The Nameless Lake

The lake at the edge of the Cursed Barrens had no name on any map Liang Fei had ever read — mostly because every cartographer who came to chart it had never returned.

He crouched at the waterline and let the cold seep through his boots. His cultivation root had been assessed at three months old: absent. The spirit tester had shattered on contact. The elder who performed the test had wiped his hands on his robes afterward as though Liang Fei had contaminated him.

That was fourteen years ago.

"One year left," he muttered. Outer disciples without an awakened root by fifteen were expelled. Some took jobs in sect kitchens. Most disappeared.

He wasn't ready to disappear.

The void crystal was visible through the black water — a sliver of pure nothingness so dark it hurt to look at. He had found references to it in a forbidden primer three years ago. Void Fragments, the text had said, are not treasures. They are wounds in the Dao itself. They do not confer power. They erase it.

Liang Fei reached in anyway.

The crystal dissolved into his palm like smoke inhaled. The cold stopped being a temperature and became a direction — downward, always downward, toward a gravity that existed only inside his dantian.

Then the world's laws hit him all at once, and he understood why the cartographers never came back.