The news of the "Testing Stone's Death" had turned the servant quarters into a graveyard. No one dared to speak to Long Chen. To the other servants, he was a ghost—a man already walking toward his execution.
Long Chen didn't mind the silence. He spent his final nights in the Great Kitchen's Hearth, the only place hot enough to keep the morning frost at bay.
He sat by the massive iron furnaces, his back against the soot-stained bricks. On his lap sat a tattered, yellowed manual he had "borrowed" from the back of the Sect's library—a book so old and basic that even the guards didn't bother to log it. It was titled The Record of the Five Breaths.
"Listen to this, Koda," Long Chen whispered, the orange firelight dancing in his dark eyes.
The ferret poked his head out of a sack of grain, his ears twitching.
Long Chen read aloud, his voice flat: "The Heavens are a ceiling of jade. A man may climb the five steps of the Mortal Path—Sensing, Refinement, Tempering, Foundation, and finally, Transcendence. Beyond the Fifth Step lies the Void, where the soul dissolves and returns to the mountain. To seek a Sixth Step is to seek madness."
Long Chen closed the book with a soft thud. He looked at his hands. If the book was right, then his father, the man he saw in his vision holding the chains of the world, didn't exist. If the book was right, the "Universe River" was just a myth.
"A ceiling of jade..." Long Chen murmured. "Or a lid on a jar?"
Suddenly, the rusted key in his pocket grew cold—not the biting cold of the spring, but a deep, hollow chill. The air in the kitchen seemed to thicken. The roaring fire in the furnace froze mid-flicker, the flames turning into static tongues of orange glass.
"A ceiling for the blind, perhaps."
The voice didn't come from the room. It came from the Key.
Long Chen gripped the iron relic. "Who are you?"
"I am a memory of a time when the stars were not just lights in the sky, but pebbles in your father's garden," the voice vibrated through his bones. "The Five Steps of this world are not a path to power, Long Chen. They are the bars of a cage built by the Ten Divine Kings. They want you to believe that Transcendence is the end, so you never look up to see the River that feeds the stars."
The static flames snapped back to life, the heat rushing over Long Chen's face. The voice was gone, but a new piece of information was burned into his mind.
He realized the "Smart" truth: The Sect wasn't teaching them how to cultivate; they were teaching them how to limit themselves. They gathered Qi in the Dantian because it was easy to control—and easy to destroy.
"They want us to be small," Long Chen said, a cold, sharp smile touching his lips. He picked up the Stone-Breaker's Gavel. "Then I'll just have to break the ceiling."
Author's Note: The "Lid" Theory
A theory that every one has in this realm is that there are only five stages and after that if someone try his soul would vanish or reincarnate which is theory not really there more spices to add on and also sorry that this chapter is short 🥲