When Jared lifted the blade again, a dusky swirl of unformed matter oozed from the steel. Instead of gushing out, the chaos folded back, braiding itself around the edge, breathing a promise of erasing all things.
Next came the five-element rhythm, not in loud colors but in a whispered cycle, each phase birthing the next so quickly the eye lost count. Earthfire True Flame licked along the spine, savage and clean. A pale gold dragon sigil coiled at the guard, sharpening every breath of metal with imperial bite.
Compared with the hundred-yard storms he had flung earlier, the weapon now seemed almost polite, even ordinary. He reached out toward the whip of starlight. The moment chaos touched it, that dense ribbon, strong enough to garrote artifacts, melted like frost under a noon sun. The elemental cycle slipped inside the fracture, scrambling its spine, and Earthfire burned the scraps to smoke.
The dragon whispered, and the point sailed on, straight for the phantom’s throat. A blur rippled across the phantom’s face. Its seals reshuffled; the body shattered into motes and reassembled several yards away, the aura clearly dimmed.
It studied the sword and spoke in that indifferent monotone, “Interwoven forces, chaos as root… Interesting. The first trial is yours.”
At the last syllable, the other two figures broke off—one from battering the Demon Lord, the other from pinning gravity—and began to thin like mist. Stars peeled away, colors bled, and suddenly the hum of insects in the Jade Bamboo Grove returned as though someone had unmuted the world. Yet the hollowness in Jared’s limbs and the fresh blood striping the Demon Lord’s arm said the fight had been anything but an illusion.
“That was passing?” The Demon Lord flexed his tingling arm, unease still clouding his eyes. “Those three tricks were outright wicked. If not for that final stroke of yours…”
“A shortcut, nothing more.” Jared shook his head, no triumph warming his face, only a deeper gravity. “The way they handled power just rewrote my map. Maybe we’ve been flinging too much outward and keeping too little close to the bone.”
The insight from the first trial still hummed behind Jared’s breastbone: true strength lived in the precise union of every strain of power, not in raw force alone. He tasted the warning nested in that lesson. This was only the opening gate; whatever waited deeper would cut closer to the bone.
He and the Vermilion Demon Lord let their lungs settle, trading one slow breath after another until the tremor in their limbs calmed. When the last echo faded, Jared tipped his chin toward the darkened tunnel. They moved again, boots whispering over ancient dust. The passage bent, and the air ahead thickened, bright as struck iron. Jared barely registered the change before a new threshold unfolded across the path. So, the second trial had not waited long after all.
One step later the tunnel was gone. Wind drenched in mist slapped his face, and he stood on the knife-edge summit of a lone peak wrapped in drifting clouds. At the very crown, a plain stone pavilion hunched like an afterthought. Inside, a figure sat—white hair against a childlike face, hemp robes falling through his body as if he were smoke. Before the phantom rested a board Jared first mistook for polished slate. Then the surface breathed; threads of black and white vapor wove runes that birthed each other, died, and returned—a quiet storm contained by square borders.
“Sit…” The command arrived like a leaf settling on water, gentle yet impossible to ignore. The phantom lifted one translucent hand. “This trial asks no blood,” he said, voice even as dusk light. “Only insight… The Vital Force Chessboard carries the ancient art of drawing breath from heaven and tempering yin with yang.”
“Take black first,” he continued. “Place each piece where the currents cross. Stir the board until either I must rise or chaos’s first dawn blooms. Only then will the gate open.”
Jared’s eyes slid toward the Vermilion Demon Lord. The other man’s crimson pupils mirrored his own confusion. Chess? The single word rang hollow in his skull, equal parts disbelief and dread. Why chess? A moment ago Jared had braced for swords or flame. Now strategy and subtlety stood in their place, and somehow that felt more lethal.
The Demon Lord scratched the back of his head. “Games like this aren’t in my repertoire. Jared, the board is yours.”
Jared swallowed the protest that tried to rise, stepped to the stone table, and lowered himself onto the cushion opposite the phantom. The instant his gaze met the swirling runes, the world pitched. Vertigo clamped around his temples, turning the pavilion floor into spin and blur. What had seemed a board now sprawled into countless miniature realms—black breath pursuing white, white folding over black—each pocket a living cosmos rewriting its own laws.
Somewhere inside that storm lay the junctions of force he needed, yet every time he fixed on one, it drifted like smoke at dawn. Jared extended a thread of consciousness, hoping to map the flow. The current swallowed it without ripple, as a sea absorbs a droplet. A hollow click echoed in his chest; brute perception would not save him here.
The revelation stung: the board tested not strength of sight but harmony—the capacity to resonate with the dance already underway. Jared let his lids fall, denying the flickering universe its grip. He traced memory instead: the moment his four forces fused into a single newborn haze before light and shadow learned their names.
Breath slowed. Thought unknotted. The summit wind drifted through him without finding purchase. Warmth budded along the sigils that braided his forearm, a quiet answer to the board‘s silent rhythm. Deep within, the Four-Colored Origin Star began its unhurried spin, each hue chiming in turn, weaving a pulse that promised alignment.
He had lost track of time. A hush settled inside him, like the moment before an inhale. Without summoning even a flicker of power, he lifted his hand. Intuition tugged, directing his index finger toward an unremarkable intersection on the board.
A low, metallic hum vibrated through the air the instant skin touched wood. Black and white currents beneath the grid jolted awake, spreading in ripples the way water answers a stone. Something inside him answered. A pearl of dim light—grey, neither black nor white—gathered unbidden at his fingertip. The mote carried the breath of four converging forces. It slipped from him and landed with deceptive softness on the chosen point.
The moment it settled, the calm shattered. The entire field churned as if a boulder had been hurled into still water. Twin currents rushed, collided, absorbed each other. Shape and strategy dissolved, giving way to wild, unreadable motion. Across the table, the robed phantom who had watched with austere detachment finally twitched. Light flared in the old man’s eyes, bright enough to stain the dim pavilion.
Jared hardly noticed; the board itself demanded all attention. Boundaries of black and white bled together. Here a white thread wormed through midnight swirls; there a dark seed sprouted inside pale fog. Out of the turbulence rose faint images—cracking earth, licking fire, coursing water, keening wind—each birthed, each snuffed, faster than breath.
At the heart of it all, color vanished. A pin-head pocket of swirling mist remained; featureless, ancient, frightening in its simplicity. The sight pulled at his chest like gravity, as though everything that had ever mattered could emerge from that speck of nothing.
The phantom’s lips parted, and the words that drifted out were almost swallowed by the storm. “The first breath of chaos… A true beginning made manifest.”
Jared felt the pronouncement settle over him like ash, cold and electric. The elder lifted his gaze, pinning Jared with an intensity that made him want to step back, though his feet refused.
“In this age,” the phantom said, each syllable trembling with awe, “a cultivator who touches such origin power is rare… Very well. You have passed this trial…”
The pavilion, the lone peak, and even the elder‘s outline thinned to mist, then to nothing, as though swallowed by the same primal haze.
