Chapter 33: Anchor's Echo
They pulled him from the Maw after nine hours. Not by choice. The containment field had shuddered violently, readings spiking into the catastrophic red. Technocrats screamed of a "sympathetic resonance cascade." Chapter Master Shard, her porcelain face a mask of cold fury, gave the order to abort.
The retrieval net hauled him up like a drowned thing. He landed on the Anteroom floor not with a thud, but a silence that absorbed the clatter. His skin was laced with fine, silver cracks that pulsed with a soft, inner darkness. His eyes, when they opened, held the storm, the silence, the sorrow, and now something deeper—a patient, geologic weight.
He coughed, and a small, perfect black stone, smooth as a river pebble, tumbled from his lips. It hummed with condensed, empathetic understanding. A byproduct of his evolution.
Shard was before him in an instant. "What happened? The Maw nearly ruptured."
Xiao Feng pushed himself up, movements slow, deliberate, as if moving through deep water. He met her heterochromatic gaze. "I found the source. It's not a natural flaw. It's a wound. Made by a foreign object. An Anchor. It's siphoning the world's spirit. The chaos… is the world trying to reject it."
The room went still. Even the hum of the instruments seemed to quiet. This was not data. This was heresy of the highest order. It suggested the Maw—the Broken Blade's founding purpose, their source of power—was not a resource, but a crime scene.
Shard's organic eye narrowed. Her porcelain cheek remained immobile. "A bold hypothesis. What proof?"
Xiao Feng held up the black stone. "This is a solidified moment of the world's pain. The pain of violation. Taste it. If you dare."
A technocrat stepped forward, a scanning wand extended. It passed over the stone and let out a shrill beep. The readout screen flashed: ENERGY SIGNATURE: PRIMORDIAL / NON-CORPOREAL / HOSTILE TO EXOGENOUS ORDER.
Shard took the stone. She held it in her palm. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, her organic eye widened. A single, reflexive tear traced a path through the dust on her tattooed cheek. She felt it—the profound, impersonal grief of a planet. She dropped the stone as if scorched.
"This changes nothing," she said, her voice regaining its steel, but the tear betrayed her. "The Anchor is irrelevant. The chaos is real. Our purpose—to control it, to wield it—remains. You have simply given us a new target for stabilization: remove the irritant, calm the fever."
"Remove it?" Xiao Feng rasped a humorless laugh. "It's a needle of foreign law driven into a continent's soul. Your 'stabilization' is helping the parasite."
"Enough!" Shard's voice cracked like a whip. "You are a tool, Xiao Feng. A uniquely insightful one, but a tool nonetheless. You will prepare a full report. You will detail the Anchor's location, its nature, its defenses. Fang-7 will be tasked with a reconnaissance and extraction mission. We will pull the thorn."
It was madness. She was talking about performing surgery on a god with a squad of broken toys.
But Xiao Feng saw the truth in her ceramic eye. It wasn't about saving the world. It was about claiming the Anchor. A shard of foreign, universal law? That was power beyond comprehension. The Broken Blade's ambition had just been ignited.
"And if I refuse?" he asked, though he knew the answer.
Shard's smile was a thin, cruel line. "Then your new pack, Fang-7, will be sent into the Maw without you. As a probe. To see how deep they get before the chaos unmakes them. Starting with the fire-breather. Then the bone-shaper. One by one."
She had learned his weakness. He had given them a heart, and she would hold it over the flame.
Xiao Feng bowed his head, not in submission, but to hide the cold fire in his own eyes. "I will prepare the report."
He was given a sealed scroll-case and sent to a isolated cell to write. Lin, Kaelan, and Lian were barred from seeing him. Isolated.
In the silence, Xiao Feng did not write of the Anchor's location. He poured his new, empathetic understanding into the parchment. He described the World-Spirit's pain not as data, but as a song. He wrote of the Custodian not as a defense system, but as a symptom—a scab of logical law over a dreaming wound. He wrote of the chaos not as a problem, but as a conversation the world was having with itself in its agony.
He was not writing a report for the Broken Blade. He was writing a diagnosis. And a prophecy.
When he finished, he did not seal the scroll. He placed the black stone of primordial pain on top of it. Then he sat and waited.
He didn't have to wait long. The door hissed open. But it wasn't Shard or Vex.
It was Lum, the transparent man. His inner lights pulsed with a slow, urgent rhythm. He slipped inside, the door closing silently behind him.
"You saw the truth," Lum intoned, his voice a hollow echo. "I have always seen it. The Maw is a sickness. The Blade treats the fever and calls it strength. They are sick too."
Xiao Feng regarded him. "You're a spy."
"I am a symptom," Lum corrected. "My flaw is perfect internal transparency. I cannot hide what I am. I see the sickness in the Blade's purpose. It festers. I report to… other interested parties."
"The Silent Archive."
Lum's lights flickered in acknowledgment. "The Archive collects truths. The truth of the Anchor is the greatest truth in this age. Shard will not share it. She will hoard it, use it. The Archive cannot allow that. We must acquire the Anchor first."
"So you want to use me too," Xiao Feng stated flatly.
"We want to liberate the truth," Lum whispered. "You can interface with the wound. You can approach the Anchor. The Archive will provide support. Extraction. Sanctuary for you and your… pack. A place where flaws are studied, not weaponized."
It was the same offer, different master. The Archive wanted a specimen. The Blade wanted a weapon.
Xiao Feng looked at the scroll, at the black stone. He had a third option.
"The Custodian," he said. "It's a fragment of the Anchor's will. It will defend it. I cannot fight it and extract the Anchor alone."
"The Archive has resources. Cloaking protocols. Temporal dampeners. We can create a window."
"And my people? Fang-7? Lin, Kaelan, Lian?"
"Evacuation can be arranged. Concurrently. But you must commit. Now."
Xiao Feng made his decision. He would play all sides against the middle. He would use the Blade's ambition, the Archive's curiosity, and the World-Spirit's pain to achieve his own end.
He wasn't sure what that end was yet. Free the world? Claim the Anchor for himself? Eat it?
But he knew the next step. He had to go back down. With an army at his back, and a different purpose in his heart.
"Tell the Archive I agree," Xiao Feng said. "But on my terms. The extraction happens during the Blade's own mission. Let them be the distraction. We take the prize from under their noses."
Lum's lights swirled in a complex, approving pattern. "A flawed, chaotic plan. It is fitting. I will relay the terms."
After Lum left, Xiao Feng was not alone for long. A different kind of visitor arrived, slipping through the shadows not by technique, but by innate nature.
Lian stepped from the dark corner of his cell, her shadow pooling around her like ink. "The walls here… they have thin places," she whispered. "I heard. You're going to betray them all."
"I'm going to survive," Xiao Feng corrected softly. "And maybe fix the thing that's causing all this pain."
"The big hurt," Lian said, her eyes wide. "My shadow… it's scared of that place. But it will follow you. We all will."
"It will be worse than the Purists," he warned. "It will be… cosmic."
Lian just nodded, her shadow reaching out to touch his hand. It was cool, and solid, and utterly loyal. "We're flawed. We don't belong in a clean, cosmic world anyway."
Xiao Feng almost smiled. She was right. They were the errors, the grit in the machine. And sometimes, grit was all it took to grind a machine to a halt.
The report was delivered. Shard read it, her face unreadable. She saw the poetry, the empathy, and dismissed it as the ramblings of a chaos-addled mind. But the technical data—the Custodian's frequency, the Anchor's estimated resonance—she devoured.
"Fang-7 will be equipped with resonance disruptors based on your findings," she declared. "You will lead them. You will disable the Custodian. A secondary team will secure the Anchor. Prepare them. You have two days."
Two days to train his pack for a suicide mission. Two days to coordinate a secret betrayal with a transparent spy. Two days before he descended again into the screaming heart of the world, not as a probe, but as a liberator. Or a thief.
As he walked back to the training yard to give Fang-7 the news, the black stone in his pocket hummed against his thigh, a steady, empathetic drumbeat of the world's pain.
It was no longer just a hunger in his gut.
It was a responsibility on his shoulders.
He was Xiao Feng, who had eaten a storm, a law, a god's sorrow, and a planet's pain.
Now, he had to decide if he was a hero, a villain, or simply the next, inevitable flaw in a broken system.