The multiverse sang to him.
Lin Feng stood at the edge of everything, infinite realities fanning out beneath his feet like pages of a book he'd already read. Mei pressed against his side, warm, permanent, her soul so tangled with his that he couldn't tell where she ended and he began. The Cardinal Circle hummed through his bones. Nine divine guardians, a fragment of primordial chaos, twelve mortal protectors, all threaded through his consciousness like veins through flesh. He was vast. He was complete. He was—
Screaming.
The multiverse cracked. Not gradually, not with warning. It broke like a mirror dropped on stone. Realities fractured into shards of light that sliced through his mind. Mei dissolved. The Cardinal Circle shattered. The divine guardians howled and fell silent, one by one, like candles snuffed by a fist. His power, that impossible ocean of power, drained out of him faster than blood from a cut throat.
He tried to hold on. Clawed at the fragments of the vision with fingers that were already dissolving. Fifty years of memories tearing loose from the walls of his skull: the taste of Mei's mouth, the weight of the Emperor's gaze, the feeling of a chaos entity choosing to become something ordered. All of it ripping away like bandages off a wound that had never healed underneath.
He screamed again. Or maybe he'd never stopped.
---
Cold.
Stone floor, uneven, pressing into his cheekbone hard enough to leave a mark. His hands were splayed in front of his face: thin, bony, the nails cracked and dirty. No scales. No golden light. Just the hands of an eighteen-year-old who couldn't carry a water bucket without his arms shaking.
Lin Feng vomited.
Nothing much came up. He hadn't eaten since yesterday morning, and his stomach had been empty even then. But his body heaved anyway, rejecting something. The vision, maybe, or the reality of its absence. Bile burned his throat. His eyes watered. Snot ran from his nose and he let it because wiping it would mean moving and moving meant acknowledging.
The cave was dark. Not the vast, energy-thrumming sanctum of his vision. Just dark. Wet rock walls that dripped onto other wet rock walls. The smell of mineral water and old stone and something else, something under everything: a dry sweetness that didn't belong underground. Like incense that had been burning for so long it had become part of the air.
And the corpse.
It sat against the far wall, exactly as he'd found it. Skeleton wrapped in robes that should have rotted millennia ago but hadn't. The skull tilted forward as though the person had fallen asleep sitting up and simply never woken. A scroll case lay across the lap bones, held in place by finger bones curled around it with deliberate care.
Even dead, even reduced to dry bone and ancient cloth, the thing radiated. Lin Feng's shattered meridians pulsed with a pain like needles driven into every nerve, the same pain that had dropped him when he first stumbled into this chamber an hour ago. Or had it been an hour? The vision had felt like decades.
"Have you finished emptying yourself?"
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Old. Dry as the corpse's robes. The words shaped strangely, consonants held too long, vowels stretched in patterns that didn't match any dialect Lin Feng knew.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Pushed himself to sitting. The movement cost him; his left knee ground with familiar agony, and his spine complained about every year of compensating for meridians that had never worked right. He was breathing hard from the effort of sitting up.
Sitting up. He'd fought the Jade Emperor. He'd consumed divine beasts. He'd flown across continents on wings of fire.
Now he was winded from sitting up.
"That," Lin Feng said. His voice came out raw, scraped. "What was that."
The translucent figure that hovered near the corpse shifted. Not quite a man, more the memory of one, rendered in faded ink. Features that might have been sharp once, blurred by time and death into something approximate. Eyes that held light they shouldn't have been able to hold, given that they weren't real eyes.
"Would you call it a gift?" the ghost asked. "Or would you call it a theft? The man I was debated that question for the better part of a century, and never..."
He trailed off. His form flickered. When he spoke again, the sentence had changed.
"You touched the bones. Did anyone tell you to touch the bones?"
"There was no one to tell me anything." Lin Feng stared at his hands. These weak, trembling, human hands. Five minutes ago, fifty years ago, they had held the power to reshape reality. "I fell. Down the shaft. Into this chamber. And when I touched the corpse—"
"When you touched what remains of me, yes." The ghost's voice held something between amusement and irritation. "And the residual essence within these bones showed you what it was designed to show any fool with compatible channels who stumbled in and put their hands where they should not."
Lin Feng went still.
"Designed."
"Did you think it was a dream? A hallucination? Something your starving brain conjured from desperation?" The ghost drifted closer. His translucent face was unreadable, which was impressive for something that wasn't entirely there. "The vision is a tool. A map of possibility. Every Devourer who has found this place has seen their own version of what the path might offer."
"Every Devourer."
"Do you intend to repeat everything I say as a statement? That is a tiresome habit."
Lin Feng's jaw tightened. The ghost was right; it was a deflection. His mind was stuttering, caught between the enormity of what he'd experienced and the smallness of what he actually was.
He made himself breathe. In. Out.
"How many others have come here?"
"In ten thousand years? Seven. No, eight, if you count the woman who made it to the entrance and turned back." The ghost paused. "Do you know what happened to the other seven?"
"They failed."
"They died. There is a difference, though perhaps a subtle one." The ghost settled into something like a seated position, though he had nothing to sit on. "Three died in this cave, attempting to take the Scripture before they were ready. Two died in the wilderness above, consumed by beasts drawn to the energy they'd absorbed. One made it seven years before his body rejected the power he'd stolen. And the last..."
The ghost trailed off again. His form went translucent enough that Lin Feng could see the cave wall through his chest.
"The last came closest. The man I was admired her. She reached the third stage of the path before heaven noticed. After that..." A flicker. "The details are unpleasant."
"And the vision showed all of them the same thing? The full path? The power?"
"Each vision is tailored to the recipient. You saw what your particular hunger desired." The ghost's tone sharpened. "Tell me. What did you see?"
Lin Feng opened his mouth and closed it again.
What had he seen? He could still feel it, the phantom weight of divine essence, the ghost-sensation of Mei Ling's hand in his. A woman he'd never met. A woman who didn't know he existed. He'd loved her for fifty years that hadn't happened, and the grief of losing her sat in his chest like a stone he couldn't swallow and couldn't spit out.
"Everything," he said. Flat. Toneless.
"And did everything come easily?"
Lin Feng thought about it. In the vision, yes. It had. There had been battles, challenges, setbacks that felt real at the time. But looking back with clear eyes, the arc of it was too smooth. Too clean. He'd consumed divine beasts. Negotiated with the Jade Emperor. Built a civilization. Explored the multiverse. All within what, a few years? A decade?
"It was too fast," he said.
"Good." The ghost leaned forward, and for the first time, his blurred features resolved into something sharper. "Do you know how long the man I was spent in this cave before he was ready, truly ready, to hunt his first lesser beast?"
"Tell me."
"Was that a question? You phrased it as a command. The man I was would have found that amusing. Mortals commanding ghosts." A pause that might have been for effect. "Three hundred years."
The number landed like a fist to the chest.
"Three hundred—"
"Years. In this cave. Learning. Preparing. Building a foundation strong enough to hold what the path demands." The ghost's voice dropped. "The man I was had advantages you lack. He was already a cultivator of the seventh stage when he found this place. His meridians were intact. His body was strong. He had centuries of accumulated knowledge and technique. And it still took him three hundred years."
Lin Feng looked down at himself. Thin arms. Knees that ached when it rained. Meridians that had been shattered since birth, that had never channeled a single wisp of qi. He couldn't run without his chest seizing. Couldn't lift anything heavier than a hoe without his shoulders screaming. The village children could outfight him. The village dogs probably could too.
Three hundred years.
"I don't have three hundred years," he said. Quietly.
"No. You do not."
"I'll be dead in sixty if I'm lucky. Forty if my body keeps breaking down the way it has been."
"Likely less than forty, given the state of your channels. The pain will worsen. By thirty, the man I was predicts, you will struggle to walk. By thirty-five, the degradation will reach your internal organs."
Lin Feng let that land. Processed it without expression. Thirty-five years old. That was his ceiling.
"Good," he said.
The ghost paused. "You consider an early death good?"
"I consider clarity good." Lin Feng met the ghost's not-quite-eyes. "I've been dying since I was born. Knowing the timeline doesn't change anything. It just means I know how much time I don't have."
---
He made himself stand. It took longer than it should have. His left leg had stiffened while he was unconscious, however long that had been, and the meridian pain had settled into a low, constant throb that radiated from his core out to his fingertips. Like his entire nervous system was a bruise.
The cave was smaller than the vision had suggested. One main chamber, roughly circular, maybe thirty feet across. The ceiling was low enough that he could touch it if he reached up. The walls were covered in—
Lin Feng stopped.
Inscriptions. Thousands of them.
In the vision, he'd somehow known what they said. The knowledge had been there, effortless, part of the package of cosmic understanding. Now he stared at the carved characters and recognized exactly none of them. They weren't modern script. Weren't any script he'd encountered in the village elder's meager collection of books. The shapes were angular, aggressive, each character carved deep enough that he could fit his fingertip into the grooves.
"Can you read these?"
"Can you?"
"Obviously not."
"Then that is where we begin. Or where we would begin, if you choose to begin." The ghost drifted toward the inscribed wall. "The script is ten thousand years old. Pre-abandonment. When the gods still walked among mortals and cultivation was as natural as breathing. Learning to read it will take months."
"Months."
"You are repeating again."
Lin Feng bit down on his irritation. He moved along the wall, letting his fingers hover over the inscriptions without touching them. Even at a distance, he could feel something. Warmth, almost. As if the stone itself held a residual charge.
"What do they say?"
"Many things. Histories. Techniques. Warnings. The man I was carved them over the course of centuries, recording everything he learned on the Devourer's Path." The ghost's form drifted alongside Lin Feng. "They are, in essence, a manual. How to walk the path without losing yourself to it. Assuming one can read them."
"And the scroll?"
They both looked at the corpse. The scroll case still sat in the skeletal lap, finger bones wrapped around it with ten-thousand-year-old care.
"The Devourer's Scripture," the ghost confirmed. "The core technique. The foundation of the path."
Lin Feng moved toward it. Reached out.
Pain.
It was immediate and total, like plunging his hands into boiling water, except the heat was inside his skin rather than outside it. His shattered meridians lit up with agony so intense that his vision went white. He yanked his hands back with a sound that was not quite a scream and not quite a word.
His palms were unmarked. No burns, no blisters. But they shook with remembered pain.
"The Scripture rejects those who are not prepared," the ghost said, and there was something heavy in his voice. "The seven who died in this cave? Three of them died reaching for that scroll. The Scripture's defensive formations destroyed their channels entirely. What little cultivation they possessed was ripped from their bodies in an instant."
"You could have mentioned that before I reached for it."
"Would you have listened? You touched the corpse without invitation. You are not, it seems, a cautious person."
Lin Feng cradled his hands against his chest. The pain was already fading, which was strange. Normal pain from his meridians lingered for hours, sometimes days. This had been worse than anything he'd experienced, but it was dissipating like smoke.
"Why didn't it kill me?"
The ghost was quiet for a long moment. His form flickered, the translucent equivalent of someone gathering their thoughts.
"Your meridians," he said finally. "They are... different."
"Different how? They're broken. They've always been broken."
"Do you know what broken channels typically look like? They collapse. Close. Scar over, like a wound healing badly. A cultivator who suffers meridian damage loses their channels entirely; the pathways seal and the energy has nowhere to flow."
"Mine didn't seal."
"No. They did not." The ghost drifted closer, studying Lin Feng with an intensity that felt physical despite coming from something incorporeal. "Your channels shattered but remained open. Not open in the way functional meridians are open; they cannot carry qi. But the fragments remain. The pathways are present, merely... rearranged."
"Rearranged into what?"
"That is the question that the man I was would have spent decades investigating. In ten thousand years, I have seen many broken cultivators. Disciples whose training went wrong. Warriors crippled in battle. Elders whose bodies betrayed them in old age. Their meridians all followed the same pattern of collapse."
He paused.
"Yours follow no pattern I recognize. The channels are not merely broken. They are shaped into something. Something deliberate."
The words hung in the cave's damp air.
"You're saying someone did this to me on purpose."
"I am saying that your meridians do not behave the way natural breakage behaves. Whether that constitutes 'purpose' is a question I cannot answer from this cave." The ghost's form settled slightly, becoming more opaque. "But I can tell you this: when you touched the Scripture, it should have killed you. The defensive formations are designed to destroy any unworthy channel system that makes contact. Instead, the formations activated and then... stopped."
"Stopped."
"As though they encountered something they recognized. The man I was designed those defenses ten thousand years ago. Nothing in the intervening millennia has triggered that recognition response." The ghost's eyes, those not-quite-real points of light, fixed on Lin Feng. "Until you."
---
Lin Feng sat against the cave wall, across from the corpse, and tried to think.
His body ached. His meridians throbbed with a low, persistent pain that he'd lived with so long it had become indistinguishable from his heartbeat. The cave was cold, and his thin clothing, a laborer's tunic and worn trousers, the only things that fit his wasted frame, did nothing against the chill that seeped from the stone.
The vision was already fading. Not the broad strokes; he could still remember the shape of it, the arc from cripple to god-eater to cosmic power. But the details were going soft. Mei Ling's face was a blur. The Emperor's throne room was losing its edges. The feeling of divine essence flowing through his body, that impossible fullness, was becoming harder to recall with each passing minute.
He'd lived fifty years in that vision. Loved. Fought. Built something. And now it was dissolving like frost on a warm morning, and he was back in the dark with a dead man's bones and the knowledge that his real body would betray him before he reached middle age.
"The vision showed me companions," he said. "People who helped me walk the path."
"The vision showed you what you wanted to see."
"A healer. Mei Ling. A warrior called Iron Bull. A noblewoman. Others." He paused. "Are they real? Do they exist somewhere?"
"Does it matter? They are not here. You are alone in a cave with a corpse that talks. That is your reality."
"It matters to me."
The ghost was quiet. When he spoke, some of the sharpness had left his voice.
"The vision draws on possibilities. Threads of fate that might exist. It is not prophecy; the future it shows will not come to pass as you saw it. But the people... the people are sometimes drawn from what is. Not always. Sometimes the vision invents." A flicker. "But sometimes it finds souls that truly exist in the world, and weaves them into the story it tells."
Lin Feng filed that away. Somewhere out there, Mei Ling might exist. Might be real, might be a fiction his desperate mind invented. It didn't change his immediate situation, but it gave him something to hold. A hook in the future that kept him from drowning in the present.
"The path," he said. "The real path. Not the vision's version. What does it actually require?"
"More than you have."
"That's not an answer."
"Is it not? You have no cultivation. No training. No allies. No resources. A body that is deteriorating by the year. And you sit in a cave that will kill you if you touch the wrong object." The ghost's voice held no cruelty, just the flat delivery of facts. "The Devourer's Path requires consuming the essence of beasts. But before you can consume, you must survive the consumption. Before you can survive the consumption, your body must be prepared. Before your body can be prepared, you must understand what you are preparing it for. And before you can understand..."
"I need to read the inscriptions."
"Among other things."
"Months of study. Before I can even begin to prepare. Before I can begin to think about hunting my first beast." Lin Feng leaned his head back against the stone. The cold of it grounded him. "And I might have fifteen years of functional life remaining."
"Seventeen, at the man I was's most optimistic estimate."
"Seventeen years to walk a path that took three hundred."
"The man I was had the luxury of time. You do not. That is either your greatest weakness or your greatest advantage. It depends entirely on what you do with the pressure."
Lin Feng stared at the ceiling. Damp stone. Mineral deposits that caught the faint luminescence of the cave's residual energy, a glow so dim that he could barely see the outline of his own hands. This was his world now. Not the multiverse. Not the celestial realm. A wet hole in the ground with a talking corpse.
He could leave. Climb back up the shaft, walk to the village, return to his life of hauling water and sweeping floors and being called cripple trash by people who'd never earned the right to look down on anyone. Die at thirty-five with nothing to show for his existence except worn-out clothing and calloused hands.
Or.
He could stay in this cave and learn to read a dead language. Could spend months, years, deciphering inscriptions that might teach him the first steps of a path that had killed everyone else who'd attempted it. Could push his broken body through preparations that the ghost himself admitted might not be survivable. Could do all of this with no guarantee of success, no safety net, no way back if it went wrong.
In the vision, the choice had been obvious. Power, glory, love, purpose. Of course he'd chosen the path. Who wouldn't?
But the vision was a fantasy. The real choice was this: suffering in the dark, alone, with nothing but a dead man's voice for company. For years. With the very real possibility that all of it would end in the same way it ended for the seven before him.
Lin Feng thought about the village. About the elder who gave him the worst jobs because he was too weak to do the good ones. About Liu Chen, the miller's son, who'd knocked him into the mud three days ago for the crime of walking too slowly. About the women who looked through him like he was furniture. About his mother's grave on the hill, unmarked because nobody had cared enough to carve her name.
He thought about the vision. The parts that were already fading, the specifics, the details, the false warmth of a life he'd never lived. And the parts that remained, sharp and bright: the hunger. The need. The bone-deep certainty that the world owed him nothing and he intended to take everything anyway.
"Good," Lin Feng said.
The ghost waited.
"Good," Lin Feng said again. One word. Flat. Final.
"Is that your answer to a question I have not yet asked?"
"You're going to ask if I want to walk the path. If I'm willing to stay in this cave and learn and suffer and probably die the same way the others did." He met the ghost's fading eyes. "I'm telling you the question is irrelevant. I was dying before I found this place. At least here, I get to die reaching for something."
The ghost studied him. Seconds passed. The cave dripped.
"When do we start?" Lin Feng asked.
The ghost's form solidified, just slightly, just enough to notice. For the first time, his expression held something that wasn't clinical assessment or ancient weariness.
"Can you stand?"
Lin Feng's knee ground as he pushed himself up. His spine cracked. His left hip protested with a flare of pain that made his vision swim. But he stood.
"Yes."
"Then come here." The ghost drifted toward the wall of inscriptions. "The first character you will learn means 'hunger.' Not the hunger of the belly. The hunger of the empty channel. The hunger that exists in the space where power should be."
Lin Feng limped to the wall. Pressed his fingers against the first carved character. Felt the stone's warmth pulse faintly against his skin.
"Do you feel that?" the ghost asked.
"Heat. Almost."
"That is the residual essence responding to your presence. To your broken, impossible, not-quite-dead channels." A pause. "In ten thousand years, you are the only one who has felt warmth from that wall."
"The others felt nothing?"
"The others felt cold. Or pain. Or nothing at all." The ghost's voice dropped. "You feel warmth. And I do not yet know what that means. But the man I was suspects that when your mother carried you, something was done. Something deliberate. Something ancient. Something that should not have been possible in a world without cultivation."
The ghost trailed off. His form went thin as paper.
"But those are questions for later," he said, when he came back. "Months from now. Years. The first thing is the first character. Learn to read it. Then the second. Then the third. One at a time. That is the only pace that does not kill."
Lin Feng traced the grooves of the character with his fingertip. Hunger. The shape meant nothing to him, just lines and angles. But the warmth was real. Faint, barely there, like holding his hands near a fire that was almost out.
Almost. Not quite.
Behind him, the corpse sat in its eternal vigil, scroll case clutched in bone fingers, waiting for the day, if it ever came, when someone would be worthy of taking it.
Lin Feng had seventeen years.
He started learning.
