He burst through the compound gates before dusk, shame burning hotter than the sun. The path to his father's study felt both forbidden and inevitable.
The echoes of the Grand Scriptorium were ghosts that followed him into the suffocating confines of his small room. Sun Jian's voice, sharp with triumph. The whispers of the crowd, thick with pity and scorn. Ink-dead hands. Son of a traitor. The words clung to him, a shroud of shame he couldn't cast off. He sat on the edge of his thin mattress, the coarse fabric a familiar discomfort, and stared at the opposite wall as if the taunts were written there in fading ink. The air was stale, smelling of old paper and damp plaster, a poverty so deep it had its own scent.
His gaze drifted to the simple wooden box on his small, scarred desk. It held the few possessions his father had left behind. A worn seal, a handful of letters, and the object he had discovered less than an hour ago, now resting on top of the lid.
The inkstone.
It looked like a rectangle of polished night, a solid piece of emptiness that drank the meager lamplight and gave nothing back. It was cool to the touch, unnervingly smooth, its very existence a contradiction to everything he had ever been taught. The Resonant Path was about life, about infusing one's Qi into the ink until it sang with spirit. This stone felt like a tomb.
He remembered his father's lectures, the quiet intensity in his eyes. A specific memory surfaced, sharp and unwelcome: a rainy afternoon in the study, his father's hand resting on his shoulder.
Power sought outside the proper Path is a serpent that consumes its own tail, Jin Wei. It offers everything and leaves you with nothing but the taste of your own ash.
The memory was a faint warning, a ghost of caution against the roaring storm of his humiliation. But his father's words were a distant echo from a world that no longer existed. Sun Jian's sneer was a fresh, bleeding wound. The image of Lin's desperate helplessness, of the instructor's averted eyes, of a hundred faces looking at him not as a person but as a disgrace—that was real. That was now. The fear for his family's future, for his own survival in a world that saw him as nothing more than a traitor's worthless son, was a poison already in his veins.
The desperate, clawing need to fight back, to possess a weapon they could not anticipate, began to strangle his fear of the unknown. He was betraying his father's memory, he knew. But his father was dead, and his enemies were very much alive.
With a hand that trembled from a mix of rage and resolve, he took the inkstone. He cleared his desk, pushing aside scrolls of failed practice. He set out his meager tools: a cheap grinding pestle, a worn brush with frayed wolf-hairs, and a single sheet of low-grade paper, its surface rough and imperfect.
He had found the hidden drawer behind a fractured carving, the inkstone resting in faded silk — a relic his father had sealed away.
He poured a few drops of clean water onto the inkstone's surface.
He began to grind.
Whatever strange hush had brushed the study when he touched it before, this time he meant to hold it — to see what truth it carried.
The sound was immediately wrong. Instead of the smooth, wet whisper of stone on stone he had heard a million times, this was a faint, dry hiss. It was the sound of a snake slithering over sand, of dust settling in a place long dead. A strange scent rose from the stone, not the familiar, earthy fragrance of pine-soot ink, but something sharp and sterile, like the air after a lightning strike, with an undercurrent of dry, ancient decay.
The ink that pooled in the stone's shallow well was not black. It was a viscous, lightless void, a tiny puddle of pure emptiness that seemed to warp the space around it, pulling the lamplight into itself and annihilating it.
Jin Wei stared at it, his heart hammering against his ribs. His mind was a battlefield. Sun Jian's arrogant face, contorted in a triumphant smirk. The quiet, disappointed sigh of the Instructor. The weight of his own failure, a physical pressure on his chest. He was drowning in the noise, in the memories, in the shame. He craved only one thing. An end to it.
Silence.
In a surge of pure, desperate anguish, he plunged his brush into the viscous black liquid. He lifted it, the tip heavy with the malevolent-looking ink. Fueled by raw emotion, not by the ten thousand strokes of his failed training, he scrawled a single, jagged character onto the paper: **寂**.
The instant the final, angry stroke was complete, the world died.
It wasn't a fading. It was a cessation. The chirping of the night crickets outside his window, the rustle of leaves in the courtyard, the distant, ever-present hum of the city—all of it vanished.
The silence was not peaceful. It was a solid thing, an immense pressure that pushed in from all sides, making his eardrums ache in the sudden, total vacuum. The world was holding its breath, and he was trapped in its frozen lungs.
A heartbeat later, a lance of pure, white-hot agony drove through his skull.
He gasped, the sound stolen by the void. The brush clattered from his nerveless fingers as he grabbed his head, his vision exploding into a static of white light. It was not a headache; it was a physical extraction, a psychic toll being violently torn from the very fabric of his mind. The pain was brief but absolute, leaving him breathless and trembling.
As the agony receded to a dull, throbbing ache, Jin Wei stumbled back, his legs weak. He braced himself against the wall, panting in the oppressive quiet. He needed to ground himself, to anchor his reeling senses to something safe, something real.
His mind instinctively reached for a memory he kept like a hidden treasure, a balm for every hardship. His mother's smile. The image of her turning from the kitchen, a tray of hot tea in her hands, her face lit with a warm, gentle light that had always made the world feel right.
He searched for it. His consciousness dove into the familiar archive of his past, seeking that specific, warm image. But where it should have been, there was only a smooth, cold, featureless void. Panic flared. He tried again, frantically, pushing his mind harder against the blankness, like a man trying to grip smoke. He could remember the fact of the memory. He knew she had brought him tea. He knew she had smiled at him. He could recall the feeling of comfort it gave him, the abstract concept of her happiness.
But the image itself—the specific, beloved way her eyes would crinkle at the corners, the gentle curve of her lips, the light in her gaze—was gone. Wiped clean. A perfect, irrevocable hole had been carved in his mind.
A cold dread, far more terrifying than the physical pain, flooded his veins, chilling him to the bone. He stared at the stark black character drying on the scroll, its jagged lines seeming to mock him. The unnatural silence of the world pressed in, a constant reminder of the power he had just unleashed. Then his gaze shifted to the inkstone, a piece of polished night resting on his desk, silent and patient.
He had found it. A power that could rewrite reality. A weapon to defy House Sun, to silence his enemies, to protect his family.
But its price was his soul. It fueled itself with his life, with the very memories that made him who he was.
This power was a poison that devoured its wielder.
And to survive, he realized with a chilling, terrifying certainty, I will have to drink it again.
----
A single tap feeds the heretic's flame. Your Power Stone keeps the story alive.