Li Qingxuan's voice was a whip, cracking across the ruined hall.
The cruel smile, the casual arrogance—it was the same look from an hour ago, a year ago, a lifetime ago.
For Dao Yan, the world dissolved into white noise.
The sneer on Li Qingxuan's face blurred, replaced by another memory, one forged in darkness and pain.
Flashback: Three Months Ago.
The air was thick with the dust of ages. He was deep beneath the workshop, in the forbidden section of the family catacombs where the foundations met raw earth. He wasn't supposed to be there. He was searching for rare metals, trying to prove that the old ways, the "useless trinkets," still had value.
His fingers brushed against something that wasn't stone.
It was a sphere, no bigger than his fist, made of a metal that felt cold and warm at the same time. It was covered in geometric patterns that seemed to shift and writhe just at the edge of his vision. A relic from a time before time. A Precursor Core.
The moment his skin touched its surface, the ground groaned.
The ancient support beams, weakened by recent tremors, finally gave way. The ceiling collapsed.
Tons of rock and earth plunged down, a curtain of death.
There was no time to scream. No time to run.
In that instant of pure, primal terror, the sphere in his hand pulsed with an inner light.
The world vanished.
Pain.
Not the pain of being crushed, but something far worse. It was the pain of a mind being torn apart and reassembled. A flood of information, of raw data, slammed into his consciousness.
He saw it all.
He saw榫卯 (mortise and tenon) joints not as wood, but as interlocking energy fields. He saw a simple water wheel not as a tool for grinding grain, but as the blueprint for a planetary-scale Yuan Qi turbine. He saw the brushstrokes of calligraphy as weaponized force vectors, and the notes of a guqin as the resonant frequencies that could shatter mountains.
A billion blueprints, a million scientific principles, the entire technological history of a lost, god-like civilization, was being forcibly uploaded into the mind of a teenage boy.
It was a gift wrapped in agony.
The last thing he saw before blacking out was the sphere crumbling to dust, its light pouring into him, branding its knowledge onto his very soul.
Present.
Dao Yan snapped back to reality. The entire memory had flashed through his mind in the space of a single heartbeat.
Li Qingxuan had taken a step forward, his amusement growing. "Cat got your tongue, little artisan? Has the reality of your situation finally sunk in?"
Something had changed in Dao Yan's eyes.
The terror was still there, a cold knot in his stomach. But the rage had been honed to a razor's edge by the memory of his power's origin. This wasn't just a family feud over a mine. This was a clash of civilizations. The future he had seen in those flashes versus the stagnant present that Li Qingxuan represented.
He was no longer just a boy protecting his father.
He was the sole inheritor of a forgotten legacy.
His gaze flickered past Li Qingxuan, towards the piles of scrap metal in the yard. His mind raced, sifting through a thousand deadly designs. Too slow. Too complex. Needs a power source.
Then, his eyes landed on the [Yuan Qi Collector] still humming on his father's chest.
A new blueprint, simple, desperate, and terrifyingly brilliant, clicked into place in his mind.
He met Li Qingxuan's gaze. The fear was gone, replaced by a chilling, calculating calm.
"You call my craft 'toys'," Dao Yan said, his voice quiet but clear. "Let me show you what a toy can do."