Day seven of training introduced me to the most dangerous Fate Weaving technique yet: temporal severance.
"Time isn't what most people think it is," Lin Mei explained as we stood in the Causality Training Ground. "It's not a river flowing in one direction. It's a causal relationship,past causes present, present causes future. Break those causal connections, and time becomes... negotiable."
"Negotiable how?"
"Watch." She gestured at a falling leaf.
The leaf drifted down normally for three seconds. Then it stopped mid-air, completely motionless. Not suspended by force—frozen in time. Everything else continued moving normally—wind, clouds, other leaves. But this one leaf existed outside temporal flow.
"You severed its connection to time," I breathed.
"I severed the causal chain connecting its present moment to the next moment. For that leaf, time has stopped progressing. It will remain frozen until I reconnect the thread." She released the severance, and the leaf resumed falling as if nothing had happened.
[TECHNIQUE OBSERVED: TEMPORAL SEVERANCE]
[DIFFICULTY: MASTER LEVEL]
[RISK: CATASTROPHIC]
[APPLICATIONS: INFINITE]
[DANGERS: PARADOX CREATION, CAUSALITY COLLAPSE, EXISTENCE ERASURE]
"This is what we'll use during the vault heist," Lin Mei continued. "Sever the temporal connection between 'vault now' and 'vault five minutes from now.' We'll exist in a pocket of frozen time where we can work undisturbed while the rest of reality continues normally."
"How long can you maintain it?"
"For a single leaf? Hours. For a person? Minutes. For an entire vault chamber?" She paused. "Maybe ten minutes maximum before the causal strain becomes unbearable and reality fights back violently."
"Ten minutes to steal centuries of accumulated artifacts."
"Which is why we need to be extremely efficient. And why you need to learn basic temporal severance,I'll handle the vault chamber, but you'll need to freeze individual guards if any of them causally slip through our manipulations."
She produced a small hourglass, sand trickling through its narrow middle. "Start simple. This hourglass measures time through causal progression,sand falls because gravity, because friction, because temporal flow. Your task: sever one of those causal connections and stop the sand without touching the glass."
I studied the hourglass with my fortune sense, perceiving the layered causality. Gravity pulled the sand down. Friction allowed it to flow through the narrow opening. Temporal progression meant each grain's position caused the next grain's movement.
Three separate causal chains, all intertwined.
"Which one should I sever?" I asked.
"Your choice. But understand: each severance has different implications. Sever gravity, the sand stops falling but time continues normally. Sever friction, the sand stops flowing but gravity still pulls. Sever temporal connection, the sand freezes in whatever state it's currently in."
"Temporal severance sounds most relevant to the heist."
"It's also the most dangerous. Sever time wrong, and you might disconnect yourself from causality entirely. You'd exist in a permanent frozen moment, conscious but unable to interact with reality, watching the universe continue without you forever."
[WARNING: TEMPORAL SEVERANCE RISKS]
[INCORRECT TARGETING: PERMANENT TIME DISPLACEMENT]
[EXCESSIVE DURATION: CAUSALITY COLLAPSE]
[PARADOX CREATION: EXISTENCE ERASURE]
[RECOMMENDATION: EXTREME CAUTION]
Despite the warnings, I had to learn this. The heist required temporal manipulation,there was no other way to bypass the vault's security in time.
I extended my fortune sense toward the hourglass, perceiving not just probability threads but temporal ones,thin strands of causality connecting each moment to the next. The sand's present state caused its future state, which would cause the subsequent state, ad infinitum.
Breaking that chain meant interrupting cause and effect at the temporal level.
I identified a single grain of sand mid-fall and focused on its temporal thread,the connection between "grain at position A at time T" and "grain at position B at time T+1."
[ATTEMPTING: TEMPORAL SEVERANCE]
[TARGET: SINGLE GRAIN OF SAND]
[COST: 100 LP]
[CURRENT LP: 2,247]
I pulled.
Reality screamed.
Not audibly,more like the universe itself registered protest at causality being violated. The temporal thread resisted with force that made my spiritual sense recoil. This wasn't like severing gravity or friction. This was fighting time itself.
But I'd learned something during the past week: reality resisted, but it could be negotiated with. Enough LP, enough will, enough skill, and even fundamental forces became flexible.
I spent more LP, pushed harder, and the temporal thread severed.
The grain of sand stopped mid-fall.
Not suspended. Not slowed. Stopped. It existed in a single frozen moment while everything around it continued normally. Other grains fell past it, the hourglass continued measuring time, but this one grain was causally disconnected from temporal progression.
"Excellent," Lin Mei said. "How does it feel to maintain?"
"Like holding a boulder underwater. Reality wants the thread to reconnect. I'm spending LP constantly just to keep it severed."
[TEMPORAL SEVERANCE: ACTIVE]
[MAINTENANCE COST: 20 LP PER MINUTE]
[CURRENT LP: 2,147]
"That's the cost of manipulating time. Now the hard part: let it reconnect smoothly without creating a paradox."
"What kind of paradox?"
"The grain has existed outside time for,how long now?"
"Thirty seconds."
"So when you reconnect it, does it resume from where it would have been after thirty seconds of falling? Or does it resume from its frozen position? If the former, you've created a discontinuity,the grain teleports. If the latter, you've created a time debt,the grain owes reality thirty seconds of cause-effect progression."
My head hurt just thinking about it. "What happens with a time debt?"
"Reality collects. Violently. The grain would experience thirty seconds of compressed causality instantly,probably vaporizing from the temporal strain."
"So I need to reconnect it at exactly the right causal point."
"Exactly. Which requires understanding temporal mechanics at a level that takes most Fate Weavers years to develop. You have four days."
I focused on the frozen grain, perceiving its temporal state. It existed in a bubble of now, disconnected from the universal flow. To reconnect it safely, I needed to find the specific moment where its frozen state could merge back into timeline without creating discontinuity.
That moment was... there. A gap in the temporal flow where the grain's absence hadn't yet propagated consequences. If I reconnected at that exact instant—
I released the severance with surgical precision, timing the reconnection to the microsecond.
The grain resumed falling naturally, as if it had never stopped. No discontinuity, no time debt, no paradox.
[TEMPORAL SEVERANCE: SUCCESSFUL]
[RECONNECTION: SMOOTH]
[LP SPENT: 120 TOTAL]
[CURRENT LP: 2,127]
[TECHNIQUE COMPETENCY: BEGINNER]
I staggered, my mind reeling from the effort. Temporal manipulation was exponentially more exhausting than other causality severances.
"Well done," Lin Mei said. "You've just performed a master-level technique as a beginner. That's either impressive talent or concerning recklessness."
"Probably both."
"Agreed." She picked up the hourglass. "Now do it again. This time, freeze three grains simultaneously and reconnect them at different intervals without creating paradoxes."
"That's impossible."
"Everything's impossible until it's not. And you need to master three-target temporal manipulation in four days, so let's start practicing."
By day ten, I could freeze five objects simultaneously and maintain the severances for three minutes each.
By day twelve, I successfully froze an entire person,Wang Jun volunteered, terrified but eager,for thirty seconds without killing him or creating time debts.
By day fourteen, the final day before we left for the capital, I could freeze myself.
That was the most disorienting experience yet—severing my own temporal thread, existing in a frozen moment while watching reality continue around me. Lin Mei moved, spoke, gestured, but I perceived it all as a blur. From my perspective inside frozen time, the world accelerated impossibly.
From her perspective outside, I simply vanished for ten seconds.
"That's the heist's escape mechanism," she explained after I reconnected myself. "If everything goes catastrophically wrong, you freeze yourself temporally and slip past guards who literally cannot perceive you because you're not existing in their timeframe."
[TEMPORAL SEVERANCE: COMPETENT]
[SELF-TARGETING: ACHIEVED]
[MAXIMUM DURATION: 30 SECONDS]
[COST: 200 LP PER USE]
"I'm ready," I said. "As ready as I'll ever be."
"Good. Because we leave tonight."
The Fate Weaver Refuge gathered in the main hall for our departure. Nearly four hundred people—survivors, refugees, fighters, families—all watching as Lin Mei, Yun Xia, and I prepared to attempt the impossible.
"We'll be gone approximately one week," Lin Mei addressed the crowd. "Three days travel to the Celestial Capital, three days for infiltration and heist execution, one day return. If we're not back in two weeks, assume we failed."
"What happens if you fail?" someone called out.
"Then the Celestial Court discovers this refuge eventually, and you'll need to scatter before they arrive. Elder Shen has evacuation protocols prepared." She gestured at an elderly Foundation Establishment cultivator who nodded gravely. "But we don't plan to fail."
Wang Jun pushed through the crowd, his young face determined. "Senior Wei Chen, let me come with you. I can help"
"You can help by surviving," I interrupted gently. "By mastering your fortune sense, by growing stronger, by being ready when we return. This heist is three people because three people can slip through causality cracks. More would create too many causal threads to manage."
"But if you die"
"Then you avenge us. You and every other Fate Weaver here." I placed a hand on his shoulder. "The Celestial Court killed your family, Wang Jun. Mine too. Don't waste your life on reckless revenge. Get strong enough that your revenge actually matters."
He nodded reluctantly, stepping back into the crowd.
Xiao Lan appeared from the gathering,she'd arrived at the refuge two days ago with her brother Xiao Feng, having successfully escaped Azure Peak City using Feng Ming's forged documents.
"Young Master," she said quietly, using my old title despite my protests. "Don't die. You've already done that once. It didn't suit you."
"I'll do my best."
"Your best got you killed the first time." She smiled slightly, taking the sting from her words. "Try harder this time."
"Deal."
Feng Ming approached with three packages. "Identity documents, Court bureaucrat credentials, and travel permits. Everything you need to enter the Celestial Capital and access the administrative building. Cost me every favor I had, but they're perfect. Don't waste them by dying stupidly."
"We'll die competently if we die at all," I assured him.
"Comforting."
Lin Mei raised her hand, silencing the crowd. "The Celestial Court has hunted us for three thousand years. They've killed thousands of Fate Weavers, destroyed hundreds of bloodlines, built their reign on our extinction. Tonight, we prove they failed. Tonight, we steal back what they took. Tonight, we show them that some ghosts bite back."
The crowd erupted in determined shouts.
And we left ,three Fate Weavers walking into darkness, heading toward the heart of tyranny itself, carrying the desperate hope of an almost extinct lineage.
The journey to the Celestial Capital took three days of hard travel.
We moved through territories I'd never seen,forests that gave way to farmland, farmland that gave way to towns, towns that grew into cities. Each mile closer to the capital, the Celestial Court's presence became more obvious: patrol cultivators, administrative buildings, propaganda posters celebrating the Court's benevolent rule.
"They really believe their own narrative," Yun Xia observed as we passed another poster showing the Court "protecting" citizens from dangerous rogue cultivators. "Or they've repeated the lies so long they've forgotten they're lies."
"Both, probably," I said. "Tyranny always clothes itself in righteousness. The Celestial Court thinks they're heroes preventing chaos."
"Maybe they are," Lin Mei said quietly. "Maybe hunting Fate Weavers really does prevent cosmic disasters. Maybe we're the villains in this story."
"Then we're villains fighting for survival against heroes who commit genocide." I looked at her. "I can live with that moral ambiguity."
"Can you? Can you really?" She met my eyes. "Because Wei Chen, if we succeed in this heist, if we grow strong enough to actually challenge the Court,we'll be making the very choice they fear. We'll be accumulating enough power to potentially rewrite reality on a whim. What happens if we win? What stops us from becoming the next tyrannical force?"
"The fact that we remember what it's like to be hunted," I said. "The fact that we've lost families, watched bloodlines die, felt tyranny's weight personally. That's what stops us."
"You hope."
"I hope. But hope backed by memory and determination." I smiled without humor. "Besides, we have to survive the heist before we can worry about becoming tyrants. One impossible task at a time."
We reached the Celestial Capital at dusk on the third day.
The city sprawled across a valley like a jewel, buildings of white stone and jade rising in tiered levels toward the central peak where the Celestial Court's palace dominated the skyline. Formation arrays glowed softly across the city, maintaining order and monitoring threats.
Half a million people lived here. Maybe more. The largest concentration of power on the continent, where the Court ruled absolutely and resistance was literally unthinkable,the formations detected treasonous thoughts and reported them to enforcers.
"Smile," Yun Xia reminded us as we approached the city gates. "We're traveling merchants excited to do business in the capital. Not fugitives planning robbery."
We passed through security without incident. The guards barely glanced at our forged documents, waving us through with bored efficiency. Inside the walls, the city hummed with controlled energy,cultivators moving purposefully, merchants hawking wares, citizens going about daily life under the Court's watchful eye.
"It's beautiful," I admitted despite myself.
"Tyranny often is," Lin Mei said. "The Celestial Court is very good at making oppression look like order. That's why they've lasted three thousand years."
We checked into an inn using our merchant covers, secured rooms, and gathered in mine to finalize the plan.
"Tomorrow we begin establishing our bureaucrat identities," Lin Mei said, spreading out a map of the administrative district. "Yun Xia knows the protocols from when she served as Enforcer. We spend two days integrating into the bureaucracy, making ourselves familiar faces, getting close to the vault access points."
"And then?" I asked.
"Then we wait for the shift change at midnight on the third day. Security is minimally staffed during the overnight transition. That's when we move,enter the vault, sever causality on every defense, steal everything we can carry, and disappear before anyone realizes what happened."
"Twelve percent success rate," Yun Xia reminded us.
"Twelve percent is better than zero." I checked my LP reserves—sitting comfortably at 2,456 after three days of regeneration. "I'm ready."
"Then tomorrow, we start the infiltration." Lin Mei's eyes gleamed with anticipation and fear in equal measure. "Three Fate Weavers against the Celestial Court's most secure facility. This is either genius or suicide."
"Why not both?" I suggested.
She laughed despite the tension. "Fair point. Get some sleep. Tomorrow, we become the ghosts that haunt tyranny's heart."
I lay in the inn bed that night, staring at the ceiling, knowing that in three days I'd either be dead or I'd have committed the most audacious theft in history.
Twelve percent odds.
Terrible for most people.
Perfect for a Fortune Foundation cultivator whose entire cultivation path was built on defying probability.
The dead man was ready.
The ghost had found tyranny's throat.
And in three days, the Celestial Court would discover what happened when you hunted Fate Weavers to near-extinction.
You created exactly what you feared most.