Holding a fragment of a divine spatial law inside a body with zero functioning meridians felt exactly like trying to swallow a handful of crushed glass.
I stood in the exact center of the ruined outer training court. It was just past noon. The July sun was beating down on the cracked black stones, baking the dirt until the air itself shimmered with thick, suffocating humidity. It smelled heavily of baked dust, dry pine, and my own stale sweat.
But inside a fifteen-meter radius around my boots, it was the dead of winter.
My breath plumed into thick, white clouds. I held my right hand out, my fingers splayed so hard the tendons in my wrist screamed.
About six feet away from me, a large, iridescent green June beetle was suspended perfectly in mid-air. It wasn't encased in a block of ice. There was no frost on its wings. It was simply... stopped. Caught in a localized pocket of absolute zero momentum.
My torn left hamstring was currently burning with a dull, sickening throb, cannibalizing my physical stamina because the law had no ambient Qi to feed on. I squeezed my eyes shut, my jaw locking as I tried to force the boundary of the frost from fifteen meters to sixteen.
Crack.
The spatial pocket shattered. The June beetle dropped like a stone, hitting the dirt with a dry, hollow crunch. The localized winter instantly evaporated into a violent hiss of steam as the surrounding summer heat rushed in to collapse the vacuum.
I dropped heavily to one knee, gasping for air, clutching my left thigh with white-knuckled fingers.
"If you were any less talented," Old Geezer's voice vibrated in the hollow, aching architecture of my skull, dripping with aristocratic contempt, "I would advise you to take up a career as decorative furniture. You are treating a conceptual law of reality like a blunt club."
"I got it... to fifteen meters," I wheezed, wiping a confusing mix of freezing condensation and hot sweat from my forehead. My fingers were completely numb.
"You pushed the cold outward," the ancient god snapped, his voice feeling like a physical spike scraping against the back of my eyes. "That is what a mortal peasant does. You do not push space. You command it to cease. True absolute zero is just the absence of movement. You must listen to the space between the physical matter."
I stood up slowly, leaning my weight heavily onto my good right leg. I looked down at the dead beetle in the dirt. Its wings had shattered from the sudden temperature shock.
"The architecture of this law," I muttered, my chest still heaving. "It's too specific. Combining spatial-delay with thermal absolute zero. It feels engineered. Like it was custom-built for a very specific type of anatomy."
A heavy, irritated sigh echoed in my mind. It sounded like an avalanche settling.
"Because it was," Old Geezer said dismissively, adopting the rigid cadence of a bored academic. "The Ice bloodline was one I developed manually. It was built specifically to accommodate the spiritual meridians of a student of mine—"
The voice in my head simply ceased to exist.
It didn't fade out. He didn't pause for dramatic effect. It felt as though the ancient, omnipotent entity residing in my soul had suddenly, violently severed his own vocal cords.
I stood perfectly still in the oppressive summer heat.
The silence stretching across my mind was absolute. It was the heaviest thing I had felt since waking up in this world. It possessed a dense, suffocating texture. It felt exactly like walking into a sealed room and realizing someone had died there a very, very long time ago.
I looked at the crushed beetle in the dirt.
I didn't ask.
I didn't ask: Who was she? I didn't ask: Did she have silver hair and pale eyes like Shen Yuebing?
You do not press a knife into a three-thousand-year-old wound unless you are prepared to bleed.
I slowly raised my right hand, splayed my numb fingers, and locked my jaw.
"Continue your forms," Old Geezer said finally.
The voice was completely flat. It lacked the simmering arrogance, the mockery, the fire. It sounded incredibly, unfathomably tired.
"Right," I said to the empty courtyard.
I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the space between the heat.
By mid-afternoon, the pain in my hamstring had degraded from a sharp scream into a deep, vibrating uselessness.
I limped to the edge of the training yard and sat down heavily on the stone steps of the main hall, leaning my spine against a rotting wooden pillar. The rough wood dug into my back, but I didn't move. I didn't have the mental bandwidth to navigate Old Geezer's aggressive, lingering silence anymore.
Across the cracked expanse of the outer courtyard, Zhou Bao was sweating entirely through his cheap gray robes.
He wasn't sweeping today. He was holding a heavily splintered wooden practice sword.
Standing exactly five feet to Zhou Bao's right was Elder Tan. The old man had set his twig broom neatly against the stone lip of the well. He was holding a straight, relatively clean willow branch in his right hand.
I didn't say anything. I just watched them from the shade.
"Your center of gravity is trapped in your neck, boy," Elder Tan said. His voice sounded like dry leaves rubbing together. "You are trying to pull the sword with your shoulders. The sword does not care about your shoulders. The sword only cares about the earth."
Zhou Bao wiped his nose with a filthy sleeve, his round face flushed a violent, unhealthy shade of purple. He grunted, shifting his weight clumsily, and swung the wooden blade horizontally. It was a terrible, messy arc. The tip dipped lazily toward the dirt.
Elder Tan didn't sigh. He didn't insult the boy. He simply reached out with his willow branch and tapped the back of Zhou Bao's left knee.
"Bend," the old man instructed quietly.
Zhou Bao bent his knee, his legs shaking from exhaustion.
"Now the hip," Elder Tan tapped the boy's side with the branch. "Breathe into the dantian. Do not look at the wood. Look at the space the wood is going to occupy."
It was the Cloud-Parting Step. A basic Foundation-level sword form. It was meant for cultivators who had already washed their marrow and refined their physical vessels. Zhou Bao was a Qi Gathering Stage 2 washout who cried when doors slammed too loudly. He had absolutely no business attempting it.
I watched the fat teenager bite the inside of his lip. He adjusted his grip on the splintered handle. His knuckles were bone-white. He was terrified of failing, he was exhausted, and his stance was atrocious.
But he hadn't dropped the sword.
He took a ragged, wet breath. He stepped into the form.
He swung the wood.
It wasn't elegant. It was frantic, and his back foot slipped slightly on a patch of dry moss. But for a fraction of a microsecond, the wooden blade cut a clean, perfectly horizontal line through the thick summer air.
Hiss.
It was barely audible. But I saw it.
A tiny, microscopic spark of pale blue Qi ignited along the splintered edge of the wooden sword. It trailed the arc for exactly one inch, weak and sputtering, before instantly dissipating into the summer heat.
Zhou Bao froze. He tripped over his own oversized boots and landed hard on his backside in the dirt.
But he didn't look at his scraped hands. He didn't cry. He was staring at the wooden sword in his lap, his mouth hanging completely open, his eyes wide with a manic, disbelieving shock.
He looked at the stick like he had just invented fire.
Elder Tan didn't clap. He didn't offer a grand, philosophical speech about the Dao. He simply nodded once, his heavy, drooping eyelids unreadable in the harsh light.
"Again," Elder Tan said.
Zhou Bao scrambled to his feet, ignoring the dirt clinging to his wet robes. He raised the sword.
I sat on the steps, resting my forearms on my knees. I felt something shift violently in the center of my chest. It wasn't the cold pressure of the Ice Law or the suffocating, atmospheric weight of the Heavenly Dao monitoring formation circling overhead.
It felt like a stone dropping into my stomach.
I am a software engineer, I thought, watching the boy swing the stick again. I shouldn't be here. I don't know how to run a sect. I am making up half of what I say. I am faking it.
I looked at Elder Tan, who had survived the sect's collapse and chosen to stay just to sweep the floors. I looked at Zhou Bao, who was currently attempting to break his own physical limits simply because I had told him, three days ago, that we were going to war.
I am a fraud, I thought, my throat tightening uncomfortably. But they don't know that. And they are going to die if I don't figure this out.
Before the panic could fully paralyze my lungs, the pristine blue interface of the system panel snapped open in the lower corner of my vision, overlaying the sunlit courtyard.
[ SOUL CULTIVATION BOND ARRAY — STATUS UPDATE ]
[ BACKGROUND LOG: Structural Complexity Increasing ]
[ Space-Ice Law Fragment approaching INTERMEDIATE THRESHOLD ]
[ Array Note: Law integration deepens through environmental application and emotional resonance. ]
I dismissed the panel with a blink.
"You saw the spark," Old Geezer noted in my mind. His voice had returned, though the sharp, cutting edge of his usual arrogance was noticeably blunted.
"I saw it," I thought back.
"The boy's talent is abysmal. He is a leaky bucket. But his meridians are widening. The ambient Qi environment of this sect is... changing. You are changing it."
I didn't respond to that. I kept my eyes on the old man and the teenager in the dirt.
I leaned my head back against the rotting wooden pillar, massaging my torn thigh with a numb thumb, waiting for the three days of Zhao Feng's deadline to bleed away.
I didn't say anything else to the ancient ghost in my head. Some silences needed to be left alone.