The eye that had opened was larger than Ling Xiao's entire head.
It glowed with a soft, gold-tinged violet light, like the last ember of a forgotten sun. It didn't just look at him—it saw him. Through skin, through bone, through the chaotic energy humming in his newly awakened meridians.
Ling Xiao scrambled backward until his shoulders hit cold, carved stone. The air in the chamber was still and ancient, tasting of dust and petrified time. The glowing runes on the walls pulsed in a slow, sleeping rhythm, casting long, dancing shadows.
The massive figure on the stone throne did not move. It couldn't. Stone encased its legs, its arms, its torso—not as a burial shroud, but as a integration. The being was the mountain, and the mountain was its tomb.
"Three billion years," the rumbling voice echoed again, not from a mouth, but from the chamber itself. The stone beneath Ling Xiao vibrated with each syllable. "Since a mortal soul last breathed this air. And now… a child. A chaos-touched child."
Ling Xiao found his voice, small and scratched from dust. "What are you?"
A sound like grinding continents—a laugh. "What remains. A memory. A regret. A guardian who failed." The single open eye blinked slowly, a shutter of stone. "They called us Titans. The First Children of Chaos and Order. The builders of the first worlds."
Ling Xiao's own chaotic energy stirred, as if recognizing a relative. The silver mark on his forehead burned warmly.
"You… feel familiar," Ling Xiao whispered.
"And you," the Titan's voice softened, "are an impossibility. The mortal races that came after us… they were born of balance. Their souls are threads of order, weaving through the loom of chaos. They can touch chaos, wield it even, but they are not of it." The eye gleamed. "You are. Your soul is not a thread. It is a fragment of the loom itself."
Ling Xiao didn't understand half the words, but the meaning seeped into him through the energy in the room. He was different. Not just unusual. Wrong, in the way a square sun would be wrong.
"The scouts," Ling Xiao said, the memory of the lightning-strike and the dissolving man jolting back. "They called me an anomaly. They wanted to purify me."
"Purify." The word was a curse. "The language of the small races. The language of fear. They seek to cut away what they cannot control. To flatten the mountain because they cannot climb it." The Titan's eye drifted to the sealed ceiling. "The one above… he still seeks you. His will is a needle of order, probing the stone. He will dig his way in."
Fear, cold and sharp, returned. "He'll kill me."
"Yes."
The bluntness was terrifying.
"But not immediately,"the Titan continued. "He will want to study the energy that deflected his companion's end. He will bind you, dissect your spirit, map your chaos. It will take decades. You will be conscious for most of it."
Ling Xiao hugged his knees to his chest. He was five years old. The word "decades" was an eternity. "What do I do?"
The chamber fell silent. The runes dimmed, as if the Titan was conserving energy.
"I have a year left," the voice said, finally. It was quieter now, tinged with a fatigue older than mountains. "One turn of your world around its star. That is the last of my spirit energy. When it gutters out, I become truly stone. A statue in a forgotten tomb."
The eye fixed on him.
"I can spend that year in silence.Waiting for the end I earned long ago."
A pause.
"Or I can spend it teaching you."
Ling Xiao stared. "Teaching me what?"
"What you are. How to survive it. The first steps on a path no mortal has walked in epochs." The Titan's voice gained a sliver of intensity. "The scout is of the Sea Formation realm. A pond aspiring to be a puddle. You are Mortal Foundation, unformed clay. But your clay is primordial. With the right shaping… you could break him before the year is out."
Hope, dangerous and fragile, flickered in Ling Xiao's chest. "You could teach me to fight?"
"I could teach you to see. Fighting will follow." The Titan's gaze was heavy. "But know this, child. My path is not one of gentle cultivation. It is not one of balanced cycles and serene meditation. It is the path of the Titan. We did not cultivate chaos. We conversed with it. We argued. We wrestled. Many of us went mad. Many were torn apart. The ones who survived… we built stars."
A fragment of memory, not his own, flashed behind Ling Xiao's eyes: massive hands, not of flesh, but of condensed nebula, pressing together until a new sun ignited between them. The awe was eclipsed by terror.
"I'm not a Titan," Ling Xiao whispered.
"No. You are something else. Something new. Or something very, very old." The Titan sighed, a sound like a landslide settling. "The offer stands. One year. My final year. For you, a chance. For me… a reason not to have vanished completely."
The choice hung in the dusty air. Above, Ling Xiao could almost feel the persistent, drilling pressure of Jin's will, searching, searching. Outside was capture, torture, a slow unraveling. In here was a teacher made of stone and madness, offering a path of terrifying power.
He thought of Elder Wen's house burning. Of the villagers' fearful eyes. Of Kai dissolving into light. He thought of the lightning that had chosen to spare him.
He stood up, small and filthy in the gigantic hall. He looked at the ancient, dying being whose single eye held the ghosts of galaxies.
"Teach me," Ling Xiao said.
A deep, approving hum vibrated through the stone. "Good. The first lesson. Chaos is not random. It is complex. To a small mind, complexity looks like randomness. Your mind is not small. It is simply untrained. Look at the wall."
Ling Xiao turned to the rune-covered wall. Before, it was just pretty light.
"Do not see the light. See the pattern between the pulses. The hesitation. The syncopated rhythm. That is the heartbeat of the prison that holds me. Read it."
Ling Xiao stared. He let his eyes go soft, the way he did when watching storm patterns. The runes weren't just glowing. They were breathing. And their breath was in a staggered, pained rhythm. One set pulsed strong. Another, fainter, answered a half-beat later, trapped.
"It's… hurting you," Ling Xiao realized. "The runes are keeping you here. Some are stronger. They're the jailers. The weaker ones… they're you, trying to push back."
The Titan's surprise was a physical change in the air. "You see it immediately. Not just the energy, but the narrative within it. Perhaps I have not wasted my final year." The eye closed for a moment. "The jailers are the Seal of the Sevenfold Star. The ones who defeated us. The ancestors of the 'Star-Seers' who hunt you now."
A new kind of understanding dawned—a connection across impossible time. The scouts weren't just random enforcers. They were the heirs of the ones who had slain Ling Xiao's would-be teacher.
"Now," the Titan's voice grew urgent, "the practical lesson. The scout will break through near the eastern wall in approximately seventeen minutes. He uses a sonic resonance drill. The pattern of his attack will be a repeating triad of vibrations. Listen…"
A low thrum began to emanate from the far wall. Boom… ba-boom… boom… ba-boom…
"That is the echo of his tool. Your chaos energy resonates with vibration. You cannot stop it. But you can… edit it. Change one note in the triad. Introduce a dissonance. It will fracture his focus, slow him down. To do this, you must feel the vibration not as sound, but as a shape. Then you must push a spike of your own chaos into its weakest point."
"How?" Ling Xiao asked, feeling utterly lost.
"Breathe. Not just air. Breathe the energy of this tomb. It is thick with my faded power. It is compatible with yours. Inhale the chaos. Exhale intention."
Ling Xiao tried. He sucked in a breath. Dust and ancient air. Nothing.
"Not with your lungs, child. With your mark."
Ling Xiao focused on the star on his forehead. He thought of it opening, like a mouth. He pulled.
A stream of violet energy, visible as faint mist, detached from the nearest rune and streamed into his forehead. It was cold and electric, tasting of lightning and deep time. His body sang with sudden, overwhelming power.
"Now," the Titan guided, his voice the only steady thing in the whirlwind, "find the vibration. Give it a form in your mind."
Ling Xiao turned to the eastern wall. The boom… ba-boom… was clearer now. He didn't just hear it. He saw it. Each boom was a hammer strike of ordered energy, a perfect sphere of force. The ba-boom was a smaller, faster follow-up, a nail being driven. The pattern was relentless, mechanical.
But between the nail and the next hammer… there was a gap. A tiny space where the rhythm reset.
"There," he whispered.
"Strike now," the Titan commanded.
Ling Xiao didn't know how to 'strike' with energy. So he did what felt natural. He exhaled sharply, imagining the chaotic energy inside him as a needle, and he blew that needle toward the gap in the rhythm.
A tiny thread of violet light, no thicker than a hair, shot from his forehead and touched the wall.
Silence.
Then, from beyond the stone, a muffled curse. The rhythmic booming stopped, replaced by erratic, frustrated thumps.
"You delayed him by five minutes," the Titan said, satisfaction in his tone. "A small victory. But in a war, survival is measured in minutes. Remember this feeling. This is Chaos Sensing. The foundation of everything."
Before Ling Xiao could respond, a new sound came. Not from the east. From directly above. The sound of cracking stone.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK.
Dust rained down. A hairline fracture of pure white light—ordered, invasive light—split the dark ceiling of the tomb.
"He changed tactics," the Titan's voice was tight. "He found a natural fault. He's not drilling. He's splitting."
The fracture widened. A sliver of storm-gray sky became visible, and the howl of the valley's wind rushed in. A silhouette blocked the light—a man's form, peering down.
Jin's voice, strained with effort and fury, echoed into the chamber. "I see you, anomaly. And I see what you've found. A Titan's corpse. A treasure tomb for the Alliance. You've just made yourself more valuable than ever."
A rope of shimmering silver energy snaked down from the crack, its end forming a glowing lasso. It descended directly toward Ling Xiao.
"The lesson is over," the Titan said, his voice suddenly resonating with a power that made the entire tomb shudder. "The test begins. Survive the next five minutes, Ling Xiao. Or everything ends here."
The lasso dropped around Ling Xiao's shoulders, cold and binding. It began to tighten.
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END OF CHAPTER 4