Dawn found Wang Ben where night had left him: slumped against the workshop wall, his father's alchemy journal open across his knees, frost glittering on his eyelashes.
He jerked awake at the sound of his father's voice.
"...the fire... it turned..."
Wang Ben was on his feet in an instant, crossing to the medicinal bath. Wang Tian floated in water that had gone pale and cloudy, the last of the supplementary herbs dissolving into mist. His skin had taken on a deeper blue tinge overnight, and the tremors had changed. They came in waves now, building and subsiding like tides.
"Father?"
But Wang Tian's eyes were closed, his lips moving without sound. Whatever he was seeing, it wasn't the workshop.
[DAY 2 - MONITORING]
[Subject status: Stable]
[Tremor pattern: Cyclic, 4-6 minute intervals]
[Cold energy penetration: 34% and holding]
[Meridian reconstruction: 23% complete]
[Estimated completion: 41-47 hours]
Wang Ben let out a slow breath. The numbers were good. Better than good. The technique was working exactly as the research predicted.
So why couldn't he shake the feeling that something was wrong?
The second day passed in fragments.
Wang Ben added herbs at the prescribed intervals, breaking the layer of frost that kept forming on the water's surface. He monitored his father's breathing, his heartbeat, the subtle fluctuations in his spiritual energy. He read from the alchemy journals when the silence grew too heavy, letting his voice fill the frozen workshop with words his father had written decades ago.
Li Mei came twice that day.
The first time, she brought breakfast and stood in the doorway for a long moment, watching her husband shake in his bath of ice. Baby Chen was awake in her arms, making small sounds that seemed impossibly warm in the frozen room.
"Has he spoken?"
"Fragments. He's reliving the past." Wang Ben accepted the bowl of congee she offered. "It's normal. The technique affects consciousness as well as meridians."
"How do you know that's normal?"
Wang Ben didn't answer. He couldn't.
Li Mei's eyes lingered on him, searching for something. Then she turned and left without pressing further.
The second time, she came alone. Chen must have been sleeping.
"You need to rest," she said.
"I'm fine."
"You haven't slept in two days."
"I slept last night."
"Slumped against a wall with a book on your lap." Li Mei's voice was sharp. "Ben'er, you can't help your father if you collapse."
"I won't collapse."
"You're fifteen years old."
"I know how old I am."
The words came out harder than he intended. Li Mei flinched, and Wang Ben felt a flash of guilt.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I just... I can't leave him. Not now. Not when he's..."
He gestured at his father, at the tremors that wracked his body, at the frost that crept across the tub's edges like reaching fingers.
Li Mei was quiet for a moment. Then she crossed to him and pressed her palm against his forehead, the way she used to when he was small and feverish.
"You're cold," she said. "You're sitting in this frozen room without a coat."
"I don't feel it."
"That's what worries me."
She left and returned with a thick coat, which she draped across his shoulders without asking permission. Wang Ben didn't protest.
"I'll check on you again before nightfall," she said from the doorway. "And Ben?"
He looked up.
"Whatever is happening to you... whatever changed... I don't need to understand it. I just need you to survive it."
She closed the door behind her. Wang Ben sat in silence, the coat heavy on his shoulders, and watched his father dream of fire.
The flashbacks came in waves, matching the tremors.
Wang Tian would go still for minutes at a time, his breathing shallow, his face peaceful. Then the shaking would begin, and with it, the words.
"...checked them three times..."
Wang Ben listened, piecing together fragments of a story he'd never been told.
"...the foundational herb... different... the color was..."
His father's brow furrowed, even in his trance state. Pain flickered across his features, and not just from the cold.
"...Elder... Elder Liu... he was there that morning..."
Wang Ben went very still.
[RECORDING]
[Subject vocal pattern: Consistent with trauma recall]
[Key phrase detected: "Elder Liu"]
[Context: Possible witness or participant in original incident]
[Recommendation: Continue monitoring, do not interrupt recall sequence]
Wang Ben's hands curled into fists. Elder Liu. The name kept surfacing, over and over, throughout the day. Always in connection with that morning nine years ago. Always with the same undertone of wrongness.
He couldn't prove anything. Not yet. But the suspicion that had been growing since the wolf attack, since the failed warning formation, since every small sabotage that had plagued his family... it was crystallizing into something harder. Something certain.
Elder Liu had been there the morning of his father's fall.
Elder Liu, who had almost certainly disabled the warning formation.
Elder Liu, whose eyes had held something cold and calculating every time Wang Ben caught him watching.
The same Elder Liu who was now somewhere in the Blackwood Forest, sent away by Grand Elder Wang Feng. Far from the workshop. Far from the family he had spent a decade trying to destroy.
Wang Ben looked at his father, still shaking, still dreaming, still fighting through the pain of a healing that should have happened nine years ago.
His hands were shaking. Not from cold.
You did this to him. The thought burned through his mind like poison. You took nine years from us. You made my mother cry. You made my father afraid of his own fire.
He wanted to break something. He wanted to find Elder Liu right now, drag him back from whatever mission had sent him away, and...
Wang Ben forced himself to breathe. He was fifteen. Body refinement 5. Elder Liu was foundation establishment 9. The gap between them was a chasm he couldn't cross with anger alone.
But he would cross it. Somehow. Eventually.
I'll remember this, he promised silently. Every tremor. Every fragment of pain in his voice. I'll remember all of it.
Night fell. The tremors continued.
Wang Ben caught himself drifting twice, jerking awake with his father's journals slipping from his hands. The exhaustion was a physical weight now, pressing down on his shoulders, blurring his vision at the edges.
But he couldn't sleep. Not when his father was like this.
[HOST FATIGUE DETECTED]
[Performance degradation: 12%]
[Recommendation: 4-6 hours sleep to maintain optimal monitoring capability]
[Note: Subject is stable. Risk of adverse event during rest period: Low]
Wang Ben ignored the System's advice. He'd ignored it all day.
Instead, he read. His father's alchemy journals were filled with careful observations, detailed experiments, the meticulous notes of a craftsman at the peak of his powers. Reading them felt like meeting a stranger who wore his father's face. The man who had written these words was confident, brilliant, unbroken.
The man in the bath was something else entirely.
But maybe not for much longer.
The third day dawned grey and cold.
Wang Ben barely noticed. His world had narrowed to the workshop, to the frost and the tremors and the steady rhythm of his father's breathing. Everything else felt distant, unreal.
Li Mei came with breakfast. She didn't try to make him leave.
"How much longer?"
"It should be done by this evening. Maybe sooner."
"And then?"
"Then we wait for him to wake up."
She nodded. Hesitated. "The Patriarch sent a messenger. He wants to know the outcome."
"Tell him we're not done yet."
"I already did." A ghost of a smile crossed her face. "I may have been less polite about it."
She left Chen with Wang Ben for an hour that afternoon. The baby slept in a basket near the fire Wang Ben had built to keep one corner of the workshop warm, oblivious to the frozen tableau at its center. Sometimes Wang Ben caught himself looking between his father and his brother, between the man fighting to reclaim his past and the child who represented the family's future.
This has to work, he thought. For both of them.
The final flashback came near sunset.
Wang Tian's tremors had been growing weaker all day, the violent shaking subsiding into gentle shivers, the shivers fading into stillness. His color was improving too, the blue tinge receding, healthy warmth returning to his skin.
And then, just as Wang Ben was beginning to believe they'd reached the other side, his father spoke one last time.
"...the herb... was replaced..."
Wang Ben leaned forward.
"...I saw... someone leaving my workshop... that morning... before dawn..."
Wang Tian's face twisted, pain and confusion and the desperate struggle to remember something important.
"...couldn't see the face... but the walk... the way he moved..."
His voice dropped to a whisper.
"...I know that walk..."
Then silence. Wang Tian's features smoothed, the tension draining away. His breathing deepened. The tremors stopped entirely.
[PROCEDURE COMPLETE]
[Duration: 72.3 hours]
[Subject status: Unconscious but stable]
[Vital signs: Strong]
[Meridian reconstruction: 100% complete]
[Note: Initiating post-procedure analysis...]
Wang Ben's heart was pounding. He reached for his father's wrist, checking the pulse the old-fashioned way, feeling the steady beat beneath his fingers. Strong. Steady. Alive.
"It worked," he breathed. "Father, it worked."
But Wang Tian didn't respond. He lay motionless in the water, which had finally warmed to room temperature as the last of the Coldvein Lotus energy dissipated.
Wang Ben began the process of lifting his father from the bath.
They laid him on the bed that Li Mei had prepared, covering him with blankets, propping his head on pillows. Wang Tian's face was peaceful, his breathing deep and regular. He looked like a man sleeping off a hard day's work, not someone who had just endured three days of what amounted to controlled torture.
"Is it over?" Li Mei asked from the doorway. Chen was in her arms again, wide-eyed and silent.
"The procedure is complete."
"Did it work?"
Wang Ben checked his father's pulse the way any son would, feeling the steady beat beneath his fingers. But even as he did, text flickered at the edge of his vision.
[INITIATING POST-PROCEDURE SCAN]
[Analyzing subject meridian network...]
The System was doing something. Wang Ben kept his face neutral as information scrolled past, data he couldn't have gathered on his own. Body refinement cultivators couldn't sense qi flows. They couldn't examine meridians. But the thing in his head could.
What it found made him freeze.
[ANOMALY DETECTED]
[Meridian configuration: Does not match expected post-procedure parameters]
[Energy density: 147% of baseline expectations]
[Flow pattern: Unknown configuration]
[Cross-referencing database...]
[No exact match found]
[Closest approximation: Reconstruction template exceeds original capacity]
[Analysis: Subject's meridians are not merely healed]
[They are... enhanced]
Wang Ben stared at his unconscious father. The spiritual energy in his meridians wasn't just flowing normally. It was flowing in patterns he didn't recognize, configurations that shouldn't exist, channels that were wider and deeper than they had any right to be.
The technique had worked. But it had done something the research never predicted.
"Ben'er?" Li Mei's voice was sharp with worry. "What's wrong?"
He shook his head slowly. "I'm not sure. Something is... different."
"Different bad or different good?"
Wang Ben studied the System's analysis of his father's restored meridians. According to the data, they weren't damaged. They weren't unstable. If anything, the readings suggested they were stronger than before, more refined, more... complete.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I've never seen anything like this."
[CONTINUED ANALYSIS]
[Hypothesis: Coldvein Lotus interaction with dormant Spirit Fire created unexpected resonance]
[Probability: 34%]
[Hypothesis: Subject's original meridian damage contained suppressed potential that reconstruction unlocked]
[Probability: 28%]
[Hypothesis: Unknown factor]
[Probability: 38%]
[Recommendation: Await subject awakening for full assessment]
Li Mei crossed to the bed and took her husband's hand. Her face was pale, but her grip was steady.
"He's breathing," she said. "His heart is beating. He's warm."
"Yes."
"Then whatever else is happening, he's alive. He survived." She glanced toward the door, toward the world beyond their frozen workshop. "The beast tide reports are getting worse. The Patriarch has called three emergency meetings in three days. But that can wait. Right now, your father is alive."
Wang Ben nodded. She was right. Whatever the anomaly meant, his father had made it through. The rest could wait until he woke.
"I'll stay with him," Li Mei said. "You need to sleep."
"Mother..."
"That wasn't a request." Her voice brooked no argument. "You've been awake for three days. You can barely stand. Go to your room, sleep for a few hours, and come back when you're human again."
Wang Ben wanted to argue. But his legs were shaking, his vision was blurring, and he knew she was right.
"If anything changes..."
"I'll send for you immediately."
He took one last look at his father, at the peaceful face of a man whose rebuilt meridians held mysteries even the System couldn't fully explain. A man who might be waking up to something extraordinary.
Then he walked out of the workshop and let exhaustion claim him.
Somewhere in the Blackwood Forest, Elder Liu crouched behind a fallen log and tried to control his breathing.
Something was following him.
He'd sensed it yesterday, a presence at the edge of his awareness, always just out of sight. He'd dismissed it as paranoia at first, the natural unease of being alone in dangerous territory. But the feeling hadn't faded. If anything, it had grown stronger.
Now, as night fell and the forest darkened around him, he was certain.
Something was hunting him.
He'd tried to circle back, to catch whatever it was by surprise. He'd set traps, laid false trails, used every trick he'd learned in decades of skulking and scheming. Nothing worked. The presence remained, patient and persistent, always watching.
And there was something else. A smell. Faint but unmistakable.
Serpent.
Elder Liu's hand went to his robes, to the faint residue that still clung to the fabric despite his attempts to wash it away. The pheromones from the eggs he'd cracked. The scent he'd used to lure the wolves toward Wang Ben.
It can't be, he thought. The parent serpents shouldn't be this far from their territory...
But even as he thought it, he knew it wasn't true. Poison Marsh Serpents were patient creatures. Vengeful creatures. They could track their prey for weeks, for months, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
And he had killed their children.
Elder Liu pressed himself against the log and stared into the gathering darkness, waiting for something he couldn't see.
In the shadows beyond his sight, the female serpent tasted the air and found the scent of her murdered offspring.
She was patient. She could wait.
But not for much longer.
END OF CHAPTER 16