Part Two
Lian sensed it immediately.
She arrived at the courtyard entrance and stopped.
This was not grief.
Not vulnerability.
It was instability.
"Your circulation is fracturing," she said sharply.
He did not respond.
His breathing grew uneven.
Inside him, integration attempted to absorb ambition.
But ambition resisted.
Ambition wanted direction.
A path.
A claim.
A declaration.
"Choose," Lian said suddenly.
The word cut through the air.
His eyes snapped open.
"Choose what?" he demanded, voice strained.
"A position. A direction. A future."
"I reject possession."
"That is not the same as rejecting identity."
The words struck harder than the destabilization.
His dantian pulsed erratically.
Fragments of Earth returned.
Failure.
Obscurity.
Being ordinary.
He had told himself integration was enough.
But beneath it—
There had always been a quiet hunger.
To matter.
To not disappear unnoticed.
He had never integrated that.
Because that hunger frightened him.
He feared it would turn him into the same desperate man who drank alone in a collapsing house.
Energy surged violently.
Cracks formed across the stone beneath him.
Lian stepped forward.
"If you remain undefined," she said, voice steady despite the chaos, "you will tear yourself apart."
Silence exploded inside him.
He had rejected sect doctrine.
Rejected external claim.
But he had not chosen his own axis.
And spiritual cultivation without axis—
Was self-destruction.