The late awakening
Death reached for him in that suffocating darkness. But amidst the crackling inferno, something primal ~ forged in battle, twisted by stolen science, fueled by the last embers of his warrior spirit ~ ignited.
Against all reason, bone splintered and reknit itself. Flesh writhed in unnatural regeneration. Broken, burning, driven by pure animal fury, he erupted from the flames. Hands like claws tore through blazing timbers. He staggered across ash-choked ground, a revenant of rage, and ripped through the walls of neighboring houses where his attackers celebrated. Finding them gone, he surged into the night.
Their engine roared as they tried to flee. He reached them. Chaos erupted ~ screeching tires, muzzle flashes cutting through darkness. He dragged men from car doors, silencing them before they could cry out. Crushed another beneath reversing wheels. The last two fled, bleeding and limping consumed by the soldier's all-consuming wrath.
Then, finally spent, the fire within him guttered out. His body died there on the scorched earth. He didn't felt accomplished. The real ones are still in power somewhere.
God's intervention. This was the witness testimony from the only escaped one.
But the rage? That profound, world-shattering resentment born of betrayal, violation, and unimaginable loss? That didn't die. It soaked into the very foundations of that ruined house. It waited.
He died. But the resentment remained.
___________________________
Mystery
The air was wrong.
Han Chen and his wives landed before the ruins, their boots crunching on brittle grass that had long since surrendered to decay. The house loomed—half-collapsed but refusing to fall, its shattered windows like empty eyes. Paint curled away from the walls in jagged strips, revealing wood rotted black with time. Vines slithered through broken floorboards, nature's slow reclaiming of a place that refused to be forgotten.
The ghostly Qi hit Han Chen immediately, but worse than that was what his spirit sense revealed: layers of unresolved resentment thick as congealed blood, as an infection that had never healed. Furthermore decay and hatred intermixed together.
He could feel the fury of the resentment emanating even with no living being nearby . Stepping into the rooms, he saw cleaned floors but he felt the attached remnant souls clinging to the ghostly Qi. The floors seem scrubbed clean by someone, probably multiple times but not everywhere.
Any normal person stepping inside would feel it instantly: the crushing nausea, the suffocating weight pressing down on their spirit. The intent would seep into them through proximity alone, flooding them with unnatural anger and hatred. The brain, desperate for logic, spun hallucinations to rationalize it ~ visions so vivid they convinced even the skeptical. And just like that, the site became one of the most inexplicable cases of alleged supernatural disturbance, eventually sealed off by the authorities.
That's also what had happened to the people who'd tried to sell this place before—they'd all left changed, tainted by something they couldn't understand. Most of all horrified.
Among the many reported supernatural cases this one is truly on top.
Multiple soul remnants haunted these rooms. Their unwillingness to pass on had somehow crystallized, and the last traces of that master-level Qi had embedded itself in their personal belongings. It had formed an innate curse, etched into the very fabric of the place. Without spiritual energy in the air to feed on, it couldn't develop true ghostly sentience, but what remained was stubborn as a bloodstain ~ only time could wash it away.
Hye Won and Yue Lan stiffened beside him, their shared spirit sense amplifying the suffocating dread. A normal human would've collapsed already, their souls tainting under the nausea of so much condensed suffering.
Han Chen raised his hand, golden light already flickering between his fingers. The Samsara Wheel Seal could sever these grudges cleanly, guide the trapped souls toward whatever rest awaited them.
But Yue Lan's fingers closed around his wrist.
"Let us handle this."
The two women stepped forward in perfect synchronization, palms pressed together in meditation. Then came the separation—one hand darkening with pure yin energy, the other blazing white-hot with yang. The air itself began to ripple as their Taiji Yin-Yang purification Technique unfolded, creating a swirling vortex of opposing forces that ground through the spiritual remnants like an enormous millstone.
The curse fought back with everything it had left—a final, desperate snarl of defiance—but abysmal compared the sisters' combined will, which is relentless. The entire room shuddered as the last traces of resentment dissolved into drifting motes of neutral qi.
Then came silence. True, complete silence for the first time in years in the area.
But just as Hye Won and Yue Lan began to relax—
A whisper reached them. Not sound exactly, but pure emotion bleeding into their consciousness like ink spreading through water. A plea that bypassed their ears entirely, speaking directly to something deeper.
Justice.
Hye Won's eyes narrowed into slits. "We need to find them. The ones responsible. If they haven't already faced mortal justice."
Han Chen frowned. "This isn't our business. Why burden ourselves with the karma of lost souls?"
"Because these were innocent people crying out for justice," Hye Won replied, her voice carrying an edge he rarely heard. "We'll feel restless and inhumane if we do nothing about those who are still out there, still in the old ways, exploiting others. We'll bear the weight of what needs to be done."
Han Chen sighed and materialized a laptop from his storage ring. His fingers moved across the keys, databases and records flowing past in streams of data. Within seconds, faces appeared on the screen—the ones who had orchestrated the massacre that had created this cursed ground. Some had moved on to peaceful lives, but others... others were still in the same business.
The women didn't hesitate. They extended their shared spirit sense outward, searching, finding, judging the latter.
Hundreds of miles away, scattered across the city in gang hideouts and public spaces, men and women they targeted going about their daily routines suddenly collapsed. Their legs simply gave out beneath them. Then their skin began to crack like sun-baked earth, peeling away in sheets as their bodies started to disintegrate from within.
They felt every excruciating every second of it—the slow unraveling of muscle and bone, the creeping dissolution that consumed spine and brain—until nothing remained but screams that the indifferent air swallowed whole.
The didn't care about the public out rest that happened around it. And in order to be thorough, even dragged Han Chen to another few cities to get done with the rest.
"Done?" he asked quietly after. Han Chen is now unsure of how his wives would react to the true violence and horrors in upper realms that he witnessed in his memories. For them Chaos and Order are separate, judging the right and wrong in absolute.
Yue Lan exhaled slowly. "Done."
They left without looking back. The weight of the dead had finally lifted, and the curse was broken at last. What followed would go down as one of the most baffling enigmas in the nation's history.
Over the span of hours, thirty-four people died in grotesque, inexplicable ways into fine dust ~ many in broad daylight, scattered across vast distances, some thousands of miles apart. Just as mysteriously, the oppressive aura that once clung to the related haunted area vanished completely. Whatever haunted that place seemed to have dispersed ~ its remnants now woven into scattered deaths and a silence no one could quite explain.
Return
The rest of the days were simply spent exploring in flight. Though it appeared that people here were free from surveillance and movement restrictions, the levels of control were actually the same ~ they just weren't as obvious without insider knowledge.
They traveled from cities owned by corporations to farmlands stretching endlessly toward the horizon. It was a fascinating geographical region. Han Chen observed very rare fauna and flora, and even essence beasts with nearly master-level strength from experimentation and even natural ones, unknown in the undergrounds.
They even held an impromptu wildlife food party to experience the local ecosystem. Their weeks-long land tour eventually concluded, and it was time to return to cultivation.
Eventually, they returned to their homeland. Cultivation resumed. Life, in its own rhythm, flowed forward.
...
...
The March of Time
Time slowed. Or perhaps it only seemed to. Much things happened in the six years followed.
His sister is now in middle school. Han Ruo Xi.
She breezed through academics and sports with an effortless grace that irritated her teachers more than it impressed them. Her success wasn't born of ambition, but of something innate. She never studied late, never trained too hard. Things just worked out for her so much so that she was given option to skip classes but she said no because it would be boring.
As the only daughter of the now-renowned Chen Group Industries founders, she wore her surname like a badge. Confident ~ bordering on bossy; she had gathered a small entourage of friends and admirers. At school, her word carried weight. She wasn't feared exactly, but she was definitely figure carrying weight, like a weather system no one could control.
Han Chen occasionally picked her up after school. He'd arrive in one of the low-slung, matte black company fleet cars that had become iconic in the tech-energy sector. The moment the vehicle pulled in, small heads would turn, and eyes would widen. His sister would emerge from the school gates with a smug smile—not too wide, just enough for her classmates to notice—and stroll into the passenger seat like royalty.
The little girls watching from behind the gates didn't understand much about cultivation, or economics, or what it meant to build a trillion-yuan company from shadows. But they understood status, and Han Chen ~ tall, calm, mysterious and most of all looked like someone from the dramas their older sisters watched. To them, he was a figure of quiet myth from the tales of boasting heard from Ruo Xi.
Now thirteen, she had begun her martial arts training two years earlier ~ begged her brother in secret, citing self-defense and swearing him to silence from parents. Han Chen had agreed, seeing no harm in letting her learn quietly.
By now, she had reached the mid-stage of Ming Jin. Protecting herself was no longer a question.
Her parents discovered the truth the hard way.
Few months back, a boy, a classmate, had confessed to her. He was quite an annoying but prideful fellow. Has some background. She'd turned him down gently, but he hadn't taken it well.
Maybe it was status, pride, maybe peer pressure. Either way, he tried to grab her wrist, to force something ~ nothing catastrophic, just the clumsy aggression of a boy facing his first rejection from crush.
A second later, he was on the ground, clutching his forearm, dazed by the pain ~ and the realization that she had struck him without hesitation, overpowering him, a boy.. instantly without him even seeing it coming. Bone broken. Boy's pride wounded and fell into cries.
The boy's parents complained, of course. But the school's surveillance footage showed everything, and given her standing as the Chen Group's daughter—not to mention the donations in her name—no one demanded an apology. Still, the family pushed, sending a notice to her mother in some small, greedy hope of compensation.
Han Chen found out through Ruo Xi messaging him as her mother learned of her martial realm and her being annoyed at being dragged into it. He went to the school himself instead of parents when other party insisted on a meeting. No one knew what was said behind those closed doors, but when they emerged, there was no apology, no money exchanged, only polite, stiff farewells and a call to parents that everything was a misunderstanding from their part.
Later, in the car, Han Chen glanced at his sister. She was looking at him for a while to explain or even be angry at her.
"You went too hard,"he said, calm but firm. "Next time, control the angle. Only aim for bone if you're really in danger. I will train you in the subtleties to overpower and defend effortlessly."
...