Kage despised the forest’s scent—it unleashed devastating nostalgia within him. Even though he’d returned to the past, where his mother still lived, he struggled against the sorrow and emptiness that crushed him each ti he slipped back into the fortress after sneaking out.
It was agony.
But he had to endure this anyway.
He wrinkled his nose slightly, wishing he could spray deodorant into the air and banish the sharp, tingling sll of sap, bark, and leaves.
He sat cross-legged, eyes closed, hands resting gently on his legs. His breathing was ragged from the Breath of Death—from afar, nothing seed amiss, but closer inspection revealed he breathed like soone who had sprinted a hundred miles, though at a more controlled, deliberate pace.
Kage could finally sense his dantian. The dantian of Purists—what Weavers called the Essence Core—burned like a furnace.
Before awakening, it remained nothing but a dark, hollow void below the navel. The awakening’s purpose was to use surrounding Qi essence to ignite that furnace.
Now that his furnace had been ignited, Kage’s Stage on3, lower level dantian glowed like an ember. But his ember was dark and faint, flickering as if desperate to die. It pulsed purple with black gradients, betraying how pathetically weak he was.
People commonly judged strength by one’s Qi essence color. The most powerful cultivators throughout history had shared certain hues, and those who inherited those sa colors often proved equally formidable. Naturally, it had beco doctrine.
Kage rembered all too well that purple-black gradient Qi essence had never existed before—and the mixture of two colors scread weak potency.
All of that predetermined his fate. Yet he’d fought viciously against it. In this life, he would fight even harder.
Using the Breath of Death, Kage drew a different kind of Qi from the air—not the standard essence most people absorbed. Qi essence was the world’s energy, an all-encompassing force.
Breathing techniques were cultivation paths Purists needed to sift through that encompassing essence and absorb only the world’s purest energy—though "purest" ant different things to different people.
"Pure" carried a volatile aning. Each Clan held different philosophies about purity. The Ironstorm Clan, naturally, absorbed Iron and Storm—the violent, unbreakable energy of the world. Clans like the Moonblossom cultivated the essence of beauty and serenity from the encompassing Qi.
Each Breath style was designed to filter out everything else and absorb only what practitioners could champion and believe in—their core principle.
For Kage, that principle was Death. The crudest, filthiest, most widely discarded fragnt of the world’s Qi essence. And surprisingly, after millions of years of neglect, it all rushed toward him like starving strays racing toward a house packed with at.
This was the solution he’d devised while desperately seeking ways to overco his talentlessness. Of course, it would have been impossible to use in his past life—Kage would have died instantly if he’d tried.
Once soone began a Cultivation Path, changing it proved incredibly dangerous. At most, you could create variations, but they couldn’t stray too far from the original.
And one had to be exceptionally talented to create variants.
As Kage breathed, the death Qi essence swirling in the air surged into his flickering ember like a wave of putrid black sea. It crashed in with force that threatened to shatter his entire dantian—the chamber was too small to contain such vast Qi essence desperate to nestle within him.
This made his dantian remain too cramped. And his body was too fragile. He couldn’t even attempt Qi circulation because his ridians were blocked, and any effort to unblock them would kill him outright.
Kage existed in a pathetic state, unable to properly refine his Qi essence. Refining required cycles of absorption and circulation, but he could only absorb right now.
He sighed heavily.
I’m trapped indeed... I need to escape this place first, then find that damned old woman.’
His gaze sharpened to slits, violet orbs glowing coldly.
For now, he would sleep and rise when the east turned pale.
Kage studied the pit he’d created, then shook his head.
’I’ll sleep after I craft so arrows.’
He gathered the small sticks from the pit, drew out a kitchen knife, and began sharpening their edges.
After so ti, Kage had fashioned multiple makeshift arrows. He allowed himself to rest, and in the earliest hour of dawn, he woke and began preparing for the treacherous day ahead.
First, he struck his knife against stone to spark fire onto the kindling. Then he fanned the flas. As they grew, his crooked smile widened.
Smoke billowed into the sky, and the fire blazed stronger. The forest’s soft hums and bird chirps intensified. Of course they would.
Kage despised letting his enemies sleep peacefully before attacking them from behind. He would strike from the shadows, yes, but he preferred them aware of approaching danger.
That way, both he and his enemies stood on equal ground. This thod would force these mindless Impures into erratic behavior so Kage could break them swiftly.
He knew their patterns—so were favorable, others were not.
The first thing the fire would do was startle the Rootgnarls Watchers out of their skin. They’d panic and flee, forgetting in that mont the forest’s single, sacred rule.
Kage cut a portion of rope, littered it with leaves and twigs, creating a trail toward a major bush entanglent deeper in the forest.
He then straightened and secured the remaining ropes. He bundled the makeshift arrows and tethered them to his left sash.
Then he ventured into the forest, to hunt his prey.
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