Wei Wudao lay on the library floor, his body a broken shell. The silence of the room was heavy, smelling of old paper and the metallic tang of his own blood. For a long time, the only movement was the flickering of a dying candle.
Then—his fingers twitched.
His eyes snapped open. They weren't the dull blue of a 'good-for-nothing' anymore. They were sharp, piercing, and icy.
'I'm alive.'
He tried to sit up, but a jolt of ice-cold energy shot from his chest to his skull. It wasn't the searing fire of the reverse flow; it was something else. It was stable. It was dense. It was the "Cold Stone" he had felt right before the darkness took him.
He reached inward with his mind, peering into his own body.
His meridians were no longer the tangled, withered roots they had been for fourteen years. They were fractured—shattered into a million pieces—but held together by a dark, swirling mist. And at the center of it all, his Upper Core wasn't just open. It was roaring.
'My mind... it's too clear.'
Every detail of the library was suddenly hyper-vivid. He could see the individual grains of dust dancing in the moonlight. He could hear the heartbeat of a mouse scurrying behind the shelves three floors up. His Upper Core, the seat of the soul and intellect, had expanded into a vast, empty void.
"So this is it," Wei Wudao whispered.
His voice was a ragged shadow of itself, but it carried a strange weight.
"The Heavenly Dao says the Upper Core must be the last to open. It says we must build the foundation of the body first."
He slowly stood up, his bones popping like dry wood.
'But the Heavens were wrong.'
By forcing his Qi backward, he hadn't destroyed his potential. He had bypassed the "body's gate" and gone straight for the "mind's throne." He was an insane genius with the mental capacity of an Immortal, trapped in the bruised body of a fourteen-year-old boy.
Suddenly, the heavy oak doors of the library groaned.
***
A light flickered in the hallway. Footsteps—slow and rhythmic—approached.
"Young Master Wudao?" a voice called out. It was Old Han, the head housekeeper. "The Master has requested your presence for the morning meal. You've been in here all night."
Wei Wudao looked down at the forbidden scroll. If Old Han saw the blood on the floor and the ink on his hands, word would reach his father within minutes.
'Morning meal... I've been out for six hours.'
He quickly kicked the scroll under a low shelf and wiped the copper-tasting blood from his chin with his sleeve. He felt a surge of the Cold Stone energy in his palm.
'The Blockage Acupressure Point... if I strike him now, with this new energy, his heart will stop before he can even blink.'
The door creaked open. Old Han stepped in, holding a lantern high. The light hit Wudao's pale face.
"Young Master? You look... unwell," Han said, squinting. "There is a strange scent in the air. Have you been—"
"I was just reading, Han," Wudao interrupted.
He stepped forward, his movements unnaturally fluid. His Upper Core was already calculating Han's heartbeat, his breathing rhythm, and the exact distance to his Conception Vessel.
'One strike. That's all it would take to test if this new Dao is truly superior.'
"Reading? For twelve hours?" Han looked suspicious, his eyes drifting toward the shelf where the scroll was hidden. "The Master will be displeased if you are wasting time on fairy tales again."
"Then let's not keep him waiting," Wudao said, a cold smile touching his lips.