The rain fell in sheets, turning the village paths to rivers of mud. Through the downpour, Kai's voice cut like a blade.
"Burn it."
"What?" Jin stared at his superior, rain dripping from the brim of his traveler's hat. "The house? With the elder inside?"
"The anomaly has gone to ground. Smoke him out." Kai's expression was carved from ice. "And signal the village. Anyone harboring the child shares his fate."
Jin hesitated only a moment before nodding. He understood the calculus: one unstable chaos-touched child versus planetary security. The math was brutal, but clear.
He raised a hand, fingers weaving a quick formation in the air. A spark of silver light blossomed at his fingertips, then shot toward Elder Wen's thatched roof.
The house erupted in flames that burned blue-white, defying the pouring rain. Spirit fire—it would consume everything, even stone, until its caster willed it to stop.
Inside, Elder Wen coughed as smoke filled the main room. "Ling Xiao!" he shouted, stumbling toward the back room. But the boy wasn't there. Just a loose floorboard, and darkness below.
The old man smiled through the smoke. Clever boy.
Then the ceiling beam above him groaned, charred through. He dove aside as it crashed down, embers scattering across the floor. The heat was unbearable.
Outside, villagers had gathered, drawn by the unnatural fire that burned in the rain.
"Give up the child!" Kai's voice boomed, amplified by cultivation. "This ends when he's in our custody!"
Old Man Li stepped forward, wringing his hands. "He's not in there! The boy ran!"
"Then find him." Kai's eyes swept the crowd. "One spirit stone per household still stands. But only if he's delivered before the next hour passes. After that…" He let the threat hang, punctuated by another section of Elder Wen's roof collapsing.
The greed in their eyes warred with fear. Then Mei Lin, the woman whose house had cracked, pointed a trembling finger toward the eastern tree line. "I saw something moving that way! Toward the valley!"
A murmur ran through the crowd. The forbidden valley. Where the great storm had been born. Where no one went and returned the same.
Kai nodded to Jin. "You take the north path. I'll take the south. Flush him toward the cliffs."
"And the villagers?" Jin asked.
"Let them hunt. More eyes, more chance." Kai's smile was thin. "If the valley kills some of them, it's fewer witnesses."
---
Under the village, in the dark and the mud, Ling Xiao crawled.
The space was tight, barely larger than his small frame, and it stank of wet earth and rotting roots. But he could feel the vibrations through the soil—the heavy footsteps of cultivators, the lighter patter of villagers, all converging, all hunting.
He followed the pull.
It was a hum in his bones, a resonance that grew stronger as he moved east. The same feeling he got before a storm, but deeper, older. The valley was calling him. Or the chaos within it was.
He emerged from the crawl space a hundred yards beyond the village perimeter, through a hole where a lightning-struck tree had torn up its roots. The rain immediately soaked him to the skin, but he didn't feel the cold. His mark—the silver star between his brows—was glowing faintly, pulsing in time with the distant thunder.
Behind him, shouts. Torches bobbing in the rain.
"There! By the broken pine!"
Ling Xiao didn't look back. He ran.
Five-year-old legs pumped through mud and slippery grass, carrying him up the rising slope toward the jagged mouth of the Stormfang Pass. The forbidden valley lay beyond—a place of permanent clouds and ground that shook even on calm days.
Something whistled past his ear, embedding itself in a tree trunk with a thunk. A dart, tipped with something that shimmered with suppression energy.
"Don't kill him!" Jin's voice, from somewhere to the left. "We need him alive!"
For now, Ling Xiao thought, the understanding cold and clear in his mind. Alive for study. Then containment. Then disposal.
He reached the pass as the first villagers crested the ridge behind him. Their torches looked like angry eyes in the gloom.
"Stop, boy!" Old Man Li shouted, surprisingly fast for his years. "Don't go in there! It's death!"
Ling Xiao paused at the threshold. Before him, the valley opened up—a bowl of shattered rock and swirling mist. Lightning flashed within the clouds below, silent but constant. The air tasted of ozone and something else, something metallic and wild.
He looked back at the villagers. At their frightened, furious faces. At the two silver-robed scouts moving to flank him.
"I'm sorry," he said, though he wasn't sure what he was apologizing for. For being born? For drawing patterns? For existing?
Then he stepped into the valley.
The change was immediate.
The rain didn't just fall here—it spiraled, dancing in eddies and whirlpools. The wind didn't blow—it sang, a low hum that vibrated in his teeth. And the lightning… the lightning was alive.
A bolt arced from a cloudbank, not striking the ground but weaving between stones like a curious serpent. It passed within an arm's length of Ling Xiao, and he felt every hair on his body stand on end.
But not from fear.
From recognition.
The energy in the lightning called to the energy in his blood. His mark burned brighter, and for the first time, he understood what it was—not a curse, not a brand, but an organ. A new sense. One that could taste chaos.
"Follow him!" Kai's command cut through the valley's song.
The villagers hesitated at the threshold, but the scouts did not. Jin entered first, his device now screaming so loudly it distorted the air around it. Kai followed, a sword of condensed moonlight appearing in his hand.
Ling Xiao ran deeper, toward the heart of the valley where the storm had torn the sky open five years ago. The ground trembled with every step. Cracks glowed with violet energy beneath his feet.
"Anomaly, halt!" Kai's voice was closer than it should have been. "This is your last warning!"
Ling Xiao glanced back. Kai was moving with impossible speed, feet barely touching the ground, closing the distance with each heartbeat.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced Ling Xiao's chest. He scrambled up a slope of loose shale, stones skittering away beneath his hands and feet.
"Got you." Kai's hand closed around his ankle.
Ling Xiao kicked, twisted, bit—but the cultivator's grip was iron. He was lifted into the air, dangling upside down, rain running up his face into his eyes.
"Fascinating," Kai murmured, turning him like a specimen. "The chaotic energy isn't just around you. It's integrating. Your meridians… I can see them glowing through your skin."
Ling Xiao struggled, but it was useless. Kai's other hand came up, fingers extended toward his forehead—toward the mark. "Let's see what happens when we suppress the resonance point."
The fingers touched.
Pain.
Not the pain of injury, but of something being unmade. The connection between Ling Xiao and the valley snapped. The song became noise. The patterns became chaos. He screamed, a raw, child's scream that was swallowed by the storm.
"Jin, prepare the containment seals," Kai said, his voice clinical. "We'll extract him here before the environment interferes."
But the valley had other plans.
The moment Kai's suppression energy entered Ling Xiao's body, the valley reacted. Like an immune system attacking a foreign pathogen.
The ground beneath them erupted.
Not in explosion, but in growth. Crystalline structures shot upward—jagged, violet, singing with chaotic energy. One pierced Kai's shoulder, not deep, but enough to make him drop Ling Xiao with a curse.
The boy hit the ground rolling, the pain in his head replaced by a roaring in his ears. The valley's energy was flooding back into him, but different now—angry, defensive.
He scrambled to his feet as Kai tore the crystal from his shoulder, blood mixing with violet light.
"Enough of this," the scout snarled. He raised his sword, and the moonlight blade brightened until it hurt to look at. "If we can't take you pure, we take you in pieces."
He struck.
Not at Ling Xiao, but at the ground between them. A wave of ordered energy, perfect and cold, shot forward. Where it passed, the chaotic crystals shattered, the wild energy subdued, the very air stilled.
It hit Ling Xiao like a wall.
He flew backward, tumbling end over end, the ordered energy searing through his chaotic meridians. It hurt worse than the suppression—this was annihilation, the opposite of what he was, trying to overwrite his very nature.
He came to a stop at the edge of a cliff, the valley's heart churning below him in a maelstrom of cloud and lightning.
Kai approached, sword ready for a finishing strike. "A shame. The Alliance would have learned much from you."
Ling Xiao tried to stand, but his body wouldn't obey. The ordered energy was inside him, fighting the chaos, tearing him apart from within.
Above, the storm clouds gathered. Concentrated. As if taking aim.
Jin shouted from a distance, "Kai, the energy readings are spiking! Get back!"
But Kai didn't retreat. He raised his sword for a final thrust.
The sky answered.
A bolt of lightning thicker than a tree trunk lanced down. Not violet, but pure white—a concentrated beam of celestial fury.
It struck Kai's upraised sword.
The scout had time for one shocked expression before the energy traveled down the blade, through his body, and into the ground. He didn't scream. He came apart, dissolving into motes of light that were swallowed by the storm.
The sword clattered to the ground, now just ordinary metal.
Ling Xiao stared, breathless. The lightning had missed him by inches. He should be dead. But…
He looked at his hands. At the way the residual energy from the bolt swirled around them, not harming him, but… merging. Tiny arcs of white light danced between his fingers, then sank into his skin. The ordered energy Kai had forced into him was burned away, replaced by this new, purer chaos.
He could feel it. Not just around him. In him.
The storm had defended him.
"KAI!" Jin's scream was raw with horror and rage. He stood fifty yards away, his device shattered in his hands, face pale. "You… you killed him!"
Ling Xiao shook his head. "I didn't—"
"Chaos spawn!" Jin's hands came up, weaving a formation faster than sight. "I'll burn the chaos out of you atom by atom!"
A net of silver light shot from his fingers, expanding to cover the entire cliff edge. This wasn't capture. This was eradication.
Ling Xiao did the only thing he could.
He jumped.
Not away from the net, but off the cliff—into the heart of the valley, into the maelstrom below.
The net followed, but the storm intervened. A whip of lightning caught it, tore it apart. Jin's scream of frustration faded as Ling Xiao fell.
Wind roared in his ears. Lightning flashed around him. But he wasn't afraid. The energy here was thick, liquid almost, and his body drank it in. His mark blazed like a small star on his forehead. His meridians, once burning with ordered energy, now sang with chaotic power.
He fell toward a lake of churning clouds—but just before he hit, the ground beneath those clouds shifted.
The entire mountainside was sliding.
The cliff he'd jumped from, weakened by Kai's attack and the storm's fury, collapsed. A landslide of rock and earth and ancient crystals thundered down, catching Ling Xiao in its flow.
He tumbled, world turning over and over, stone striking him, dirt filling his mouth. But through it all, he felt the chaos cradling him, directing the flow, ensuring he wasn't crushed.
Then the ground beneath him opened.
A crack, glowing with inner light, widened as the landslide hit it. Stones fell into darkness. Ling Xiao fell with them.
Down into the mountain's heart.
Down into ancient dark.
Down—
Impact.
Not on stone, but on something that gave way—a cushion of thick moss or fungus. The air left his lungs in a whoosh. Above, the crack closed as more earth shifted, sealing him in.
Silence.
Darkness.
Then, slowly, light.
Not from above, but from around him. The walls of this cave—no, not a cave, something carved, something made—glowed with faint violet runes. They pulsed like a slow heartbeat.
Ling Xiao pushed himself up, every bone aching. He was in a chamber larger than Elder Wen's house. The walls were smooth, too smooth for natural stone. The floor was etched with patterns that made his head hurt to look at—too ordered, too perfect, the opposite of the chaos he understood.
At the chamber's center stood a dais.
And on that dais…
A figure sat in a throne of stone, massive even in repose. Not a man. Something older. Its skin looked like cracked granite, its hair like fossilized roots. It wore armor made of crystalline formations that still shimmered with captured lightning.
Its eyes were closed.
But as Ling Xiao stared, one of those eyes—the right one—cracked open.
A glow like a dying star shone out, fixing on him.
A voice spoke, not through air, but through the stone, through his bones, through the chaos in his blood.
"A chaos-touched mortal?" it rumbled, the words shaking dust from the ceiling. "Here? After three billion years of silence?"
The eye focused on Ling Xiao's mark, and the glow intensified.
"Child of the storm," the ancient thing said. "What have you awakened?"
---
END OF CHAPTER 3