The silver lasso tightened like a snake of cold fire around Ling Xiao's chest, squeezing the air from his lungs. It wasn't just rope—it was solidified order, a binding that sought to smother the chaos within him.
"Don't struggle against its strength," the Titan's voice boomed, calm amidst the crisis. "Find its rhythm. All ordered constructs have one. A heartbeat. A flaw."
Ling Xiao gagged, his small hands clawing at the energy cord. It burned where it touched his skin, leaving glowing red marks. Above, Jin's face was a pale moon in the crack of sky, his hand outstretched, controlling the descent.
Find the rhythm.
Through the panic and the pain,Ling Xiao focused. He let his consciousness sink into the binding, as the Titan had taught him to do with the wall's vibration. He didn't fight the energy; he listened to it.
And there it was. A pulsing beat, like a relentless, metallic drum. Thrum-thrum-thrum. Each pulse sent a wave of suppression through him, trying to quiet the storm in his veins. But between pulses, for the briefest instant, the binding's focus shifted—renewing itself, preparing for the next beat.
The gap.
Ling Xiao waited. The lasso tightened further, lifting him off the ground. His vision spotted with darkness.
Now.
He didn't have enough energy to break the cord. So he didn't try. He exhaled a thread of his own chaotic energy, not at the cord itself, but into that microscopic gap in its attention. He didn't push. He slipped it in, like a drop of oil into a machine.
The silver lasso shimmered. The perfect, rhythmic pulse stuttered.
Thrum-thr—
A discordant note.
For one second,the binding's intention blurred. Was it supposed to constrict? To lift? To purify?
That second was enough.
"The wall!"the Titan commanded. "Three paces left of the dais—the stone is thin, weakened by time! Strike it with everything you have left!"
Ling Xiao, still half-bound, twisted in the air. He pulled not just on the tomb's energy, but on the storm-charged power still singing in his meridians from the valley. He focused it all into his palm, a ball of chaotic violet light sputtering with tiny lightnings. He didn't know how to throw it. So he simply willed it to go.
The energy shot from his hand, a wild, unformed bolt. It didn't strike the wall with force. It sank into it, like water into sponge.
For a breath, nothing happened.
Then,the entire section of wall silently dissolved into fine, violet sand, revealing a dark, narrow tunnel beyond.
The lasso, its connection to Jin momentarily confused by the chaotic eruption, loosened. Ling Xiao fell two feet to the floor, gasping.
"GO!" The Titan's voice was a physical shove against his back.
Ling Xiao scrambled on hands and knees through the new hole, just as a beam of concentrated silver light—Jin's angry follow-up—speared into the space where he'd just been.
The tunnel was tight, carved not for humans but for some ancient, smaller utility. Ling Xiao crawled blindly into the dark, the sounds of the scout's enraged shouts and the Titan's low, challenging laughter fading behind him.
He crawled until his hands found open space, and he tumbled into another chamber, smaller and utterly dark. He lay there, heart hammering against his ribs, the afterglow of used energy leaving him shivering and empty.
A soft, golden-violet light bloomed in the center of the chamber. Not from the walls. It coalesced into a translucent, shimmering form—the ghost of a massive, muscular man with stone-like skin and eyes of nebular light. It was the Titan, but diminished. A spirit projection.
"He cannot follow easily," the spirit said, its voice quieter, more intimate in the enclosed space. "That tunnel will collapse behind you. It gives us time. But not much. He will now seal the entire mountain. We are in the stomach of the tomb. The only way out is through knowledge."
Ling Xiao pushed himself up, staring at the spectral giant. "You left your body?"
"A fragment of my consciousness. The rest remains anchored, holding his attention. This," the spirit gestured to itself, "is the last of my mobile energy. When this fades, I am truly bound to the throne. So we will work quickly."
The spirit Titan sat, cross-legged, its form sinking until it was eye-level with the boy. "Lesson one: Chaos Sensing. You have done it instinctively. Now we do it deliberately. Close your eyes."
Ling Xiao obeyed.
"Feel the stone beneath you. Not its solidity. Feel the microscopic fractures, the spaces where atoms do not touch. That is chaos—the void between things, the potential for change. Now feel the air. The random dance of dust motes. That too is chaos. Now… feel the energy left in this room from when I was still whole. It is not ordered qi. It is… memory of power. Taste it."
Ling Xiao reached out with his mind. At first, there was only darkness and the ache of his body. Then, slowly, the world resolved into something else. He felt the grain of the stone, not as a solid block, but as a network of tiny, shifting fault lines. He felt the air currents, each carrying a whisper of different ages—dust from the collapse, spores from ancient fungi, the breath he'd just exhaled. And he felt the energy—a fading, golden warmth that held echoes of vastness, of crafting worlds and wrestling with leviathans of pure creation.
"I feel it," he whispered.
"Good. That is your foundation. Chaos is not your enemy. It is the raw material of reality. Order is the shape imposed upon it. The scout outside uses ordered shapes—formations, spells, tools. You will use the material itself."
For hours that felt like minutes, the Titan drilled him. He taught Ling Xiao to differentiate between types of chaotic energy: the wild, fresh chaos of the living storm outside; the slow, deep chaos of geological pressure; the bitter, stale chaos of decaying magic in the tomb's seals.
Chaos Sensing became more than feeling—it became a map. Ling Xiao could close his eyes and see the energy landscape of the surrounding stone, could find the weak points, the flows, the dormant pockets of power.
"Now, lesson two," the Titan said, as Ling Xiao panted from the mental exertion. "Pattern Reading. Sensing tells you what is. Reading tells you what will be." The spirit pointed a translucent finger at the ceiling. "The scout is angry. Impatient. He is setting up a formation—a Seven-Point Star Suppression Array—to collapse this entire tomb structure onto us, then sift the rubble for our remains. I can feel the anchors being placed. Six are done. He works on the seventh."
Ling Xiao stretched his newfound senses upward. He felt them—six points of piercing, ordered energy like needles driven into the mountain's flesh. A seventh was forming, its energy sharp and intent.
"Read the pattern of their placement," the Titan instructed. "Not the points themselves, but the tension between them. The shape they are trying to create."
Ling Xiao focused. The six points formed a rough hexagon. The seventh was being placed at the center. But the energy wasn't flowing evenly. Two of the points were slightly weaker, their hold on the mountain less secure. The pattern they wanted to make was a perfect, crushing star. The pattern they could make was lopsided, strained.
"The formation is unstable," Ling Xiao said, opening his eyes. "The north and east anchors are weak. When he activates it, the pressure won't distribute evenly. It will… tear. Mostly on the eastern side."
The Titan's spirit glowed with approval. "You see it. That is Pattern Reading. Seeing the inevitable collapse within the intended order. Now, lesson three. The most dangerous." The spirit's face grew solemn. "Energy Absorption. Your body is chaos-touched. It does not generate spiritual energy like ordinary cultivators. It must absorb it from the environment. You did it instinctively in the storm. To do it deliberately is to invite agony."
"Why?"
"Because you are not just absorbing raw power. You are absorbing potential. Unformed reality. Your body, your mortal meridians, will fight it. It will try to form that energy into something, and when it cannot, it will feel like you are being unmade from within. Watch."
The Titan's spirit extended a hand toward a dark corner of the room. A tiny, dying wisp of the tomb's ancient defensive energy—a fragment of a seal—drifted there, like a forgotten thought.
"Call it."
Ling Xiao focused on the wisp. He inhaled, using his mark as a conduit, and pulled.
It flowed into him. It was a cold, sharp, ancient energy, tasting of duty and finality. For a moment, it was just cold. Then the pain began.
It was like swallowing broken glass made of ideas. The energy had no compatible form within his immature meridian channels. It scraped, it burned, it refused. His body convulsed. He screamed, a short, sharp sound before his jaw locked. His veins stood out, glowing violet against his skin, threatening to split.
"Shape it!" the Titan's voice cut through the pain. "It is chaos! Give it a purpose! You are not a passive vessel! You are a smith! Make it into a tool! Any tool!"
Through the white-hot agony, Ling Xiao grasped for a thought. A shape. The memory of the silver lasso. He imagined the chaotic energy becoming a cord. Not a binding, but a lifeline. A thread.
The searing, formless pain concentrated. Coalesced. It became a specific, acute burning along a single meridian path in his right arm. The energy stopped fighting and began to flow, reluctantly, into the shape he demanded. It solidified within him, a small, brittle reservoir of power.
The pain receded, leaving him trembling and drenched in cold sweat. In his spiritual sense, he now held a sliver of tangible energy where before there was only emptiness.
"It hurts," he gasped.
"Every time," the Titan confirmed, no pity in his voice. "And it will never not hurt. The day absorption becomes painless is the day you cease to be a creature of potential and become a creature of set form. That day may come. Today is not it."
The training continued in a blurred, painful marathon. The Titan was a relentless, brilliant teacher. He compressed millennia of understanding into desperate, bite-sized lessons. Ling Xiao learned to sense the specific frequency of Jin's ordered energy, like a sour note in the mountain's song. He learned to read the patterns of stress in the ceiling, predicting which rocks would crumble first. He absorbed tiny, painful fragments of energy until his spiritual reserves, while minuscule, were no longer zero.
Through it all, the spirit of the Titan spoke. Not just of technique, but of history.
"We Titans,"he said as Ling Xiao recovered from a particularly vicious absorption, "were lonely. We built races to keep us company. The Star-Seers' ancestors were among them. They learned order from us, then called it holy and declared our chaos heresy." A weary, cosmic sigh. "They were clever children. They found our rhythms and turned them into cages."
"Why did you stay?" Ling Xiao asked, nursing his aching head. "Why not break the seals?"
"Pride. Stubbornness. This tomb is not just my prison. It is my monument. My statement: I was here. To break it and flee would be to erase my final word." The Titan's spirit looked at him, its light softening. "But teaching you… that is a new statement. Perhaps a better one."
The bond formed in the shared darkness, under the threat of annihilation. The Titan was not gentle, but he was present. He was the first being that did not look at Ling Xiao with fear or greed, but with recognition. In turn, Ling Xiao looked at the fading spirit not as a monster or a god, but as a lonely old warrior, trying to pass on one last, crucial secret before the dark took him.
Ling Xiao began to think of him not as "the Titan," but as "Shi," the ancient word for stone the spirit had murmured once.
"Shi," Ling Xiao said, after mastering a basic chaotic pulse that could disturb loose gravel. "What happens when the year is up? When your energy is gone?"
Shi's spirit was growing fainter, its edges blurring. "Then I sleep. And then, I am stone. Do not look so grim, child. I have had three billion years of silence. One more year of purpose is a blessing you give me. Now, focus. The scout's formation is nearly complete. I feel the seventh anchor locking into place."
A deep, resonant THUMM vibrated through the mountain, shaking dust from the ceiling.
"He's activated it," Shi said, his voice urgent. "The Suppression Array is live. It will now begin draining all chaotic energy from this local space and converting it to ordered pressure. The mountain will be crushed into a perfect, dense cube. We have minutes."
"What do we do?"
"We use his own pattern against him. You sensed the weak anchors. The formation's collapse will be violent, but not instantaneous. There will be a pathway—a crack in the pressure. You must find it with your senses, read its pattern, and be ready to move. You will have one chance."
Ling Xiao closed his eyes, expanding his chaotic sense. The world became a lattice of pressure and force. The seven anchors shone like white-hot stars, connected by lines of crushing intent. He could see the flaw—the weaker eastern anchor was already buckling, causing the entire formation to warp. The collapse would begin there, ripping eastward…
"There!" he pointed with his mind's eye. "A conduit will open… there! For two, maybe three seconds!"
"Good," Shi's voice was growing distant. "My spirit must return to my body now. To hold the tomb's core intact for as long as I can. To give you those seconds."
"Wait!" Ling Xiao reached out, his hand passing through the fading light.
"Remember, Ling Xiao," Shi's voice was a whisper now, filled with a fondness that cracked something in the boy's chest. "You are not an anomaly. You are an answer. Now… survive."
The spirit light vanished, snuffed out.
Alone in the dark, Ling Xiao felt the mountain groan around him. The ceiling above cracked with a sound like a continent splitting. Not a localized collapse.
The entire cave system was coming down.
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END OF CHAPTER 5