The border formation wasn't a wall. It was a filter. Stepping through it was like plunging into water that was also fire and static and the taste of forgotten memories. The world screamed in a frequency only Li Wei's enhanced senses could perceive.
[WARNING: ENVIRONMENTAL DATA STREAM IS CORRUPTED. MULTIPLE CONTRADICTORY PHYSICAL LAWS DETECTED.]
[ADJUSTING PERCEPTUAL FILTERS...]
The Ashen Wastes were not a place of mere destruction. They were a place where the rules had been shredded. Gravity was a suggestion. Li Wei watched a plume of grey dust fall upward into the bruised sky, while a shard of black obsidian the size of a house floated sideways, grinding against the ground with the sound of breaking bones.
Time was not a river here; it was a choppy sea. One moment, the sun was a pale, sickly disc overhead. The next, it was a blood-red sliver on the horizon, only to snap back to its zenith a heartbeat later. Their horses whinnied in terror, their biological clocks unable to cope. Su Lian was forced to envelop the beasts in a bubble of her stable aura, a tiny island of order in a ocean of chaos.
"This is worse than I imagined," she said, her voice strained. Maintaining the bubble was a constant, draining effort against the environment's relentless entropy.
"It's beautiful," Li Wei whispered, his First Glimpse working overtime. He wasn't seeing a wasteland; he was seeing the raw, unformatted source code of a broken world. Glitching textures, memory leaks of ancient events replaying as ghostly afterimages, and the deep, festering scars of the Soul-Forge Cataclysm.
[FRAGMENT RESONANCE STRENGTHENING. BEARING CONFIRMED. PROCEED.]
Navigating was a nightmare. A step forward could suddenly become a step backward. A canyon would appear where flat land had been a second ago. They passed a forest of trees made of solidified sound, their leaves chiming a discordant symphony that frayed the nerves.
The Censor's presence was absent here. This place was a cancerous tumor on reality, a zone the system had quarantined but could not heal. It was the perfect hiding place.
After a day of disorienting travel, the System chimed again.
[ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED. NOT FRAGMENT. BIOLOGICAL. HOSTILE.]
From behind a dune of crystalline sand that was both hot and cold to the touch, a creature emerged. It was a horror of contradictions—a wolf-like beast with six legs, two of which were transparent and phased in and out of existence. One of its eyes was a normal, feral yellow, while the other was a swirling vortex of probabilities, showing a dozen different places it could be looking at once.
[SCANNING... 'PROBABILITY HOUND'. A NATIVE LIFE-FORM ADAPTED TO REALITY FAILURE. ITS ATTACKS ARE NON-DETERMINISTIC.]
The beast snarled, a sound that seemed to come from both in front and behind them. It didn't pounce. It simply repositioned. One moment it was twenty feet away, the next it was five feet to their left, its jaws already snapping at Su Lian's protective bubble.
The bubble held, but it flickered. The attack hadn't traveled through space; it had simply changed the probability of its location relative to theirs.
[ZERO: OKAY, THAT'S JUST CHEATING!]
Li Wei's mind raced. He couldn't predict its movements. He couldn't analyze a stable pattern because there was none. He had to fight probability with probability.
As the Hound blurred, preparing to teleport-bite again, Li Wei focused. He didn't target the beast. He targeted the space around them. He issued a low-level Reality Command, pouring a significant chunk of his power into it.
"Stable," he commanded.
The glitching air solidified. The probabilities collapsed. The Hound reappeared mid-lunge, confused to find itself obeying normal physics for a split second. It was a sitting duck.
Su Lian didn't waste the opening. A blade of pure, focused azure light—not Qi, but solidified order—shot from her hand and pierced the creature's core. It yelped, a sound of pure statistical improbability, and dissolved into a cloud of grey dust and fading math.
The effort left Li Wei breathing heavily. Using commands in this place was like trying to shout in a hurricane.
[SYSTEM POWER: 58%.]
They pressed on, the land growing more treacherous. They crossed a river that flowed in a perfect, silent circle, its water possessing the properties of both a liquid and a solid. They skirted a zone where colors had swapped places—the sky was green, the grey dust was a vibrant purple.
Finally, they reached the source of the resonance.
It was a crater, miles wide. But it wasn't a crater from an impact. It was a crater from an un-impact. The land looked as if a giant cookie cutter had cleanly removed a piece of the world, leaving behind smooth, glassy walls. At the bottom stood a single, intact structure: a pagoda made of a material that was neither stone nor metal, but something that seemed to absorb light and thought. It was the only stable, non-glitching object in the entire Wastes.
The Soul-Forge.
[FRAGMENT RESONANCE: MAXIMUM. SOURCE IS WITHIN THE STRUCTURE.]
Getting down was the next challenge. Gravity was inverted at the crater's rim. One wrong step would send them flying into the distorted sky. Li Wei had to constantly issue micro-commands—"Down," "Gravity,"—to create a temporary, safe path downward, his power draining with every step.
When they finally reached the pagoda, there was no door. Only a seamless wall.
Su Lian placed her hand on it. "It's... locked by a concept. Not a formation. It requires a specific state of being to enter."
Li Wei activated his First Glimpse. The wall was a perfect data-cipher. It required a key that was not a password, but a philosophical truth.
[ANALYZING ENCRYPTION...]
[REQUIREMENT: A BEING THAT ACKNOWLEDGES ITS OWN NON-EXISTENCE.]
A being that acknowledged its own non-existence. For any cultivator of this world, whose entire path was about affirming and strengthening their self and soul, this was an impossible request. It was a logical suicide.
But for Li Wei, the glitch, the survivor of a deleted world, it was a simple statement of fact.
"I am a ghost of a dead iteration," he said, placing his hand next to Su Lian's. "A piece of data that should have been purged. My existence is a mathematical error. I do not belong here."
The wall did not open. It ceased to be. One moment it was there, the next it was a void, an entrance into absolute darkness.
They stepped through.
Inside was not a room, but a space. A perfect, silent, black cube where the very concept of "outside" had no meaning. Floating in the center was a sphere of swirling, iridescent light. The third fragment.
But they were not alone.
Standing between them and the fragment was a figure. It was humanoid, but composed of the same shifting, glitching static as the Wastes outside. It had no face, only a smooth surface where probabilities collapsed and reformed.
[SCANNING... 'CONCEPTUAL GUARDIAN'. A SENTIENT REALITY-FAILURE. PURPOSE: TO PREVENT THE FRAGMENT'S RETRIEVAL.]
The Guardian didn't speak. It didn't need to. Its purpose was clear. It raised a hand, and the very nature of the space around Li Wei changed.
The concept of "forward" was deleted.
Li Wei willed himself to step toward the fragment, but his body no longer understood the command. "Forward" had no meaning. He was trapped in a semantic prison.
Su Lian cried out as the concept of "sight" was altered for her. She could see, but what she saw was a scrambled, nonsensical mess of colors and shapes that conveyed no information.
The Guardian was not attacking them. It was editing the definitions of the words that made up their reality.
This was the Censor's ultimate weapon in this place. Not a brute-force deletion, but a being that could weaponize the very language of existence.
And it was turning that power on them.
To be continued...