The air in the Long Clan's Ancestral Hall was thick with the cloying scent of sandalwood and simmering anticipation. Torchlight flickered across stern, painted faces of ancestors gazing down from worn scrolls. At the center of the hall, kneeling on the cold, polished Blood-Ironwood floor, was a youth of fifteen.
Long Chen.
His posture was straight, his black hair tied back simply, revealing a face that was once described as jade-like, now pale and etched with a grim concentration. His simple blue disciple robes were spotless. Before him, on the ancient altar, rested the Dragon Resonance Stone, a crystalline orb the size of a human head, currently dark and inert.
"Proceed, Long Chen." The voice of the Grand Elder, Long Tianhai, echoed with a gravity that silenced the whispers of the dozens of clansmen gathered. Today was the Ancestral Rite, the ceremony where youths of the clan who had reached the peak of Body Tempering would awaken their latent bloodline power by communing with the stone, using it as a catalyst to form their first star of Qi Condensation.
Long Chen was the star. The prodigy. The one who had blazed through the Nine Layers of Body Tempering in just three years, a record in Azure Mist City's recent history. Rumors said his awakened Dragon Bloodline might even reach the Middle-Tier. The clan's future, its hope of rising from a third-rate power in the city, rested on his slender, yet steel-corded, shoulders.
He took a deep breath, the memories of his father's proud smile and his mother's gentle encouragement before her passing flashing in his mind. He placed his hands on the cold surface of the stone.
At first, nothing. Then, a faint warmth. A deep, resonant hum, like a slumbering giant stirring, began to emanate from the stone. A wisp of crimson-gold light, thin as a hair, snaked from the stone's core and touched his fingertip.
A collective intake of breath swept the hall. The Elders leaned forward.
Long Chen felt it—the familiar, powerful surge of his own blood answering the call. The dragon within, inherited from some distant, diluted ancestor, roared to life in his veins. His skin flushed with a faint, scaly luminescence. This was it. He guided the awakened bloodline energy, a torrent of crimson-gold light, towards his dantian, the sea of energy in his lower abdomen, to condense his first star of Qi.
But then, the resonance changed.
The deep hum from the Dragon Resonance Stone twisted into a discordant shriek. The crimson-gold light from Long Chen's body suddenly flared violently, then sputtered. From the depths of the altar itself, not from the stone but from the ancient, inscribed masonry beneath it, a blinding, chaotic light erupted.
It was not one color, but many—a violent, unstable flash of gold, silver, azure, violet, emerald—all searing into Long Chen's chest. He had no time to scream. The light didn't burn; it invaded. It tore through his meticulously tempered meridians, the pathways for his qi, like a hot knife through paper. It zeroed in on the proudly awakening Dragon Bloodline in his dantian and shattered it.
Crack.
The sound was not audible to the others, but it echoed in Long Chen's soul, a sound of fundamental breaking. The surging power in his veins evaporated. The luminescence on his skin died, replaced by a sickly, ashen gray that spread like ink in water. A wave of absolute, void-like weakness hollowed him out.
He collapsed forward, hands slipping from the stone, which now lay dark and silent once more. Blood, startlingly bright against his pallor, trickled from the corner of his mouth.
Silence. A silence so profound the popping of the torches sounded like thunder.
Then, chaos.
"Chen'er!" His father, Clan Head Long Zhan, roared, surging forward, his aura of a Qi Condensation (9th Star) expert flaring.
"What happened?!" "The stone rejected him!" "His bloodline… look at his veins! They're dead!"
The whispers were no longer hushed; they were horrified exclamations.
Long Tianhai, the Grand Elder, was at his side in an instant, his gnarled hand grasping Long Chen's wrist. His spiritual sense probed, and his aged face, usually an impassive mask, contorted in shock and dawning horror. "His… his Dragon Bloodline meridians are in ruins. Fractured beyond recognition. His dantian is… leaking. Unstable."
The verdict, delivered in a gravelly, stunned tone, fell like a death sentence.
"Crippled." The word came from the side, not loud, but dripping with a venomous satisfaction. Long Chen, through swimming vision, saw his cousin, Long Hao, standing with a group of his supporters. Long Hao's face was a masterpiece of feigned concern, but his eyes, dark and ambitious, glittered with unhidden triumph. "The heavens have shown their disfavor. The clan's resources were wasted."
"Enough!" Long Zhan bellowed, cradling his son's limp head. But the damage was done. The hope that had filled the hall moments ago had curdled into pity, disgust, and opportunistic calculation.
Long Chen tried to speak, to move, but only a weak gasp escaped. The world faded in and out. In that internal darkness, amidst the wreckage of his cultivation and pride, he felt something else. Not just emptiness. Deep, deep within the shattered fragments of his bloodline, where the chaotic, multi-colored light had briefly raged, there was a… residue. A faint, almost imperceptible warmth, tinged with silver and speckled with motes of impossible colors. And beneath even that, a profound, heavy sleeping sensation, like the deepest bedrock of the world.
But it was distant, inaccessible, a flicker in a vast cavern of ruin. All he could comprehend was the pain and the cold.
As his father carried him out of the Ancestral Hall, the clan's eyes followed. No longer looks of awe, but of scrutiny, of reevaluation. The genius had fallen, and in the brutal calculus of the cultivation world, a fallen genius was less than trash.
The Jade of the Long Clan was not just cracked. It was pulverized, its brilliance extinguished in a single, inexplicable moment. And in the ashes of that brilliance, something unknown, something primal and utterly forgotten, had been stirred from its eon-long slumber.
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