Chapter 32: The Summoning
Xiao Feng stood before Chapter Master Shard, the silence in her chamber thicker than the canyon's stone. The blood from the Purist mission was still a phantom scent on his clothes. Vex stood at parade rest beside him, her report delivered in clipped, merciless tones.
Shard's organic eye studied a crystal tablet, its surface flickering with data—likely the biometrics and spiritual readings Vex had collected during the operation. Her porcelain cheek reflected the cold light, giving nothing away.
"Fang-7's operational rating is confirmed," Shard said, setting the tablet down with a soft click. "Efficiency: 94%. Synergy: Remarkable. Casualties: Zero. You have passed the field test, Xiao Feng."
The use of his full name was deliberate. Not 'Feng,' the lone wolf, the error. Xiao Feng, the asset, the commander.
"Your reward is twofold," she continued. "First, your companions—Lin, the sand-man, the shadow-girl—are granted provisional Blade status. They will be assigned to auxiliary duties. Their safety is now marginally more secure, as their deaths would represent a loss of investment."
Xiao Feng gave a slight nod. It was not freedom, but a longer leash. He'd take it.
"Second," Shard said, a subtle tension entering her frame. "You are granted a solo descent into the Maw. Your previous interaction suggests you can not only withstand the chaos but interact with its… consciousness. The instability spikes are becoming more frequent. We need data from deeper than any probe has gone. You will descend for twelve hours. You will seek the source of the dreams. You will not engage. You will observe, and return."
A solo mission. Deeper into the wound. It was a promotion and a death sentence woven together.
"Understood," Xiao Feng said.
"Dawn tomorrow," Shard stated, dismissing him. "Prepare. Or don't. The Maw doesn't care."
Back in the barracks he shared with his original trio, Xiao Feng relayed the news. Lin's expression was grim. "They're pushing you to see how much you can take before you break. Or before you find something so valuable it's worth more than you."
Kaelan's sandy form shifted uneasily. "The sands remember tales of those who listened too closely to the earth's pain. They became part of its story, unable to leave."
Lian simply moved closer, her shadow stretching to touch his own in a gesture of silent solidarity.
"I'll be back," Xiao Feng said, the words feeling hollow even to him. His hunger, however, thrummed in anticipation. Deeper. Closer to the source. Closer to the feast.
Dawn came, cold and indifferent. The Anteroom of Dissolution hummed with a higher pitch today, the Maw's energy restless. The gate runes glowed with an angry red light.
Shard was there, along with a contingent of technocrats monitoring a bank of esoteric instruments. "Remember," she said, her dual-colored eyes boring into him. "Observe. Do not provoke. Your life is less valuable than the data you might retrieve, but your death would be a waste of a useful tool."
Xiao Feng said nothing. He walked to the edge. The chaotic column of light roared before him, today tinged with veins of ugly, pulsing black. The dreams were louder. He could feel them as a pressure behind his eyes: Hurt. Trapped. ANGRY.
He stepped into the storm.
The descent was familiar yet profoundly different. The chaos was not just random here; it was directed. As if the wound knew he was coming back, and it was paying attention.
Tendrils of condensed nightmare snaked towards him—not to attack, but to inspect. A coil of freezing mist that carried the memory of a star's death brushed his cheek. A ribbon of screaming light that was the birth-cry of a poisonous galaxy wrapped around his wrist, tasting his Qi.
He did not consume them. He let them taste. He was a guest in the wound's house now, and it was deciding if he was food or something else.
He fell deeper than ever before. The kaleidoscopic chaos began to darken, the colors bleeding into deep purples, bruise-blues, and an absolute, light-eating black. The temperature rose, not with heat, but with a psychic pressure, a density of suffering.
He reached a layer where the chaos wasn't streaming upward, but swirling in a vast, slow, toroidal flow—like a hurricane around an eye. This was near the heart.
And here, the dreams were not fragments. They were visions.
He saw it.
Not with his eyes, but in his soul. A memory imprinted on the fabric of this place.
A presence. Vast, warm, slow. A consciousness as wide as a continent, slumbering in the planet's mantle. Not a god, but a World-Spirit, a nascent sentience of the land itself.
Then, a falling star. Not rock. A shard of foreign law. A sleek, silver needle of impossible geometry, dripping with the cold logic of a different universe. It pierced the World-Spirit's dream-body, not to kill, but to anchor. To siphon. To impose order on the dreaming chaos.
The World-Spirit woke in agony. Its thrashing created the Scarred Wastes. The foreign shard—the Anchor—became lodged in its side, a leaking wound. The chaos was its lifeblood, infected and fevered, spilling out. The Maw was the infection point.
The Anchor was still there. Still siphoning. Still imposing its cold, logical, wrong order on the spirit's native dream.
The vision faded, leaving Xiao Feng trembling in the swirling dark. He understood now. The instability wasn't the wound dying. It was the wound fighting the parasite. The chaos spikes were the World-Spirit's immune response, trying to expel the foreign object.
The Broken Blade, in their ignorance, were trying to suppress the fever to save the patient, not knowing the fever was the cure.
A new presence coalesced in the storm before him. Not a Chaos-Echo this time. Something… curated.
The swirling energies formed a figure. It was humanoid, but made of solidified, logical patterns—geometric light, rotating equations, gleaming silver filaments. It had the same aesthetic as the Heaven's Enforcers, but purer, older, colder. In its chest pulsed a core of that same foreign, silver light he'd seen in the vision.
A Custodian. A automated defense system left by the Anchor.
It looked at Xiao Feng with eyes of spinning calculus. Its voice was the sound of perfect gears meshing.
"ANOMALY DETECTED. PROXIMITY TO PRIMARY ANCHOR IS UNAUTHORIZED. YOU CARRY TAINT OF NATIVE RESISTANCE (GRIEF-SIGNATURE). ASSESSMENT: CONTAMINANT. PURIFICATION PROTOCOL ENGAGED."
It extended a hand. From its palm, a beam of Absolute Order lanced out. This wasn't the crude judgment of the Weeping Eye. This was the fundamental principle of a universe that had no room for chaos, for flaw, for dreaming. It sought not to erase Xiao Feng, but to reformat him into something logical, quiet, and useful.
Xiao Feng had no defense against this. His Dao was of this world—of consumption, chaos, and tribulation. This was an anti-virus from outside.
The beam hit him.
Agony was too small a word. It was un-becoming. His memories started to linearize, his emotions to flatten into data points. The storm in him was forced into a predictable sine wave. The god-sorrow was analyzed as a spiritual inefficiency and marked for deletion.
He was being turned into a report.
NO.
The rebellion was primal. It came from the deepest part of him, the part that was still a Debt-Slave digging graves, the part that had chosen to eat lightning rather than die. It came from the swallowed pride of the Storm Khan and the stolen certainty of the Enforcer. It came from the cold, deep lake of god-sorrow.
They were all flaws. All chaos. All resistance.
He couldn't consume the beam of Absolute Order. It was the opposite of food.
So he did the only thing he could. He used the World-Spirit's own weapon.
He opened himself to the chaotic, fevered, native energy of the Maw around him—the raw, angry, dreaming tribulation of the wounded earth. He didn't just pull it in; he channeled it, using his body as a conduit, and aimed it directly at the logical, reforming beam.
CHAOS versus ORDER.
DREAM versus LAW.
The two opposing forces met in the space of his own unraveling spirit. The conflict was cataclysmic on a microscopic scale. It was the war of the Maw itself, fought inside the soul of one flawed boy.
Xiao Feng screamed, a sound lost in the chaos. His body became a battleground. He felt his meridians tear and rebuild in the same instant. His dantian screamed as the storm, the silence, the sorrow, and his own hungry void were all hammered on the anvil of this cosmic conflict.
He was not consuming. He was being forged.
The Custodian observed, its head tilting. "UNEXPECTED RESISTANCE. NATIVE CONTAMINATION IS RESILIENT. ESCALATING PURIFICATION."
A second beam, more intense, joined the first.
Xiao Feng's world went white. Then black. Then a profound, silent grey.
He felt a hand. Not physical. Vast. Gentle. Suffering.
It was the World-Spirit. A tendril of its agonized consciousness, brushing against his own crumbling will. It recognized the flavor of the god-sorrow within him—another lost, divine thing. It recognized his hunger—a fellow creature trying to survive in a painful world.
It did not help him fight. It gave him a gift.
A single, perfect drop of Primordial Tribulation. Not the infected chaos of the Maw, but the pure, undiluted pain of a world being violated. The pain of existence itself.
Xiao Feng took it.
He swallowed the pure, unadulterated agony of a living planet.
And in that moment, his Dao… evolved.
The hungry void at his center didn't just consume anymore. It understood. It gained a new principle: EMPATHETIC CONSUMPTION. He could now not just eat a tribulation, but comprehend its origin, its nature, its place in the tapestry of suffering. And in understanding it, he could consume it perfectly, leaving no poison, no echo, only pure, integrated power.
He turned this new understanding upon the beams of Absolute Order.
He did not see them as an attack. He saw them as a tribulation of sterility. The suffering of a universe with no surprise, no dream, no flaw.
And he ate the sterility.
The logical beams frayed, their perfect order disrupted by the chaotic, empathetic hunger now devouring them. The Custodian's geometric form flickered.
"ERROR. CORRUPTION VICTORIOUS IN LOCAL CONTEXT. WITHDRAWING. ANCHOR INTEGRITY REMAINS."
It dissolved back into the chaos.
Xiao Feng hung in the void, reborn. He was shattered. He was whole. He was more than he was.
He had taken a bite of the world's soul.
And he now knew the truth. The Broken Blade wasn't just guarding a resource.
They were guarding the Anchor's feeding tube. And he, Xiao Feng, had just become the only thing in either world that could potentially pull it out.