The Azure Cloud Sect's Outer Assessment Platform, usually a place of spiritual light and joyful ascent, felt today like a stage set for judgment. Below the towering, jade-colored peaks of the main sect—where true Immortals resided—the air was heavy with the scent of crisp pine needles and the cold, stinging disdain of two hundred young cultivators.
Lin Feng, thin and unremarkable, stood at the very edge of the crowd. At sixteen years old, his body was worn not from strenuous practice, but from the spiritual stagnation of a decade. He was the last disciple waiting to be tested, and the only one whose fate was already sealed in the eyes of his peers.
"Lin Feng, get on with it!"
The voice belonged to Elder Qing, a Core Formation master whose status gave him the right to judge the Outer Disciples. The Elder, distinguished by a silver beard that flowed like a spiritual waterfall and robes embroidered with stylized thunderclouds, didn't bother to look up from the thick stone tablet listing the sect's roster. His impatience was palpable.
"It has been ten years since your initiation into the sect, boy," Elder Qing stated, his voice a powerful, booming resonance that shook the spiritual formation underpinning the platform. "State your current cultivation level for the final report."
Lin Feng felt the familiar, crushing weight of failure tighten in his chest. A hundred pairs of eyes focused on him—eyes that held a mixture of genuine pity from the younger servants and raw, predatory scorn from the successful cultivators, particularly those who had just achieved Qi Condensation Level Five or Six.
He walked to the center, his cheap, faded outer-sect robes—mended countless times—a stark contrast to the brilliant, embroidered silks of the high-talent disciples.
"To the Elder's report," Lin Feng spoke, forcing the words past a throat suddenly dry. "Qi Condensation, Level One."
A ripple of cruel, unrestrained laughter swept through the platform.
Level One.
In ten years.
Most children with even the weakest Earthen Spirit Root could achieve Qi Condensation Level One within the first month of absorbing their first spirit stone. Lin Feng had consumed a small, steady trickle of basic spirit resources for a decade—enough to nurture a hundred nascent talents—yet he remained fixed at the absolute starting point, his dantian a stagnant pond.
The laughter was loudest from a young man named Liu Kai, a smug, handsome disciple who had just tested at Level Seven. "Ten years for Level One! That's a new sect record for inefficiency! Perhaps the sect should assign him the task of condensing the filth from the latrines instead of cleaning them!"
Elder Qing raised a hand, silencing the crowd, but his expression offered no sympathy. He fixed Lin Feng with a look of profound, bureaucratic weariness.
"The sect Master indulged your late father's dying wish for too long, Lin Feng," the Elder said, tapping the tablet sharply. "Your father, a faithful but unremarkable guard, earned this indulgence, but even faith has its limits. Every year, you consume basic resources that could be used for a true talent. The final assessment is a formality, but let us complete the waste."
He slammed a palm onto the Spirit Root Testing Monument, a block of luminous white crystal nearly the height of a man, activating its detection array. "Place your hand."
Lin Feng's whole body trembled. He knew the result. He had known it since the first day, but he still placed his hand on the cold, smooth surface. He poured every ounce of the meager, sticky energy from his dantian into the crystal, pushing against the crippling internal blockages he had fought for ten years.
For a brief, agonizing moment, the crystal glowed a faint, troubled green—the color of the Wood Element.
But the light was sickly, weak, and immediately fragmented, sputtering out like light passing through a web of cracked, broken glass. The energy signature was not just low; it was damaged.
Elder Qing read the metrics displayed in the crystal's core without emotion. "The result is unchanged. Shattered Wood Spirit Root. Ninety-nine percent spiritual blockage due to severe impurity infiltration. The Spirit Root is compromised, damaged, and fundamentally useless. You are a cultivator in name only, Lin Feng. You will never accumulate enough Qi to reach Qi Condensation Level Two. Not in a hundred years."
The physical pain of the humiliation was sharper than any blade. Lin Feng pulled his hand back, his shame leaving a burning heat on his palm.
"Your path as a cultivator is over," Elder Qing announced, his voice carrying the finality of an imperial decree. "Your name is struck from the Outer Disciple roster. You are hereby stripped of your spiritual supplies, your allocated shack, and all entitlements. You will report to the Mortal Estate—the servant quarters below the mountain—to clean the spirit horse stables and latrines. You may keep the uniform of a menial servant. Consider yourself grateful the Azure Cloud Sect allows you to remain within its grounds at all."
Lin Feng did not argue. He did not beg. He simply bowed low, a deep, shaking bow, his vision blurred with tears he refused to let fall. He turned and walked off the platform, the renewed laughter of the successful disciples echoing in his ears like the tolling of a funeral bell for his entire future.
He retreated to the eastern edge of the Outer Peak, to the small, dilapidated shack he had called home for a decade—a place so far past the main path that even the proper menial servants avoided it. Kicking the rotting wooden door shut, he collapsed onto his damp straw pallet, the last vestiges of his pride shattered.
Cleaning horse dung. The son of a loyal guard, reduced to this.
His hand instinctively went to his chest and gripped the only thing he had left of his mother: a plain, dull black ring. It was made of some unknown heavy metal, cold to the touch and completely devoid of spiritual energy, yet it was the only memento she had given him before she vanished years ago. He had clung to it as a last symbol of hope.
Failure. Waste. Mortal. Nothing.
He squeezed the ring, the heavy metal pressing painfully into his palm. A sharp, ragged edge of the metal bit into the flesh of his thumb, piercing the skin. A single, hot, desperate bead of his blood welled up and instantly ran down the side of the dull black surface.
Before Lin Feng could register the pain, the drop of blood was gone. It was not wiped away; it was instantly and completely absorbed by the cold, dead metal.
The world dissolved.
A thunderclap, silent but deafening, exploded inside his consciousness. The shack, the mountains, the distant mockery—everything dissolved into a void of pure, terrifying, primordial light. Lin Feng found himself standing not on his straw mattress, but in an impossible space of boundless, purple-gold energy.
Below his feet was a vast, desolate landscape floating in endless chaos, constantly being formed and unformed. Above, swirling cosmic dust coalesced into the formation of new stars. The air here was so incredibly thick with the essence of creation—Primordial Spiritual Qi—that a single breath felt like absorbing a massive spirit stone mine.
In the center of this dimension, resting on a pedestal carved from pure, crystalline starlight, was a scroll, radiating an ancient, eternal, incomprehensible power. On the scroll, illuminated by the purple-gold light, a single line of script glowed into his very soul:
Primordial Chaos Art: Heaven's Foundation
As the words imprinted themselves onto his consciousness, the chaotic, divine energy of the dimension rushed toward him. It flooded his body not through his meridians, but through the point where his blood had touched the ring. The energy struck his shattered Wood Spirit Root and his blocked dantian not with violence, but with unstoppable, corrosive cleansing.
The ninety-nine percent blockage that had plagued him for a decade was not bypassed; it was obliterated. The sticky, gray impurities that choked his Qi Condensation melted away like snow under a summer sun.
Lin Feng screamed in silent agony and ecstasy as the Primordial Chaos Art began its work, not cultivating, but refounding him. His broken Spirit Root began to reform, twisting the fragile green light into a deep, vibrant emerald, strengthened and purified by the supreme energy. The ring, now invisibly anchored to his soul, pulsed with cold fire.
Lin Feng, forgotten by the sect, shamed by the Core Formation Elder, and abandoned by his own talent, stared at the impossible sight of his transformation. He knew, with a certainty that shook the foundations of his very soul, that his path had not just begun—it had been reborn.