Xīng Hé sat on the floor of the training room.
The bland walls surrounded her once more—featureless grey, absorbing light rather than reflecting it. The mirror floated in its usual position, pulsing gently, waiting for instruction.
She reached out with her intent.
Nothing happened.
She tried again, focusing harder, directing her will toward the artefact with deliberate precision.
The mirror remained dormant. Unresponsive. Its surface still and dark.
A limit, she realized. There's a daily limit.
That explained why no one had come to bother her. They knew. Knew she would exhaust the mirror's capacity, knew she would emerge eventually, knew there was no point in interrupting when the artefact itself would force her to stop.
She pushed herself to her feet, legs unsteady from hours of exertion, and walked toward the door.
---
Questions churned through her mind as she moved through the manor's corridors.
So many questions.
The knowledge she possessed—from her family's library, from the texts disguised as bedtime stories, from years of decoding hidden truths—gave her frameworks for understanding. But frameworks weren't answers. They were scaffolding, useful for building something larger, useless on their own.
And right now, she felt like she was onto something.
Something that sounded crazy even inside her own head.
Restoration.
She turned the concept over in her thoughts, examining it from every angle.
It was like healing. More than healing. She'd seen that during her training—the way wounds closed, the way damage reversed, the way her power reached toward injuries and tried to undo what had been done.
Undo.
That was the key word. Not fix. Not mend. Undo.
Healing accepted that damage had occurred and worked to repair it. Restoration operated differently. It reached back toward what something had been and tried to return it to that state.
Which meant her abilities overlapped with healers. She could do what they did—close wounds, mend flesh, restore function.
But she could do more.
Her concept wasn't just healing. It was healing and then some. A superset rather than an equivalent. Something that contained the healing concept within itself while extending beyond it.
Superior.
The word surfaced unbidden.
Her concept might be superior to some concepts.
The implication staggered her.
She'd assumed concepts were equal. Different, yes—fire wasn't ice, space wasn't time—but fundamentally balanced. Each one a valid path to power, each one capable of reaching the same heights given sufficient understanding and evolution.
But what if that wasn't true?
What if there were tiers?
---
The questions cascaded from that single possibility.
If concepts had tiers—if some were inherently superior to others—then strength and abilities at each stage wouldn't be equal. Two Resonance-stage divine existences with different concepts wouldn't be equivalent in power. The higher-tier concept would win.
What qualified a concept for a higher tier? What made one superior and another inferior? Was it the scope of application? The fundamental nature of the truth it embodied? Something else entirely?
And if this information became widely known...
Xīng Hé's stomach tightened.
She didn't know how many Transcendents currently ruled this world. But she knew the balance between them was delicate. The texts in her family's library had spoken of this—the careful equilibrium that kept the most powerful beings in existence from tearing the realm apart.
They believed themselves equals.
That belief was what maintained the peace.
If one Transcendent discovered they held a superior concept—if they realized they could defeat another without suffering equivalent damage—the consequences would be catastrophic. The false peace would shatter. Wars would erupt between beings whose battles reshaped continents.
But even setting that aside, the current equilibrium made a certain brutal sense.
If two Transcendents fought, neither would escape unscathed. And the moment one was weakened, the others would descend. The watchers would become predators. The injured would become prey.
Those who fought were the losers.
Those who watched it happen were the winners.
They got to reap the benefits without paying the costs.
So in reality, the only thing keeping the Transcendents in check was mutual fear. The knowledge that fighting meant losing, even if you won. The understanding that victory was just another word for becoming someone else's target.
If there were concept tiers—if that equilibrium was based on a false assumption of equality—then...
If...
She collided with something solid.
---
The impact jarred her from her thoughts, sent her stumbling backward. She blinked, reality flooding back in, and found herself staring at one of the manor's maids.
The woman was already bowing, apologies spilling from her lips.
"Forgive me, my lady, I wasn't watching where—"
"No." Xīng Hé shook her head, pushing the concept-tier theories aside. "It's my fault. I'm the one who should apologize."
The maid looked uncertain—servants weren't accustomed to receiving apologies from their betters—but she accepted the words with a slight nod.
"Your dinner is ready," she said. "Also, your friend is here. She's waiting in the guest room."
Xīng Hé's hand rose to her face before she could stop it.
Palm met forehead with a soft smack.
That's what she'd forgotten.
Hongyu. Her friend. The girl who had been visiting again and again for two months, who had finally been allowed access, who was probably sitting in the guest room right now wondering if Xīng Hé had abandoned her.
"Bring her to the main house," Xīng Hé said, recovering quickly. "Serve her dinner with mine."
The maid nodded.
Xīng Hé turned to continue toward her quarters, already composing apologies in her head—
"How was your training?"
The question stopped her mid-step.
It was innocent. Casual. The kind of thing servants asked when making conversation.
But the answer wasn't innocent at all.
---
Pain flooded her body.
Not physical pain—the memory of it. The accumulated exhaustion of hours spent testing her limits, failing her tests, discovering exactly how useless she currently was.
The training came back to her in fragments.
The first simulation. Five hundred Resonance-stage divine existences, broken and bleeding on a battlefield that existed only in the mirror's memory. She'd approached the nearest casualty—a woman with her arm torn free at the shoulder—and reached for her Restoration.
The concept had responded.
Power had flowed from her toward the wound.
And nothing had happened.
No. That wasn't quite right. Something had happened. The bleeding had slowed. The edges of the wound had stabilized, somehow. But the arm hadn't regrown. The damage hadn't reversed. Her Restoration had touched the injury and found itself unable to undo what had been done.
She'd tried again.
Different casualty. Different wound. Smaller this time—a gash across a man's chest, deep but not immediately fatal.
The same result.
Her power reached the injury. Made contact. Failed to reverse it completely. She could close the surface wound, stop the bleeding, prevent immediate death. But the true damage—the deeper harm—remained untouched.
Small wounds, she could heal.
Battle damage, she couldn't.
She'd gone through dozens of casualties. Tried again and again. Pushed until her head throbbed and her vision swam. Rested. Pushed again.
The pattern held.
Minor injuries yielded to her Restoration. Cuts closed. Bruises faded. But anything inflicted during actual combat—anything that carried the weight of divine conflict—resisted her.
Preservation had fared no better.
She'd tried to freeze injuries in place—not heal them, just hold them, prevent them from worsening. Stop the bleeding. Suspend the damage. Buy time for something else to work.
The injuries had continued to deteriorate.
Balance had been the same.
She'd attempted to stabilize—to create equilibrium between the wounded state and the healthy state, to hold the casualty in stasis between life and death.
Nothing.
And then, watching another divine existence expire beneath her hands, she'd understood.
The damage came from higher-stage divine existences.
Of course it had. This was a battle. A real battle, recorded by the mirror. And in battles between divine existences, the most devastating injuries came from the most powerful combatants.
The casualties she was trying to heal hadn't been wounded by Resonance-stage opponents. They'd been wounded by Domain stage. By Ascendant. By beings whose concepts operated at levels she couldn't perceive, let alone affect.
She couldn't override the concept that had damaged them.
It didn't matter if the casualty was Resonance stage or higher. What mattered was the source of their injuries. And if that source was a divine existence more powerful than her—if the damage had been inflicted by a concept user beyond her reach—then her Restoration was useless.
She couldn't heal them.
Any of them.
---
"My lady?"
The maid's voice pulled her back.
Xīng Hé realized she'd been standing motionless, staring at nothing, for several seconds.
"It was difficult," she said finally. "Today was... difficult."
That was an understatement.
Today had been a failure.
Complete. Absolute. Every test she'd attempted, every application of her concepts, every effort to make herself useful in the aftermath of battle—all of it had failed.
She couldn't save anyone.
Not yet.
The maid nodded sympathetically, though she couldn't possibly understand the weight behind Xīng Hé's words.
"Rest well tonight, my lady. Tomorrow is another day."
Yes, Xīng Hé thought. It is.
She would be in that training room tomorrow. And the day after. And every day after that, for as long as it took.
She'd known this wouldn't be easy.
She'd known there would be failures.
But knowing and experiencing were different things. The gap between them was filled with frustration, exhaustion, and the bitter taste of inadequacy.
She swallowed it all.
If this is what it takes, then I'm ready.
She turned and continued toward her quarters.
Her friend was waiting.
And tomorrow, she would try again.
---
End of Chapter 27
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