Darkness was a welcome friend. It was the agony that was the enemy. Kaelen drifted in a sea of it, his body a broken puppet. Vaguely, he was aware of being dragged, of the rough scrape of rock against his skin. There were voices, distant and distorted.
"...just kill him?" "Lord Lucius wants him to suffer. Said to throw him in the Carrion Pit." "Pit 7? The one with the raw ore saturation? He'll be dead in an hour." "That's the point."
A final, jarring heave, and then he was falling. He landed with a sickening crunch on a pile of jagged, crystalline rocks. The air here was different. It was thick, heavy, and thrummed with a dissonant energy that made his teeth ache. He was in one of the deep mining pits, a place where the unrefined Aetherium ore was so concentrated that its chaotic, radioactive properties were lethal. The shimmering, rainbow-hued crystals pulsed with a faint, sickly light, casting dancing, distorted shadows on the pit walls.
This was it, then. The end of the line for the Ashen Son of House Voros. A fittingly pathetic end, tossed away like garbage. The chaotic energy of the raw Aetherium began to seep into him. It should have felt like being torn apart, soul and body dissolving into screaming entropy. Every story, every warning, spoke of its lethal touch.
But something was wrong.
Or rather, something was different. The searing, tearing pain was there, but beneath it, another sensation stirred. A deep, ancient hunger. In the core of his being, in the spiritual center known as the Dantian where a cultivator's Qi was stored, Kaelen had only ever known emptiness. His was a barren wasteland. Now, in that wasteland, a tiny spark ignited.
The chaotic energy, instead of annihilating him, was being drawn in. It flowed towards the spark in his Dantian, a vortex opening where there should have been nothing. The pain intensified, becoming an inferno that threatened to consume his sanity. His flesh felt like it was being flayed from his bones, his blood boiling in his veins. But the spark in his Dantian grew, from a flicker to a flame, from a flame to a roaring furnace.
He screamed, a raw, soundless cry of pure agony that had no audience but the uncaring stones. The Chaos Furnace—the nascent singularity that was his birthright and his curse—had awakened. It was not a normal Dantian, designed for the gentle, ordered flow of refined Heaven and Earth Qi. It was a micro-tear in the fabric of reality, a hungry mouth that craved the universe's most primal, untamed power.
The raw Aetherium surged into him, a torrent of cosmic violence. The Chaos Furnace spun, faster and faster, a miniature black hole devouring the storm. And as it devoured, it transformed. The lethal, chaotic energy was stripped of its destructive properties, filtered, and purified into a stream of Qi so potent, so flawless, it was like the lifeblood of a god.
This perfect energy flooded his body. It was not gentle. It was a scouring force, a brutal act of re-creation. It didn't heal his broken meridians; it obliterated them. In their place, it forged new pathways, not of flesh and spirit, but of something other, something darker and more resilient, shimmering with a faint, ashen light. His shattered bones knit back together, stronger than before. His torn muscles mended, infused with a new, wiry strength.
The agony began to recede, replaced by a wave of intoxicating power. It was a feeling he had never known, a strength that was his and his alone. He pushed himself to his knees, his body trembling not from weakness, but from the sheer, overwhelming force contained within him. He had done it. In a single night, fueled by a substance that should have killed him, he had stepped onto the Path of Cultivation.
He had reached the first stage of the Body Refinement realm. The journey of a thousand stars had begun with a single, brutal step.