CHAPTER 43 — Returning to the World
The transition was as silent as the grave, a sudden and total shift in the fundamental laws of Ren's reality.
One heartbeat, his boots were planted on the seamless obsidian floor of a divine ruin, a place where time felt like a stagnant pool and the air was heavy with the weight of ancient, celestial secrets. The next heartbeat, the obsidian was gone. His soles sank into soft, damp loam that gave way under his weight with a quiet, organic squelch. The air that hit his lungs wasn't the ink-heavy musk of the Sunless Canyons he had spent so long breathing. It was sharp, vibrant, and overwhelming—saturated with the scent of crushed pine needles, wet earth, and the delicate, honeyed sweetness of blooming wildflowers.
Ren turned around immediately, his hand instinctively twitching toward the space where the ruin's entrance should have been.
Behind him, there was no white stone gate. There was no shimmering violet light or shifting dimensional mist. There was only a jagged, moss-covered cliff face. Its granite surface was cracked and weathered, looking as though it hadn't been disturbed by anything larger than a mountain goat in centuries. The spatial distortion had vanished so completely that even with his Peak Core Realm senses—senses that could now feel the vibration of an insect's wing fifty paces away—Ren couldn't find a single ripple in the air.
He stood there for a long, unblinking moment, the shadow fox a silent, watchful weight at his side. He looked up, squinting against a brightness his eyes had nearly forgotten. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime of darkness, he saw the sun. It was high and golden, filtering through a dense canopy of emerald leaves that rustled in a breeze he could actually feel on his skin.
The Sunless Canyons were gone. The "Dead Zone" created by the ruin had folded back into the world's fabric, and in its absence, nature had reclaimed the valley with terrifying, voracious speed. Understanding settled quietly in his mind like silt at the bottom of a lake. The ruin had never been hidden by simple stone; it had been bound, anchored to laws that no longer applied to this plane. When the Phoenix burned for rebirth and Ren accepted the Weights, those anchors had been released. The valley hadn't been cleansed by a miracle; it had simply remembered what it was always supposed to be.
A low, guttural growl vibrated through the air to his left, breaking the sudden peace.
From behind a thicket of overgrown ferns, a Level 2 Razor-Tusk Boar emerged. It was a massive, ugly thing, its eyes clouded with red territorial aggression and its tusks dripping with foul-smelling ichor from a previous kill. In the old, shadowed Canyons, such a beast wouldn't have lasted five minutes against the predatory Shadow Stalkers. Here, in this new, "normal" forest, it was likely a local apex predator, used to seeing everything as prey.
It lunged, a sudden blur of coarse fur and bone.
Ren didn't move. He didn't even draw a breath to circulate his Qi through his meridians. He stood like a statue of weathered stone.
Before the beast could close half the distance, the shadow fox flickered. It didn't look like a leap; it looked like a tear in the very fabric of reality. A streak of black fur and blood-red streaks passed through the air too fast for the human eye to track. There was no sound of a struggle, no roar of pain—only a wet, heavy thud as the three-hundred-pound boar was thrown thirty feet backward. Its neck had been snapped with surgical precision, its chest cavity collapsed inward by a force it couldn't comprehend.
The fox returned to Ren's side in a blink, its fur clean, its expression bored. To the fox, a Level 2 beast was no longer a threat to be hunted; it was an annoyance to be cleared away.
"Let's go," Ren said, his voice sounding strangely hollow and ancient to his own ears.
He began to walk toward the mouth of the valley. He moved with a deceptive, predatory grace that lacked the frantic energy of his youth. Every step he took felt anchored to the very core of the earth. His "Mercury-Phoenix" bones and the weight of the "Abyssal Anchor" made him feel like a mountain in motion. He ignored the occasional roars of low-level beasts in the distance. To him, they were no longer monsters; they were merely the background noise of a world he had outgrown.
As he reached the outskirts of the forest, the familiar, jagged silhouette of Frostmere City appeared on the horizon.
Ren reached the main gates of Frostmere an hour later. Before stepping into the light of the road, he had pulled a travel-worn cloak from his storage ring to hide the sheen of his refined skin and suppressed his aura until he looked like nothing more than a weary, unranked traveler. He was a ghost walking among the living.
The guards at the gate were older than he remembered, their armor scarred and their faces lined with deep fatigue. They didn't even look at him as he passed. Their eyes were glazed with the heavy boredom of men who had seen too much and expected too little.
He found a crowded tea-house near the central square, the kind of place where the air was thick with the smell of cheap tobacco and the sound of loose tongues. It was a place where rumors were traded as frequently as copper coins. He ordered a large meal of roasted meat and sat in the shadows of the corner, his ears tuned to the ambient noise of the crowd.
"Still hard to believe it's been three years since the Great Chaos," an old merchant muttered to his friend at the next table, nursing a jar of sour wine.
Ren's hand froze mid-air, the cup of tea inches from his lips. His heart, usually steady as a drum, gave a single, hard thud against his ribs.
To him, the time in the ruin had felt like weeks—perhaps a month at most. But the Phoenix's chamber had existed in a pocket of space outside the flow of the Great Boundary. While he was condensing his core and undergoing the agony of the Mercury Baptism, the world had turned three times.
"Three years," the friend sighed, leaning back. "The city nearly died that day. If the Tribunal Master hadn't stabilized the spiritual veins after the canyon collapse, we'd all be dust."
In the cultivation world, three years was an eternity. It was enough time for empires to fall and for new geniuses to rise. In three years, Kael would have stabilized his Violet Nova Essence. Serik, Rovan, and Kane would have mastered their treasures. They might even have moved on from the Stonewake Pavilion entirely. They might have forgotten him.
He listened closer, gathering the threads of history he had missed. He learned that the hunt for the "Edict" had cooled into a tense, frozen conflict.
The Arbiters had nearly succeeded in seizing the Edict from the Obsidian Vale's Elders shortly after Ren disappeared. Their formation had been closing, golden seals descending from the sky like the hand of iron law. The valley itself had seemed to inhale, the air pressure dropping until men's ears bled. Then, the Vale Leader arrived without any announcement—no flare of aura, no grand declaration of authority.
One moment the Arbiters were advancing; the next, their formation simply faltered. The lines collapsed under a silent, invisible pressure that never revealed its source. No blows were exchanged. No words were spoken. The Arbiters had withdrawn in total silence, understanding instinctively that their enforcement had crossed the line into provocation. The Edict remained in the hands of Obsidian Vale, a sleeping dragon that no one dared wake.
Ren finished his meal, feeling the heat of the food settle into his refined stomach. He wasn't the boy who had fled into the dark canyons with nothing but a broken sword and a desperate hope. He was a man who had outstayed his own era.
He looked down at the shadow fox resting at his feet, its ears twitching at the sound of a passing carriage. "Three years," he murmured so softly only the beast could hear. "I wonder if they still remember the boy who nearly died to send them out of that collapsing space."
Ren stood up and left a few copper coins on the table, their dull ring on the wood sounding like a closing bell. He didn't need a map to find his way anymore. The path to the Pavilion was burned into his memory, a map of debt and brotherhood.
He stepped out into the streets of Frostmere, the sun setting in a bruised purple sky over the city he had once called a prison. It was no longer a cage to him; it was a starting point. It was time to return to the Stonewake Pavilion. It was time to see who had remained standing in the three years he was dead to the world.
_
Chapter End