The crack in the collar was a lifeline to a hurricane.
Power, raw and primordial, flooded Ling Xiao's system. It was not the wild, multi-faceted chaos of storms or life. This was older, denser, more fundamental—the creative fury that existed before concepts like 'order' and 'disorder' had names. Titan essence. Shí's final gift, awakened by a child's boundless rage.
Memories that were not his own flashed behind his eyes: Shí's massive hands commanding gravity to kneel, shaping a nebula into a star; Shí's voice arguing with the fundamental laws of a young universe, forging compromises that became physics. This was not cultivation. This was authority.
The suppression field flooding the duct washed over him. The silver light sought to extinguish his energy. Instead, it met the Titan-touched chaos and shattered. Like a wave breaking against a continent. The field didn't just fail around him; it unraveled in a spreading radius, the orderly patterns dissolving into harmless noise.
A technique formed in his mind, not learned, but remembered. A basic principle of Titan interaction with lesser order: the Chaos Disruption Field. It didn't attack. It simply declared a local rule: Here, complex order cannot cohere.
He stood up in the duct, the metal warping and groaning around him without being touched. He pushed.
A sphere of distorted reality, ten paces across, pulsed out from him. Within it, the silver suppression light guttered and died. The humming machinery in the walls fell silent, then began to emit chaotic, screeching feedback. Ordered formations fizzled. The collar around his neck, its internal runes now meaningless scribbles, fell away with a dull clink.
He was free. And he was furious.
He burst from the duct into a main corridor just as a squad of Silver Lake guards rounded the corner. They saw a small, ash-covered boy with eyes blazing gold-violet, standing in a sphere of visual distortion that made the air itself seem to waver like a heat haze.
"Subject Alpha! Contain him!"
They raised formation flags, launching bolts of freezing blue energy. The bolts entered his Disruption Field and simply… came apart. The orderly bonds holding their energy together dissolved. They dissipated into faint, cold mist.
Ling Xiao didn't know any fancy martial techniques. He had Shí's authority and his own chaos. He pointed a finger at the lead guard's formation flag. He willed the chaos around it to resist.
The flag, a tool designed to channel order, exploded in the guard's hand as its own energy rebelled against its structure.
Panic spread. Ling Xiao walked forward. He didn't run. His Disruption Field moved with him, a bubble of beautiful, terrible impossibility. Alarms that sounded near him distorted into atonal wails. Spirit-locked doors hissed open as their sealing formations failed.
He was a walking systems crash.
He remembered the cells. The imprisoned ones. He turned, his senses guided by the Titan essence's kinship with raw, living power. He found the cell block. The doors here were thick, but their locks were complex formations. He placed a hand on one. His Disruption Field interacted with the lock. There was a sound like shattering crystal, and the door slid open.
Inside, the woman with hair of living flame stared, her silver net-headgear sparking and dying. She gasped as the suppression vanished. Her hair burst into brilliant, joyful fire. She looked at Ling Xiao, her eyes wide with disbelief, then darted past him into the corridor with a whoop of mad laughter.
He moved down the line. The man turning to stone felt the petrification recede. He groaned, flesh returning, and stumbled out, nodding grim thanks. Ling Xiao freed a dozen more: a boy who whispered to shadows, a girl whose tears became acid, a pair of twins linked by a chaotic emotional bond.
But not all could be saved.
In one cell, he found what was left of a chaos-touched badger spirit. The "purification" process had gone too far. Its natural chaos had been stripped, but not replaced with order—just… removed. What remained was a mindless, twitching husk, its body randomly flickering between solid and intangible, a broken reality. It moaned, a sound of pure existential pain.
In another, a human subject sat rocking, their own chaotic energy, driven inward by suppression, having consumed their mind. They were a vortex of uncontrolled, self-devouring power, dangerous to everything, including themselves.
Ling Xiao stood before each cell, his rage cooling into a sorrow as heavy as stone. These were not victims who could be freed. They were warnings. Testaments to the cost of the "perfect order" above.
He understood Li Ming's words now, deeply. Use your gift to see.
He saw what had to be done.
He entered the cell of the badger spirit. It lunged at him, not with malice, but with the blind reflex of agony. He didn't raise a defense. He let his Disruption Field touch it. The field didn't hurt it. It did something else: it simplified. It gently, irrevocably, unraveled the last chaotic knots holding its broken existence together. The spirit dissolved into a shower of harmless, fading light, finally at peace.
He did the same for the mindless vortex. A touch, a unraveling, a release.
Each mercy kill felt like a piece of his own soul being carved out. But it was necessary. It was responsibility. It was the weight.
News of the breakout and the "walking null-field" spread. Resistance organized. Disciples formed grand, combined formations in the central atrium, weaving a net of such dense ordered energy it glowed like a captive sun. Elder Lin was there, his face a mask of icy fury. Beside him stood an older, leaner man in stark white robes—Director Ko, the facility head. His aura was quiet, but to Ling Xiao's Titan-touched senses, it was a black hole of controlled, surgical order. A Core Formation master, and a specialist.
"Remarkable," Director Ko said, his voice dry and analytical. "The Titan essence hypothesis is confirmed. It's providing a stabilizing matrix for the chaos. This is beyond priceless. Take him. Dissection protocols are authorized. Prioritize the heart region."
Elder Lin and six other elders moved as one. They launched not attacks, but Anchors of Finality—beams of blue-white energy designed not to destroy, but to pin reality itself, to create zones where only their defined laws worked.
Ling Xiao's Disruption Field strained. It could break formations, but this was a direct imposition of law. The beams began to penetrate, solidifying the air around him, trying to freeze his field in place.
He couldn't overpower seven elders and a director. Not directly.
So he remembered Shí's other lesson: Chaos is not random. It is complex. To a small mind, complexity looks like randomness.
He dropped his Disruption Field.
The elders surged forward, sensing victory.
Ling Xiao closed his eyes. He stopped trying to impose a rule. Instead, he listened to the facility. To the hum of its power cores, the flow of coolant, the vibrations in the structure from the freed experiments rampaging elsewhere, the precise, rhythmic breathing of the elders as they channeled their energy. He wove all these disparate, chaotic signals—the machine chaos, the biological chaos, the spiritual chaos—into a single, impossibly complex tapestry in his mind.
Then, he fed that tapestry back into the Anchors of Finality.
He didn't attack the beams. He answered them with information. Overwhelming, meaningless, glorious noise.
The Anchors, designed to impose simple order, were flooded with chaotic data they couldn't parse. They short-circuited. The beams twisted in mid-air, lashing out wildly. One struck a power conduit on the ceiling. Another wrapped around Elder Lin's own leg, binding him with his own technique.
Director Ko's eyes widened. "He's not just wielding power. He's weaponizing context! Contain the environmental inputs!"
But it was too late. Ling Xiao had learned. He was the eye of the storm, and the storm was everything else. He pointed a trembling hand at the main support pillar of the central atrium, already stressed by the wild energy discharges. He didn't blast it. He showed it, through a focused pulse of chaotic resonance, a million possible fractures at once. He gave it a choice.
The pillar, made of super-dense, order-forged stone, chose the most chaotic option available: it exploded into dust.
The ceiling of the Apex Research Facility groaned. Then it fell.
Director Ko shouted, throwing up a massive dome of protective order around himself and his closest men. Elder Lin was less lucky, buried under a cascade of rubble.
Ling Xiao turned and ran, not away from the collapse, but using it. He ran through the raining destruction, his senses guiding him through falling debris, his body moving with a grace born of absolute situational awareness. He was a leaf in a hurricane of his own making.
He found Goran's maintenance shaft, now half-crushed but passable. He dove in as the world came down behind him.
He crawled through darkness, the sounds of collapse fading. He emerged into the "coolant tunnels"—ancient, abandoned passages reeking of chemicals. He was out. The facility was a tomb.
He slumped against the cold wall, the Titan essence receding, leaving him exhausted, empty, and scarred. He had won. He was free.
He closed his eyes, just for a moment.
The Chaos Observation Stone in his pouch, dormant through the battle, grew unbearably hot.
He pulled it out. Its surface, usually a swirling gray, was now a seething, angry red. It showed him the vision from the tomb again, but magnified, urgent.
The planet's core, spinning erratically. The black fractures, now wider, bleeding chaotic energy. The Star-Seer extraction arrays glowed brighter, sucking harder. And the timer, now flashing relentlessly in his mind's eye:
TIME TO CORE COLLAPSE: 6 MONTHS, 3 DAYS, 14 HOURS.
The facility's destruction had done nothing to stop it. If anything, the massive release of chaotic energy from the breakout and collapse might have accelerated the instability.
He wasn't just a fugitive. He wasn't just a weapon or a savior.
He was a witness to a planet's murder. And the clock was ticking faster.
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END OF CHAPTER 19