emotions were governed, and vitality was distributed. In a modern human, they were silted with the toxic byproducts of processed food, polluted air, and chronic stress.
The elixir for this stage, the Five Palaces Cleansing Decoction, was a study in symbolic balance. He assembled his components, each chosen for their elemental correspondence:
· Heart (Fire): Dried Hawthorn Berry and a single, potent Ghost Pepper, pulverized.
· Liver (Wood): High-quality Apple Cider Vinegar and powdered Dandelion Root.
· Spleen (Earth): Raw, local Honey and a paste of cooked Sweet Potato.
· Lungs (Metal): Dried Shiitake Mushroom and a pinch of finely ground Oyster Shell.
· Kidneys (Water): Pink Himalayan Sea Salt and a decoction of Nettle Leaf.
But the true catalyst, the element that would force harmony upon the five, was the Five-Colored Peacock Feather. He had sourced it from a disreputable online dealer in exotic taxidermy for a small fortune. The peacock, in the low-tier spiritual symbology still clinging to Earth's collective unconscious, was the living embodiment of the harmonious integration of the five elements, its spectacular fan a manifest diagram of their interaction. This feather, plucked from a bird that had lived in a relatively pristine stretch of Southeast Asian forest, held a fading but tangible echo of that natural, balanced vibrancy.
The brewing process was a six-hour marathon of precise thermal management. He used a five-vessel setup, steeping each elemental pair separately at their ideal temperatures, guided by the flawless focus bestowed by the Seal Stone. A single moment of distraction, a degree of misjudged heat, would ruin the delicate balance. He then combined the five infusions in his cobalt crucible, finally adding the peacock feather, which he had meticulously burned to ash in a dedicated ceramic bowl. The feather's ash, swirled into the combined decoction, acted as a unifying agent.
The liquid, when finished, was a cloudy, opalescent suspension that seemed to hold swirling motes of five different hues—a faint red, a deep green, a golden yellow, a metallic grey, a deep blue. It smelled not of herbs, but of ozone after a rainstorm in an ancient forest.
He did not hesitate. He drank the entire crucible's contents in one long, burning draft.
The effect was not the violent, fiery scourging of the blood purification, nor the structural, grinding agony of the marrow cleanse. This was a deep, pervasive, systemic realignment. He immediately assumed the Sutra's Five Palaces Furnace Stance, a brutal, twisting posture that applied intense, focused pressure to each organ network in a specific sequence, stoking the metaphorical fires within each "palace."
He felt it in waves:
· A fiery flush centered in his chest, as if his heart were a smith's bellows being pumped, driving out stagnation and fear.
· A grinding, detoxifying ache in his right side beneath the ribs, as his liver processed and expelled lifetimes of chemical and emotional toxins.
· A warm, grounding solidity spreading from his core, his spleen harmonizing his entire digestive and energetic system.
· A scraping, expansive clean sensation in his lungs, as if he were breathing for the first time through completely clear, resilient passages.
· A filtering, cold clarity settling in his lower back, his kidneys refining his vital essence and calming the adrenal overdrive of modern life.
Sweat poured from him, and this sweat carried faint tints—a rusty red from his pores, a bilious green from his sides, a milky yellow from his brow. The impurities were not just physical; they were the crystallized residues of unbalanced emotions, of environmental poisons, of biological inefficiency. For two hours, he cycled through the stance, his body a closed-loop purification system. When he finally collapsed, steam rising from his skin in the cool room air, he felt… optimized. Lighter. As if a series of internal governors had been removed. His breath was deeper, his circulation smoother, his mind clearer, his energy more readily available and sustained. The Five Palaces hummed in quiet, potent synchrony.
Layer 5. Organ Purification, Complete.
Yet, as he cleaned his equipment, wiping away the strangely colored residues, a frown etched itself onto his face. The process had taken significantly longer than previous layers. The effects, while profound, represented a law of diminishing returns. The common herbs, the low-tier symbolic catalysts like the peacock feather—they were hitting the absolute limit of their efficacy. The Divine God Body Sutra was a method designed to forge a vessel for a god; it demanded resources of commensurate quality. To breach Layer 6 (Nerve Forging) and push onward toward the ultimate Layer 9 (Unified Flesh), he would need materials that held not just symbolic value or faint psychic echoes, but actual, tangible spiritual energy. Materials that, by all rights, should not exist on this dormant, Qi-starved world.
His gaze drifted to the third artifact on his shelf, the dull, void-metal tablet. The Soul Grinding Scripture of the Eternal Crucible loomed in his future, a terrifying peak of infinite potential and agony. To even approach its base camp, he needed to first summit the mountain of his own physical perfection. And for that ascent, his current tools were now inadequate.
He needed access to the strange, the anomalous, the powerful. He needed to bargain with the curators of Earth's forgotten treasures.
He needed the Elysian Foundation.
Lying in bed that night, the harmonious systems of his body humming with quiet, integrated power, he planned his next move. He had stabilized his soul and fortified his body's core systems. He had planted the first seed of awareness and defense in Ken. Ruri's silent, watchful support was a weight he carried with love and determination.
The phase of quiet, solitary preparation was over. It was time to step into the gallery of shadows, look the collectors in their sterile eyes, and extract from them the price of their relentless curiosity.