Chapter 28: The Canyon That Screams
The Glass Plains were a lie. They were not glass, but a vast, flat expanse of obsidian-like stone, polished to a brutal shine by ancient, scouring energies. The sun hammered down, reflected twofold, turning the world into a blinding oven. There was no cover. No water. Just heat-haze and the distant, shimmering promise of mountains.
They traveled at dawn and dusk, hiding in shallow, knife-carved trenches during the day. Kaelan's sand-body suffered the least, but even he moved sluggishly under the glare. Lian's shadow was a small, desperate puddle at her feet, offering no coolness. Lin's lips cracked, but her eyes remained watchful, scanning the featureless plain for threats.
Feng walked, his internal world a stark contrast to the external blaze.
Three days of this. A crucible of sun. They want us weak when we arrive. Desperate. More pliable. This is the first test of the Broken Blade—not strength, but endurance. Can your flaw survive being baked out of you?
He felt the god-sorrow within him, a cool, abyssal layer beneath the heat of his own thoughts. It did nothing to cool his skin, but it gave him patience. A god's grief had waited millennia. He could wait three days.
The bandaged Curator traded a truth for a memory. Why? What value is the "sensation" of the Tear's shattering to an archive? Unless… unless they're not just collecting stories. They're collecting experiences to understand anomalies like me. To predict us. I gave them a data point. Was that a mistake?
The thought was a splinter. He pushed it down. The decision was made. Regret was a luxury his hunger couldn't afford.
On the morning of the third day, they heard it.
At first, it was a vibration in the obsidian underfoot. Then, a low, resonant hum that wasn't sound, but a pressure in the skull. As the sun climbed to its zenith, the hum gathered itself, tightened, and then—screamed.
It was the sound of stone remembering it was alive and in agony. It poured from a jagged crack in the earth ahead, a canyon not carved by water, but by some colossal, forgotten violence.
The audition, Feng thought, his pulse quickening not with fear, but with a grim focus. They don't meet you at the gate. The gate meets you, and it screams to see if you break.
Lin winced, clapping her hands over her ears. It was useless. The scream was spiritual, bypassing the flesh, vibrating the soul. Kaelan's form rippled, grains threatening to scatter. Lian whimpered, her shadow trying to wrap around her head like a muffler.
Feng stopped. He closed his eyes. He let the scream in.
It was a tribulation. A sonic-spiritual attack. Raw, directionless pain and madness.
His devouring core stirred. His first instinct was to consume it, to silence the scream by eating the vibration. But the god-sorrow within him offered a different insight.
This is not just an attack. It's a question. How do you handle overwhelming, meaningless pain? Do you fight it? Flee it? Or do you understand it?
Understanding was not his Dao. Consumption was.
But perhaps… he could do both.
He focused. He didn't open his mouth to eat the scream. He opened his senses. He let the scream wash over his spiritual awareness, not as an enemy, but as a phenomenon. He felt its frequency, its edges, the hollow, echoing despair at its core. It was the land's trauma, given voice.
Now, he thought. Now I consume.
He didn't eat the whole scream. That would be like drinking the ocean. He targeted the despair at its heart—the emotion powering it. The tribulation of eternal, geologic pain.
He took a sip.
It tasted of deep time and irreparable damage. It was vast and heavy. He couldn't absorb it all. He took a fragment, a shard of the canyon's ancient sorrow, and drew it into the cold lake of the god-sorrow within him.
The two griefs resonated. The canyon's scream… wavered. For a fraction of a second, the piercing note faltered, as if recognizing a kindred pain.
In that moment of hesitation, Feng spoke. Not aloud. He pushed a thread of his will, sharpened by Enforcer-focus and fueled by storm-pride, down into the crack from which the scream originated.
ENOUGH.
It was not a command of power, but of recognition. An acknowledgment of pain. A statement that the test was understood.
The scream cut off.
Silence crashed back, more shocking than the noise. The pressure vanished. Lin lowered her hands, breathing heavily. Kaelan stabilized. Lian's shadow relaxed.
From the edge of the canyon, a figure appeared.
He was massive, his body a patchwork of grafted muscle and scar tissue over a frame that seemed too large to be human. One arm was entirely made of dark, volcanic rock. His eyes were chips of flint. He wore no shirt, only a harness holding an array of brutal, simple weapons.
He looked at Feng, then at the now-silent canyon, then back at Feng.
"You didn't block it. You didn't break. You… conversed with it." His voice was the grind of millstones. "Interesting flaw."
"We are here for the Broken Blade," Feng said, his own voice steady.
"I am Boulder, gate-warden," the giant rumbled. "You have passed the Whisper Test. The Screaming Canyon has accepted you. Follow. And do not stray from the path. The canyon is hungry, and it prefers meat that talks back."
He turned and descended into the crack without a backward glance.
The path was a narrow ledge along the canyon wall, descending into profound darkness. The air grew cold and damp. Bioluminescent fungi clung to the walls, providing a sickly green light. The sense of oppressive, watchful malice was thick enough to taste.
This isn't just a canyon, Feng thought, his senses on a razor's edge. This is a throat. We're being swallowed.
They passed side tunnels from which chilling drafts blew, carrying echoes of distant roars, clashing metal, and sobs. Once, a pale, many-jointed limb, slick with mucus, slithered out of a crevice and brushed Lian's arm before retracting. She didn't make a sound, but her shadow flared in silent fury.
After an hour of descent, the ledge opened into a vast, subterranean cavern. Light came from massive, floating crystals embedded in the ceiling. Below sprawled a city of sorts—if a city could be built from pain and purpose.
Fortifications of fused bone and black metal. Barracks carved directly into the living rock. Training grounds where figures fought with a vicious, no-holds-barred intensity. And at the far end, the source of the pervasive, chaotic Qi: a vast, circular pit, its edges reinforced with glowing, restraining runes. From it rose a visible, swirling column of multicolored energy—violence, despair, rage, and raw creation all churned together.
The Maw of the World.
Even from this distance, Feng felt it. A call. A promise of infinite, chaotic tribulation. His hunger roared in response, a sympathetic vibration.
That's it. That's the buffet. And something is down there. Something sleeping. I can feel its dreams brushing against the chaos. Big dreams.
Boulder led them to a squat, fortress-like building near the pit. Inside, in a room lit by harsh crystal light, sat the Chapter Master of the Broken Blade.
She was a woman of severe beauty, her hair shorn to grey stubble, one side of her face a intricate tattoo of interlocking blades. The other side was smooth, cold porcelain—a perfect, unfeeling mask. Her Qi was a contained singularity, a stillness that threatened immense violence. Foundation Establishment peak, Feng sensed, maybe higher.
She looked up from a scroll. Her eyes—one dark brown, the other a polished ceramic blue—swept over them and settled on Feng.
"Boulder says the canyon stopped screaming for you." Her voice was clipped, devoid of warmth. "Explain."
Feng met her heterochromatic gaze. "It was in pain. I acknowledged it."
A faint twitch at the corner of her organic eye. "Simplistic. But the result is what matters. I am Chapter Master Shard. You seek to join the Broken Blade. Why?"
"You have something I need," Feng said, gesturing vaguely towards the chaotic energy throbbing from the Maw.
"Tribulation," Shard stated. "You consume it. The Curator of the Silent Archive sent word. He believes you are a 'unique catalytic entity.' We believe you may be a solution." She leaned forward. "The Maw is unstable. The primordial chaos it emits is intensifying. Our runes will fail within a year. When they do, the energy release will annihilate this chapter and poison a thousand miles of the Wastes. We need someone to go down there. To find the source of the instability. And either fix it, or consume enough of the chaos to buy us time."
"And if I can't?" Feng asked, though he already knew the answer.
Shard's porcelain cheek reflected the cold light. "Then you will die. And we will find another flawed fool to throw into the dark. You are not the first we've tried. You are simply the most promising. Your choice is this: serve as our blade—our broken, hungry blade—and you will have unlimited access to the Maw's tribulations to grow stronger. Or leave now, and take your chances with the Enforcers who are, I assure you, already converging on the Scarred Wastes, drawn by the Archive's report of your location."
It was no choice at all. A trap within a trap. Fight the chaos below, or fight heaven's order above.
Feng looked past her, through a slit window, at the swirling, beautiful, terrible energy of the Maw.
They see a tool. A sacrifice. They don't see that I've been starving my whole life, and they've just offered me a seat at the richest table in the world. They fear what's down there waking up.
I just wonder what it tastes like.
He looked back at Chapter Master Shard.
"When do I start?"