The wind had long silenced the screams.
Chen Yun stood at the edge of the clearing, his back to the corpses strewn across blood-soaked earth.The mountain breeze tousled his robes and carried the lingering scent of scorched space, brushing over skin that still pulsed faintly with residual force.
He looked down at his palm.It trembled — not from fear, but from strain.
Even now, long minutes after the final blow, the fabric of space at his fingertips quivered, warping faintly like ripples on shattered glass.
He pressed two fingers to his chest and exhaled slowly.
His Qi stirred in response — sluggish, uneven, frayed at the edges.
A cold weight settled in his gut.
"…Half," he whispered.
Half his Qi — gone. Not through prolonged combat. Not through a clash of blades or overwhelming odds. But in a single, precise instant: the compressed space strangulation that had erased five lives without a step forward or backward.
The forest had returned to stillness, but inside him, the echoes remained — not of guilt, but of calculation.
This... wasn't mastery.It was a borrowed moment of dominance, bought at a price he couldn't afford to pay twice.
His meridians, though mended over time, still bore the trauma of collapse. The flow of Qi had improved, but it moved like a torrent forced through cracked stone — unstable, leaky, dangerous.
If this was what it cost to execute one technique…Then what awaited him on a battlefield that demanded ten? A hundred?
Chen Yun let his fingers drop. His gaze drifted to the dark treeline ahead.
Power meant little if it could not be sustained.
And so, without fanfare or declaration, he turned and stepped deeper into the forest.
Not to flee.Not to vanish.But to refine.
To rebuild, not just his Qi — but his essence.
The days bled into nights.Spring, summer, autumn, and winter passed like breaths in the wind.
Within the mist-veiled heart of the mountain woods, where no sect banners flew and no human foot dared linger long, Chen Yun disappeared from the world.
He did not train for glory.He did not keep count of the days.He simply endured — as stone endures wind, as stars endure silence.
At sixteen, his body was still healing, still re-learning its own rhythms.
So he began not with blade or force — but breath.
Not techniques. Not strikes.Just breath — the kind that steadies storms, that tames the chaos inside the soul.
Inhale — draw Qi from the roots of the earth, feel it ascend like silent vines through the limbs.Exhale — release the pain, let fractured meridians soften and realign under warmth.
Each dawn, he sat cross-legged on moss-woven stone, spine straight, eyes half-lidded. The world outside might have seen stillness. But within him — a cosmos trembled and rebuilt itself.
He practiced micro-movements of space — pinching the air between two fingers until it sang, folding a leaf across a ripple of void, making a single raindrop hang motionless in time, suspended on the edge of now and never.
In the heart of winter, he suffered.
His body trembled with frostbite, his skin split from cold.He coughed blood when pathways clogged under pressure.Once, he attempted to warp a five-foot radius of space — and blacked out from the backlash, vision flickering between fractured realms.
But pain became instruction.
He learned that the void was not a weapon to command.It was a presence — vast, ancient, aware.
It would not yield to force.But it would respond to clarity.
So he stopped trying to dominate space — and began listening to it.
And space… listened back.
By seventeen, his Qi no longer stuttered.It flowed — steady, sharp, and silent.
His control over compressed fields became refined — not flashy, but surgical. He could condense air into a point fine enough to cleave steel, or shift the trajectory of a falling leaf without stirring the wind.
But this was only the foundation.
The real trial was Void Step.
A technique so rare it was considered myth — the art of not traversing space, but bypassing it entirely.
He etched the forest floor with ancient runes, each aligned to natural spatial currents.At dawn and dusk, he ran those paths — not to chase speed, but to vanish between steps.
One foot rooted in the material world.The other dipped into the unseen folds.
Failure was brutal.Each misstep compressed bones or tore at nerves with invisible pressure.Sometimes he collapsed.Sometimes, he woke with blood at his lips and his limbs half-numb.But every time — he stood again, breath steady, gaze unwavering.
And then, one day, as winter gave way to spring — it happened.
He stepped forward…And the world didn't follow.
Time bent.Light twisted.Reality stuttered.
And for one perfect instant — he existed in two places at once.
He emerged five meters away — no gasping, no distortion, no pain.
Void Step had become instinct.
Not a technique — a truth.
At eighteen, Chen Yun was no longer the broken boy the world had discarded.
He was lean, not from famine, but from discipline.His muscles bore no bulk — only precision.His eyes glowed with the faintest shade of crimson, but their depth was oceanic — as though they stared not at what was, but at what could be unmade.
His sword no longer needed motion.Only intent.
His steps left no sound.No trace.
Only the quietest ripple — a blink in reality's curtain.
He was not the strongest.He was not flawless.
But he had become something far more dangerous.
A man the world could no longer follow.A shadow in the shape of resolve.