Dust to Immortals
Chapter 1: Mercy is a Poisoned Blade
The glass rain had fallen again last night. Lián traced a finger along the edge of his ramshackle shelter – a warped rib bone from some long-dead leviathan – watching moonlight fracture through the razor-sharp shards littering the Blighted Steppes. Each piece sang with the memory of Silverpeak City. Of his sister, Xia, her final scream frozen into crystalline lace as the Rot Zone consumed her.
Mercy, the Qi-Healers had called it when they sealed his shattered meridians after the disaster. A kindness, they said, to spare him the agony of leaking Qi. A death sentence, Lián knew. In a world that worshipped refinement, a cripple was less than dust. Exiled to the cancerous borderlands where reality frayed, he survived by selling decay-pattern maps to desperate scavengers. He documented entropy like a scholar chronicling a dying god.
Tonight, the violet bruise on the horizon pulsed. The Steppes whispered – the low groan of petrified wind, the brittle snapping of fossilized grasses underfoot. Lián moved with the silence of deep rot, his threadbare robes blending with the ashen landscape. He wasn't heading for the scavenger camp. He was drawn to the *resonance*.
It hummed through the soles of his thin shoes, a vibration deeper than sound, older than cultivation. It emanated from the Dragon's Grave – a colossal, obsidian spike jutting from the cracked earth like a fang of the world itself. Most saw only a monument to extinction. Lián saw veins of light within the fossilized bone, a hungry, shifting violet that pulsed in time with the Rot Zone's breath.
He knelt. Not in reverence, but in study. The air here tasted metallic, thick with the scent of crumbling time. His crippled meridians, usually numb channels of emptiness, itched. A phantom sensation, like roots seeking water. He pressed his palm flat against the bone. It was neither cold nor hot. It was… void. An absence.
"Foolish decay-rat," a voice rasped from the shadows. Preserver Kai stepped into the fractured moonlight, his silver-chased armor gleaming with unnatural purity against the blighted landscape. The insignia of the Jade Aegis Academy – a closed lotus cradling a perfect sphere – shone on his breastplate. His sword, Gleam of Purity, was already half-drawn, radiating a sharp, sterile Qi that made Lián's eyes water. "The Grave is forbidden. Your kind spreads contamination just by breathing."
Lián didn't turn. His focus remained on the bone. The itch in his meridians became a low thrum. "Preserver Kai. Still hunting phantoms while the real disease festers above?"
"Your maps lead scavengers too close to active zones," Kai spat, taking another step. The sterile Qi intensified, pushing against the natural decay of the Steppes like an unwelcome tide. "You hasten the blight. The Preservers cleanse."
Lián's lips thinned. Cleansing. Like they'd "cleansed" Silverpeak. Sealed the survivors' broken meridians, condemning them to slow starvation in the wastes while the Academy siphoned the residual energy of the Rot Zone into their precious spirit gardens. He remembered the healers' detached eyes, the way they'd looked at Xia not as a dying girl, but as a source of impurity to be contained. Mercy, they called it. Mercy was the poison that choked the world.
"The blight isn't contamination, Kai," Lián murmured, his voice barely audible over the whispering wastes. "It's the foundation. The truth your masters buried."
Kai's laugh was harsh. "Heresy spat from broken meridians! The only truth is Purity. The only path is Refinement." He fully drew Gleam of Purity. The blade sang, a sound that scraped against Lián's nerves. "Your decay ends now."
As Kai lunged, a silvery arc aimed to cleave Lián's head from his shoulders, Lián did the only thing he could. He didn't dodge. He didn't plead. He pushed his awareness, his desperate, broken self, into the fossilized bone beneath his palm.
And the Dragon's Grave answered.
Not with power. Not with Qi. With hunger.
Violet light, deep as a dying star and cold as the void between worlds, erupted from the bone where his hand touched it. It didn't flood into him; it recognized the emptiness within him – the shattered meridians, the hollow places where refined Qi should have been – and flowed inward like water finding cracks in parched earth. It was Primordial Decay. Not corruption, but the raw, chaotic potential from which all things coalesced… and to which all things inevitably returned.
Agony? There was none. It was dissolution. It was the sigh at the end of existence. His nerves didn't scream; they unraveled. His bones didn't break; they resonated with the ancient song of collapse. He saw the universe not as a construct of laws, but as a tapestry woven from strands of decaying time. He saw Kai's perfect sword, not as a blade of light, but as a temporary knot in the fabric, already fraying.
Time seemed to stretch, thin and brittle. Kai's sword descended with glacial slowness. Lián, moving without conscious thought, raised his other hand – the one not fused to the dragon bone. Not to block. To *touch* the incoming steel.
His fingertips brushed the pristine edge of Gleam of Purity.
There was no clash. No spark. Only a soft, dreadful hiss.
Where his decaying flesh met the refined spirit steel, vibrant metal turned the color of dried blood. Then ash-gray. Then dust. Rust bloomed like a malignant flower, racing up the blade faster than thought. Kai's triumphant snarl froze into a mask of utter disbelief as his divine weapon, forged in celestial fires and imbued with purest Qi, crumbled into metallic flakes that scattered on the blighted wind. The disintegration didn't stop. It crawled onto the silver-chased guard, turning intricate filigree into powdery ruin, then touched the edge of Kai's gauntlet.
The Preserver screamed – a raw sound of violation – as the pristine metal darkened and flaked away, revealing the skin beneath already withering, desiccating like ancient parchment.
Lián stared at his own hand. Violet light pulsed faintly beneath his skin, tracing the pathways of his shattered meridians not with healing energy, but with the profound, terrifying power of ending. The dragon bone beneath his other palm was now visibly pitted, ancient layers reduced to fine, dark sand trickling through his fingers. He felt… whole. Not healed, but fundamentally aligned. The emptiness was filled not with borrowed strength, but with the universe's oldest truth.
He looked up at Kai, who clutched his decaying hand, eyes wide with terror that had eclipsed all dogma. The sterile Qi around the Preserver was fraying, unable to withstand the ambient Primordial Decay amplified by Lián's presence.
"Y-You… demon…" Kai choked out, staggering back.
Lián slowly withdrew his hand from the crumbling bone. Violet motes danced around his fingertips. He felt the vast hunger within him, the power to unmake. Not malice. Necessity. He looked past the trembling Preserver, towards the pulsing bruise on the horizon – the Rot Zone that had birthed and broken him. He saw it clearly now, not as a scar, but as a wound in a suffocating lie.
"No, Kai," Lián said, his voice echoing with the depth of crumbling mountains. "I'm the cure."
He took a step forward. Not towards Kai, but towards the heart of the blight. His shattered meridians hummed with the power of endings. His path wasn't refinement. It was return. He was the anathema. He was the dust from which new worlds might rise.
And the rotting universe sighed in relief.