The mountain screamed.
It wasn't a sound of rock and earth—it was the shriek of reality being compressed. The Seven-Point Star Suppression Array was active, and it didn't just collapse stone; it simplified it. Chaotic fractures, ancient pockets of gas, layered sediments—all were being forced into perfect, dense order. The process released terrifying waves of concussive force.
Ling Xiao ran, not with his eyes, but with his chaos senses wide open. The world was a symphony of pressure and breaking points. He didn't see the falling rock; he felt the potential for collapse three steps ahead. A pillar to his left groaned—he juked right as it powdered into dust. The ceiling above him sagged—he dove forward into a roll as a slab the size of a househammered down where he'd been.
Pattern Reading had become instinct. But it was reactive. He was reading the present fractures, predicting the immediate future based on current stresses. It was enough to keep him half a second ahead of death.
Then he turned a corner into a straight, narrow tunnel—and his senses screamed.
The collapse here wasn't a possibility. It was a certainty. The entire tunnel roof was one single, massive fault line, and the suppression array's pressure was focused directly on it. In his mind's eye, he saw it: the crack propagating, the ceiling falling in a solid wall of stone, crushing him into nothing. The image was so vivid, so final, it felt less like a prediction and more like a memory of something that had already happened.
He skidded to a halt, heart hammering. He had two seconds. Maybe three.
Think! The frantic, desperate part of his mind shrieked. There has to be a way!
He stretched his senses to their limit, searching for a weakness, a flaw, anything. He saw the pattern of the collapse again. And again. Each time, it ended with him dead. He was trapped in a chaotic equation with only one solution: zero.
Wait.
The thought cut through the panic.It wasn't Shí's voice. It was his own, born of five years of watching storms.
If the equation has only one solution… change a variable.
The variable was him. His position. His action.
He looked at the pattern of falling stone not as a fixed event, but as a fluid one, responsive to energy. The ceiling was fracturing along a line of intense ordered pressure from the array. What if he introduced a new pressure? A chaotic one?
He had a tiny reservoir of absorbed energy—the painful, brittle cord of power within him. He had nowhere to run. So he planted his feet in the shuddering tunnel, raised his hands toward the fault line in the ceiling, and did the only thing he could.
He didn't try to hold the rock up. He didn't try to blast it.
Hepushed a single, focused pulse of chaotic energy directly into the heart of the fracture pattern, not to support it, but to complicate it.
The energy left him in a violet thread. It touched the fault line.
For a breathtaking, terrifying moment, nothing in the pattern changed. The ceiling still groaned, destined to fall.
Then, a new branch appeared in his mind's eye. A split-second alternative. The chaotic energy had created a minor, secondary fracture perpendicular to the main one. The single massive collapse became two smaller, staggered ones. The crushing wall of stone became a deadly rain.
It wasn't safety. It was a different kind of danger. But it was a path.
He saw it. Not as a prediction, but as a vision. A clear, three-second glimpse of the immediate future, showing him the exact pattern of falling rocks, the gaps between them, the safe spots that would exist for a fraction of a heartbeat.
Chaos Precognition.
The ceiling exploded downward.
Ling Xiao moved. He didn't think. He followed the ghostly afterimages of himself his new sight provided. A step left, duck, roll under a tumbling boulder, spring forward between two crashing pillars, slide on gravel beneath a spray of shale. He was a leaf in a rockslide, flowing through chaos he had subtly redirected.
He emerged from the other side of the tunnel collapse, gasping, covered in dust and minor cuts, into a wider cavern. The vision was gone, and a pounding headache took its place, centered on his burning mark. But he was alive.
A slow, cold clapping echoed through the dusty air.
Jin stood at the far end of the cavern, where the tunnel continued upward. His silver robes were torn and dirty, his face smudged with soot. One of his hands was clenched around a cracked formation flag—the source of the suppression array. His other hand held a dagger made of solidified moonlight. His eyes held no trace of the pity Ling Xiao had seen before. Only a cold, professional fury.
"Impressive," Jin said, his voice flat. "You didn't just survive my formation. You edited it. That is not a skill a chaos-touched should possess. It is a skill that makes you a Category Five existential risk."
Ling Xiao backed away, his senses still screaming. Jin was a solid wall of ordered energy, a star burning in the chaotic dark of the mountain. He was wounded, his energy depleted from maintaining the array, but he was still a Sea Formation cultivator. A pond, Shí had called him. But to Ling Xiao's Mortal Foundation senses, that pond was an ocean.
"I don't want to fight you," Ling Xiao said, his voice small.
"This stopped being about your wants the moment you were born," Jin replied, beginning to advance. "My mission parameters have shifted. Live capture is no longer optimal. I am to retrieve your core and your mark for study. The rest is… disposable."
He moved. Not with the blinding speed of Kai, but with a terrible, inevitable grace. The moonlight dagger flickered, and a arc of silver energy shot toward Ling Xiao, humming with a frequency designed to disrupt chaotic resonance.
Ling Xiao's precognition didn't flare this time; the attack was too straightforward. He threw himself sideways, but the edge of the energy grazed his arm. It didn't cut skin. It unraveled. The chaotic energy in his meridians at that spot hissed and dissolved, leaving a numb, dead feeling, as if that part of his body had been conceptually erased.
He cried out, more in shock than pain.
Jin closed in, his movements economical. "You have no technique. No discipline. You are a natural disaster in a child's skin. I am a surgeon. This will be quick."
Ling Xiao scrambled backward, his mind racing. He couldn't match Jin's power. He couldn't outrun him in this enclosed space. His gaze darted around the cavern. It was a junction where several ancient energy flows had once met. The suppression array had drained most of it, but the ghosts of those flows remained—chaotic imprints on the stone, like scars.
An idea, desperate and born of Shí's teaching, flickered in his mind.
You are not a passive vessel. You are a smith. Make it into a tool.
Jin lunged, dagger aiming precisely for Ling Xiao's dantian, to cripple his energy center.
Ling Xiao didn't try to block. He dropped flat to the cavern floor and pressed both his palms against the stone. He reached out with his Chaos Sensing, not for energy to absorb, but for the memory of energy. He found the ghost of the largest, most violent ley line fracture that had once run through this junction—a fossilized echo of tectonic rage.
And he poured his entire remaining reservoir of chaotic energy, every painful scrap he'd absorbed, into that ghost. He didn't command it. He awakened it. He gave the echo a moment of borrowed substance, a single, reverberating shout of what it once was.
The cavern floor remembered it was once a fault line.
The stone beneath Jin's feet, already stressed by the suppression array's collapse, gave up its fragile order. It didn't just crack. It liquefied for a moment in a localized circle three paces wide, turning into a slurry of grinding rock. Then it snapped back into solidity with immense pressure.
Jin's forward lunge became a trap. His legs were instantly encased to the knees in solid rock. He snarled, his ordered energy flaring to shatter the stone. It began to crack.
But Ling Xiao wasn't done. Empty of his own power, he did something even more reckless. He used his last spark of will to perform Pattern Reading on the ceiling directly above Jin. The suppression array had weakened it. The miniature earthquake he'd triggered had destabilized it. It was a chaotic system on the brink.
He found the precise point—a single keystone in the arch of natural rock. And with the last of his mental strength, he flicked it. Not with energy, but with intention, a nudge against a possibility.
The keystone fractured.
With a roar that drowned out Jin's shout, the entire section of ceiling directly above the scout collapsed. Not in a rain of stones, but in a single, multi-ton spear of bedrock. It fell with the finality of a mountain's judgment.
Jin looked up, his ordered energy forming a desperate, brilliant shield above him.
The shield held for a fraction of a second, glowing like a small moon in the dark.
Then it shattered.
The rock drove down.
The sound was wet, deep, and final.
Then, silence, broken only by the settling of dust.
Ling Xiao lay on his stomach, arms still pressed to the now-still stone. He was empty. Spiritually, physically, emotionally. He stared at the new pile of rubble that filled the far end of the cavern. From beneath it, one silver-robed arm protruded, fingers curled loosely around the cracked formation flag. Unmoving.
He had done it. He had won.
He had killed a man.
The reality of it didn't hit him immediately. There was just a numb hollow where fear and adrenaline had been. He pushed himself up, swaying. He walked, step by shaky step, toward the rubble. He didn't want to. His body moved anyway.
Up close, he could see a trickle of dark blood seeping from between the rocks, pooling around the silver fabric. The hand was clean, well-manicured. A scholar's hand.
This wasn't like Kai, who was unmade by the storm. This was… messier. More personal. Ling Xiao had looked into this man's eyes. He had seen his anger, his duty, his fear. And then he had brought a mountain down on him.
A violent tremor ran through him. He turned and vomited onto the stone, heaving until there was nothing left. The taste of bile mixed with the dust in his mouth. He sank to his knees, shaking uncontrollably.
He was going to kill me. He called me disposable. The logic was cold, clear, and utterly meaningless against the raw, animal horror coiling in his gut. He had ended a life. He had felt the chaotic potential of a living being—its thoughts, its memories, its future—snap into absolute, final stillness.
He didn't know how long he knelt there. Time became the slow settling of dust.
A faint, pained whisper reached his ears. Not from the rubble. From the flag in the dead hand.
Jin's final spiritual imprint, clinging to his tool.
"…not…over…" the whisper sighed, fading. "…Star-Seer… knows your… resonance now… They will come… for the Titan's legacy…"
The whisper dissolved.
Ling Xiao flinched. It wasn't over. It would never be over. He stumbled to his feet, backing away from the rubble, from the flag, from the blood.
He needed to find Shí. He needed to tell him. He needed… he didn't know what he needed.
He turned and ran, deeper into the mountain, away from the death he'd made, following the fading, familiar warmth of the Titan's true body. He found the main tomb chamber through a side passage. The sight that greeted him stole what little breath he had left.
Shí, the Primordial Titan, was still on his throne. But the stone encasing him had spread. It now covered his chest, crawling up his neck. The gold-violet light in his single open eye was dim, guttering like a candle in a draft.
He had used immense power—holding the core of the tomb together against the suppression array, maintaining the spirit projection—and it had cost him dearly.
"Child…" the voice was a thin rasp, barely vibrating the stone. "You… live."
"I killed him," Ling Xiao blurted out, the words tasting of bile and blood.
The Titan's eye managed a slow blink. "I felt the silence where his will once pressed. You did what was necessary."
"It doesn't feel necessary!" Ling Xiao shouted, the tears finally coming, hot and angry. "It feels horrible! It feels like I broke something that can never be fixed!"
For a long moment, Shí was silent. Then, with great effort, he spoke. "That feeling… is the weight. The first and heaviest weight. Remember it. If the day comes when killing feels light… you will have lost something far greater than a life." The Titan's voice faded further. "My time… is less than a year now. The expenditure… accelerated the decay. I have months. Weeks, perhaps."
The finality of it, on the heels of the killing, was too much. Ling Xiao's legs gave out, and he crumpled to the floor before the ancient throne, a small, broken figure in a hall of giants.
He had survived. He had won his first fight.
Why did it feel like he had lost everything?
---
END OF CHAPTER 6