Qin Feng sat in absolute stillness, his breath shallow, his body drenched in sweat. The voice of the shrine spirit had long faded, yet its final words echoed endlessly within him. And then, without warning, it began.
A strange warmth stirred deep inside his soul. It wasn't pain. It was pressure. A spiraling force, vast and ancient, pushing against the boundaries of his mind like a rising tide breaking through an old dam.
And then it hit.
His body shuddered violently as an immense stream of information flooded into him. There were no symbols, no scripts, just pure, unfiltered knowledge crashing through his consciousness like thunder across a mountain pass. It was overwhelming, suffocating, divine. His mind strained to contain it all, teetering on the brink of collapse.
The Soul Echo Sutra.
The name branded itself into the very walls of his soul.
It was unlike any cultivation technique he had ever heard of. It didn't channel qi through the meridians or refine essence through the dantian. It reached deeper into the core of what made a being exist. It reached into the soul.
As the torrent calmed and his mind began to adjust, Qin Feng started to grasp the shape of it.
The Soul Echo Sutra was a soul technique that targeted a hidden gate within every being a third eye of perception. Buried within the soul was a point of sensitivity, dormant in most, long ignored by cultivators who sought brute force or dazzling technique. But for one whose body was flawed, whose senses were denied, that gate could become the key to a different kind of power.
For someone like him… it was salvation.
This third eye was not literal, not a mark upon the brow or a glowing sigil. It was a seed of perception, nestled in the deepest folds of the soul a gateway through which the practitioner could sense the world not through eyes or ears, but through essence itself. The Sutra's cultivation path involved awakening and growing that eye through ten mysterious stages.
As the initial knowledge embedded itself into his spirit, he became aware of the first three.
The beginning was Perception a stage that broke the numbing fog within the soul, clearing the static and allowing the practitioner to feel the faint whispers of essence around them. It didn't give sight or clarity. But it trained the soul to listen, to reach out. To perceive. Next came the Soul Seed a delicate process in which the third eye began to take shape. This wasn't a seed made of essence, but of will and soul resonance compress into a nucleus of awareness.
And then came Eye Opening. Once opened, the practitioner could "perceive" things clealy not just essence but all things. Every living and nonliving thing became a tapestry of flowing energy.
For Qin Feng, that possibility lit a fire in his chest.
His fingers tightened slowly into a fist.
Though his body still ached, his soul was alive.
He lowered his head and exhaled slowly. The shrine had given him a gift beyond anything he could have imagined. Not a weapon. Not a treasure. But a path.
As he sorted the information in his mind, he noticed somethinf and his expression chaned directly....
"This is...."