Three thousand people making no noise is significantly louder than three thousand people shouting.
The silence in the main courtyard of the White Jade Sect was a physical weight. It smelled of stale sweat, nervous breath, and the ozone tang of drawn qi. Every outer and inner disciple stood in perfectly aligned rows around the perimeter of the testing grounds. They were holding their collective breath.
They had come to watch a man die. Or, at the very least, suffer catastrophic organ failure.
Wei Tian walked down the center aisle. His cheap cloth shoes scuffed against the jade tiles. Scuff. Drag. Scuff. The sound echoed off the high stone walls.
He hadn't dressed up. He wore the same plain white scholar's robe he had worn yesterday. There was a loose thread hanging off his left cuff. He kept rubbing it with his thumb. He held his worn, blue-covered book in his right hand. A dried birch leaf stuck out from the top, marking his page.
On the elevated dais at the north end of the courtyard sat the Elder Council. Twelve men and women in varying shades of green, gold, and silver silk.
In the center seat, elevated a half-step above the rest, sat Bai Qian.
She wore pristine white. Her face was an absolute, unreadable mask. She didn't lean forward. She didn't lean back. She looked at Wei Tian with the clinical detachment of a mortician reviewing a chart.
To her right sat Elder Shen Mu.
Shen Mu was leaning so far forward his chest practically touched his knees. His knuckles were white where he gripped the carved armrests of his heavy wooden chair. He looked like a man watching a winning lottery ticket slowly float down into his hands.
Wei Tian stopped in the dead center of the courtyard.
Waiting for him was a stone pedestal. On top of the pedestal rested a jagged, irregular chunk of black rock, roughly the size of a human head.
The Deep Earth Obsidian Resonance Stone.
It wasn't just dark. It actively ate the morning sunlight. The ambient temperature in a three-foot radius around the pedestal was freezing, the stone constantly siphoning thermal and spiritual energy from the environment to feed its internal detection matrix. To a cultivator, standing near it felt like standing next to a hungry vacuum.
Wei Tian looked at it. It smelled faintly of crushed chalk and old blood.
"The Assessment of the Husband will commence," Shen Mu's voice boomed across the courtyard, laced with enough qi to rattle the teeth of the junior disciples in the back rows. "The White Jade Sect does not harbor the weak. We do not shelter the useless. The first trial is the Resonance of the Core."
Shen Mu stood up. He pointed a long, rigid finger at Wei Tian.
"Place your hand upon the Obsidian Stone. It will draw your qi to measure your foundation. If you possess no foundation, it will draw your life force. Survive it for ten seconds."
In the back row, Xiao Mei squeezed her eyes shut. She bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted copper. Ten seconds touching deep-earth obsidian without qi was a death sentence. The stone would rip the heat right out of his blood.
Wei Tian didn't look at Shen Mu. He didn't look at Bai Qian.
He looked at the rock.
Yesterday, in the dark of his pavilion, he had run the calculations. Failing correctly was an art. If he didn't react at all, they would know he was hiding something. If he died, he'd have to find a new mountain to read on. The solution was mundane structural failure. Break the equipment.
He stepped up to the pedestal.
He placed his left hand flat against the jagged black surface.
The Obsidian Stone hummed. A low, vicious vibration traveled up Wei Tian's arm. The stone's internal matrix deployed, reaching into his body, hunting for a spiritual sea, a qi pathway, a core, anything to measure and consume.
It hit the absolute, infinite void of Wei Tian's suppressed existence.
The stone did not find a mortal. It found an abyss that defied the geometric laws of reality. The detection matrix essentially tried to measure the depth of a bottomless cliff by jumping off it.
Wei Tian adjusted his suppression boundary. Just a fraction of a millimeter. He let the void push back.
Crumb.
It wasn't an explosion. There was no flash of light. There was no dramatic shockwave.
The Deep Earth Obsidian Resonance Stone simply gave up. The molecular bonds holding the ancient rock together collapsed under the paradoxical weight of trying to process zero.
The top half of the stone turned to fine, gray sand. It cascaded through Wei Tian's fingers, spilling over the edge of the pedestal and hitting the jade floor with a soft, pathetic shhh sound.
Wei Tian pulled his hand back. He wiped the gray dust on his robe.
The courtyard was dead silent.
Three thousand disciples stared at the pile of dirt.
Shen Mu stopped breathing. His outstretched finger trembled slightly. He looked from the sand to the mortal, his brain frantically trying to categorize an event that had never occurred in the four-thousand-year history of the sect.
Obsidian stones didn't crumble. They exploded if overwhelmed by massive, Celestial-tier power. They glowed if they found a genius. They killed mortals. They did not turn into sand.
"What..." Shen Mu choked out. He swallowed, his face flushing dark red. His cultivation foundation stuttered. "What trick is this?"
Wei Tian held up his left hand. The palm was slightly dusty. "The rock was brittle."
"Brittle?" Shen Mu roared, the word tearing out of his throat. "That is deep-earth obsidian! It can withstand a strike from a siege hammer!"
Wei Tian looked down at the pile of sand. "Then someone sold you a bad hammer."
A collective gasp rippled through the front rows of disciples. Xiao Mei opened her eyes, saw the scholar standing perfectly fine next to a pile of dirt, and let out a sound that was half-sob, half-hiccup.
On the dais, Bai Qian did not move. Her eyes dragged from the pile of sand to Wei Tian's bored face. She remembered the soul scan. She remembered looking into the void and feeling the vertigo hit the base of her skull. The stone hadn't broken from power. The stone had broken because it couldn't comprehend what it was touching.
File thirteen was getting thicker.
"Bring another!" Shen Mu barked at the testing proctors. Saliva flew from his lips. "He used a dissolution talisman! He hid it in his sleeve! Strip his sleeves, bring a fresh stone!"
Two proctors scrambled to the storehouse. They returned three minutes later, carrying a wooden crate. They hauled out a second Obsidian Stone, slightly larger than the first. They set it on the pedestal, sweeping the previous sand onto the floor.
One proctor grabbed Wei Tian's left arm, roughly pulling his sleeve back to the elbow. He checked the forearm. No hidden runes. No paper talismans. Just pale skin.
The proctor backed away quickly.
"Ten seconds," Shen Mu hissed, gripping the railing of the dais so hard the wood groaned. "Try your tricks again, mortal."
Wei Tian sighed. A very quiet, very genuine sigh.
He didn't want to do this twice. He placed his bare hand against the cold black rock.
He didn't bother calculating the boundary shift this time. He just let his natural, suppressed weight rest against the object.
Crunch.
The second stone didn't even try to measure him. It fractured the moment his skin made contact, turning instantly into a cascading pile of identical gray dust. It fell through his fingers faster than the first one.
Wei Tian didn't pull his hand back immediately. He stood there, his palm resting in the pile of dirt on top of the pedestal.
He looked up at Shen Mu. He didn't say a word. He didn't smile. He just stared at the Elder with the exhausted patience of a man waiting for a slow clerk to find the right paperwork.
Zero verbal response. The silence was deafening.
"It rejected him," Shen Mu breathed, his voice dropping into a manic, desperate register. He was speaking to the other elders now, wildly gesturing at the pedestal. "Do you see? The resonance matrix is designed to measure cultivation. His body is such a profound, absolute void of spiritual impurity that the stone refuses to interact with it! It shatters from the insult of his presence!"
It was an incredibly creative rationalization. The mental gymnastics required to conclude that a priceless magical artifact destroyed itself out of sheer disgust was impressive.
Several junior elders nodded slowly, grabbing onto the logic because the alternative—that the mortal had broken it with raw, invisible force—was structurally terrifying.
"Fetch the Ancestral Core," Shen Mu ordered. His voice was shaking.
The proctors froze. "Elder? The Ancestral Core is from the founding era. It's priceless. We only use it for—"
"FETCH IT."
Ten minutes passed. The three thousand disciples didn't move a muscle. Wei Tian opened his book. He read a page about the migration patterns of a civilization that had gone extinct before this mountain range was formed.
Four proctors returned, straining under the weight of a massive slab of raw, uncut deep-earth obsidian. It was the size of a large dog, strapped to a reinforced steel palanquin. They heaved it onto the testing floor, unable to lift it onto the pedestal.
The air in the courtyard plummeted to freezing. Frost formed on the edges of the jade tiles.
"The Ancestral Core," Shen Mu said, his chest heaving. "It cannot be tricked. It cannot be insulted. Touch it."
Wei Tian closed his book. He marked his place with his thumb.
He walked over to the massive slab of rock. The frost biting at his ankles didn't register.
He looked at the stone. It was old. He could feel the sediment of history packed into its density. It was a good rock. It was a shame to ruin it because an old man had a political grudge.
Wei Tian placed his hand on the center of the massive core.
He pressed.
For three seconds, nothing happened. Shen Mu's face twisted into a vicious, triumphant sneer. "Count!" he yelled. "One! Two!"
On the third second, a sound echoed through the courtyard.
It sounded like a glacier snapping in half.
CRACK.
A jagged fissure, two inches wide, split the massive Ancestral Core straight down the middle. The crack ran from the point of Wei Tian's palm down to the steel palanquin. The metal frame shrieked, bending under the sudden shift in the stone's structural integrity.
A heavy, dead gust of wind blew outward from the fractured rock, smelling of ozone and centuries of trapped air.
Wei Tian removed his hand. He stepped back.
The Ancestral Core sat there, broken perfectly in twain.
Shen Mu collapsed backward into his chair. The wood cracked under his weight. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Wei Tian wiped his hand on his robe again. He opened his book, returning to his page. He didn't look at the broken heirloom. He didn't look at the trembling proctors.
He looked up at the dais.
"Are we moving on to the formations," Wei Tian asked flatly, "or do you want me to wait while you find a fourth rock?"