Chapter 24: The Silent Meadow
They found the valley shrouded in mist that didn't drift. It hung, a permanent curtain of grey.
No birdsong. No insect hum. The silence was a presence.
Ahead, the mist parted around a single, petrified tree. Hanging from its branches were not leaves, but bones—animal, human, some unidentifiable—tied with threads of faded color. A warning. A welcome.
From the mist, a figure emerged.
It was a woman, but not. Her skin was bark. Her hair, moss. One eye was a pool of clear water, the other a knot of wood. She smelled of damp earth and sorrow.
"You are Flawed," she said, her voice the sound of roots shifting. "You carry the taste of dead storms and broken laws. You may enter. Violence is silenced here. It is the one rule."
The mist opened before her, revealing a path.
The Silent Meadow was not a meadow.
It was a graveyard of broken destinies.
A man made of shifting sand sat by a creek that flowed upwards, weeping quartz tears. A girl whose shadow moved independently of her body tended glowing fungi. A being that was all interconnected clockwork gears, some bent, some missing, ticked softly under a rock shelter.
Dozens of them. Cultivators, beasts, things in between. All marred. All wrong in the eyes of heaven.
They were the Flawed.
A man with three pupils in each eye approached. His Qi felt like shattered glass.
"New flaw," he stated. "What is your error?"
Feng met his gaze. "I consume tribulation. I am the Eater."
A ripple went through the clearing. The bark-woman's water eye shimmered.
"An active flaw," murmured the clockwork being. "Not a static curse. A dynamic error. Rare."
"Why are you here?" Feng asked.
The sand-man's quartz tears fell faster. "We are waiting."
"For what?"
The girl with the separate shadow answered, her voice echoing from two places at once. "For the Forgotten God's Tear. It falls through the cracks of reality here, once a decade. It is the only thing that can… fix us. Or make our flaws into something more."
A cure. Or an evolution.
"When?"
"Soon," said the three-pupiled man. "The mist thins when it comes. You may wait. Or you may try to take it. But remember the rule. Violence is silenced here."
Feng looked at the gathered broken things. He saw not weakness, but latent, twisted power. A clockwork that defied entropy. A shadow with a will. Sand that wept.
He had found his people.
He would wait. And when the Tear fell, he would see if it was a tribulation he could consume, or a key he could use.
In the Silent Meadow, surrounded by silence and flaws, Xiao Feng finally stopped running.
He began to plan.