Chapter 25: The Taste of Forgotten
Days in the Silent Meadow were marked by the slow creep of shadows, not the sun. Time pooled here like stagnant water. Feng learned the flawed.
The sand-man, Kaelan, wept because he could not hold a form; his memories and self bled away with every grain lost. The shadow-girl, Lian, was hunted by her own darkness, which sometimes tried to strangle her in sleep. The clockwork being, Tock, sought the Tear to replace its missing gears—gears of causality and fate, not metal.
They were refugees from heaven's perfect design.
Feng trained. Not cultivation, but control. He practiced using his storm-pride to fuel his will while the Enforcer's focus directed it. He could now extend his devouring aura in a thin, precise line, like a tongue tasting the air for specific energies. He practiced on the strange phenomena of the Meadow—sipping the sorrow from Kaelan's quartz tears (it tasted of lost beaches and fading names), or gently drawing the rebellious malice from Lian's shadow (a flavor of cellar-dark and childish spite).
He was learning to eat without destroying. To heal by consuming poison.
The bark-skinned woman was their guardian. She called herself Root. She was the oldest Flawed, a dryad whose tree had been cursed by a passing immortal's blood. She was bound to the Meadow, her roots its perimeter. She enforced the silence.
"The Tear is not a thing of power as you know it," Root told him one evening, her water eye reflecting the perpetual mist. "It is a fragment of a god who fell not in battle, but in grief. It is solidified sorrow that remembers being divine. It does not fix flaws. It… re-contextualizes them. It makes the flaw the central feature of a new design."
"What will it do to me?" Feng asked.
Root's wooden eye seemed to peer into his core. "You are not passively flawed. You are an active consumer of flaw. The Tear may judge you the ultimate flaw and reject you. Or it may see you as a kindred spirit—a fellow gatherer of broken things."
A week passed. The mist began to thin.
It was not a clearing. It was a fading. The grey veil remained, but it grew translucent, like aged glass. Through it, they could see the outlines of the twisted petrified trees, the other Flawed gathering in the center of the Meadow where the ground dipped into a natural stone bowl.
The air grew heavy with anticipation. A pressure built, not of Qi, but of significance.
"They come for it too," Lian whispered, her shadow huddling close to her legs. She pointed with a thin finger towards the misty tree line.
Figures stood at the edge of the Meadow, just outside Root's perimeter. They did not enter.
Heaven's Enforcers.
Not the Porcelain rank. These wore robes of muted blue, and their faces were covered by smooth, expressionless metal masks. Curators. Their purpose was not termination, but acquisition. They held complex brass instruments that hummed softly, scanning the fading mist, measuring the gathering significance.
"They cannot enter while the rule of silence holds," Root said, her voice a low growl of roots grinding. "But the rule is tied to the Meadow's peace. If violence erupts inside when the Tear falls… the barrier may weaken."
The message was clear. The Enforcers were waiting for them to fight each other over the god-fragment.
The Flawed gathered in the stone bowl—about thirty of them. Fear and desperate hope hung on them like rags. Kaelan's form trembled, shedding a small pile of sand. Tock's ticking grew irregular. Lian's shadow wrapped around her like a protective cloak.
Feng stood with them, but apart. He was not here for a cure. He was here to see if this divine sorrow was something he could add to his palette.
The mist reached its peak translucency. The world became a grey dream.
Then, it fell.
Not from the sky. From between.
A single, perfect drop of liquid silver appeared in the center of the stone bowl, hanging in the air. It was the size of a man's fist. It pulsed with a soft, internal light, and from it radiated an emotion so profound it was a physical force: Grief. Not petty sadness, but the grief of eternity, of lost creation, of a love that spanned galaxies and died.
The Forgotten God's Tear.
For a moment, everyone froze, overwhelmed by the feeling.
Then, the craving broke the silence.
A Flawed with crystalline skin shrieked and lunged. A being made of swirling documents and legal scrolls fluttered forward. Chaos erupted.
Root roared, a sound of splintering wood. "NO VIOLENCE!"
But it was too late. The first shove, the first greedy grab, had broken the covenant.
The moment violence sparked inside the Meadow, the perimeter flickered.
The blue-masked Curators outside raised their instruments. A harmonic, piercing tone cut through the mist. The barrier didn't collapse, but it thinned, became permeable. Six Curators stepped through, their movements synchronized, efficient. They did not attack the Flawed fighting over the Tear. They began erecting a shimmering, hexagonal field around the entire stone bowl—a Containment and Collection Grid. They were going to let the Flawed fight, then scoop up the Tear and all the survivors as specimens.
Feng watched, his mind cold and clear. The storm-pride rose in him, a fury at the trap, at the exploitation. The Enforcer-focus layered over it, calculating.
The Tear was not a tribulation of poison or lightning. It was a tribulation of emotion. Of overwhelming, divine sorrow. Could he consume that? Could he eat grief without being drowned by it?
He saw Kaelan knocked aside, crumbling. He saw Lian's shadow turn on a Flawed who got too close, tearing at him with dark claws. He saw Tock trying to shield them both, its gears screaming.
They were his people. Broken, flawed, but his.
The Curators' grid was half-formed, closing like a flower made of light.
Feng made a decision.
He did not run towards the Tear. He ran towards the nearest Curator erecting the grid.
The Curator saw him coming, raised a brass rod. A beam of solidifying logic, meant to freeze his biological processes, shot out.
Feng didn't dodge. He opened his mouth and breathed in.
He consumed the beam.
It was pure, structured rationality. The opposite of the Tear's chaotic grief. It was a bland, cold taste, like swallowing a mathematical theorem. It was nourishment, but empty. He used its energy to fuel his next move.
He reached the Curator. The man tried to switch to a physical nullification strike.
Feng placed a hand on the Curator's brass instrument. Through it, he didn't drain the man's Qi. He fed a pulse of the storm's pride—the unshakeable will of a king—directly into the device's logical core.
The instrument, designed for cold analysis, short-circuited under the assault of pure, arrogant self-worth. It exploded in a shower of brass shards and discordant data.
The Curator stumbled back, his mask cracking.
Feng moved to the next grid point. He was a ghost in the chaos, a saboteur. He didn't fight the Flawed. He didn't touch the Tear. He attacked the system trying to cage them all.
He used the Enforcer's focus to find the weak points in the forming grid—the resonant frequencies, the spiritual load-bearing nodes. He used the storm's will to overwhelm them with pure, disruptive force.
One by one, the grid-lights flickered and died.
The lead Curator, his mask engraved with a single silver line, turned from supervising the containment to face Feng. "Anomaly. You disrupt the collection. You will be pacified."
He drew not a tool, but a word from a scroll at his belt. The word was "STASIS."
It flew from the scroll, a command made real, a law of stopped time aimed at Feng's heart.
Feng had no defense against such a high-order conceptual attack. So he did the only thing he could.
He turned and ran—straight for the center of the stone bowl, where the Flawed still scrabbled for the pulsing Tear.
The "STASIS" command followed him, a hunting silver arrow of stopped time.
Feng dove into the crowd of fighting Flawed. He rolled past Lian, past the crystalline being, and came up right beneath the hovering Forgotten God's Tear.
He looked up into its liquid silver light, feeling the god's grief wash over him—the loss of worshippers, the fading of myths, the cold of an empty celestial throne.
The "STASIS" command hit him in the back.
Time froze around him. His muscles locked. His heart stuttered.
But his will, forged in storm-pride and sharpened by Enforcer-focus, screamed. And his Dao—the Dao of Consuming Tribulation—reacted on instinct.
Feng was trapped in stasis, but his hunger was not.
In that frozen millisecond, his devouring core, facing annihilation by a temporal law, did not try to eat the stasis. It reached for the closest, most powerful source of opposing energy.
It reached for the Forgotten God's Tear.
The divine sorrow, the grief of a lost god, was a tribulation of cosmic scale.
His hunger latched onto it and pulled.
A thread of liquid silver grief, pure and potent, tore from the Tear and siphoned into Feng's frozen form.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.
The "STASIS" command, a law of order and cessation, met the raw, chaotic grief of divine loss.
They canceled each other out in a silent explosion of paradox.
Time unfroze. Feng gasped, falling to his knees.
And the Forgotten God's Tear… shattered.
Not into pieces. Into a mist of silver emotion that showered down over the entire stone bowl, drenching every Flawed, every Curator, Feng, and Root.
The fighting stopped.
Kaelan stopped weeping, his sandy form firming, the grains holding a new, cohesive memory. Lian's shadow relaxed, merging with her gently, no longer a separate thing but a deep, protective pool at her feet. Tock's missing gears glimmered with silver light, not replaced, but their absence now part of a new, elegant pattern.
The Flawed were not fixed. They were transformed. Their flaws became features, scars turned into marks of unique power.
The Curators staggered, their logical minds assaulted by the direct emotional download. They clutched their heads, their instruments beeping erratically.
The silver-masked lead Curator looked at Feng, his eyes visible through the cracked mask, wide with horrified revelation. "You… you didn't take it. You shared it."
Feng stood, dripping with god-grief. It swam in his veins, a vast, melancholy ocean. He had consumed only a thread, but it was enough. He now held a Divine Tribulation within him. The sorrow of a forgotten god was a quiet, endless weight. It didn't empower him. It deepened him. It gave his hunger a new, bittersweet dimension.
He looked at the transformed Flawed, then at the incapacitated Curators.
Root stood at the edge of the bowl, her bark skin glistening with silver dew, her water eye flowing with actual tears. "The Meadow is satisfied. The Tear's purpose is served."
Feng walked to the lead Curator. He placed a hand on the man's chest, not to drain, but to push a fragment of the god's grief into him. "Remember this feeling," Feng said, his voice echoing with divine sorrow. "Remember what your order tries to erase. Now go. Tell them the Error is no longer just consuming. He is redistributing."
The Curators, broken by empathy, fled into the mist, their containment mission a failure.
Feng turned to the Flawed. They looked at him, not with fear, but with awe. He had not taken their cure. He had, however unintentionally, given it to them all.
He was no longer just the Eater.
He was the Catalyst.
And as the mist thickened once more, hiding them from heaven's sight, Xiao Feng knew the rules of the hunt had changed forever. He had tasted the divine. And he found it was just another flavor of hunger.