They called it a malfunction.
The official notice issued within an hour:
Candidate Fang Min experienced a Class-3 Core destabilization event.
Match against Candidate Lei Qing declared null.
Both candidates temporarily suspended from combat tier.
That was the story.
Neat. Sanitized. And false.
But it was the only version allowed into the school feed.
Fang Yuan didn't correct it.
He walked the halls of Sublevel Nine like a ghost—watched but untouched. Students whispered as he passed, not out of reverence, but uncertainty.
How do you talk about someone who broke the system?
You don't.
You speculate.
---
In the Core analytics lab, three instructors stood over a display.
One pointed at a waveform loop.
"This isn't a destabilization. Look—he collapsed the Core's field from inside, then funneled the dispersal through an inverse Qi spiral. That's an intentional compression—not an accident."
Another narrowed her eyes. "That technique's not on any database."
"Because it's not from here."
The third said nothing. Just watched the screen rewind, watched the golden pulse ripple outward, not like an explosion—but like a release.
---
In the restricted faculty tower, Xu Ran stood alone in his private office.
He didn't watch the footage.
He didn't need to.
He'd seen what mattered.
Not the technique. Not the reaction.
The moment Fang Yuan crushed his own Core.
That wasn't defiance.
That was control.
Deliberate. Symbolic. Disarming.
It told the academy, the sponsors, the system itself:
"I am not yours."
Xu Ran closed the holoscreen and tapped into a private channel.
"Begin pressure protocol."
A voice replied instantly. "Which target?"
"Nian'er."
Pause.
"Soft or terminal?"
Xu Ran tilted his head slightly, eyes blank.
"Start with pressure. We'll see how far she bends before she breaks."
The first thing to vanish was her access.
Training modules locked. Messaging privileges revoked. Medical service requests returned "Pending Review" indefinitely.
She couldn't even charge her Core band.
The next to go were her allies.
Students who had spoken with her the day before now passed her in the hall without a glance. One former teammate moved dorms. Another "accidentally" deleted her sparring profile from the squad rotation.
And yet—nothing official ever came.
No reprimands. No warnings. Just cold silence and closed doors.
The kind of exile you couldn't prove.
Only survive.
---
Nian'er sat alone on the edge of the old hydroduct near the ventilation trench—one of the only places in the Academy with no signal coverage, no surveillance, and no patrols.
She knew they'd sent someone eventually.
She was right.
Footsteps behind her. Measured. Polished.
Xu Ran didn't hide his presence.
"Strange place to be alone," he said. "Unless you're hiding something."
Nian'er didn't turn.
"Or unless you know the system listens everywhere else."
Xu Ran smiled faintly. "Smart girl."
Silence stretched between them. The trench hummed with distant water.
He finally sat beside her, perfectly at ease.
"You've made yourself difficult to support," he said gently. "Your record's excellent. Sharp mind. Lethal focus. You're exactly the kind of student we invest in."
She said nothing.
He continued.
"But loyalty is currency. And right now, your account is… running low."
Still no response.
"Fang Min is not what he claims to be," Xu Ran said. "That doesn't concern us. What concerns us is what happens when people like him start to interrupt the system."
At that, Nian'er finally looked at him.
"And what happens when the system is already broken?"
Xu Ran chuckled. "Systems don't need to be fair. They only need to work."
He reached into his coat and pulled out a slim, data-slicked token.
"Final offer," he said. "Turn over Fang Min's Core signature. Just the imprint. We handle the rest. You walk clean. Back into the stream. Full reinstatement."
Nian'er stared at the token.
Then at him.
"Why not just take it?"
Xu Ran tilted his head, amused. "Because if I take it, it says I'm afraid of him."
She held the token.
Let it hover in her palm.
Then flicked it into the trench.
Xu Ran didn't move.
"Disappointing," he said.
She stood, blade already in hand.
"Not as much as you think."
He didn't ask what they'd done to her.
He didn't need to.
When Nian'er returned—quiet, unsmiling, a fresh red mark along her sleeve where a pulse blade had grazed her—Fang Yuan only watched her step across the threshold of their shared low-tier dorm and sit on the edge of her bunk.
She didn't speak.
Neither did he.
But in the silence, a decision calcified.
Fang Yuan turned away from the console and slid open the false floorplate beneath his bed.
Beneath it: three ancient objects.
A cracked jade scroll. A vial of something blacker than ink. And a single fang, still coated in dull golden blood.
He took the scroll first.
Unfurled it.
Spoke the words aloud, quiet, like a prayer:
"The path forgotten is not forbidden. The flame unbound is not unrighteous. I walked through Hell in silence once— And silence is what I bring again."
Nian'er watched from across the room.
"You said you wouldn't cultivate the old way here," she said.
He looked up.
"I said I wouldn't start a war."
He tied back his sleeves.
"I've changed my mind."
That night, beneath the abandoned greenhouse dome on the Academy's edge, Fang Yuan began burning the air.
Not figuratively.
Literally.
His Core was gone. But his will remained. And with it, the ancient form of cultivation lost to this world:
Atmospheric Conversion.
He pressed two fingers together and carved a ring in the air.
Qi bled from the seal, raw and wild—then twisted, caught between his palms like a trapped animal.
He began to breathe it in.
Slow. Steady.
Not through channels. Through hunger.
The ground blackened in a perfect circle beneath him. The greenhouse glass fogged, cracked, and then hissed with frost.
And above him, unseen, a sensor in the Academy's outer ring flickered red.
An old warning. One not triggered in 1,972 years.
UNSANCTIONED CORELESS ABSORPTION DETECTED
—ALERT ADMINISTRATOR LEVEL 5—
—UNSTABLE SIGNATURE: FLAME ROOT PROTOCOL—
The greenhouse's outer shell cracked at the corners.
Not from impact.
From pressure.
Qi—raw, pre-tech, unfiltered by Core regulators—spiraled upward from Fang Yuan's body in a slow, deliberate cyclone. Not blinding. Not theatrical. But heavy. True.
His limbs didn't glow. His eyes didn't change.
But the temperature in a one-kilometer radius dropped by two degrees.
Birds, artificial and real, veered away from the dome. Plants inside began to rot. Machines nearby malfunctioned. Systems misread his energy as weather interference.
They had no category for what he was becoming.
Far below the academy, past locked sublevels and AI-guarded archives, a door opened by itself.
It hadn't moved in over a millennium.
Inside, surrounded by living wires and memory engines, a man opened his eyes.
He was not old.
Not exactly.
But he had outlived entire sects. Entire wars.
He stood in silence, surrounded by thirteen dormant Core shells—each belonging to a rival he had consumed before the Core Harvest system was born.
And now?
Now someone was calling up the Dao again.
Primitive. Unfiltered. Unforgiven.
He smiled without warmth.
"So. One of them lived."
Back on the surface, Fang Yuan drew his breath in slower now.
Every inhale gathered Qi from the broken world around him.
It was fractured. Stale. Diseased.
But not dead.
He held it in his chest.
Transformed it.
Not through machines.
Through meaning.
He closed his hand. The air turned gold.
And then something behind his ribs shifted.
No artificial spark.
No digitized pulse.
A new Core.
But it didn't flash. Didn't buzz.
It glowed like coals in the base of a long-dead fire pit.
Not new.
Reborn.
And somewhere in the dark of the under-academy, the archivist of the Old Wars whispered into a silent comm line.
"Send word to Xu Ran. Your problem just became historic."
When Fang Yuan entered the training concourse the next morning, everything was silent.
Not cautious.
Expectant.
Students glanced up, then away. Instructors checked his Core band, then looked twice when they saw no number, no energy reading, nothing quantifiable.
An empty slot.
Yet every one of them felt it.
The weight.
The silence around him was too perfect.
Nian'er met him near the atrium.
"You burned through the campus firewall last night," she said softly. "Your energy signature bounced off five restricted sensors."
"I was breathing," he said.
She gave a faint smile. "That's what worries them."
At midday, a broadcast override took over the intercoms.
"Combat demo required in Simulation Hall 4C. Subject: Fang Min."
"Opponent selected by Director Xu Ran."
"Attendance: Mandatory."
Fang Yuan made no comment.
He walked to the hall alone.
Simulation Hall 4C was shaped like an ancient coliseum turned inward—stone textures rendered by light, too smooth to be real. Above, a fake sky flickered between clouded twilight and stormlight.
Waiting in the center stood a figure not on any registry.
Seven feet tall. Wrapped in bone-gray armor, Core filaments running like veins beneath its skin. Its face was a blank mask of stretched flesh.
On its chest: a black circle. In the center, a single vertical eye.
The Heavenly Demon's mark.
Fang Yuan stopped.
He could feel it. Not Qi.
Not spirit.
Doctrine.
This creature wasn't trained. It was built on a belief.
And that belief was annihilation.
Xu Ran's voice echoed calmly over the system.
"As a candidate without measurable rank, your standing must be evaluated against non-student assets."
"Please begin."
The construct moved first.
Not fast.
Immediate.
One moment it stood.
The next it was in front of him—flesh-arm blades sweeping downward in a perfect arc.
Fang Yuan didn't flinch.
He slid inside the attack, hand open, Core pulsing once beneath his skin.
"Lotus Bloom Form: Final Gate – Silent Fracture."
He struck once.
The air buckled.
The creature stopped mid-motion. No noise. No damage. Just… pause.
Then every vein of energy in its body cracked.
Not broken—disassembled.
The mask split.
Light bled from its chest as it collapsed into itself, like a house folding into its own blueprints.
Gone.
Silence again.
Above, Xu Ran said nothing.
Fang Yuan stood alone in the ruin of the construct's final frame.
Then turned to the hidden cameras and said, clearly:
"Next time, don't send something that doesn't believe in itself."