It began with a scent.
Not the perfume of incense or the dry tang of sacred ash that clung to the temples of Phoenix City, but something rancid, sweet, thick, and wrong.
It crept into the palace like a whisper, carried on strands of Qi that twisted unnaturally. Where natural Qi flowed like a river, vital, pure, this seeped like rot, dense and stagnant, as if it had been severed from the breath of the world.
Ryu noticed it first.
Meditating in the southern garden, surrounded by spirit lilies and lacquered stone lanterns, he felt the world veins pulse unevenly beneath him. The flow stuttered, tightened. Not blocked but coiled around. Something suffocating the channels from within.
His eyes opened slowly.
"They're moving underground."
That evening, the three gathered in one of the palace's private halls. The air within flickered with soft flame from hanging lanterns, and the walls bore tapestries woven with phoenix crests.
Ryu spoke first. "It's not just corrupted Qi. It's being redirected, cut from the world and fed into something else. Something unnatural."
Yan nodded. "Near the old temples... the air tastes stale. Even the flames in that area aren't breathing right."
Kalavan poised his arms. "Qi poisoning. I saw this in texts in the Void
palace. Necrotic techniques. The kind banned by every sect in the first age."
Ryu's brow tightened. "Those should have died out long ago."
"They did," Yan said grimly. "But this world... it's no longer playing by the old rules."
Later that night, cloaked in spirit-threaded hoods that masked their auras, they moved through the lower districts of Phoenix City. The streets were quiet but uneasy, spirit lanterns flickered without wind, casting long shadows across stone courtyards.
Yan led them toward the Temple District's far edge, where collapsed masonry choked once-sacred paths. Beneath the rubble, they reached a half-buried shrine, a forgotten sanctum of flame ascetics, long since reduced to dust and overgrowth.
The Qi here felt colder. Heavier.
Inside, a stray breeze stirred the ash, revealing a freshly etched sigil,
A spiral of thorns surrounding a broken flame.
Ryu frowned. "That's no sect I've studied."
Yan crouched low, fingers brushing the mark. "It's not from any known lineage."
Kalavan unsheathed a dagger. "Because it's new."
A low scrape echoed from deeper inside.
A figure stepped from the darkness, warped, barely human. Its skin hung tight over its bones, eyes entirely black, hollowed with rot. Tendrils of Qi spiralled from its spine, anchoring it to the cracked floor like roots.
Its jaw split too far. "You should not have come."
Kalavan struck without hesitation. His blades flashed, but the creature caught one, barehanded. The air rippled as corrupted Qi bled outward.
Yan flared into action. "Don't let it bind your meridians!"
Ryu slammed a palm to the ground. Golden Yang Qi pulsed outward burning away the crawling tendrils.
The creature screamed, a high, broken sound that no longer belonged to man.
The fight was sharp and vicious.
Kalavan severed its limbs with lethal precision. Yan's phoenix flame blasted through its core. Ryu ended it, his blade bending space to pierce the creature's heart from three angles at once.
Ash drifted through the air. The shrine trembled with residual Qi shock.
Ryu crouched beside the remains.
No blood. Only charred residue. And a second symbol burnt into the stone.
"The Ash Sect," he murmured.
"They're using forbidden channels," Yan said softly. "Binding themselves to death, feeding on decay."
Kalavan's gaze hardened. "And they're building something. Beneath us."
Back at the palace the trio reconvened in the inner archives, dusty chambers filled with scrolls, maps, and relics of the old world. Yan spread a parchment across a jade inlayed table. The cult's symbol glared up at them.
She tapped a half-erased sigil in an old scroll. "They called themselves the Ash Sect. A splinter cult from before the collapse. Their belief? That Qi is meant to be broken. That the cycle of life and death is a cage."
Kalavan nodded. "And with the world veins active again, they've found new ground to infect."
Far below Phoenix City in tunnels forgotten even by the temple builders descendants a figure stood before a pool of shimmering, sickly green Qi. Its surface bubbled softly, pulsing like a dying heartbeat.
Around him knelt six others, cloaked in rags, eyes vacant, auras deformed.
The leader extended a hand.
"She has returned."
A ripple moved through the pool.
"And with her… the key."
The entrance lay hidden beneath an abandoned bathhouse near the Temple District's edge. Glyphs carved in fading flame script sealed the stones beneath its floor.
Ryu knelt, fingers brushing against the resonance node buried deep in the foundation. With a careful pulse of Yang Qi, the glyph cracked, and the ground split open, revealing a spiral staircase descending into pure dark.
No light.
No Qi.
Only absence.
Yan summoned phoenix-fire. Its golden glow flickered strangely, like the tunnel resisted light itself.
Kalavan's steps made no sound. "They buried this for a reason."
"They didn't expect us to follow," Ryu said.
Downward they moved, past layers of bedrock and forgotten ruins. The air grew sharp, metallic, cold.
The tunnels opened into a complex of ancient halls, once sacred, now wrong. The Qi was warped, muffled, like energy submerged beneath thick water. Ryu's breath felt shallow. The world here breathed backwards.
Half-melted glyphs stained the walls. Some pulsed faintly.
Others watched.
Then they heard it.
Chanting. Dozens of voices, low and deliberate.
The trio slipped behind a collapsed arch, peering into the heart of the hidden ruin.
The central chamber was immense. A dome of black stone stretched overhead, lit by heatless Qi-braziers. At its centre, a ritual circle of carved obsidian spiralled outward, glowing with lines of corrupted Qi that rotated like a clock.
Cloaked figures knelt in formation, heads bowed. At least thirty of them.
Atop a dais stood their leader, arms extended, still as stone. His robes shimmered with layered enchantments, unmoving.
His voice, when it came, echoed inside the bones.
"Balance is a cage.
Harmony, a lie.
Let the world forget what it means to be whole."
Yan's voice dropped to a whisper. "He's not channelling it… He's feeding on the Qi."
Kalavan's grip tightened. "We stop him, now."
"Not yet," Ryu murmured. His eyes locked on the item in the man's hand. "That crystal, "
The cult leader raised a small, dark stone. It pulsed once.
Ryu's heart froze.
The stone pulsed again and answered him.
The man turned, slowly.
"Children of the surface," he said. "Why do you walk where fire once ruled?"
Yan's flame ignited at her palm. "We've seen enough."
The man tilted his head. "Then come. End it."
The fight shattered the silence.
Kalavan surged into motion, twin daggers cleaving through cultists in a blur. His movements were sharp and economical, each step a whisper, each strike a whisper turned lethal. He pivoted between shadows and flame, his blades carving precise arcs that severed limbs and silenced screams. Blood misted the air in delicate red fans before fading into the swirling Qi.
Yan moved with the storm of a bloodline awakened.
Yan raised both hands, and phoenix-fire erupted in twin arcs, searing crescents that tore through the front line like divine judgment. Cultists screamed as flame carved through them, not just burning flesh, but stripping corrupted Qi at the root. Her eyes burned gold, fire spiralling around her like wings that refused to fold.
With a snap of her fingers her flames coiled into a spear. She hurled it into a summoner mid-incantation. It struck with a blossom of red and gold, scattering molten ash and throwing the nearby cultists off-balance.
She didn't give them a second chance.
The next cultist lunged and she met him head-on. A spinning heel cracked across his jaw, flame trailing from her foot. She dropped low, swept the legs from another, and drove her elbow into his throat as he fell. Her strikes were precise, each movement honed from years of disciplined training, her Qi amplifying every blow.
Behind her, the air rippled as more Ash Sect reinforcements poured from the stone corridors but Kalavan was already there. He moved like wind pressed into steel slipping past a blade, plunging both daggers into a cultist's ribs, then twisting. One dagger flew from his hand, embedding in a torchbearer's chest. He caught it as the man fell, his flow unbroken.
Ryu didn't move at first. His gaze was fixed on the man at the dais.
Their eyes met.
And then.
A voice. Not his own.
"You are not the first to fall.
But you may be the first to return."
The crystal flew from the man's hand.
Ryu raised his spatial ward but the stone ignored it. It tore through reality and embedded itself in his chest.
He gasped.
Not in pain.
In recognition.
"Void-born," the voice inside him whispered.
And then.
Visions.
A figure cloaked in stars.
Skies splitting open.
A seal, ancient and massive, cracking.
A gate breaking wide.
And a voice, deep and knowing,
Remember.
Yan screamed. "Ryu!"
He fell to one knee, eyes glowing faintly with lightless energy.
The cult leader smirked.
Kalavan appeared behind him.
His blade fell like judgment.
The smirk faded.
The chanting ended.
The Qi in the chamber stilled. Something vast had been pulled... and severed.
Back in the palace sanctum, Ryu lay unconscious, surrounded by glowing seals and burning wards.
The crystal had vanished.
But something remained.
Something older than the Void Emperor.
Yan sat at his bedside, unmoving.
Kalavan stood by the flame pillar, blades sheathed, but ready.
"This wasn't the core," he said. "Only one branch."
"They'll spread," Yan replied softly. "Especially now that they've seen him."
Her gaze drifted to Ryu's right hand.
A new mark had appeared, burned faintly into his skin.
A ring of stars orbiting a single, dark flame.