One day after surviving the Worldfire pursuit, Jalen managed to recover—barely. His qi pool still sputtered under strain, body bruised, and nerves frayed, but at least he had reclaimed some composure. Forty percent, maybe less. But it was enough.
He spent those silent hours lying beneath flickering glyphs, letting Origin Shard resonance trickle through his core like a thread of tempered silk. The walls of the chamber pulsed gently, as if offering calm after chaos.
But calm never lasts in cursed realms.
That morning—if time could even be measured here—the Origin Shard flared again. No warning. No mercy. Just motion.
The chamber quaked. Glyphs burst into flame. The floor split with spiraling cracks, and the walls began to close in—not like doors, but like clenched fists ready to crush him.
Jalen bolted. No hesitation.
His feet struck the ground with desperation, wind surging across his soles to grant acceleration. The chamber narrowed. Every stone edge curled inward like the jaws of some ancient construct.
The final exit trembled ahead.
For one breath, he didn't think he'd make it. The closing wall snarled toward him. But with a last sprint and a leap fueled by instinct, he squeezed through just as the opening slammed shut behind him.
The Origin Shard never moved without reason. But this… felt like preparation wrapped in punishment.
Jalen stepped forward—and darkness greeted him.
Silence fell.
No light. No glyphs. No flames.
Only void.
Jalen stepped forward—and darkness greeted him.
Not the absence of flame. Not night. Not an illusion.
This was thick dark. A silence dense enough to feel. His spiritual vision tried to cut through it. Failed. His eyes—enhanced by cultivation—still saw nothing.
He walked.
There was no other choice.
He didn't know how far he moved. How many corridors twisted around him. How long he wandered through this abyss. The walls didn't hum. The air didn't pulse. Even his Origin Shard felt distant, dulled by whatever power ruled this depth.
It felt like an eternity.
Each footstep became its own hour. Each breath another question. Was he even going in a direction? Did space matter here? Or had the temple swallowed him whole?
Then—without sound, without warning—something pulled him.
Not violently. Not physically. Just motion.
Like gravity tied to intention.
He didn't resist. Couldn't. The force slid him sideways, then upward, then through a corridor that didn't exist seconds ago. He blinked—and found himself inside a grand chamber.
It was vast—walls etched in shimmering text.
Thousands of glowing glyphs floated along the surfaces, written in a language no continent had claimed. Symbols twisted in arcs and diagonal cascades, whispering meanings he couldn't grasp.
The chamber was quiet. Overwhelmingly so.
No flame. No wind. No beasts.
Just floating ink etched on stone.
Then the Origin Shard pulsed once—its light flickering inside his chest— and a tendril of shadow rose from the floor, slow and deliberate. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't kind. It simply was.
Jalen didn't move. Couldn't.
The tendril coiled around his chest, then pierced into his dantian. His spirit convulsed. Qi flared due to the foreign energy. And something ancient settled inside him.
Not a gift. Not a curse. A bond.
The Origin Shard—now fused with his primary core—flared in response, reaching for the seed's essence. But before it could claim it, something unexpected happened.
His second spirit core stirred after all this time of being unresponsive.
It opened like a starved beast—and devoured the Shadow Seed whole.
The Origin Shard flared in anger, its light pulsing with fury. But it was too late. The seed had been consumed, not by the shard, but by the second core.
And just like that, the impossible became real.
Jalen's second spirit core had awakened. And it was shadow-bound.
His meridians tingled with unfamiliar qi. Shadow threads curled through his spirit veins like ink in water. His primary core—wind-based—remained untouched, stable. But now, a second force pulsed within him.
The Vault had accepted him.
The trial had begun.
The shadow seed that had now took root in his second spirit core began its slow work—reshaping him, month by month, into something the world hadn't seen in generations. Something rare.
A Shadow Physique.
It was only after that moment—that the writings on the walls began to change.
Every line of foreign scripture wavered in midair, stretching, twisting, then reassembling into a language Jalen understood.
It revealed everything.
This was the Legacy Chamber of Reuven Duskborn, an ascended shadow cultivator who vanished four thousand years ago. His final act was constructing this realm—a pocket dimension imbued with a time-warping relic from the upper realm known as the Time Stone.
Here, time moved exponentially faster than in the outside world.
A month outside could span over a century within.
The legacy he left was specific: Ten Shadow Techniques, carved into space itself. Any cultivator who mastered all ten could earn the shadow twin blades, Ebon Severance, a supreme-grade shadow-attuned weapon, and leave the realm. Failure meant entrapment—forever.
Jalen breathed deeply.
He wasn't afraid, he was just excited to complete this task and get out of here.
The first obstacle wasn't qi control. It was comprehension.
The techniques weren't described linearly. Each one was written in metaphor, reverse phrasing, and multi-part glyph arrays that required cross-referencing with physical movement patterns. Jalen spent months just decoding one passage, only to find the key hidden in a script across the chamber.
He drew diagrams across the floor. Recreated glyphs on stone using spirit chalk. Then he sat cross-legged and began the first form.
One week passed.
Then two.
Then four.
Jalen's qi fluctuated wildly as he tried to capture the essence of the first technique: Eclipsed Motion—a method for vanishing into ambient shadows and reappearing elsewhere, as if space itself folded to his will. It wasn't teleportation perse. It was more like slipping through a fracture in reality, guided by darkness.
Difficult. Counterintuitive.
He failed. Repeatedly.
The glyphs mocked him with silence. The chamber didn't shift.
After a month, Jalen hadn't scratched the surface.
He cursed. Meditated. Cursed again.
But something kept him going.
Perhaps it was the Origin Shard's quiet pulse, reacting to the room. Perhaps it was the memory of his father and Rana. Or maybe… it was pride.
He wasn't going to die forgotten in someone else's memory chamber.
Not without a fight.
So he persevered.
Eclipsed Motion took him several hundred of thousands of tries.
He adjusted shadow qi into spiral inversion. Studied negative compression forms. Learned how to wrap aura flow inward while matching spatial vibration.
Range was the first limitation.
At first, he could barely shift five feet—just enough to dodge a strike or slip behind a pillar. The shadows had to be thick, unmoving, and connected.
As his control deepened, the distance grew. Ten feet. Fifteen.
By the end of his third year, he could vanish from one side of the chamber and reappear just twenty feet away.
That was his limit.
Not a battlefield leap. Not a grand escape.
But in close quarters, it was lethal.
He could slip behind an enemy mid-strike. Evade a trap. Reposition without warning.
The cost was steep. Each shift drained his qi like a floodgate torn open.
And the shadows had to be pure. No flickering flame. No spiritual interference.
He learned to measure the darkness like a craftsman measures wood grain—searching for depth, density, and silence.
Only then could he slip through.
It took him seven years to master this technique.
One glyph flickered.
Only one.
And now?
There were nine more forms to learn.