The night before the duel was the longest of Shen Li's life.
The pain in his head had receded to a dull ache, and his thread-sight had partially recovered. It was no longer shattered glass, but a foggy, unstable mirror. He could see the major threads, but the fine details were blurred, and maintaining the sight for long periods was exhausting. He was operating at a severe disadvantage, and he was facing an enemy he barely understood.
He couldn't sleep. He sat in the darkest corner of the silent bunkhouse, his mind a battlefield.
A Karmic Null. A Fate-Eater. Lin Feng.
The principles were clear from Lian's explanation and the two duels he'd witnessed: Lin Feng negated. He didn't attack; he subtracted. He made the extraordinary ordinary. He turned luck into misfortune. He reduced complex, brilliant techniques to simple, clumsy movements.
Bai Xiaoling's entire revised strength was built on being extraordinary. On sharp skill, on clever strategy, on a brilliant, resilient thread of destiny. Everything Lin Feng was designed to erase.
A direct confrontation using her Winter Sword arts was doomed. The more beautifully she executed a technique, the more perfectly she planned, the more powerfully the nullification field would work against her. Her confidence would become doubt. Her precise footwork would stumble. Frostbite's icy edge might feel like a dull iron bar in her hands.
He had to think differently. He had to design a strategy for fighting nothingness.
What were the void's limitations? Lian said it was drawn to "turbulent fate" and "complex knots." Bai Xiaoling was certainly that. But what if the knot was… simple? What if the strategy wasn't complex? What if it was brutally, stupidly basic?
The Null simplified. So, give it nothing to simplify.
Don't fight with refined sword arts. Fight like a brawler. Like a thug in an alley. Use the "dirty" tactics he'd taught her, not as clever twists, but as the entirety of her approach. Pepper in the eyes. Kick dirt. Go for the groin, the knees, the throat. There was no "skill" to nullify in a well-thrown handful of gravel. There was no "destiny" in a finger jab to the eye.
But would that be enough? The Null also seemed to affect luck and fortune. Bai Xiaoling could still slip. The pepper pouch could burst in her own hand. She could miss a simple kick.
He needed to negate the negation. To create a local environment so chaotic, so random, that even the void's simplifying influence couldn't impose order.
An idea began to form. A terrible, risky, brilliantly stupid idea.
He needed Xuan Ji. And he needed to talk to Bai Xiaoling. Now.
He slipped out into the cold, starless night. First, to the Poison Garden. He didn't enter. He left another signal—a specific arrangement of three common pebbles by the gate. Then he went to the isolated storage shed behind the disciples' bathhouse. It was a place they had used once before for a clandestine meeting.
Bai Xiaoling was already there, waiting in the shadows. She looked pale but composed, her eyes like chips of glacial ice in the dark.
"You saw," she stated, not asked.
"I saw," Shen Li replied. "He is not what he seems."
"He is a hole," she said, her voice low and certain. "When I looked at him… I didn't see a person. I felt a… pull. Like standing at the edge of that ravine again. A pull toward nothing."
Her instinct was terrifyingly accurate. "He's called a Karmic Null. A corrector. The universe's way of erasing mistakes. Of smoothing out knots. You are the knot."
She absorbed this, her jaw tightening. "How do I fight nothing?"
"You don't fight it. You overwhelm it with chaos." Shen Li stepped closer. "Your sword arts, your Winter Sword techniques—they are refined, brilliant, complex. They are exactly what he feeds on. You must forget them tomorrow. Forget you are Bai Xiaoling of the Winter Sword. Be the savage from the gorge. Be the animal I taught you to be. There is no honor in this fight. There is only survival. Your goal is not to defeat him with skill. Your goal is to touch him. To get close. And when you are close, you create a storm."
He outlined his nascent plan. It was crude, visceral, and relied on throwing every concept of cultivated combat out the window.
Before she could fully process it, a soft tap came at the door. Xuan Ji entered, a shadow in green. She listened as Shen Li explained the Null and his crude strategy.
"Chaos…" Xuan Ji mused, her fingers tapping her chin. "The opposite of the Null's simplifying order. It might work. To destabilize the void's local reality. I can provide tools for chaos." A cruel, thoughtful smile touched her lips. "Not poisons. He may nullify those. But… irritants. Confusants. Things that attack perception and sense in a purely physical, mundane way."
"What do you have?" Shen Li asked.
"A powder I call 'Mirage Dust.' It is ground flash-rock and itching nettle spores. It creates blinding flashes of light and causes intense, distracting skin irritation on contact. No spiritual component. Just physics and biology."
"A sonic pellet—'Thunder-egg.'Crush it, and it produces a deafening bang louder than any thunderclap. Again, mundane black powder and alchemical salts."
"And a gel…'Spider-Foot Slime.' Slippery beyond belief, almost impossible to remove, and it smells like a rotting corpse. For the platform."
Shen Li nodded. These were perfect. Tools of pure, sensorial chaos. "Can you have them by dawn?"
"They are already in my satchel," Xuan Ji said, producing three small, wax-sealed parcels. She handed them to Bai Xiaoling. "Use them without thought. As reflexes. The moment you feel your skill waver, your luck turn, create a mess."
Bai Xiaoling took the packages, her hands steady. "And then what? I blind him, deafen him, and cover us both in slime. Then I push him off?"
"No," Shen Li said, his eyes glinting in the dark. "Then, while he is blinded, deafened, itching, and slipping… you use the one thing he cannot nullify."
"What?"
"Your body. Your weight. Your will." Shen Li's voice was stone. "You tackle him. You wrap your arms and legs around him. You hold on like your life depends on it—because it does. And you take him over the edge with you."
The shed fell utterly silent. The audacity of the plan was breathtaking. It wasn't a duel. It was a suicide tackle.
"The safety nets…" Bai Xiaoling breathed.
"Are fifty feet below the platform edges," Shen Li finished. "A fall onto them from the platform is safe. A fall off the platform, while grappling an opponent, is unpredictable. But it is a risk for both of you. It equalizes the field. His void cannot save him from gravity. It cannot nullify the impact of two bodies hitting a net. The judges will have to intervene. They may declare a draw, or they may judge based on who yields first in the air. Your will must be stronger. You must make him yield to the fall, to the chaos, before you do."
It was a plan born of absolute desperation. To win by surrendering to chaos and gambling both their fates on a single, brutal embrace in mid-air.
Bai Xiaoling looked at the packages in her hands, then at Shen Li. She didn't ask if it would work. There were no guarantees. She simply asked, "When?"
"The moment the gong sounds. Do not let him establish his presence. Do not let the void-field solidify around you. Attack with chaos first. Be the unpredictable variable he cannot simplify."
She took a deep, shuddering breath, and then nodded. There was no fear in her eyes now. Only a fierce, wild resolve. She was no longer just a swordsman. She was a weapon of chaos, aimed at a hole in the world.
Dawn of the duel arrived, grey and cold. A thick, damp mist clung to the peaks, making the floating platforms seem like ghostly islands in a white sea. The crowds were larger today, buzzing with speculation about the bizarre match-up.
Shen Li took his place among the servants, his heart a cold, hard drum in his chest. His thread-sight was unstable, flickering. He could see Bai Xiaoling's thread, a tight, focused coil of Chaotic Resolve. He could see Lin Feng's… or rather, he could see the absence. A patch of blurry, muted non-color where his threads should be.
They stood on opposite sides of the First Peak platform. Lin Feng looked as he always did—nervous, dirty, holding his cheap iron sword like it was a dead fish. Bai Xiaoling stood still, Frostbite sheathed at her side. Her hands were empty, resting lightly on her hips, near the hidden parcels.
Elder Wu herself was the presiding judge, hovering on her flying disc nearby, her glacial eyes missing nothing.
The gong sounded.
Lin Feng shuffled forward, his void-field expanding like an invisible stain.
Bai Xiaoling did not draw her sword. She did not assume a stance.
She charged.
It was not a graceful, flowing movement. It was a raw, aggressive, headlong sprint. It broke every rule of duel decorum. The crowd gasped.
As she ran, her right hand dipped into a pouch and came out cupped. At ten paces from Lin Feng, she hurled the contents—Xuan Ji's 'Mirage Dust.'
A blinding white flash erupted in the misty air, accompanied by a cloud of fine powder. Lin Feng flinched, throwing a hand up over his eyes with a startled grunt. The predictable, nullifying aura around him wavered.
Bai Xiaoling didn't stop. She closed the distance. As Lin Feng blinked, tears starting from the irritating spores, she skidded to a stop and slammed her foot down on the stone, crushing the 'Thunder-egg' she had dropped.
BANG!
The sound was physical, a concussive wave that made the very platform shake. Spectators clutched their ears. Lin Feng cried out, staggering, completely deafened and disoriented.
Now Bai Xiaoling drew Frostbite—but not to use its edge. She scooped up a glob of the 'Spider-Foot Slime' from a broken capsule on her belt with the flat of the blade and flicked it at Lin Feng's feet and the stone between them.
The clear, viscous gel spread instantly. Lin Feng's boots lost all traction. He windmilled his arms, his face a mask of confusion, pain, and sudden panic. The reek of rotting flesh filled the air.
The duel was thirty seconds old, and it was already a surreal, messy nightmare. There was no skill, no technique. Just blinding light, deafening noise, unbearable stench, and impossible slipperiness.
Bai Xiaoling, expecting the slime, used the last of her momentum to leap, planting a foot on a slightly drier patch and launching herself at the flailing, blinded, deafened Lin Feng.
She didn't strike with her sword. She dropped it.
She slammed into him, wrapping her arms around his torso, her legs scissoring around his slippery legs. They fell together in a tangled heap onto the slime-covered stone.
"WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?" Elder Wu's amplified voice boomed, a mix of outrage and disbelief.
On the platform, it was a struggle of pure, grunting, messy physicality. Lin Feng thrashed, trying to throw her off, but he couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't get purchase. Bai Xiaoling held on with the strength of desperation, her face pressed against his stinking, slime-covered robe.
"Yield!" she screamed into his ear, though he couldn't hear it.
He didn't yield. He fought with a strange, silent, mechanical strength. His void-field was still active—Bai Xiaoling felt a deep, draining fatigue, a sense that her will was seeping away. But the physical chaos, the overwhelming sensory assault, was disrupting its focus.
With a final, mighty heave, she rolled. Not to pin him, but to carry them both toward the edge.
The crowd roared as the tangled mass of limbs slid through the slime, toward the precipice.
"HALT!" Elder Wu commanded, but it was too late.
Bai Xiaoling, with a last, wild shout, pushed off with her feet.
She and Lin Feng went over the edge together, locked in a desperate embrace.
A collective scream went up from a thousand throats.
They fell, a single, messy, twisting shape, into the white mist.
Shen Li's breath stopped. His thread-sight flickered wildly. He saw their two threads—one bright and fierce, one a blurry void—plummeting, intertwined.
The safety nets, stretched between the peaks, were there to catch falls from the platform's surface. A fall from the side was a different trajectory.
They hit the outermost edge of the net. The impact was brutal. The net sagged violently, then rebounded.
For a second, they bounced, still tangled. Then, the force of the impact and the slime did their work.
Lin Feng's grip, already disoriented, slipped.
Bai Xiaoling, her mind screaming with survival instinct, held on to the net with one hand, her other still gripping his robe.
Lin Feng dangled for a terrifying moment, held only by her grip and the slime sticking them together. His blind, deafened face was turned up toward the sky. For the first time, Shen Li saw a clear emotion on it: not fear, but a profound, empty confusion. The tool did not understand this outcome.
Then, the slime gave way.
Bai Xiaoling's fingers, strained to their limit, lost their purchase on the slippery fabric.
Lin Feng fell.
Not onto the net. He slid off it, down through the gaps in the ropes, and into the endless, mist-shrouded abyss below.
The crowd fell dead silent.
There was no scream. One moment he was there, a blot of confusion against the net. The next, he was gone, swallowed by the white void beneath the peaks.
Bai Xiaoling hung from the net, breathing in ragged, sobbing gasps. She was hauled up by rescue disciples on flying swords, covered in slime, shaking, but alive.
Elder Wu hovered over the empty platform, her face like carved stone. She looked down into the mist where Lin Feng had disappeared, then at the panting, battered Bai Xiaoling being brought back to the cliffside.
The silence stretched. The rules were clear: killing was forbidden. But was this killing? It was a mutual fall. An accident born of a chaotic, rule-breaking brawl. The Null had not been stabbed or blasted. He had been… out-chaosed. And he had fallen.
Finally, Elder Wu spoke, her voice echoing in the absolute quiet.
"The duel is concluded. Bai Xiaoling… returns to the platform. Lin Feng… is disqualified by absence."
It was a neutral, bureaucratic pronouncement. It did not declare her the winner. It did not accuse her of murder. It simply noted the outcome. The universe's corrector had been corrected by a chaos it could not compute.
Bai Xiaoling stood on the solid cliff, her legs trembling. She looked across at Shen Li. There was no triumph in her eyes. Only a hollow, shell-shocked relief, and the dawning horror of what she had just done—and what had just been done to her.
Shen Li met her gaze and gave a slow, solemn nod. It was over. The void was gone.
But as he turned away, pushing through the stunned, murmuring crowd, he felt it.
Not from the abyss. From the earth.
The ancient, bitter watcher's thread. It had been focused on the duel, intensely so. And now, as Lin Feng vanished into the mist, that thread did not pulse with anger or loss.
It pulsed with a cold, sharp, unmistakable surge of…
Satisfaction.
The watcher hadn't been protecting the Null. It had been observing it. And it was satisfied with the result.
A new, more terrifying understanding dawned on Shen Li, freezing the blood in his veins.
The backlash wasn't Lin Feng. Lin Feng was just the delivery mechanism. The test.
The true watcher, the ancient thing in the earth, had been observing how he, Shen Li, would handle a Karmic Null sent to unravel his work. It had been testing his methods, his resilience, the strength of his chaotic weaves.
And Shen Li had passed the test. He had used chaos to destroy a tool of order.
The satisfaction he felt from the watcher was not benevolent. It was the satisfaction of a collector finding a rare, interesting specimen. Or a hunter confirming the strength of his prey.
The void in the tapestry was gone.
But the eye that had placed it there was now wide open. And it was fixed directly on him.
To be continued...