THE VOID THRONE

CHAPTER 5

Wei Liang stood in the middle of the courtyard with the afternoon sun on his face and didn't move for a full minute.

"It's so small," he whispered.

Seeds are small, the System said. Keep going.

He kept going.

Pattern after pattern, night after night. The nosebleeds got less frequent. The sessions got longer. The cold thread inside him grew — slowly, carefully — from spider silk to string, from string to cord. He could feel it moving now without putting his hand to his chest. It had become part of him. A quiet, steady, cold thing running through him like a river underground.

Between patterns, sometimes, the System talked to him. Not always about cultivation.

Can I ask you something? it said one night, around Pattern Eleven.

"Sure."

Zhao Peng. Do you miss him?

Wei Liang was quiet for a moment. "That's not something I think about."

Okay, the System said, without pushing.

But Wei Liang lay down that night and stared at the ceiling and thought about Zhao Peng anyway. About sharing lunch in the dirt roads of their village. About the way Zhao Peng had laughed when they were eight — big and unguarded and a little too loud, the kind of laugh that made other people laugh just from hearing it.

He hadn't heard that laugh in years.

He fell asleep thinking about it.

Forty nights after starting. All seventeen patterns done.

He was sitting on his mat at three in the morning when the seventeenth pattern finished — when the last thread of Void Qi settled into place with a sound like a bell ringing somewhere deep inside him, low and pure and real — and then something happened that he wasn't expecting.

The air in his room changed.

It was hard to explain. It wasn't an explosion. There was no flash of light. It was more like — pressure. A wave of something pushing outward from him in all directions, gentle but real, the way heat pushes out from a fire even when the fire is quiet. The candle on his desk flickered and went out. The papers on his shelf rustled though there was no wind. Outside his window, every bird that had been sleeping in the nearest pine tree woke up all at once and launched themselves into the night sky in a rush of wings that sounded, for just a moment, like applause.

Then silence. Deep and ringing.

Wei Liang sat in the middle of it and pressed his hand to his chest and felt the Void Qi moving through him. Not spider-silk thin anymore. Not string. A river now — cold and clean and wide and continuous, moving steadily through him like it had always been there and was only now being acknowledged.

Third Layer, the System said, after a long moment. It was quiet when it said it. Like it was trying not to make too big a deal of something that was, actually, a very big deal. You made it, Wei Liang.

Wei Liang pressed his forehead down to the mat.

Not because anyone told him to. Not in front of anyone. Just because something real had happened and his body needed to acknowledge it somehow. He stayed like that for almost a full minute — forehead on the mat, the silence of the room around him, the Void Qi steady and warm and his.

Then he sat up.

"What's the gift?" he said.

Void Step, the System said, and he could somehow hear it smiling. Your first real technique. Here's how it works — and yes, it's as strange as it sounds.

Void Step was the strangest thing Wei Liang had ever learned to do.

For half a second — only half a second, at first, but it would grow — he stopped being quite fully present in the world. He didn't disappear. He didn't become invisible. He became the kind of thing the world didn't need to push against. Like becoming a gap in a sentence. Still there, technically. Just not where things landed.

It meant that attacks aimed at him would pass close but miss. Hands reaching for him would close on air. He would be right there and also, briefly, not quite there.

The first time he held it for a full second, alone in his tiny room at midnight, he sat down immediately and pressed both hands flat on the mat and breathed for a solid thirty seconds before he felt right again.

You okay? the System asked.

"It feels really weird," he said.

It gets better. Though it never stops being a little weird. Some things aren't supposed to feel normal.

He practised every night. By the end of the second week he was at thirty percent mastery. Thirty percent of something that had never existed in this part of the world before.

He had three months until the Quarterly Exhibition.

He intended to use every single day of them.

But there was something else happening. Something he hadn't planned for.

A boy named Ren — Elder Mao's assistant, quiet and forgettable in the way that people who are trying very hard to be forgettable always are — had started appearing in the same places as Wei Liang.

Not always. Not obviously. But enough that Wei Liang noticed. The same corridor at the same time. The same courtyard. Always at a distance. Always looking somewhere else when Wei Liang looked up.

Wei Liang didn't know what it meant yet.

He filed it away. Kept training.

Three months.

Every. Single. Day.