They found it on the afternoon of the second day, and Ian almost walked past it.
There was nothing dramatic about its appearance. A shallow depression in the grey earth, maybe twenty meters across, ringed by dead stone that had the look of walls that had been ground down over a very long time. In the center, a dark opening, roughly square, leading down. The kind of thing that looked like a natural formation if you weren't paying attention.
But the air above it was different. Heavier. Ian had noticed it first as a pressure behind his eyes, then as something else, something he didn't have a name for yet, a sense that the space directly above the opening was more full than the air around it. Like the difference between empty water and water with something dissolved in it.
Sera stopped beside him and let out a slow breath. "That's it."
"How long has it been collapsed?"
"My father thought at least three hundred years. Maybe more. The original occupant sealed it before they died, which is why anything is still here at all."
Ian studied the opening. The stone around the edges was old and stable. Nothing moving nearby, no tracks, which meant nothing had been drawn to it, which meant the concentration wasn't so high that it attracted wasteland creatures. That was either reassuring or concerning depending on how much qi was actually left.
"Your father's instructions," Ian said. "Tell me everything he said about entering a site like this."
Sera had clearly been organizing this information in her head during the walk, because she spoke without hesitation. "Don't go below the first chamber. The deeper levels have structural instability and the qi there is older and more concentrated, which means more dangerous. In the first chamber, find a stable position near the center. Sit. Don't force anything. Let whatever is there come to you at its own pace. If you feel pain, stop and get out."
"What kind of pain?"
"He didn't specify. He said you would know the difference between the discomfort of something new entering your body and actual damage. He said most people who died in sites like this died because they stayed too long past the point where they should have left."
Ian nodded. He went to the edge of the opening and looked down. Stone steps, worn but intact, leading into dark. The air from below was cool and the pressure behind his eyes intensified slightly.
"You're going in," Sera said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"I'll wait up here. If you're not out in two hours, I'll—" She stopped.
"You'll keep moving," Ian said. "Don't wait longer than two hours. You don't owe me anything."
She didn't argue with that, which meant she understood the logic. He appreciated the absence of false sentiment.
He went down the steps carefully, one hand on the stone wall, letting his eyes adjust. The darkness was not complete. There was a faint luminescence coming from the walls themselves, old formations of something crystalline embedded in the rock, giving off just enough light to navigate by. The steps ended after about four meters. He was in the first chamber.
It was smaller than he had expected. Roughly circular, maybe eight meters across, low ceiling. The walls were covered in the crystalline formations, and in several places there were markings carved into the stone, symbols he didn't recognize, in an arrangement that suggested they had meant something once. In the center of the floor, worn down but still visible, was a circular marking that looked like a seat position.
Ian stood in the entrance for a moment and assessed. The air here was noticeably different from above. Every breath felt like it had more in it, some quality that wasn't oxygen but wasn't entirely unlike it either. His body was already responding to it in ways he couldn't control, a faint warmth in his chest, a clarity in his thinking that was almost like the feeling after drinking cold water on a hot day.
He walked to the center and sat down.
He did not force anything. He breathed normally. He waited.
For the first twenty minutes nothing happened except that the warmth in his chest spread slightly, moved toward his limbs, settled back. He tracked this without reacting to it. His father had taught him patience through hunting, through the long stillness of waiting for an animal to move into range. Ian had always been good at not moving.
Then something changed.
It was not sudden. It was more like the difference between a room being dark and your eyes having adjusted enough to see what was in it. Something in the air began to move toward him with intention, or with what felt like intention, the way a river moved toward a lower elevation. Not because it wanted to, but because the shape of things directed it.
It entered through his breathing, or through his skin, he couldn't tell. It was warm. It moved through him in a pattern that felt almost orderly, following paths in his body that he hadn't known existed. He sat and let it happen.
The discomfort came at the forty-minute mark. A pressure in his chest that was different from the warmth, something pushing against something else, like trying to fit more water into a container that was already full. Ian noted it. He assessed. It was discomfort, not damage. He stayed.
At the fifty-minute mark the pressure became sharper. He stayed.
At the sixty-minute mark something cracked open inside him, not painfully, more like a door yielding to sustained pressure. The warmth that had been building released all at once, flooded through him, and then settled into something that felt permanent.
He sat for another ten minutes to be sure, then got up and climbed back out of the chamber.
Sera was sitting on the stone above the entrance. She looked at him with an expression that was trying not to be hopeful and not entirely succeeding.
"Well?" she said.
Ian took a breath. The air up here felt thin compared to the chamber below. He tested the thing that had settled in his chest, the new presence in his body that hadn't been there before. It was small. Whatever he had absorbed was a beginning, not an achievement. But it was real.
"Something happened," he said.
Sera let out a breath. "Did it hurt?"
"Some. Not badly."
She nodded once, and something in her posture settled. "My father said the first cultivation breakthrough is the only one that can happen by accident. Everything after requires intent." She paused. "So now you know what you're doing. The accident is over."
Ian looked at his hands. They looked the same. He felt the same in most ways. But the warmth in his chest was still there, faint and steady, like an ember that had just been coaxed into something that would hold if you were careful with it.
He had no rank yet. No title, no standing in any sect hierarchy, no cultivation manual and no idea what the specific nature of his bloodline or meridians were. He was standing in the middle of the wastelands with a knife and three silver coins and a girl he had known for two days.
But he had a beginning.
That was more than he'd had three days ago. He filed it away and turned to look at the landscape ahead, calculating the next step.
"How's your ankle?" he asked.
"Better."
"Then we move. If there was qi leakage from that place, eventually something will be drawn to it. I don't want to be here when it arrives."
Sera picked up her pack without arguing.
They moved northeast, and Ian began, carefully and methodically, to learn the shape of the thing that was now inside him.
* * *