Chapter 29: The First Descent
The chamber before the Maw was called the "Anteroom of Dissolution." The air crackled with stray energy, tasting of ozone, blood, and forgotten prayers. Runes glowed like feverish eyes on the circular metal gate that sealed the pit.
Chapter Master Shard stood beside Feng, her presence a needle of cold stability in the chaotic room. Lin, Kaelan, and Lian were held back at a viewing gallery above, behind a shield of reinforced crystal. Hostages for good behavior.
"Chaotic tribulation is not like elemental Qi," Shard said, her voice cutting through the hum. "It has no pattern. It is raw possibility—often violent, often mad. It will try to unravel you, to scatter your soul into a million meaningless fragments. Your flaw must be your anchor. Your hunger must be a tether."
Feng stared at the gate. The call from below was a physical pull now, a hungry vortex matching his own. She's right. But she doesn't understand. My hunger isn't a tether. It's the hook. And something down there has already bitten.
"Duration?" he asked.
"As long as you can last. Record is seven hours, set by a man whose flaw was existential density. He returned mute and is now a living paperweight. Aim for eight." Her ceramic eye glinted. "We will monitor the Maw's output. Any significant drop in chaos, and we pull you out. Any sign of the instability's source… note it. Survive, and you earn a place here. A room, resources, protection from the Enforcers. Fail, and your companions are tossed in after you to see if they fare better."
A simple bargain. Brutal, but clear.
Feng nodded. He wore only simple, sturdy trousers and a tunic. No weapons. Tools were useless here. He was the tool.
"Open it."
Shard made a sharp gesture. Cultivators at control consoles channeled their energy. The runes on the gate flared white-hot, then inverted to black. With a groan of protesting reality, the massive metal disc slid sideways, revealing not a hole, but a storm.
A column of churning, multicolored light roared upwards, held in check only by the containment field. Within it, Feng saw fleeting shapes: screaming faces, blooming galaxies of fungus, cities of crystal rising and shattering, the birth and death of stars in a heartbeat. It was creation and destruction on fast-forward, senseless and magnificent.
It's beautiful, he thought, a strange ache in his chest. It's the world's raw, unfiltered scream. And I'm supposed to eat it.
He took a step forward, then another. At the edge, the chaotic energy lashed at him. A tendril of violet fire that smelled of regret wrapped around his arm. A shard of blue ice carrying the sensation of absolute loneliness stabbed towards his heart.
His devouring core reacted instantly.
It didn't open wide. It tasted.
He let the violet fire touch his skin. The regret seeped in—the loss of a love never spoken. He acknowledged it, felt its weight, and then his hunger consumed the emotional energy of the regret, leaving behind only a cold, factual memory. The fire winked out.
The ice shard reached his chest. The loneliness was profound, a vacuum in the soul. He absorbed the feeling, the tribulation of isolation, and let the physical ice shatter harmlessly.
He was not fighting the chaos. He was sampling it. Turning the buffet into a tasting menu.
He stepped off the edge and into the storm.
The world dissolved.
Sensation overload. He was falling, but also flying, dissolving, reforming. Colors had sounds. Emotions had textures. A wave of golden joy felt like warm honey, but it hid a core of clinging, possessive need that he had to peel away and consume separately. A shrieking ribbon of pure mathematical anger cut at his mind with flawless, cold geometry; he ate the anger, but let the perfect, useless logic pass through him.
Don't try to eat it all. You'll drown. Identify the tribulation within the chaos. Grief. Rage. Despair. Even joy can be a tribulation if it's forced. Take the poison, leave the noise.
It was exhausting, meticulous work. Every second was a thousand decisions. His consciousness felt like it was being pulled in a million directions. The god-sorrow within him became a ballast, a deep, still center he could cling to. The storm's pride was the will to keep his sense of self intact. The Enforcer's focus was the scalpel that separated the nourishing pain from the mind-breaking noise.
He fell for what felt like hours, though time was meaningless here. The character of the chaos began to change. The bright, sharp fragments of emotion and sensation gave way to thicker, darker, more cohesive streams.
He passed through a river of pure, black Apathy that threatened to unmake his will to do anything, even breathe. He had to consume it in furious gulps, burning it as fuel for his own determination.
He drifted through a cloud of scintillating Paranoia, where every shifting color felt like a hidden threat. He ate the fear, but the lingering sense of being watched remained.
And then, he felt the dreams.
They weren't his. They were vast, slow, tectonic. They brushed against the chaos like the belly of a whale against a current.
I remember sun… not this sun… a younger sun. I remember roots in the molten heart of the world. I remember… silence. Before the screaming. Before the thing that bit me.
The thoughts were not in words, but in impressions of heat, pressure, and a profound, wounded rage.
The instability's source. It's not a thing. It's a wound. Something wounded the world-soul here, and the Maw is the infected, bleeding gash. The chaos is its fever-dreams.
The revelation was a cold shock even in the chaos. He wasn't here to fix a leak. He was inside a dying god's nightmare.
A new presence coalesced in the storm around him. Not a dream, but a reaction. A defense mechanism of the wound.
The chaotic energies drew together, forming a shape. A serpent of interwoven lightning and shadow, with eyes of spinning galaxies and a maw of silent vacuum. It was a Chaos-Echo, a semi-sentient pattern formed from the Maw's own pain and the memories of things it had digested.
It saw Feng, a smaller, coherent knot of devouring will in its formless realm. An irritant. A speck to be erased.
It struck.
This wasn't disparate tribulation. This was a focused attack of pure, undiluted chaos. It hit Feng like a hammer made of madness.
His careful sampling technique shattered. The chaos invaded, a tsunami against his sandcastle defenses. It sought to rewrite his DNA, to turn his memories into gibberish, to unspool the very story of Xiao Feng into random noise.
NO.
The denial was a fusion of all he was: the slave's defiance, the storm's pride, the law's focus, the god's sorrow. He clenched his will into a diamond point.
He couldn't eat this entire attack. It was too vast, too coherent in its incoherence.
So he did something else. He used the Enforcer technique he'd stolen—the precise, surgical severing of connections.
He didn't attack the Chaos-Echo. He attacked the link between the specific strands of chaos that formed it. He severed the bond holding the shadow to the lightning, the connection between the galaxy-eyes and the vacuum-maw.
The Echo shuddered, its form blurring. It wasn't hurt, but confused. Its components began to drift apart.
And in that moment of dissolution, Feng struck with his true Dao.
He didn't eat the Echo. He ate the confusion. The tribulation of a mind coming apart.
He consumed the terrifying, fleeting moment where the Echo ceased to be a "thing" and became just… noise.
The Chaos-Echo dissipated, its energy returning to the general storm, now slightly less coherent, slightly less hostile.
Feng hung in the void, trembling, his spiritual reserves drained from the effort. That one encounter had cost him more than an hour of sampling random chaos.
He looked down, or what felt like down. The dreams were stronger here, the heat and rage more palpable. The heart of the instability. The wound itself.
He knew he couldn't reach it today. Not and return alive.
But he had learned. The Maw wasn't just energy. It had defenses. A crude immune system made of pain and madness.
And he had taken his first bite of it.
He began the arduous process of pulling himself back up, against the torrent, consuming scraps of tribulation for the energy to climb. The world above, with its brutal rules and cruel people, began to seem like a haven of simple sanity.
Seven hours and forty-three minutes after descent, a shimmering, phosphorescent net—a retrieval spell—wrapped around him and hauled him violently upward, back through the storm, through the gate, and into the harsh light and cold air of the Anteroom.
He collapsed onto the cold metal floor, coughing up sparks of void and motes of forgotten color.
Chapter Master Shard looked down at him, then at a complex dial on the wall. The needle, which had been pegged in the red, had dipped. Just a fraction.
"You reduced the output," she said, a note of something like awe buried under the ice. "By 0.3%. No one has ever done that on a first descent."
Feng pushed himself to his hands and knees, his body feeling both heavy and hollow. He looked up at her, his eyes holding the afterimage of chaos.
"I found the source," he rasped. "It's not a thing. It's a wound. And it's dreaming."
Shard's organic eye widened. Her porcelain face remained impassive. "Dreaming of what?"
Feng spat a glob of iridescent phlegm onto the floor. It hissed and evaporated.
"Of the thing that bit it," he said. "And it's very, very angry."