The chase lasted seven days.
Seven days of running through the ragged foothills north of the Fire-Gourd Mountains, where the land grew sickly and grey. The trees were stunted, claw-like things. Streams ran with water that tasted of metal and despair. This was the threshold of the Ashen Wastes, a place where the planet's energy veins had been severed long ago, leaving behind spiritual scar tissue.
The Verdant Dragon hunting party was relentless. Elder Guo himself led them—a Mortal Foundation Peak Stage cultivator whose energy felt like a gnarled, thirsty root searching for water. He was furious. His son's humiliation was a stain on the sect's face, and the rumor of a "demonic" child wielding unnatural powers was a threat that needed to be excised before bigger sects noticed and asked uncomfortable questions.
Ling Xiao and Li Ming survived through a brutal synthesis of their skills. Ling Xiao's Pattern Reading found them paths through treacherous gullies and over rock faces that left no trail. His Chaos Sensing warned them of ambush points and detected the hunters' formations from miles away—Elder Guo was using tracking flags that emitted a slow, pulsing wave of ordered energy, a sonar of orthodoxy searching for heresy.
Li Ming's role was just as crucial. He found the hidden springs the hunters missed. He set false trails using stolen scraps of green cloth. He knew how to move without leaving a shadow, how to mask their scent with pungent weeds, how to sleep in shifts in shallow scrapes in the earth. He was the anchor of gritty, human survival to Ling Xiao's esoteric awareness.
But they were wearing down. Ling Xiao's energy reserves, replenished only by painful, sporadic absorption from the feeble chaos of the badlands, were running low. Li Ming was lean to the point of gauntness, a constant, worried set to his jaw.
On the seventh day, the sky betrayed them.
Ling Xiao felt it first—a sudden, violent stirring in the atmospheric patterns. Not a normal storm. The dead zone created its own weather: vicious, capricious, born from energy vacuums and thermal imbalances.
"Li Ming," Ling Xiao said, stopping on a wind-scoured ridge. "We need shelter. Now."
"What is it?"
"Wind. Not from one direction. From all of them."
Before Li Ming could answer, the world began to scream.
It started as a dust devil in the valley below, then another to the east, then a third. They multiplied, swirling into existence like angry ghosts. Then they began to merge, drawn together by the chaotic pressure differentials Ling Xiao had sensed. The air itself seemed to tear.
A tornado, thick as a temple pillar and the color of burnt bone, formed less than a mile away. It didn't move with weather patterns. It wandered, drunk on the badlands' instability, chewing up the grey earth and spitting it skyward. And it was moving toward their ridge.
"Run!" Li Ming yelled.
But Ling Xiao stood frozen, not with fear, with analysis. The Pattern Reading showed him their options. Run down the back slope—into open ground where the hunting party's tracking formation would pinpoint them instantly. Try to outpace the tornado—impossible. His eyes tracked the funnel's chaotic, yet deeply patterned, structure. The outer winds were shredders. But the core… the core was a different kind of chaos. Not violent, but null. A paradoxical eye of structured stillness within the rage.
"This way!" Ling Xiao grabbed Li Ming's arm and did the opposite of instinct. He ran toward the descending slope that led into the tornado's probable path.
"Are you insane?!"
"Trust me!"
They scrambled down the loose scree as the roaring grew deafening.The world darkened, filled with flying grit. The tornado was upon them, a wall of grinding earth and wind.
"Get down! Hold onto something!" Li Ming screamed, throwing himself behind a boulder.
Ling Xiao didn't. He stood in the open, facing the onrushing maelstrom. He opened his Chaos Sensing to its maximum, accepting the torrent of information—the scream of shearing air, the fracture lines in the ground, the terrifying ballet of debris. He ignored the lethal outer winds and focused on the eye, the still point.
The pattern showed him a path. A series of microseconds where the wind currents would part just enough, a temporary bridge of calmer air leading into the beast's heart.
He didn't have time to explain. He lunged forward, not away from a flying rock, but with it, using its trajectory as cover. He slipped between two whipping tendrils of dust, rolled under a spinning log, and was suddenly through the wall.
Silence.
Deafening, absolute silence. He was inside the tornado. Around him, a cylindrical wall of furious grey-brown motion spun, but here, in the core perhaps ten feet wide, the air was still. Dust and small stones hung suspended, defying gravity. Light filtered down from the open funnel ceiling hundreds of feet above, ethereal and strange.
He was safe from the hunters. But he was inside a tornado. The stillness was an illusion; the wall of wind was inches away, and if the tornado stumbled or he touched that wall, he'd be minced.
Then he felt it. The energy here was incredible. Not the wild chaos of the storm outside, but a concentrated, high-pressure chaos. The tornado was a natural spiritual phenomenon, a knot of violent atmospheric potential. This still eye was its compressed, volatile heart.
His body, starved for days, screamed at the proximity. His mark blazed with hunger.
Absorbing this raw would kill him. It was too much, too fast.
But Shí's lessons echoed: You are not a passive vessel. You are a smith.
He couldn't absorb it. But what if he… breathed it?
He sat cross-legged in the center of the eye, ignoring the surreal spectacle of the suspended debris. He closed his eyes. Instead of using his mark as a funnel to pull energy in, he tried to open his entire body as a… receptor. A capacitor.
He inhaled.
Not just air. He willed his lungs, his skin, his meridians to draw in the ambient chaotic potential. He didn't force it into a shape. He allowed it to simply enter and settle.
The pain was different this time. Not the sharp agony of forced absorption, but a deep, swelling pressure, as if he were being inflated with something infinitely dense. His bones ached. His skin felt taut. He held the breath, the energy, within.
He exhaled.
But he didn't release the energy. He exhaled only the air, the physical breath. The chaotic energy? He willed it to stay. To remain in his meridians, his cells, his spirit.
Inhale. Draw the chaos in.
Exhale.Keep it.
It was Chaos Breathing. A technique of accumulation, not expenditure. With each cycle, the pressure inside him grew. It was excruciating, a feeling of containing a miniature star. But it wasn't tearing him apart. His body, his chaos-touched foundation, was adapting. The meridians, reforged by Shí's essence, stretched and strengthened. His dantian, that spiritual center orthodox cultivators filled with orderly qi, remained a void—but around it, throughout his body, a reservoir of pure chaotic potential built.
He lost track of time in the eye of the storm. He breathed. He contained.
A barrier within him, one he hadn't even known was there, shattered.
Mortal Foundation, Middle Stage.
The breakthrough wasn't a surge of power. It was an increase in capacity. The pressure didn't lessen, but his ability to hold it expanded dramatically. The pain receded to a manageable, humming fullness. He opened his eyes. The suspended debris around him now had discernible patterns to his enhanced senses—he could see the micro-currents holding each pebble aloft.
The tornado, its energy subtly siphoned by his breathing, began to waver. The wall of wind grew ragged. It was dying.
Ling Xiao stood up. He was brimming with power. He felt the chaotic energy circulating in a slow, powerful tide within him, a self-sustaining system. He looked at the weakening funnel wall, saw the pattern of its collapse.
He took a step forward, then another, walking confidently through the disintegrating wind wall as it fell apart into mere gusts. He emerged onto the scarred landscape as the last of the tornado dissipated into a dusty sigh.
Li Ming stumbled out from behind his boulder, face white with terror and relief. "Xiao! I thought you were— What did you do?"
"I learned to breathe," Ling Xiao said, his voice steadier, deeper with contained power. He could feel the difference. He was still a six-year-old boy, but he moved with a new surety, and the air around him hummed faintly with retained potential.
In the days that followed, their dynamic shifted. With his enhanced senses and greater energy reserve, Ling Xiao could protect them better. He used tiny, controlled releases of his stored chaos to deflect tracking spells, to create minor illusions of their heat signature, to hasten their steps without tiring Li Ming.
He also began teaching Li Ming in earnest. Not chaos cultivation—that was impossible—but what he called "Pattern Awareness."
"See the way the lichen grows only on the south face of these rocks?" Ling Xiao would say, pointing. "That's a pattern. It tells you direction. The way the birds suddenly stop singing over there? That's a pattern of disturbance. Maybe a predator. Maybe our hunters."
He taught him to read the land, the weather, the animal signs. To think in terms of cause and effect, of flows and disruptions. It was the mortal shadow of his own gifts, and Li Ming, smart and desperate, absorbed it like a sponge. Their bond deepened from protector/protected to something resembling brotherhood, or master and keen apprentice.
But Ling Xiao's new state had a cost. His body was now a significant reservoir of chaotic energy. To orthodox spiritual senses, he had been a void. Now, he was a blur, a distortion. To Elder Guo's tracking formation, he was becoming a glaring anomaly, a smudge of static on the clear scroll of ordered reality.
On the tenth day of their flight, they reached the edge of the true Ashen Wastes. Before them lay a vast, grey plain of cracked earth and jagged, glass-like rock formations, under a perpetual haze. Beyond it, the land rose again into the fiery spines of the Fire-Gourd Mountains, volcanoes that smoked against the leaden sky.
"The Wastes," Li Ming said, despair in his voice. "Nothing lives out there. We'll die of thirst."
Ling Xiao was about to respond when his senses jolted. The tracking pulse he'd been deftly avoiding for days didn't sweep this time. It converged. From the north, the east, and the south-west, the pulses moved inward, fast. They'd been herded.
"They're here," Ling Xiao said quietly.
From the bleak hills around them, figures emerged. Six disciples on weary spirit-horses formed a wide crescent, blocking retreat back into the hills. And from the direct path to the Wastes, Elder Guo himself walked forward, his green robes stark against the grey, his face a mask of grim triumph.
"You lead us on a fine chase, demon," the elder's voice grated across the distance. "But your tricks end here. This is the Volcanic Barrens. The earth's fire consumes all disorder. There is no chaos here for you to twist. Only pure, elemental fury. And my justice."
Ling Xiao's Chaos Sensing flared, confirming the elder's words. The land ahead was indeed searingly hot, geologically violent… but its energy was not the wild chaos of storms or life. It was a simpler, more brutal chaos of heat and pressure and molten rock. It wouldn't respond to subtle persuasion.
He and Li Ming stood with their backs to the impassable Wastes, facing a semicircle of armed cultivators, with a volcanic region before them and a vengeful elder blocking the only viable exit.
They were cornered.
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END OF CHAPTER 10 / ACT 1