Xīng Hé returned to her manor and sat in the silence for a long time.
Then she ripped off her finger.
The bone snapped clean. She watched the stump, counting under her breath. Flesh crept over the wound with agonizing slowness—veins threading together, skin sealing from the edges inward.
Twenty-nine minutes.
She flexed the regrown finger, feeling the faint ache of new bone.
Yao's had taken seconds.
She stood and walked to the training room.
The mirror's simulation came alive the moment she stepped inside—a standard opponent, mid-Resonance stage, the kind she had fought dozens of times before her evolution.
It moved first.
She felt it before she saw it. Not with her eyes—with something new, something that extended outward from her body like an invisible second skin. The opponent's strike came from her left, but she was already turning, already raising her arm.
The blow landed on her forearm instead of her temple.
She stood there for a moment, processing what had just happened.
Divine sense.
She had read about it. Had known it was coming with evolution. But knowing and experiencing were different things—the awareness pressed against her consciousness constantly, feeding her information she didn't know how to filter. The training room's walls. The mirror's surface. The simulation opponent circling her with mechanical patience.
All of it, present in her mind at once.
She let the simulation run.
It was disorienting enough that she lost the first three bouts—too much information, attention fractured between her eyes and the new perception that refused to quiet itself. By the fourth, she had learned to let it exist beneath conscious thought rather than fighting it.
By the seventh, she stopped losing.
The drain was noticeable. Not debilitating, but present—a subtle pull she would need to manage carefully. She filed that away and pushed on.
She found the seals by accident.
Mid-bout, a strike came faster than she could physically block. She felt the impact coming through her divine sense and reached instinctively for Preservation—not to block, but to *stop*—
The seal snapped into existence between her body and the blow.
It shattered on impact. But it held long enough.
She stood breathing hard, staring at where it had been.
She spent the next hour learning to place them deliberately. On herself. On the training room's practice dummies. On the floor in front of her, watching them absorb simulated strikes before fracturing. The limitations became clear quickly—anything above her stage broke through without slowing. But against equals, a well-placed seal could mean the difference between standing and falling.
She discovered the memory aspect almost as an afterthought.
The simulation had cycled through seventeen different combat patterns. She realized, somewhere around the twelfth, that she could recall the first with perfect clarity—every movement, every timing, every variation. Not because she had memorized it consciously. Simply because she had seen it.
She tested it deliberately. Read three pages of an Ascendant diary. Closed the book.
Recited it back word for word.
Useful, she thought, and moved on.
Restoration gave her more trouble.
She understood the healing—had been using it since awakening, knew its rhythms. But the new depth resisted her attempts to map it cleanly. She damaged an artifact in the training room, an old practice blade with a cracked edge, and reached for Restoration without thinking.
The crack sealed.
She stared at it.
Then she broke it deliberately. Not just the edge—snapped the blade entirely, two clean pieces. Reached again.
The pieces drew together. Slower than the crack had been. The metal knit itself back along the break line, imperfect at first, then smoothing as her concept settled into the work.
She set the restored blade down carefully.
Objects, she thought. Not just living things.
The implications unfolded slowly. Weapons that shattered in combat. Defenses that crumbled. Equipment that failed at the wrong moment. She sat with the thought until it became something practical rather than abstract, then set it aside.
Balance remained strange.
She had never fully understood it—had used it instinctively more than deliberately, let it guide her rather than directing it herself. Now she tried to examine it directly, which felt like trying to look at her own eyes without a mirror.
She disrupted the training simulation's rhythm without meaning to. One moment it was cycling through its patterns, the next it had stalled—its movements stuttering, timing thrown off. She released her grip on Balance and it resumed.
She tried the opposite. Settled a stillness into the space around her.
The simulation's movements smoothed. Became almost predictable.
Equilibrium, she thought. Evening things out.
She used it on herself next—reached inward and found the frayed edges of her own emotional state, the grief and exhaustion and barely-suppressed fury that had been present since the mission. She didn't eliminate them. Just... balanced them. Set them level.
The clarity that followed was almost startling.
She sat with it for a long moment.
Then she released all three at once.
She didn't intend to merge them.
The three concepts—Preservation, Restoration, Balance—had always felt like separate tools in a belt, distinct and manageable. But as she sat in the center of the training room, the new, hyper-sensitive resonance of her Attuned blood began to hum. It wasn't a choice; it was a collision. The concepts didn't just activate; they interlocked, like tectonic plates grinding against one another until the friction ignited.
Suddenly, the air didn't just feel heavy—it felt solid.
A sphere of absolute, crystalline stillness expanded from her chest, rushing outward until it hit the training room walls with a dull, thumping vibration that Xīng Hé felt in her teeth. Within this space, the world broke. The dust motes in the air stopped falling; they hung suspended, preserved in amber. The flickering light of the artifacts didn't just steady—it became a constant, unchanging roar of radiance.
Xīng Hé gasped, but the air she drew in tasted of nothing—no oxygen, no scent, just the cold, sterile flavor of "Existence."
She could feel every atom within the ten-meter radius. It was a Support Domain, but it felt like a cage. She was forcing the universe to be "Level," forcing reality to "Restore" itself faster than time allowed, and forcing every molecule to "Preserve" its state.
Then the price arrived.
The "drain" wasn't a slow leak; it was a predatory beast. It felt as if a hook had been buried in her navel and was pulling her entire soul toward the center of the room. Her vision tunneled. Her veins, now saturated with the concept's authority, burned with a cold, blue fire that made her skin itch with the threat of bursting.
I am not supposed to be here, she realized, the thought sluggish and heavy. A mortal heart cannot beat in a world without change.
The domain didn't dissolve; it shattered.
The sound was like a mountain of glass falling onto a marble floor. The backlash hit her with the physical weight of a falling star. Every bit of entropy she had held back—the fatigue, the grief, the tiny micro-tears in her muscles—all of it rushed back into her at once.
Xīng Hé slammed into the floor, her lungs seizing. She didn't just feel "tired." She felt like she had been unmade and stitched back together with rusty wire.
As she lay there, her cheek pressed against the cold stone, the "Wanting" returned. It wasn't a faint tug anymore. It was a whisper at the base of her skull, a dark, hungry vibration that seemed to congratulate her on the disaster.
Almost, it seemed to say. Do it again. Give me more.
She stayed there for a long time, the silence of the manor feeling less like peace and more like a predator waiting for her to move.
She was still sitting there when the sensation returned.
It had been present since the evolution—a tugging at the edge of her awareness, something external that felt almost like her own concepts but wasn't. She had dismissed it as residual noise from the advancement process.
Now, in the quiet aftermath of the domain's collapse, it was harder to ignore.
It wasn't threatening. Wasn't aggressive. It felt almost like—
Wanting.
Like something at the edge of her perception wanted her attention. Wanted her to reach back.
She didn't.
Not yet.
She had enough pieces in motion. Heiyun's offer. Yao's silences. Twenty-three names she hadn't been able to save. The joint mission Heiyun had mentioned, children from all the rulers' domains converging on a single point.
She filed the sensation away and pushed herself to her feet.
There was still work to do.
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