The air in the Eastern Courtyard of the Qingyun Sect was a suffocating blend of disappointment and failure. It was perpetually thick with the sharp, herbaceous scent of medicinal poultices meant to treat cultivation injuries, a smell that had become as intimately familiar to Lian Chen as the ache in his Dantian. He stumbled, catching himself on a cold stone railing, and violently spat a mouthful of saliva onto the clean-swept courtyard floor. The phlegm was stained crimson, a silent testament to the wreckage within his body.
Lian Chen, a youth of sixteen summers, was a paradox the sect could no longer tolerate. He possessed the incredibly rare Profound Yin Physique, a celestial endowment that should have seen him already challenging the Core Formation realm. Instead, he was perpetually trapped in the First Layer of Qi Condensation, his progress stalled and his potential wasted. His current state was worse than merely stalled; his cultivation was actively regressing. Several weeks prior, in a desperate, foolish attempt to force a breakthrough, he had tried to absorb a higher-grade Spirit Stone than his body could handle. The resulting backlash had been catastrophic, ripping through his spiritual channels and leaving his meridians—the invisible pathways for Spiritual Qi—feeling, precisely as he had described, like shattered glass. Every time he tried to channel even the smallest thread of Qi, the sharp, searing pain threatened to tear him apart from the inside.
Standing before him, his face a mask of weary disapproval, was Elder Lin. The Elder adjusted the pristine jade pendant hanging from his belt, the simple movement drawing Lian Chen's eye to the Elder's powerful, perfectly intact Golden Core cultivation aura. The comparison was devastating.
"Still nothing, Fourth Disciple?" Elder Lin's voice lacked malice; it held a far colder, more cutting emotion: pity mixed with pragmatic finality.
Lian Chen sank onto one knee, the exertion of merely standing and talking causing a fresh wave of internal tremors. "Elder," his voice was a thin, hoarse rasp, "The meridians... they feel like shattered glass. I can barely circulate the meager Spiritual Qi. It turns against me."
Elder Lin sighed, the sound loud and heavy in the otherwise silent courtyard. He had overseen Lian Chen since the boy's arrival, hoping to foster the promised genius of the Profound Yin Physique, but there was nothing left to nurture. "Lian Chen, the Sect Master has exercised immense patience. Your natural talent, extraordinary as it is, is now completely nullified by your ruined vessels. You are consuming resources—even the lowest-grade Spirit Stones—that could dramatically benefit a true prodigy, someone who can still climb the ranks."
The Elder stepped closer, his shadow falling over Lian Chen. "The sect has made its decision. By the end of this month, which is barely three days away, if you cannot somehow reach the Second Layer of Qi Condensation, you will be demoted. You will be stripped of your Inner Sect robes and reassigned as an Outer Sect Servant."
The words landed not as a verbal warning, but as a physical blow that left Lian Chen reeling. To be a Servant was a fate worse than death for a cultivator. It meant endless, grueling manual labor: sweeping the massive stone courtyards, hauling buckets from the mountain springs, chopping endless cords of spirit-dampened wood. It meant being cut off from the dense, purified Spiritual Qi of the Inner Courtyard, forcing one to breathe the thin, stale air of the mortal realm. It was a slow, agonizing death of the spirit, where all hope of Ascension would wither and die.
A death sentence, Lian Chen realized, his heart pounding a furious rhythm of fear and white-hot rage against his aching ribs. I will not accept this fate! The humiliation was unbearable, the finality absolute. He had three days. Three days to achieve a breakthrough that masters had told him would now take a year, even with top-grade medicine.
That night, the phantom ache in his core was a constant reminder, a throbbing pulse of his impending doom that made sleep impossible. Lian Chen finally gave in to his desperation. He didn't turn toward the forbidden, Qi-rich peaks where powerful artifacts might lie, for he knew he would be instantly caught and executed. Instead, he fled his small, shared dormitory and headed for the most despised and neglected place in the entire Qingyun Sect: the Forgotten Library Archives.
The archives were situated in a deep, subterranean basement beneath the main library, a place so damp and neglected that even the ubiquitous protective seals had faded. It was filled with moldering, outdated scrolls, failed cultivation manuals, and mundane sect records—the spiritual trash of a millennium, deemed useless by successive generations of ambitious disciples. No one came here except the elderly janitor, and even he regarded the place as a necessary evil.
Lian Chen found the old janitor, his eyes dim and rheumy, huddled over a flickering tallow lamp. He placed the last of his low-grade Spirit Stones—his entire remaining fortune—into the man's wrinkled hand. The janitor, more interested in the immediate, tangible coin than the spiritual potential of the Inner Sect, accepted the bribe with a silent, avaricious nod. He pointed a crooked finger toward a dark, descending stairwell, then turned his back.
Lian Chen lit his own small, shaky lamp and descended into the earth. The air immediately became heavy, thick, and suffocating, reeking of dust that had not been stirred for a millennium. Here, the Spiritual Qi was stagnant and choked, hostile to life and cultivation.
He spent an hour blindly tracing his fingers over the cracked bamboo slips and yellowed paper. Most were just tedious lists of supplies or long-forgotten protocols. The despair, which had been a low, continuous hum since Elder Lin's verdict, began to consume him. Had he come all this way just to find proof of failure? Just as he was about to give up and resign himself to his fate, his hand brushed against something entirely different, tucked away in the deep shadow behind a collapsed section of shelving.
It was not bamboo or paper.
It was a scroll made of a material that was strangely warm, yet intensely hard and cold to the touch, like polished obsidian. It was tightly bound, not with string or leather, but with a single, unbroken strand of iridescent, silver-blue thread that seemed to faintly pulse in the dim light. There were no markings, no seals, and no title on the outside. It felt utterly alien to the Qingyun Sect.
With trembling fingers, Lian Chen pulled out the pathetic spiritual knife he possessed—a dull, low-grade artifact, the only weapon a First Layer cultivator was permitted to own. He carefully, painstakingly, sawed at the unbreakable thread. When the final fiber parted, the scroll instantly unfurled with a powerful, almost violent force.
It emitted a blinding, soft blue glow that chased away the oppressive darkness, filling the basement with pure, clean light. On its surface, runes began to illuminate. They were characters Lian Chen had never seen before in any sect manual or ancient text, yet somehow, he understood them instinctively, as if the language was being written directly onto his soul. The characters spoke of Dao, of Ascension, and of a path that transcended all known boundaries.
The central text pulsed with an overwhelming spiritual pressure, forcing Lian Chen to drop to his knees. The vision of a boundless universe opened before him, a tapestry of infinite realms and endless challenges.
As Lian Chen stared, the most crucial sentence burned itself not onto his retina, but directly into his very core, resonating deep within his shattered meridians, addressing his current affliction with divine authority:
"To reach the apex, one must first shatter the cage of the mundane. Your first step is to rebuild the vessel."
He caught the name of the technique, a title of unfathomable ambition: The Ten Thousand Stages Scripture.
Before he could process the sheer impossible weight of that number, the scroll dissolved. It did not burn to ash or fade to dust. It simply condensed, folding its essence into a single, intensely glowing sapphire bead that shot forward, bypassing his defenses entirely. It flew directly into the center of Lian Chen's forehead, sinking into his spiritual consciousness and embedding itself in his Spirit Sea.
A silent, world-shattering shockwave of ancient, boundless spiritual energy erupted inside him. The searing pain in his chest, the constant agony of his ruined meridians, vanished instantly, replaced by an overwhelming, almost terrifying warmth. The dust of the basement floor received his collapsing body, his eyes wide and unblinking, fixed on the forgotten ceiling.
He heard the voice of the Scripture one last time, an echo in the boundless chasm of his awakened soul:
"Welcome, Host. The journey to the pinnacle of all realities begins now. Your true Cultivation Base awakens."