— Xo—

  The stone pulsed in my palm.

  Faint, but steady—like the heartbeat of something long buried.

  I sat on the edge of my cot, hunched forward, elbows on my knees. The others had gone quiet. Not asleep, not fully, but quiet in that way soldiers get when they know something’s coming. I stayed where I was, fingers curled gently around the gift—no, the weight—resting in my hands.

  It was warm. But not like a flame. Not alive like fire.

  It felt more like the last heat of a sun that had already set. A heat that stayed in the bones of the stone long after the sky went black.

  The Qi inside it whispered. Not with words, not even with emotion. Just presence.

  I breathed in. Let my own energy stretch toward it.

  And the stone answered.

  The moment my Qi touched it, the pulse turned to a thrum. It sank into my chest like a heavy drumbeat echoing across rock. My spine locked. My vision went dark—and then full.

  I wasn’t in the barracks anymore.

  I stood on a mountainside.

  No… I was the mountain.

  And the memory didn’t come in pieces. It came all at once. A flood. A collapse.

  A thousand hours of motion, condensed into a breath.

  A single body, wide-shouldered, scarred and quiet, stepped forward in my mind. I didn’t see their face. Didn’t need to. What mattered wasn’t their identity. It was the way they moved—like they’d been carved from the land and forgotten how to be anything else.

  They lifted a heavy blade. Not flashy. Not elegant. Just honest. A tool meant to move the world.

  And then… they stomped.

  On the impact, I felt a call. Something profound, meaningful and personal.

  The ball of their heel sank into the earth with purpose, and the Qi flowed out like a quake trying to remember its own name.

  Not forward. Not upward. Outward.

  The ripple didn’t just move the dirt. It redefined it.

  The earth bucked.

  Rocks leapt. Trees shattered. Dust rose in sheets. Birds scattered like they’d felt the end of the world coming.

  The wave spread in perfect silence, and still I could hear it. Not with ears. With something deeper. The kind of sound that made your ribs ache and your teeth feel loose in your jaw. It carried through the land, through bone, through everything.

  I watched the closest trees tear from the ground. A field was leveled. Then a cliff collapsed. Then the mountain beneath my feet cracked open with a sound like the gods were trying to breathe through it.

  I watched roots rip free from the soil like tendons pulled from flesh.

  Crevices opened like mouths—jagged and endless. Not the kind you could climb into. The kind you fell into forever.

  And in the center of it, the cultivator stood still. Unshaken. Untouched.

  Like they hadn’t moved at all.

  They turned, and did it again.

  And again. And again.

  Hundreds of repetitions. The same strike. The same stomp. The same will. No wasted breath. No wasted strength. Only perfect delivery of power, again and again, until even the world had no choice but to remember it.

  I could feel my limbs burning as if I’d trained each one alongside them.

  And when the memory receded, it didn’t fade gently.

  It was ripped away, like a root torn from the ground.

  I opened my eyes.

  The stone in my palm had gone cold.

  Not cold like ice. Cold like spent. No more Qi. No more pulse. Just stone again. Dull. Used. Empty.

  And inside me?

  The pattern remained.

  It didn’t give me the full shape of what I’d seen—that would take years. A lifetime, maybe.

  But I could feel the seed of it now. Resting just behind my sternum. A curl of tension I could snap like a whip with the right movement.

  Seismic Slam.

  I let the name sit in my chest for a moment. Not a boast. Not a trick.

  A truth.

  If I grounded myself right… if I aimed it properly…

  Two meters, maybe three. That’s what I could manage now. Enough to knock a few people down and shatter some bones. Enough to carve a circle in the dirt. Enough to send a message.

  I looked at the stone one last time.

  Just a pebble now.

  But it had given me a glimpse of something real. Something rooted.

  I set it down gently beside my cot, then lay back on the thin mattress. My shoulders still hummed. My hands twitched slightly with the weight of what I’d seen.

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  — Lei—

  The stone pulsed softly in my hands.

  Not like a heartbeat. Not like a drum or a call to arms.

  It pulsed like water—like a tide reaching for the shore, withdrawing, then returning again, deeper each time. I sat cross-legged on my cot, the light low, the voices of my squadmates dim in the background. I was barely aware of them. Not ignoring. Just… apart. Floating.

  I rolled the stone once between my fingers.

  It didn’t hum. It didn’t burn. It just pressed against the air, slow and insistent.

  I let my Qi meet it.

  It wasn’t forced. I didn’t command it. I let it happen, like letting your feet sink into the sand at low tide.

  And then the world changed.

  I wasn’t in the barracks.

  I stood on a cliff.

  Or near one. I couldn’t say for sure. The sky above me was too wide to measure. The sea below stretched on past the curve of the world.

  And there was a woman.

  She stood at the very edge, unmoving. Her robes were thin, pale. Salt-worn at the hem. Her hair was braided long down her back, silvered like winter clouds. She did not blink. She did not breathe.

  She just watched the sea.

  Not for minutes. Not hours. Years.

  The tide came in. The tide went out. The sun rose and fell, shadows chasing themselves across the curve of her shoulders. She didn’t move.

  Until one day, she did.

  She raised a hand.

  Not fast. Not dramatic.

  Just a motion. Like reaching out to catch something you already knew would fall into your palm.

  Qi gathered.

  I saw it—not like flame or storm, but shape. It formed in her hand like a sphere and a surface at once. Like the ocean remembered what stillness looked like and condensed it into her grip. It was fluid and still and massive. I couldn’t explain it. A lake in her palm. An undertow wrapped around her knuckles. The color of depth.

  She didn’t shout. She didn’t gesture.

  She just closed her hand.

  And the ocean stopped.

  The waves ceased. The sound died. The wind folded in on itself and knelt. All of it—paused.

  And then… it rose.

  One meter. Ten. Fifty. A hundred.

  Not a wave.

  Not a wall.

  A continent of water.

  Water lifted from the horizon like the earth itself had cracked, and the sea had decided it no longer wanted to lie down. Ships surfaced from old wrecks, coral towers gleamed like glass cities, whales turned slowly in the air as if weight no longer mattered. Salt hung like a curtain over the sky.

  It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t violence.

  It was authority.

  The kind of control that doesn’t come from yelling, or dominance, or will. It came from understanding.

  The ocean moved because she asked it to.

  And it obeyed because it had always been hers. I gasped as the vision broke. The stone in my hands went still. Cold. No more pulse. Just matter. Just memory. But inside me… something had shifted.

  The air around my core felt wider. Like I could reach now. Not far. Not to oceans or cliff edges.

  But enough.

  A ripple if I needed it.

  A pull.

  I flexed my fingers and felt the edge of the skill settle into them like a string I could tug. I couldn’t raise seas.

  But if someone was falling, I could bring them back. If an enemy stood too far, I could draw them close.

  I glanced down at the stone. It looked dull now. Its color had faded, like it had finally exhaled everything it had left.

  I whispered. “Thank you.”

  Then I lay back against my cot, hands resting on my chest, and listened to the rhythm of my breath.

  Like the tide. It doesn't ask.

  It moves.

  — Nozomi—

  My thumb brushed over the surface. It didn’t hum or glow. It pulsed from within, like it was alive, like it had a secret that would only open if I got close enough.

  So I let myself go quiet. Let the breath fall low in my lungs. I let the tension go from my back, from my fingers.

  And I reached.

  Not with force.

  Not with need.

  Just... presence.

  The world around me faded like ink in water.

  And then I was somewhere else.

  It wasn’t a room, or a field, or a battlefield. It was space—empty, wide, timeless. And in that void stood a man, cloaked in the absence of color, every edge of his robe fraying into the dark. He didn’t breathe. He didn’t blink. He simply held a sword above his head, both hands wrapped around the hilt. Not a dramatic stance. Just patient. Just prepared.

  The air around him was silent—but not still. It watched.

  Qi moved along the length of the blade. Not rushing like fire. Not flowing like water. Not pulsing like earth. It traced the edge in precise loops and patterns, thin and exact. A language etched in silence. It circled the blade once. Again. A hundred times.

  Each repetition perfect. Each motion the same—but deeper.

  Then, on the last pass, the Qi stopped.

  It didn't fade. It didn't fall away. It coiled along the edge like a second line of steel—darker than shadow, razor sharp.

  The man moved.

  One cut. A single simple downward slash through nothing. There was no scream. No crash. No energy blast. No resistance.

  Just a cut.

  It slid through the air like a knife through thought, clean and irreversible.

  There was nothing in its path. And when it passed, there was less than nothing.

  A scar hovered in the air where the blade had fallen—a line of darkness with no depth, like a thread pulled through fabric that didn’t know it had been torn. Not glowing. Not bleeding. Just there.

  A wound.

  Not in flesh. Not in space. In reality.

  It hung there for three long seconds.

  And in those seconds, I didn’t breathe. I couldn’t.

  Because I knew if I whispered... if anyone whispered...

  The whole world might shatter.

  And then—

  It was gone.

  Not with a sound. Not with a ripple. Just gone. Like it had never been. But I felt it linger inside me, a pressure behind my ribs. Not pain. Not power.

  Precision.

  The understanding that a blade is more than steel. It is decision. And when it’s sharp enough—when it’s truly aligned with its wielder’s will—it doesn’t strike the body.

  It strikes the world.

  I opened my eyes. The barracks returned, quiet and unchanged. But the stone in my hand was different now—its pulse gone, its weight dull. Just a shard of memory. A tool passed on.

  I let out a breath and closed my fingers around it one last time, just to feel the weight.

  “Phantom Edge,” I whispered.

  And in the corner of my vision, I thought—for a breath, a flicker, a moment—I saw a line in the air.

  Not black. Just… absence.

  And I knew that the blade I would wield wouldn’t scar bodies.

  It would even scar the silence.

  Liu woke before the sun, as he always did.

  The barracks were quiet—only the faint creak of old beams and the distant rustle of wind slipping under the eaves. His breath was steady in his chest. Calm. Measured. No dreams had lingered. No tension remained from the day before.

  Just the morning.

  He sat up slowly, the cot beneath him creaking as he moved. His hands found his boots in the half-light, fingers working the worn leather with practiced ease. He dressed with the same precision he brought to every day—layer by layer, motion by motion. Tunic. Sash. Bracers. The steel breastplate stayed hung by the bed, for now.

  Others still slept. Xo mumbled something and rolled over. Nozomi's bed was empty—probably on the roof again. Lei, too, was gone. That was rare.

  Liu rolled his shoulders once, testing the line of tension through his spine. Gone. He felt good today.

  Still grounded.

  Still solid.

  He stepped outside into the courtyard, letting the first breath of cool air settle deep in his lungs. The sky hadn’t quite turned blue—still painted in soft greys, with the hint of gold where the sun waited to rise. He liked this time. No drills. No voices. Just the world as it was, before anyone tried to shape it.

  He moved toward the training post and began the motions. The first kata—unarmed, slow. Precision over power. His feet found the earth like they belonged there. His breath was the rhythm. Fire burned in his core, but he didn’t reach for it. Not yet. Not when the silence still held.

  Then he heard the footsteps.

  Measured. Intentional. Familiar.

  He turned before the voice called his name.

  “Liu.”

  It was Lei—geared up. Bow over his shoulder, armor fastened, face tight.

  Something shifted in Liu’s chest.

  “You’re up early,” Liu said.

  Lei nodded. “Message came just before dawn. From the captain.”

  That alone set something off-kilter. Shen Kaizen don't send messages.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re called to the arena. In an hour.” Lei paused. “Only the squad. Full gear.”

  The words hung in the air like weight.

  Liu looked past him, toward the quiet windows of the barracks. The others were still sleeping. The sky was still soft. But now, something pressed in around the edges. The feeling before a storm—not wind, not sound, but pressure.

  “We don’t know what it is?” he asked.

  Lei shook his head. “Only that it came from him directly. And the messenger didn’t wait for questions.”

  Liu nodded once.

  That was answer enough.

  He turned back toward the post and began untying the wraps from his wrists. No more kata. No more slow movements. It was time to prepare.

  “I’ll be ready,” he said.

  Lei’s voice was quiet. “I know.”

  And with that, he walked back toward the barracks to rouse the others.