With Hao Lin finally outside and standing guard, the room became quiet. Only the raspy noise of Jin's laboured breathing disturbed the silence.

Dark blotches were rapidly spreading on his skin. They looked like fresh bruises, but the truth was more alarming.

The fragile equilibrium between his qi and the body that housed it was breaking apart. And when one fell, the other inevitably followed.

His only chance lied in entering a deep meditative state and wresting back the control over the rebellious energies.

Blood pounded in his ears. Jin caught his breath and tried to slowly release it, but it felt as if he would suffocate before he succeeded. Bright sparks flickered in the corners of his vision, streaking like falling stars.

Finally, he managed to let out a deep breath. A foul smell, like rotting meat, entered his nostrils. Jin Sou trembled, but it wasn’t the rancid stench that disturbed him. Within the stale air leaving his parted lips, he could sense traces of his own qi.

Whatever measure of concentration he was able to muster crumbled. His eyes opened up. He stared at the wall in front of him, alone, sad, and unwilling.

The ability to externalize one’s qi was the sovereign domain of true cultivators, people who had awakened their Immortal Sigil. Jin, however, wasn’t about to fool himself into thinking that he had miraculously joined their ranks. A different explanation - one that he had been consciously avoiding all this time - was far more likely.

“Qi deviation…”

This wasn’t something they had learnt in the camps.

This knowledge came from the older generations of miners.

Jin stirred remembering the senior who had told him the story. It happened several years ago, not long after he had first entered the mines, but the experience etched itself in his mind.

The man should have been in his early twenties, but looked thirty years older. He had grown too tall for the mine’s constrictive shafts, causing his back to bend to a ridiculous degree. His head seemed closer to his chest than his shoulders, giving an impression of a body trying to fold in on itself.

“It comes like an arrow in the night,” the old miner said with a drawl. “You could be working, eating, or even fast asleep, it don’t make no difference.”

He looked at the group of boys huddled around him and laughed, “You have just learned to sense your qi. And even now, taken and chained, you love it. Every time it passes through your meridians, you know it, you are an… immortal ”, he whispered the last word. “If someone offered to take you back at the cost of that power, half of you would refuse!” He glared at them as if daring anyone to disagree.

“But all that precious qi is not yours. It lives in you. It feeds on you. And it makes you valuable enough to enslave, but it isn’t you. And one day, when you least expect it, it will devour you."

He licked his lips. “Lucky few who are still at the first layer. You just suddenly keel over, as if the reaper walked past and yanked out your soul. It’s only when you open up the body, you don’t see nothing but mush. Guts torn and ripped apart, destroyed by that precious energy you tirelessly cultivated.”

The grin on his mouth began to grow wider. “Things become more interesting at higher levels. For one, you can actually sense it happening. Your qi refusing to obey your commands. Treating you like a stranger. You try to stop it of course, control it, but there’s just too much of it. Even as you save your lungs, your eyes begin to pop.”

His voice turned contemplative. “It’s interesting really, what people reveal about themselves. That kid, Bo, he was popping like a firecracker, an eye, a finger, his gut, even his nose flew off. It wasn’t until both his legs were gone that we finally saw his pecker taking off!

His head jerked and he broke out in a high-pitched, whining giggle. It undulated in the silence as the young miners stared mortified, both by the tale and the queer man telling it.

“Then you have those at the third layer,” the man continued after recovering from his laughing fit. He brought out a bundle wrapped in graying rags and began opening it. “Those guys don’t crack easily. Our previous warden, Feng Huaxing…” he hesitated, “well, when old Feng got serious even an immortal would be wise to steer away. It happened in the dining hall - the bastard didn’t even let it show. Continued to shovel food even as his innards were about to explode.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

The rags came off revealing an old wooden bowl. The miner held it in both hands, with gentle care befitting a family heirloom. The surface was cracked and peppered with small holes, but it was the object jutting out from its center that made the young boys gasp.

Jin still remembered the feeling of his mind struggling to connect the odd shape with what it represented. And the deep chill as he finally recognised it for what it was.

A human jaw.

It was lodged deep inside the wood, complete with a row of small brown teeth that looked like bugs perched upon a twig.

“I was quick, but you will see some of your seniors with scars on their faces. They will tell you that it was from a collapsing shaft, but know the truth!” His mouth threw open as he began to laugh. “Old Feng just decided to give them a bite on his way out!”

The memory broke.

Jin sat on the floor, dazed. The qi in his meridians continued to circulate at ever faster speeds, but he no longer did anything to control it.

Only one thought remained in his mind.

“Why me?”

It wasn’t fair.

He had just survived a meeting with an Immortal. Others might not understand, but ever since he saw Lil’ Lu’s dead face, Jin was certain of it. The reason why he was still alive. It wasn’t fate, the almighty Sect, or even mercy - it was his own actions. Every breath he took from that moment on was his own.

And now he was supposed to die?

“No! I refuse!”

He grit his teeth.

“I’ve already escaped death once. I can do it again. I will not die here!”

He closed his eyes shut, determined not to open them again until the situation was resolved. One way or another.

His senses cut out. The feeling of hundreds of needles stabbing him at every second disappeared and he could no longer hear the raspy breath coming from his throat. He focused his whole self into a single point and made his will bear down, plunging deep into recesses of his soul.

An image appeared in his mind.

He saw a complex tapestry of channels and capillaries spanning his entire body. It was vivid like never before, the strain making the meridians clearer to his senses. If not for the fact that he was on the verge of death, he might have even appreciated the opportunity to better familiarize himself with the structure.

Instead, he focused his senses on the flow of energies.

The qi poured forth from his dantian. Thankfully, even though it ignored his commands, it continued to roughly circulate along the proper pathways they were taught in the camps. The energies flowed to the greater meridian in his right hand, doubled back to the one in his stomach, before finally returning to his dantian, only to gush out again with even greater vigor.

In a way, it made sense. If his qi was completely chaotic, he would have already been dead.

It didn’t change the fact that housing this great reservoir of energy while it behaved like a foreign entity filled him with dread. It was like having an intimate part of himself hijacked. And even if the qi behaved for now, it would take just a moment for it to suddenly rampage.

If that happened, his body would probably paint the walls of his room before he had a chance to register what was happening…

“Focus, focus…”

Unnerving as it was, the most pressing danger lay elsewhere. His meridians were simply too narrow to accommodate the volume of qi gushing out from his dantian. The pressure caused hundreds of hairlike cracks to appear along his major veins. And wherever the flooding energies encountered a bottleneck, they spilled over, spreading to nearby channels they had no business entering.

It was counterintuitive, but he needed to wrangle these errant threads of qi back into the main stream. The pressure bearing on his meridian channels would slightly increase, but it was still preferable to the completely unpredictable damage from having that qi run free.

He started out small. His target was just a single strand of qi. It splintered off from the main pack and was currently traveling along his heart meridian.

To his surprise, the process was smooth. He began by gently coaxing and nudging it, the way he was first taught to sense qi, but he’d managed to form a connection almost immediately. It was as if after getting separated from the main stream, whatever was shielding it from his will had disappeared.

A thought appeared in his mind.

“What if instead of sending all these wayward strands of qi back to their proper pathways I tried doing the opposite? Could I regain control that way?”

But he rejected the idea almost as soon as it formed.

“My major veins are on the verge of breaking down as it is. If I tried shifting all that energy into random pathways, everything would collapse before I was halfway done.”

He decisively pushed the qi back into the main stream. As soon as it rejoined it, his connection faded. But he was still able to sense the almost animalistic giddiness radiating from the qi.

He continued his work. A nagging thought at the back of his mind whispered that it was all futile, that he was trying to fight a fire by throwing more embers at it, but he fought against it.

At some point, the words of the cultivation mantra began to ring out in his mind. The sounds became clearer and louder with every errant strand of qi that he corralled back to the main stream.

Even the excitement radiating from his qi began to slowly affect him. Maybe he had a fighting chance after all.

“Boss Lu has called a gathering!”

“A gathering! Everyone must appear!”

“Boss Lu has called a gathering!”

A sudden commotion erupted in the living quarters. A group of wardens serving under Boss Lu rushed in, pounding on doors and shouting at the top of their voices.

Miners began to emerge from their rooms. They looked around in confusion, some of them revealing hints of anxiety in their eyes. A surprise assembly was a rare thing - usually it meant that Immortals had passed down new orders.

They were making so much noise that some of it had even reached Jin.

He registered that something was happening outside - and put the matter aside. His concentration was stretched to a breaking point as it was and he couldn’t afford a single distraction.

Suddenly, the door to his room exploded into pieces.

“Jin Sou!” Rou Mi barged in, debris from the destroyed door crunching under his sandals. Hao Ying's motionless body lay in the hallway, sprawled out in an unnatural position.

“Boss Lu demands your presence!”