The air was not air. It was a thick, metallic soup of cooling blood and the sulfuric stench of spent talismans.
Lan Wei's world was defined by weight. It was the weight of a thousand pounds of sodden earth, the weight of cold, stiffening limbs that were not his own, and the weight of a silence so absolute it felt like a physical pressure against his eardrums. He lay at the bottom of the "Great Trench of the Fallen," though yesterday, the soldiers had simply called it a defensive perimeter.
He tried to draw a breath, but his ribs met the unyielding resistance of a chest plate—likely Captain Zhang's—pressed firmly against his sternum. Zhang had been a man of iron and bluster, a mid-stage Qi Condensation cultivator who boasted his skin could deflect arrows. Now, Zhang was merely a cooling barrier between Lan Wei and the open sky.
*The Heavens count every breath; some are gifts, most are loans.*
The local proverb of his village drifted through his mind, bitter and mocking. If breaths were loans, Lan Wei was currently in deep arrears.
He shifted his right hand. The movement was agonizingly slow, a millimeter of progress through a slurry of mud and gore. His fingers brushed against something cold and jagged. His mind, dulled by the lack of oxygen and the lingering shock of the slaughter, took several seconds to identify the object.
It was his cleaver.
It was a pathetic thing—a square-headed, rusted kitchen tool he had used to hack through the gristle of spirit-beast carcasses for the sect's auxiliary mess hall. It had no inscriptions, no glowing jade inlay, and certainly no spirit. It was a tool of drudgery, yet his fingers curled around its handle with the desperation of a drowning man grasping a reed.
With a guttural, muffled snarl, Lan Wei drove the edge of the cleaver into the meat and earth above him. He didn't use Qi; he had none. He used the raw, hysterical strength of a man who refused to let his story end in a ditch.
*Push.*
The cleaver bit deep. He felt the resistance of leather and bone give way. He twisted the blade, creating a pocket of space. A tiny, miraculous stream of freezing rain-water trickled down the gap, hitting his parched tongue. It tasted of copper and ash, but to Lan Wei, it was the nectar of the gods.
"Not today," he hissed, his voice a dry rasp that barely cleared his own throat. "I haven't even seen the gates of the Immortal Path yet. You don't get to collect the debt today."
He heaved, his muscles screaming in protest. His shoulder popped—a sharp, sickening sound in the confined space—but the weight shifted. A gap opened. Light, gray and sickly, bled into his vision.
He clawed his way upward, dragging his body over the remains of men he had shared tea with only yesterday. There was no room for grief. In the borderlands of the Great Void, grief was a luxury for the living who had walls to hide behind. For a survivor in the mud, there was only the next inch of progress.
When he finally breached the surface, he didn't scream. He collapsed onto the mound of corpses, his lungs burning as they expanded in the open air.
The battlefield was a masterpiece of desolation. The Azure Cloud Sect's banners, once proud symbols of wood-element mastery, were now tattered rags soaked in the black ichor of the Void-beasts. The sky above was a bruised purple, veiled by the ever-present mist of the Gray Marsh.
Lan Wei looked up at the stars. Even in the dim afternoon, the great constellations were visible—vast, shimmering chains of light that spanned the firmament. To the common folk, they were guides for navigation. To the scholars, they were the homes of the gods. But as Lan Wei stared at the *Great Dragon Seal* constellation, he felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. The stars didn't feel like distant suns; they felt like eyes. Cold, unblinking eyes watching the lid of a casket.
He looked down at the cleaver in his hand. It was caked in a mixture of mud and the lifeblood of his former comrades. It should have been disgusting, yet the weight of the tool felt... different. Balanced.
He wiped the blade on a relatively clean patch of a fallen soldier's tunic. The rust didn't come off, but the metal beneath seemed to swallow the dim light rather than reflect it. It was an unremarkable piece of junk, a remnant of his life as a servant, yet it had been the only thing that followed him into the grave and back out.
His internal state was a wreck. His Dantian was as dry as a desert, and his Spirit Roots—a muddy, low-purity mix of all five elements—felt frayed. In the eyes of the great sects, he was "trash," fit only for the kitchens or the front lines as fodder.
"Five elements," he muttered, staring at his trembling hands. "A Jack of all trades, master of none. The world wants me to be a bridge for others to walk on."
He thought of the inner sect disciples who had fled on their flying swords the moment the Void-beasts breached the formation. They had looked at the auxiliary troops not as people, but as a timer—meat to delay the inevitable.
A cold, hard knot formed in his stomach. It wasn't just the hunger or the trauma. It was a realization. The world—the heavens, the sects, the very stars themselves—operated on a system of consumption. To be weak was to be eaten. To be strong was to be hunted by the Heavens' Tribulations.
He stood up, his legs shaking. He used the cleaver as a makeshift cane, leaning his weight on the rusted metal.
"If the world is a prison," Lan Wei whispered to the silent dead, "then I suppose I'll need a very sharp knife."
He began to walk, leaving the mound of the dead behind. He didn't head back toward the sect—there was nothing there but a different kind of grave. Instead, he turned toward the Heart of the Marsh, where the mist was thickest and the laws of the world were said to be thin.He would find a way to cultivate. He would refine his muddy roots. And he would keep this rusted kitchen knife at his side—a reminder that even the lowliest tool could cut through the weight of the world if pushed hard enough.
The journey toward immortality began not with a golden pill or a divine revelation, but with a single, limping step through the blood-soaked mud, and a heart that had grown as cold as the stars above.