The planet began to scream.
It started with the deep, continental groan Ling Xiao had felt—a sound more felt than heard, vibrating through bedrock and bone. Then the symptoms erupted everywhere.
In the fertile valleys of the east, earthquakes rippled through fault lines that had been dormant for millennia. Not the sharp jolts of tectonic plates shifting, but long, rolling waves that turned solid ground into liquid, swallowing towns whole. Rivers changed course overnight, carving new canyons through ancient farmland.
In the volcanic Ring of Embers, every dormant peak awoke. The sky turned bruise-purple with ash, and acid rain fell on forests, stripping leaves and life alike. Lava flows, berserk and unpredictable, ignored all known channels, boiling seas and creating new, temporary mountains.
Along the coastlines, the oceans grew restless. Tides failed to ebb, then retreated miles out, only to return as tsuninas three hundred feet high that scoured entire cities from the map. Strange, phosphorescent whirlpools appeared in deep waters, glowing with chaotic energy.
The world wasn't just ending; it was unraveling.
The response from the cultivation world was swift, unified, and catastrophically wrong.
The Star-Seer's Alliance, from their orbital observatories, broadcast a planetary bulletin. They filtered the complex, terrifying data into a simple, palatable narrative: "The source of planetary instability has been identified: catastrophic feedback from a high-level Chaos Anomaly. Designation: 'Storm-Reader,' real name Ling Xiao. His uncontrolled energy emissions are resonating with and amplifying latent planetary chaos. He is the catalyst. Eliminate him, and the instability will subside."
It was a perfect lie. It turned their victim into the cause, deflecting from their own core-mining operations. And the sects, terrified and looking for a single enemy to blame, embraced it.
The Planetary Cultivation Alliance was formed in an emergency convocation of every major and minor sect. The bounty on Ling Xiao's head was forgotten, replaced by a Mandate of Extermination. He was no longer a prize. He was a cancer to be cut out. Armies of cultivators mobilized, not to shore up failing continents or evacuate mortals, but to hunt one boy and his three charges.
Ling Xiao and the Chaos Squad watched from a high, windswept mesa as the world fell apart and the net closed in. They'd been forced to keep moving constantly. Every ley line fracture, every volcanic vent, sang with chaotic energy that was like a beacon to Ling Xiao's senses—and, he realized too late, to the sensitive tracking arrays of the Star-Seers.
"They think it's you," Ming whispered, her hair flickering with anxious orange light as she watched a distant mountain vomit fire into the sky.
"It doesn't matter what they think," Ling Xiao said, his voice tight. He held the Chaos Observation Stone. The timer was no longer steady. The cascading disasters were accelerating the core's decay. "TIME TO CORE COLLAPSE: 7 DAYS, 0 HOURS."
One week. The original six-month estimate had been shredded by reality.
"We can't fight them all," Kai said, his hand perpetually on the ground now, feeling the planet's pain. "There are thousands. And they have Core Formation elders. Nascent Soul ancestors are probably waking up."
"We're not going to fight them," Ling Xiao said, a desperate plan forming in his mind, synthesized from his Chaos Sensing, his Order Primer knowledge, and Shí's memories. "We're going to fix the core."
Ren, wrapped in shadows, let out a small, incredulous sound.
"The core is breaking because the Star-Seers are draining its ordered energy, creating chaotic fractures," Ling Xiao explained quickly, sketching in the dirt with a stick. He drew a sphere (the core) with leech-like structures (the arrays) attached. "We can't remove the arrays. But the core's own energy—the chaotic geothermal and gravitational forces—is still vast. If we can guide that native chaotic energy, not to fight the fractures, but to… weave them shut, to create a scar instead of an open wound… we might stabilize it. Temporarily. Long enough to deal with the arrays later."
It was a plan of absurd, poetic symmetry: use chaos to heal a wound caused by order's greed.
"How do we 'weave' a planet's core?" Ming asked, the pragmatist.
"I don't know yet," Ling Xiao admitted. "But I have to be there. At the core chamber. I have to see the pattern directly, feel it. The Stone will show me the way."
Kai frowned. "And where is the core chamber?"
Ling Xiao pointed with his stick to the center of his crude drawing. "Deep. Below the deepest spirit stone mines. In the planet's absolute heart." He looked up, meeting their eyes. "It will be the most heavily guarded place in the world. The Star-Seers will have their main extraction array there. The Alliance will have their strongest defenders there, protecting their 'solution' to the crisis—which is just siphoning the last dregs before the end."
The scale of the suicide mission hung in the air. Infiltrate the most fortified location on a dying planet, while being the most wanted being on it, to perform a miracle surgery with a power he barely understood.
Before anyone could respond, a new tremor hit—this one different. Sharper. Local.
Ren's head snapped up. "Search party. Close. Four… no, five. Fast. Skyriders."
They scrambled. They had a protocol now. Ren deepened the shadows around their camp. Kai softened the earth behind a rock ledge, creating a hideous crawl space. Ming banked their fire to cold ash in an instant.
They melted into the landscape just as five cultivators on hovering disk-like platforms swept over the mesa. These weren't low-level disciples. They wore the unified insignia of the new Planetary Alliance—a sword over a mountain. Their leader, a woman with a scar across her throat, held a complex brass instrument that swept the area.
"Residual chaotic signature confirmed," she announced, her voice amplified. "Recent. The anomaly was here. Spread out. Check for hidden passages, spatial folds. He's tricky."
The squad dismounted, their movements professional, lethal. They began a systematic search.
Ling Xiao, hidden with the others in the cramped, dark space, held his breath. His Chaos Breathing was locked down to a near-death state to avoid detection. He watched through a tiny crack.
The searchers were good. They found the ashes of the fire. They found Ling Xiao's sketches in the dirt. The scarred woman knelt, studying them. "He knows about the core," she murmured, her face grim. "He's planning something. This changes the priority from extermination to absolute containment. Alert the Core Garrison. No one gets within a hundred miles of the Great Maw mine."
One of the other searchers, a man with hawk-like eyes, was poking near their hiding place with a spirit-glow rod. The light penetrated the shadows Ren had woven, revealing the edge of the crawl space entrance.
"Sir! Over here!"
The squad converged. The scarred woman approached, her weapon—a slender spear that crackled with lightning—held ready. "Come out, anomaly. Or we collapse the rock on you."
Trapped. They were outnumbered and outpowered. Ling Xiao prepared to unleash his Disruption Field, to fight and run. It would expose them to every tracker on the continent, but it was their only—
A rumble, deliberate and controlled, shook the ground at the opposite end of the mesa.
The searchers spun. "What was that?"
Kai, his face strained with effort, was staring at the rock wall, his hand pressed against it. He was using his affinity. Not to hide. To distract.
"It's a diversion! The anomaly is there!" the hawk-eyed man shouted, and the squad took off at speed toward the source of the noise.
"Kai, stop!" Ling Xiao hissed. "They'll see it's a trick!"
"They have to get there first," Kai whispered back, a hard smile on his face. "Run. The other way. Now. I'll lead them on a chase and catch up."
It was a terrible risk. But it was also their only window. Ling Xiao hesitated for a fraction of a second, then nodded. "Meet at the Blue Salt Falls. Three days."
Kai gave a sharp nod. As Ling Xiao, Ming, and Ren slithered out the back of the hide and down a scree slope, Kai waited a beat, then burst from the crawl space in the opposite direction, making sure to kick stones, to leave a clear, chaotic earth-signature trail for the hunters to follow.
They ran. Ling Xiao's heart was a stone in his chest. He heard shouts from the mesa top, the sound of pursuit heading away from them, following Kai's bold, self-sacrificial lead.
They made it five miles before a brilliant flash of blue-white light lit up the twilight behind them, followed by a sound like a mountain sighing in defeat.
Ling Xiao's senses, stretched back toward the mesa, felt a familiar, stubborn chaotic signature—Kai's—flare brightly, then be suddenly, utterly suppressed. Not killed. Captured. Contained by a high-level binding technique.
He stopped running, cold dread pouring through him.
Ming and Ren stopped beside him, looking back at the fading light.
The scarred woman's amplified voice echoed across the barren hills, triumphant and cruel, aimed not at them, but at the empty air, a message she knew Ling Xiao would hear.
"We have your stone-child, Storm-Reader. If you want him to live through the week, you will present yourself at the gates of the Great Maw by dawn tomorrow. Alone. Otherwise, we will use him to power the stabilization arrays. His chaos will buy the Alliance elites a few extra hours to evacuate."
The voice faded. The planetary tremors continued.
Ling Xiao stood in the gathering dark, one of his flock taken, the planet dying, and an impossible choice tearing him in two.
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END OF CHAPTER 21