Ash drifted from the sky.
"Another ashrain? Wasn't there one two days ago?" a miner said, staring upward in worry.
"Yeah," another sighed, wiping sweat from his neck.
"The world's getting uglier by the day. Let's just hope this isn't a Rank Four type..."
Lyn paused his work and watched the pale drizzle that blurred the horizon.
"Twice in two days," he murmured.
"Hey, you! Stop staring and get back to work – Light-refining ore doesn't dig itself!"
Lyn lifted his pickaxe, but before he could swing, he felt the air thicken. Each flake glowed faintly red. The miners' complaints turned to choking, then coughing.
"This is..."
The previously cocky substitute fell silent. He could identify the ashrain's rank, but that was no longer necessary. One look around was enough.
One by one, they fell.
One man straightened as if his breath had caught on an invisible hook. He clawed at his throat, eyes widening. His chest refused him. Someone tried to shout for help, but only scraped air. Knees hit the stone.
If the Fire Path overseer had come today, Vale Ridge would not have become a grave. But it had already been a few weeks since he stopped coming. Did he die? I wonder.
Lyn remained still for a few breaths, listening as the last cough faded.
The first time he saw death on this scale, he was terrified. But as it continued to happen... gradually, he became numb and uncaring.
"Unaffected as always..." Lyn nodded as he extended his right hand.
A faint shimmer appeared, thin and glass-like. A shard gate.
Lyn guided the shimmering gate to the falling ash. The flakes slid inward into his Vessel Realm—an inner world with an endless sky and an endless ocean.
He continued until the Sea within trembled slightly.
That is enough. Any more would risk backlash.
He had collected over forty fragments. Enough for two weeks of food. Enough to possibly afford a cheap Rank One heavenly shard.
A Rank One speed shard—Fleet Step, the miners called it with desperate reverence—required one month of labor. And that was if the sect didn't raise prices. Again.
A combat shard?
People killed their own families for those.
Lyn had seen it happen.
A woman just one street from where he lived had found a Rank One Iron Palm shard in her dead husband's Vessel Realm. She had a method to extract the heavenly shard which was given to her by her husband. Her husband had planned to give it to their children.
Her brother came to "help" her grieve.
By morning, she and her children were dead, and the brother was gone.
No one investigated further.
Hazelrun was small, and it was easy to find out what had happened.
Everyone knew.
No one acted.
The brother walked away with the shard. The bodies were buried in unmarked soil. The street went quiet.
And Lyn?
He had been in his clay box that night. He had heard the screams. He had pressed his palm against the wall and listened to the silence that followed.
He had done nothing.
Heavenly Shards were everything. A brother slaughtered his own sister and her children for one. Nothing new.
Lyn looked down at his own empty palm.
I have nothing worth taking.
A Heavenly Shard was a tool. It usually looked like a shard of glass, thus its name. Such tools were mostly kept inside Vessel Realms, and Lyn had no way to invade Vessel Realms and take them. Even if he had, the person—though dead—could have made the shard self-detonate if they were smart enough.
He sat among the corpses in silence and looked above.
After a moment of thought, he started looting the bodies.
As expected, they had nothing worthy to take. Lyn had no way to take their Heavenly Shards, but he managed to rob them of a few contribution tokens. Contribution tokens were the world's currency, small golden chips of glass issued by the sects.
The world had already taken everything from men like these. Lyn taking a few tokens hardly changed the insult.
He turned to leave.
He would return to Hazelrun Village and pretend he overslept. A small deduction of contribution tokens would be nothing compared to the risk of explaining how he survived the ashrain.
As he walked, Lyn glanced inward mentally at his Vessel Realm—an inner world with a sea without end and a sky that seemed to stretch forever. Three shards drifted above that silent sea humbly.
Light Reflect was still intact.
Light Cat Eyes sharpened the road ahead through the ash haze as he continued pouring his essence into the shard mentally.
Light Information remained silent, useless as always unless he knew what question to ask.
While walking toward the gate, he continued his train of thought.
If I exchange the ash too soon, the elders will ask how I harvested it without Fire Truth Carvings. I will have to rely on luck that they overlook it or forget about it...
He did not know why he could harvest any material, as normally one would need the corresponding Truth Carvings. Neither did he know why weather phenomena never affected him. It was as if they could not see him.
A gust of wind kicked ash from the ground. Pale dust swirled around his ankles, thick as fog.
Lyn's eyes adjusted. He poured more essence into Light Cat Eyes, his heavenly shard.
The ash haze peeled back like a curtain. The road ahead sharpened into crystalline clarity—every crack in the stone, every bent blade of grass, every faint footprint left by the villagers who had fled the ashrain.
At night, the effect inverted. Darkness became a pale grey dreamscape, shadows revealing their contents, ambushes becoming open books.
But there was a cost.
His tear ducts burned after prolonged use. His vision would blur for hours if he forced the ability past its limit.
A Rank One shard could only give so much. If he were gifted, he could have negated the side effects.
Lyn blinked. The ash haze returned. The road softened back to grey.
Enough. This shard costs too much of my essence to maintain.
His stomach growled.
Risky or not, harvesting materials meant tokens, and tokens meant food.
That was how one survived in a world that valued rank above life.
He stepped closer to Hazelrun's gate when suddenly a faint vibration rolled beneath his feet.
He stopped breathing for a heartbeat.
Behind him, the sky brightened. A golden glow thickened, spreading wider until the clouds seemed ready to split.
Blood warmed inside Lyn's nose and slipped down his lip.
He tried to wipe it away, but his hand would not answer.
Then the pressure deepened. His teeth ached in their roots, as if something were pressing against him from every direction at once. Wind roared through Hazelrun, dragging dust and straw into spirals that scratched across the ground.
Lyn forced his eyes upward.
The sky above the village looked like cracked glass. Pale lines spread through the clouds, widening with each silent pulse of golden light.
Dust climbed into the air. Space twisted around the glow.
Something vast turned its attention downward.
Lyn narrowed his eyes through the pain.
What is this?
Lyn tried to move again.
His legs refused. His body trembled from the inside out, every rib and joint shaking under the weight of the golden light.
He could do nothing but keep his eyes on the sky.
Overhead, forms slid into existence—golden symbols with no fixed shape drifted downward, carrying a weight that forced the body into pure, animalistic fear.
The mind did not understand, but the body did.
Screams erupted from the village. Some tried to run, but their movements grew slow and uneven, as if the air had turned thick around them. A few managed only two or three stumbling steps before collapsing. Others froze where they stood, their bodies locked in place before their minds could understand why. A few died without ever knowing what had touched them.
Then the last traces of motion began to fail.
A sound like a broken violin's screech scraped across the village, thin and unbearable, as if time itself were being pulled apart strand by strand.
Color drained from the world like water from cloth. A deep bell rang somewhere beyond the sky. People hung mid-motion, caught between breaths, screams, and falling steps.
Only the golden symbols continued to move. They shifted above the village in perfect silence, turning with impossible grace. Each movement was precise, each angle deliberate, as if the world itself had no choice but to obey them.
Something inside Lyn reacted before thought could form. His hand stretched on its own, and his Shard Gate flickered open.
He tried to force it shut, to move, to do anything, yet nothing obeyed.
This was beyond his own will.
He could only watch helplessly.
A single mark drifted away from the others. Its edges sharpened as it descended, and the pressure around Lyn deepened until every sound collapsed into a single ringing note. Blood spilled warm from his ears. His vision blurred.
The symbol surged forward and vanished into the Gate.
For one breath, everything was silent.
Then a burning pain seized Lyn's chest, so sudden and violent that he thought his heart had been pierced.
His inner Sky shone with blinding light.
He saw that all color drained from his Vessel Realm. Only the golden star shone.
It reflected across the entire sky.
Suddenly, the sea began to boil. Then it evaporated almost instantly.
As soon as it evaporated, golden liquid poured from the sky to replace it—liquid containing and reflecting entire galaxies.
The new sea was golden, and it flowed north endlessly. Across it, one could see galaxies that spanned forever.
And a large wound stretched forever across the golden expanse. Molten red. Like a slash.
He felt immense pain.
Then the color returned to inside his Vessel Realm, and the pain stopped.
The rift closed.
The broken violin screeched once more. A deep bell followed.
Color rushed back into the world. Wind moved. Dust fell. Screams continued from the exact breath where they had been cut off.
Hazelrun Village stood in stunned terror. Some villagers staggered. Others touched the blood on their faces without understanding where it had come from.
None of them knew time had stopped.
Lyn lowered his hand slowly.
Inside his Vessel Realm, the golden star hung in the sky with absolute silence.
Problem after problem.
His expression remained flat, almost listless, as if the blood still wet on his face were nothing more than morning dew. Fear would come later, perhaps. For now, only irritation stirred in his chest.
He wiped the blood from his face as best he could.
He suppressed all Essence. His presence faded until he seemed no different from a Rootless villager returning home late. In this state, even a Rank Four Dao Chosen would overlook him entirely.
Voices appeared in the distance. Sect envoys rushed to investigate.
Lyn calmly adjusted his clothes and walked into the village.
He would say he overslept. No change in plan there.
But as he walked, he reached inward once more—not toward the star, but toward his Light Information Heavenly Shard.
The shard floated above his inner sea, silent as a tomb.
Light Information. Question: What entered my Vessel Realm?
Silence.
Light Information. Question: Is it hostile?
Nothing.
Light Information. Question: What are its properties?
The shard did not move. Did not pulse. Did not react.
Lyn's jaw tightened.
Light Information. Question: Is it even a Truth Carving?
The shard stirred.
Cracks spread across its surface like frozen lightning. A sound like grinding glass echoed through his Vessel Realm—high, thin, agonized.
Light Information looked like a piece of glass which had writing on it in forms of answers. But the writing flickered. Twisted. Could not settle.
If it were a Truth Carving...
Lyn's own thought cut through the chaos.
...it's different. A Truth Carving is a dwarf star. Compact. Dense. Contained. They cluster together in the Sky like families, dwarf stars orbiting dwarf stars. A Truth Carving is understanding of a path, and yet... the star is alone. Is it something else? It isn't a dwarf star. It's too large.
The shard trembled violently.
A second crack split across its surface—diagonal this time, from corner to corner. The two halves shifted, held together by nothing but the fading glow of its own existence.
Lyn pulled back the essence he had used to activate the shard.
But the damage was done. The shard crumbled and fell into the golden sea, disappearing.
Too much, he sighed. The question was too much for a Rank One shard.
He broke it.
And for what?
He still did not have an answer.
Light Information was useless unless he knew exactly what question to ask. It could not generate new knowledge—only organize what was already hidden in the world's patterns. And he had no context for stars.
Then I will watch, he decided. And I will wait.
No one would ever know what truly fell that day.
It would become just another story to tell children at night to scare them from going outside.
It would become just another myth.
Lyn walked into Hazelrun Village with dried blood on his face and a golden star burning in his Vessel Realm.
And somewhere far above—far beyond the clouds, far beyond the sects, far beyond anything the villagers could name—something vast began to notice that its anchor had found a harbor.