The air tasted of burnt jasmine and iron. Alyssa knelt at the center of Mistveil Temple’s sacred circle, her white robes pooling around her like a fallen cloud. Twenty-nine initiates had completed the Rite of Ascension before dawn. She would be the thirtieth—or die trying.
“Channel your qi into the Aether Crystal,” Grand Elder Mo commanded, his voice colder than the marble beneath her knees. “Or forfeit your place in the Jade Lotus Sect.”
She closed her eyes, fingertips brushing the floating crystal. Her meridians burned as she summoned the golden energy drilled into her since childhood. The crystal glowed—a soft, pure light that made the elders nod in approval.
Then her blood screamed.
A searing violet current erupted from her core, crashing against her golden qi like two colliding stars. The crystal shattered with a thunderclap, embedding shards in her palm. Blood dripped onto the ritual stones, hissing like acid.
“Defiled!” An elder recoiled as the blood moon breached the horizon, staining the temple crimson. “She’s a *huànyāo*—a hybrid demon!”
The accusation hung frozen for a heartbeat before chaos erupted.
Alyssa’s body moved before her mind caught up. She rolled sideways as a suppression seal cratered the ground where she’d knelt. Golden chains materialized around her limbs—the Sect’s signature binding art. But when the violet energy in her veins met the restraints, they dissolved like sugar in boiling water.
“Capture her alive!” Grand Elder Mo barked, his ceremonial mask cracking to reveal sweat-glazed fury. “The Patriarch wants her organs intact!”
Seven elders attacked in unison.
Qi blades carved through stone pillars. Gale-force palm strikes uprooted thousand-year cedars. Alyssa danced through the carnage, her movements sharpened by primal instinct. Violet sparks leapt from her bleeding hand, warping reality itself—
A sword meant for her heart instead impaled an elder’s shoulder.
A fireball redirected into the sect’s precious scripture vault.
“Cease resisting!” Grand Elder Mo’s hands blurred through seals. “Heavenly Cage Restriction!”
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The air thickened. Alyssa’s knees buckled under pressure meant to crush bone. Through vision blurred by blood and sweat, she saw the elders forming a nine-point star formation—their ultimate sealing array.
The violet energy roared.
It tore through her golden qi reserves like a starving beast, flooding meridians never meant to contain such power. Her right arm crystallized momentarily, fingers becoming jagged shards of obsidian. With a scream that cracked nearby boulders, she slammed her mutated hand against the earth.
The temple exploded.
Marble tiles became shrapnel. The sacred cedar grove ignited with unnatural violet flames. Alyssa staggered through smoke and debris, her body flickering between flesh and something...*other*.
“Kill the abomination!” A blade-wielding elder lunged from the smoke. “For the purity of—”
His words died as Alyssa’s crystalline fist punched through his chest.
She stared in horror at her glinting fingers, now dripping red. The violet energy recoiled, retreating to her core with a psychic wail that left her nose bleeding. In the sudden silence, she heard wet coughing—the elder wasn’t dead yet.
“Why?” She crouched over him, golden qi instinctively trying to heal what her hybrid power had destroyed. “I trained with your grandson! I tended the herb gardens!”
His dying whisper chilled her more than the blood moon’s gaze: “You were never one of us.”
A gong shook the mountainside—the alarm signaling all sects to hunt her. Alyssa ran.
The forest welcomed her with strangling shadows. Thorns tore her robes to ribbons. Somewhere behind, tracking bells chimed as disciples unleashed scent-hounds bred to chase hybrids. Ahead loomed the Ghostcliff Gorge—a 300-foot drop into rapids dotted with soul-devouring whirlpools.
“Halt, devil-spawn!”
Alyssa turned to face six senior disciples materializing from mist. Their leader, Jianyu, had shared dumplings with her last Moon Festival. Now his sword gleamed with corpse-poison.
“Don’t make this ugly,” he said, forming the first stance of the Seven Sorrows Swordplay.
The violet energy stirred hungrily.
“You first,” Alyssa hissed.
They attacked in perfect harmony—blades singing toward vital points. She moved like liquid shadow, her hybrid-enhanced reflexes anticipating each strike. When her crystalized hand seized Jianyu’s sword, it disintegrated into rust flakes.
“Monster!” A disciple hurled talismans that exploded into chain lightning.
Alyssa’s golden qi rose instinctively, forming a shield...
...just as the violet energy lashed out.
The resulting blast left a smoking crater. When the smoke cleared, five disciples lay unconscious. Jianyu stared at his charred sword hilt, then at Alyssa’s half-crystallized face.
“Jump,” he whispered. “It’s cleaner than what they’ll do to you.”
The tracking bells grew louder.
Alyssa backed toward the cliff edge. “Tell them I died.”
“They’ll want your corpse.”
“Then tell them the whirlpools took me.”
She fell backward into the gorge. As wind screamed past her ears, the voice returned—the same one from the temple collapse, feminine and frayed at the edges:
*"Activate the Star Compass...before they purge your memories..."*
Black water swallowed her. The last thing she felt was something metallic embedding in her chest—a compass-shaped brand burning through flesh to fuse with bone.