The night clung to the mountains like a shroud—heavy, breathless, cold enough to bite through bone.
A lone figure dragged himself along the ridge path, one unsteady step after another. His robe, once the dull grey of a low-ranking cultivator, was torn in half a dozen places; dried blood stiffened the fabric against his ribs. Qi flickered in him like a candle guttering in a storm.
Every breath rasped. Every movement threatened collapse.
He walked anyway.
The ridge trembled under far-off tremors. Somewhere below, a formation had exploded—its dying runes briefly illuminating the slopes before fading. The smell of scorched earth drifted up with the wind, along with the distant shouts of men searching the dark.
He ignored them.
He focused only on placing one foot ahead of the other.
But the body has limits even stubbornness cannot silence, and his knees finally buckled. He crashed to the ground, palms scraping against coarse gravel. His vision pulsed black at the edges as a wave of dizziness rolled through him.
Foundation Establishment—high stage.
Yet he felt as fragile as a mortal on his last breath.
He pressed his forehead to the earth, breathing slowly, forcing the fractured Qi inside him to settle. It didn't obey. It pulsed with a chaotic rhythm, slipping through damaged channels, stinging him with a reminder of how close he had come to breaking during the fight he'd just escaped.
His fingers trembled.
His heart did not.
He pushed himself up—first to his elbows, then to a kneeling position. His jaw clenched as his ribs screamed in protest.
Another step.
Another.
Fall.
Rise again.
The pattern was familiar. He had lived it a thousand times.
The wind shifted. Torches flickered further down the slope. Voices drew nearer.
He had no Qi to fight.
No strength to run.
No allies left in these mountains.
The world contracted around him into simple arithmetic:
Move, or die.
He dug his fingers into the ground, using the pain as an anchor, and forced himself upright once more. His breath misted in the cold night air. The sky above him—jagged with torn clouds—looked impossibly distant, as though mocking his persistence.
A faint tremor of laughter escaped him. A dry, breathless sound.
"So what?" he whispered to no one.
His vision wavered again. His balance slipped. The cliff edge loomed dangerously close; a single misstep and the night would swallow him in silence.
He steadied himself with a hand against a boulder. The stone was cold—cold enough to sting—but solid. Real. Something to push against.
He inhaled.
Exhaled.
Inhaled again.
Slowly, the world sharpened.
But the effort carried a price: his mind thinned, the present blurring at the edges. Fatigue—not physical, but spiritual—washed over him like a tide.
He blinked.
And the ridge vanished.
---
Grass. Warm wind. Sunlight.
A field. Tall stalks brushing against small hands.
A child's hands.
Laughter in the distance—a light, effortless sound carried by the summer breeze.
And a woman's voice, gentle, calling his name from the doorway of a modest home.
He turned.
Her smile was warm enough to banish every shadow. Her presence felt like the center of a simple world, small but complete.
No pain.
No Qi.
No blood.
Just sunlight, and the scent of earth after rain.
For an instant he let himself stand there—barefoot, weightless, unbroken—before the memory brightened, sharpening into the threshold of a story he had tried to bury for years.
The field.
The home.
The woman.
The beginning.
The first thing the world had ever given him.
His eyes fluttered open on the ridge, breath shallow.
The torches below moved closer.
The memory lingered like a heartbeat, and he understood—without words—that he had reached the point where all journeys start: not with power, but with the place one crawls back to when standing becomes impossible.
He steadied himself.
The ridge returned.
And with the last of his strength, he stepped forward into the darkness—
carrying with him only the echo of sunlight and the warmth of a mother calling a young boy home.