The whisper was so faint it might have been the wind.

  “Did you hear that?”

  A girl tilted her head, gaze fixed on the cavern cleft that split the mountainside below. The mouth breathed darkness, and something within seemed to pulse faintly, like the low rumble of a storm before lightning breaks.

  Behind her, a young man reached for her sleeve. His voice carried the brittle edge of urgency. “Don’t go closer.”

  But curiosity held her where she stood, her posture leaning toward the shadows.

  Along the ridge, movement swelled. Cultivators pressed toward the precipice in clusters large and small, their murmurs threading together like insects swarming to flame. Some craned their necks toward the fissure. Others lingered with weapons half-drawn. All were waiting, bound by the lure of what lay within.

  The waiting broke in an instant.

  A figure shot out of the cavern mouth, breathless, hair trailing like a shadow torn loose. Xiao Lei. He did not pause. With a single vault he landed on the opposite ledge, voice slicing through the air.

  “Run! Run! It’s a Core Formation beast!”

  For a heartbeat, disbelief clung to the crowd. A few scoffed, lips curling in mockery—then the stone itself answered.

  The escarpment quivered. Pebbles rattled loose, tumbling into the depths below. The fissure disgorged a presence that made the air shiver. Then it appeared.

  A monstrosity—twenty, maybe twenty-five feet high. Lightning crawled across its translucent hide, sparking in violent threads. Its form was grotesque, caught between bird and toad: squat, heavy body, yet crowned with jagged wings that looked more like fractured storm-clouds than flesh.

  Gasps tore through the gathered cultivators.

  Xiao Lei was gone, already dissolving into the surge of bodies, his steps quick, decisive, every instinct bent on distance. He did not look back.

  The beast did.

  Dozens of intruders filled its sight, and fury burned brighter. For decades no human had dared disturb its cavern. Yet today they had not only stepped into its den but stolen what was sacred.

  Its tongue lashed forward, splitting the air with a crack like stone under sudden frost. A group of three froze an instant too long. Their cries were swallowed by thunder. When the tongue withdrew, three blackened husks collapsed to the stone. The smell of charred flesh rolled out, acrid and heavy.

  On the ridge behind, the girl stood transfixed at the brink, terror locking her joints as if the rock had fused to her bones. Breath hitched in shallow bursts, eyes wide and glassy in the storm-glare.

  Behind her, the youth yanked at her arm, panic cracking his voice. “Move!” But her body would not obey. A raw cry tore from her throat, echoing across the canyon like ice fracturing on a frozen river.

  The sound snapped the monster’s gaze to them. Its tongue cracked out again, white fire arcing. The youth faltered—his grip loosening, torn between dragging her or saving himself. Instinct won. He bolted, shame still clinging to his heels. Too late.

  The strike landed. Heat and ozone burst across the ledge, and where two figures had stood, only scorched husks remained, their final screams swallowed by rolling thunder.

  Shock moved through the crowd like a chill wind. Five breaths, maybe less than that and laughter curdled into a hard, awful understanding. The words they had flung as mockery returned to haunt them: Core Formation beast.

  Legs went liquid. Faces drained. The cliff’s edge trembled beneath many small, stumbling steps. Somewhere close, a girl’s sob broke the stunned hush — high, beautiful, fragile as spun crystal. Heads turned, instincts screaming to run.

  A voice answered the panic, firm and strange against the roar of fear. “We can’t run. If we turn our backs it’ll tear us in moments. We must strike together.”

  The plan sounded foolish — mad even — until feathered shadows cut the sky: arrows. A volley arced out over stone and lightning, black points thrown like stubborn prayers.

  One found its mark near the beast’s left eye. A tiny fracture spidered across the crystalline surface; a faint, angry crack that let a trickle of blue light leak like a wound.

  Hope, fragile and fluttering, tried to stand. Another voice, thin with exhaustion, echoed agreement—then the beast, enraged and faster than its size suggested, lashed again.

  Teeth grated.

  Breaths hitched.

  The creature moved with a sudden, terrible grace, tongue and wing and lightning stitched into a single, lethal motion. To flee now would doom most; to stay and attack was madness unless all struck as one. The thought hung between them like a pulse.

  Some broke, driven by bare survival. Boots scraped stone as bodies shoved past. Others, hope burning behind their fear, clenched jaws and raised blades, techniques flaring into colour — seals burning in the air, qi whispering along edge and tendon.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  For a single tense moment nearly a hundred cultivators answered the call; power converged into a desperate chorus hurled at a storm.

  Among the runners, Xiao Lei’s face was a pale mask, moonlit and unreadable. His retreat looked the same as theirs, but beneath that thin disguise calculation moved — patient, cold, predatory. He had seeded this very chaos.

  The volley, the rally to stand together — it was his design. He had shifted angles through void-steps, appearing and vanishing to feed panic where he needed it. Outward calm cloaked a body bristling with intent.

  Hidden among the ordinary arrows he’d loosed another thing: the jagged shot, forged from the unnamed technique. It condensed from qi — malformed, hooked, cruel — and flew with the rest. Ordinary shafts glanced off the beast’s glass hide. The jagged one bit. It grazed the beast’s left eye, a superficial wound, nothing that would fell a mountain, but enough.

  Enough to spark belief. Enough to split doubt open and pour hope in. The crowd seized that sliver of certainty and hurled themselves into the gap.

  The price was real. Summoning the malformed arrow, bending qi for repeated void-steps and strikes from within the cave, had drained him to bone-dry emptiness. His knees threatened to fold beneath him, each step a balance between collapse and momentum.

  If the beast turned its gaze on him alone now, he would die before he could draw another breath. He had bet everything on confusion and on their greed for retaliation.

  The gamble worked. Chaos braided the chamber; the beast tangled with the mass of attackers, its terrible focus splintered by a hundred blades and cries. That distraction carved him a path.

  Breath ragged, limbs trembling, Xiao Lei slipped through the turmoil and vanished into distance — a span bought not with safety, but with borrowed time.

  Behind him, the clamour roared — the sound of a risk taken and a moment bought at the cost of everything the crowd had believed safe.

  He didn’t know how far he had fled, or how many breaths had passed since the escape. When his legs refused even the smallest command, he sank to the ground, knees scraping stone, robes clinging like wet parchment. Sweat pooled along his temples, streaked his cheeks, and soaked the fabric across his back. Every beat of his heart hammered exhaustion, a warning that his body was fraying.

  Even his eyes threatened to close, lids heavy as iron, yet he forced them open. Somehow, he settled cross-legged, shoulders slumping but posture mindful. One knee quivered; the edges of his vision blurred—a tiny fracture of fragility that reminded him how close he teetered on collapse.

  A subtle pulse stirred in the air—so slight it could have been the shiver of the shadows themselves. Xiao Lei felt it brush against his senses, a whisper of qi sliding along the periphery of perception. He inhaled, letting trace streams of energy flow into him, filling hollow spaces like water seeping into parched stone.

  His 36 Qi channels flared, dominance flexing. Energy surged, restoring nearly a quarter of his total qi in ten minutes. When his eyes opened again, they were sharp, measured, precise. Panic’s edges were filed down, leaving only the calculative gaze of someone who had weathered storms and emerged unbroken.

  Rest was a luxury he could not afford. Pushing upright, he forced motion back into stiffened limbs. Qi had returned, but fatigue lingered like a shadow draped across muscle and bone. Every step demanded attention, every movement a calculation: the beast might have cleared the obstacles he’d left in its path. If it had tracked him despite the distance, he would need a plan, a way to survive the storm still to come.

  The pup’s voice flickered through his mind, teasing and smooth. Don’t fret, kid. There’s no way it can sense you this far, especially with me masking your aura. Let’s get to that treasure—see what it is.

  Xiao Lei did not slow. “You know,” he murmured against the cavern’s distant rumble, “for someone who claims to devour worlds, you’re not just impatient—you’re cocky.”

  A ripple of amusement—or irritation—twisted through the pup’s presence. What? You dare, kid? If I were in my true form, your mind wouldn’t survive the thought of me.

  Xiao Lei said nothing, deliberate. He felt the pup’s satisfaction coil like smoke in the starry void of his consciousness. Its small victory was complete, but the greater battle still loomed.

  He didn’t know if the treasure was worth all this risk, but hesitation in the presence of a calamity had long ago been etched into his memory as the first step toward oblivion. And Xiao Lei was far from finished.

  Finally, when the oppressive silence and absence of the emperor lightning beast confirmed he was alone, Xiao Lei stumbled into a small cavern tucked into the cliff-face. Jagged rocks lined its rim, and with the last of his strength, he rolled boulders across the entrance.

  The stone sealed him from the world outside, leaving only shadow and cool air. His body hit the ground with a muted thump, the cavern floor pressing against him like a cold, patient hand. For the first time in hours, the chill was welcome—more comforting than any bed he had known.

  He fought to keep his eyes open, but exhaustion tugged like a merciless tide. Limbs slackened. Thoughts frayed. Even the idea of dying now, after everything, struck him as absurdly ironic. To be undone by fatigue… without ever touching the treasure. A dry, bitter smirk tugged at his lips before darkness claimed him.

  But the nightmare never arrived. When he stirred again, the cavern was as he’d left it—still, cool, untouched. Residual qi whispered along the walls, and a trickle of energy threaded through him, confirming the pup’s promise: the treasure remained.

  “Come on. Take it out,” the pup’s voice flickered in his mind, curiosity lacing its tone.

  Adrenaline surged, chasing away the last vestiges of fatigue. Yet even as he moved, his hand trembled over the lotus. “Wait,” he murmured. “Seal the cave. If the beast senses its treasure… we’ll be trapped here for good.”

  The pup obliged, a ripple of energy curling across the stones to block the entrance. Only then did Xiao Lei’s fingers close around the lotus.

  It was as he had glimpsed before: a stem black as obsidian, few roots twisting like fragile veins into the earth, splitting near the base as though the plant itself might pry apart two worlds. Ghostly blue petals radiated a shivering light, their surface taut yet impossibly thin. At the centre hovered a pale red orb, lightning writhing across its surface in restless, snapping arcs, alive in its silent fury. The lotus towered over him, imposing, beautiful, dangerous.

  Neither could name its function. “The beast’s strength is tied to it,” the pup murmured, cautious.

  “What does that mean?” Xiao Lei asked, curiosity laced with suspicion.

  “Try touching the petals,” the pup suggested.

  His fingers hovered, brushing the light like catching smoke in his palm, the tremor sending shivers along his forearm. Beneath the glow, venom or trap could lie, yet the same pulse of necessity drew him forward. Every instinct screamed caution—but greed, audacity, and defiance flared hotter.

  Time contracted to a pinpoint. Breath caught. Heart hammered like war-drum. The cavern held its breath with him, shadows leaning close, as though the lotus measured his nerve before allowing its secret to unfold. And Xiao Lei… smiled—a faint, sharp curve of lips, equal parts defiance, calculation, and reckless delight.

  Favourite button, drop a rating, write a review, and leave a comment—I read them all (even the unhinged ones). Your support fuels my writing, and hey… maybe the protagonist will suffer slightly less if you do. No guarantees though! ??

  [Click here to head to the main page!]

  Destiny Reckoning. It’s set in the same universe, and you definitely don’t want to miss it, because the stories will eventually crossover.