The air in the Ancestral Stone Circle tasted of copper, incense, and greed.
Shen Li felt the cold, porous stone against his bare back, the intricate carvings of the sacrificial array biting into his skin like the teeth of some primordial beast. Above him, the bruised purple of a dying twilight bled into the first cold stars of the Azure Dragon Constellation—an auspicious night for awakening a spiritual root, the elders had said. An auspicious night for a sacrifice.
Torchlight guttered, painting monstrous, dancing shadows on the faces of the clan gathered in a silent, hungry ring. He saw the avarice in his uncle's narrowed eyes, the vindictive triumph in his aunt's pinched smile. And at the head of the array, standing within the circle of glowing spirit stones, was Shen Teng.
His cousin. His executioner.
"Little Li," Shen Teng said, his voice a silken poison of false pity. "Your sacrifice will be remembered. Your mortal frailty will give birth to my immortal glory. It is… the natural order."
Shen Li did not struggle against the silken spirit-bond ropes. He had long since exhausted himself in futile resistance days ago. Now, he simply stared, his dark eyes reflecting the flickering flames like still, deep pools. Inside, however, a cacophony was dying, replaced by an eerie, expanding silence. The fear, the betrayal, the sixteen years of silent endurance—it was all draining away, along with the warmth of his blood, drawn by the needle-points of the array into glowing channels that snaked towards Shen Teng's feet.
This is it, a fading part of him thought. A short, meaningless life. Born weak, died useful.
But as the life-force left him, as his vision began to tunnel, something else entered.
It wasn't a sound, nor a light. It was a… perspective. A vast, dizzying lattice of infinite connections superimposed over reality. Memories that were not his own erupted in his mind's eye: a grand hall of marble and shadow, a chessboard with pieces of living jade and weeping obsidian, the feel of silk cards against fingers, the sweet, victorious taste of a con that toppled a kingdom. A name echoed from a forgotten lifetime: Lin Feng, the Ghost Hand, the man who fooled the heavens.
And with the memories came the sight.
The world tore.
Not in a physical sense, but in the fabric of its being. The torch flames were no longer just fire; they were brilliant knots of Heat and Consumption, trailing threads of Light and Smoke that wavered in a non-existent wind. The faces of the clan members were grotesque puppets, each with a thick, pulsing cord of Self from their chests, entangled in a messy web of Loyalty, Hatred, Envy, and Avarice. His uncle's Greed thread was a thick, oily rope, wrapped tightly around Shen Teng's Ambition, which itself stabbed towards the heavens like a gnarled, desperate spear.
And the array. Oh, the array.
It was a masterpiece of cruel geometry, not in stone, but in pulsating, blood-red causality. Hundreds of Draining threads converged from the carvings onto his body, siphoning his Life thread—a fragile, silver filament that was growing dangerously thin and dim. All these threads then channeled into a single, roaring conduit that fed directly into Shen Teng's Potential thread, a dull grey rope that was now beginning to glow with stolen vigor.
The pain was gone. The fear was gone. All that remained was a cold, crystalline clarity that belonged to Lin Feng, the Ghost Hand.
So, the new-old consciousness mused, observing its own dying body with detached fascination. This is the game board. Not jade and obsidian, but fate and fortune. And these… are the strings.
His gaze, unseen by the enraptured clan, traced the lines of the array. It was well-constructed, for a provincial clan's desperate ploy. But to the eyes of a man who had once bankrupted a celestial bank by forging the threads of cosmic credit, it was riddled with vulgarities. A Convergence Node here, slightly misaligned, causing a minute feedback loop of wasted energy. A Binding Syllable there, its thread frayed where the carver's hand had slipped.
And there, at the very heart of the array, where the stolen Life met Shen Teng's Potential, was the Catalyst Anchor. A single, throbbing knot of causality that was the keystone of the entire ritual. Its thread was strong, reinforced by the collective belief and desire of the clan.
But every knot has a loose end.
Shen Li—Lin Feng—Shen Li's focus narrowed. His own Life thread was a whisper from snapping. He had no strength to move a muscle, no Qi to disrupt a flow. But he had will. And he had the sight.
He focused on the Catalyst Anchor. He saw not just its present, but the ghost-image of its creation—the elder's trembling hand, the drop of sweat that fell, slightly diluting the spirit ink. A microscopic flaw. A weak point in the thread.
I cannot pull strings, he thought, the concept forming with elegant simplicity. Not yet. But I can… pluck.
With the last iota of his consciousness, with the refined mental focus of a grandmaster who could play twenty games of celestial chess blindfolded, he did not push or pull. He vibrated.
He sent a single, precise, psychic tremor down the length of his own fading Life thread, straight into the flaw of the Catalyst Anchor.
In the physical world, nothing changed. Shen Teng threw his head back, arms wide, as the final surge of Shen Li's vitality flooded into him. The spirit stones flared with incandescent power. The air hummed. The clan held its breath.
"NOW!" roared the Grand Elder. "Manifest the root!"
Shen Teng screamed—a sound of ecstasy and agony. From his dantian, a light burst forth. It was a vibrant, grassy green, shot through with streaks of earthy brown—a Wood-Earth spiritual root, of solid quality. Murmurs of awe and relief broke out among the clan. His parents wept joyful tears.
Shen Li's heart gave its final beat.
His body went still. His Life thread snapped.
But the vibration had already traveled.
At the precise moment of successful manifestation, the microscopic flaw in the Catalyst Anchor resonated. The perfect, momentary harmony of the ritual was ever-so-slightly out of tune. It was a discordance no cultivator present could hear, for it played on the symphony of causality itself.
The brilliant green root solidified within Shen Teng… and then a hairline fracture, black as void, spider-webbed through its core. It was invisible to the naked eye, a flaw in its fundamental spiritual architecture. The vibrant light dimmed, just a shade. The earthy brown streaks darkened, becoming the color of mud and rot.
No one saw it. They saw only the success.
Shen Teng opened his eyes. They glowed with emerald power. He felt strength coursing through him, a feeling beyond anything he'd imagined. He looked down at the pale, lifeless shell of his cousin and let out a booming laugh that echoed in the stone circle.
"Behold!" he cried, voice ringing with new power. "The path is open! This…" he nudged Shen Li's shoulder with his foot, "…was a worthwhile use of chaff."
The clan began to bow, to offer congratulations.
Then, a whisper, dry as autumn leaves and cold as a grave, slithered into the sudden silence.
It came from the corpse.
Shen Li's lips had not moved. His lungs held no air. Yet the word, formed by the last exhalation of his spirit and carried on a manipulated thread of Sound that should not have existed, touched every ear.
"Checkmate."
The silence that followed was absolute and deafening.
The torches guttered violently. A wave of inexplicable, primal chill swept through the circle. Every hair on every neck stood on end.
Shen Teng's triumphant smile froze. A sudden, sharp twinge lanced through his freshly opened dantian, a sensation like a seed of ice taking root where his warm, new power should be. He gasped, clutching his abdomen.
"What… what was that?" his father asked, unease cracking his voice.
"Nothing!" Shen Teng snapped, forcing the pain down, attributing it to the strain of awakening. "A residual echo. The waste is dead. I am ascended!" He flared his spiritual pressure, the green-brown light erupting from him again.
But the Grand Elder, a withered man with eyes like chips of flint, was staring not at Shen Teng, but at Shen Li's body. Then, slowly, he turned his gaze to Shen Teng. His ancient senses, attuned to the flows of energy, felt it. The spiritual root had manifested. It was there. But its song was… off. A note of profound brittleness where there should have been resilient growth. A hint of decay where there should be fertility.
He said nothing. But the deep frown that carved itself onto his face spoke volumes.
The celebration was hollow, dampened by an unnameable dread. As clan members shuffled forward to offer muted praise, their eyes kept darting to the pale body on the stone. The words "worthwhile use of chaff" seemed to hang in the air, now tasting of ash.
Shen Teng basked in the attention, but the icy seed in his dantian never fully melted. A sliver of doubt, thin and sharp as a needle, had been threaded into his heart. He dismissed the corpse's last word as a trick of the wind, a hallucination born of powerful energies.
Servants were called to remove the body. As two reluctant men approached, one reached to close Shen Li's staring eyes.
And then it happened.
In the depths of Shen Li's dark, vacant pupils, a flicker of silver light sparked. Not a reflection. A tiny, self-contained star, winking into existence for a fraction of a second before vanishing.
The servant stumbled back with a cry, crossing himself against evil spirits.
"Fool!" Shen Teng snarled, covering his own jump of fear with anger. "Take it to the burial detail and burn it! Now!"
As the body was carried away, a single, weightless thought, the final coherent strand of a fused consciousness, drifted on the currents of the unseen world.
The board is set. The pieces are moving. You have taken my life, cousin. And in return, I have gifted you a future.
A future of inevitable ruin.
My first move is complete.
The game… has just begun.
The cold returned, and with it, sensation.
Shen Li drew in a shuddering, ragged breath that scorched his lungs. He was lying on a thin pallet in a dark, cramped room that smelled of damp straw and old wood. Moonlight filtered through a cracked shutter, painting a silver bar on the dirt floor.
He was alive.
Memories crashed over him in twin waves—the life of Shen Li, the weak clan reject, and the life of Lin Feng, the Ghost Hand. They swirled, merged, and settled not as a conflict, but as a perfect, terrible harmony. He was both. The frailty, the bitterness, the endless hours reading scrolls no one valued. The grandeur, the cunning, the thrill of manipulating empires from the shadows.
And the sight. It was still there.
He blinked, and the world was once more overlaid with its luminous tapestry of threads. The Dust threads dancing in the moonlight. The Wood threads of the rotting wall. The faint, sleepy Dream threads seeping from the servants' quarters nearby. It was overwhelming, beautiful, and immensely informative.
He pushed himself up, his body protesting with familiar weakness. But his mind was a razor. He assessed his situation with Lin Feng's chilling calculus.
Scenario: Sacrificial pawn, believed dead, currently in a servant's quarters. Resources: None. Physical capability: Negligible. Advantages: Foreknowledge of event in three days. Ability to perceive causal strings. The strategic mind of a grandmaster. Objective: Not just survival. Ascendancy. And repay every slight with compound interest.
A slow, thin smile touched his lips. It was not a pleasant expression. It was the smile of a spider feeling the first tremble in its web.
Outside, he could hear the distant sounds of a muted celebration. Shen Teng's celebration.
Shen Li closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to plan. In the darkness behind his lids, he began to trace the threads. The Greed of the clan elder for a rare herb. The Lust of a young master for a rival's fiancée. The Fear of the merchant in town who had cheated the clan.
So many threads. So many… opportunities.
He opened his eyes. The silver light within them gleamed, reflected in the moonlit bar on the floor.
You think you won, cousin, he thought, the words a silent vow in the stillness. You took my life and thought the game was over. But you merely switched the pieces from wood to jade. You are now a player on my board. And I…
He flexed his will, focusing on a single, thin Dust thread in the moonlight. With an immense effort of concentration, he gave it the faintest, most imperceptible tug.
The mote of dust changed its random trajectory, drifting to land silently on the windowsill.
…I have learned how to pull the strings.
To be continued...