The moonlight over the Imperial Capital was a lie. Back in the North, the stars were jagged diamonds against a velvet void, but here, the light was filtered through a massive jade array that sat over the city like a translucent lid. It gave the night a shimmering, sickly green glow that felt entirely wrong—sanitized and artificial. In the cramped, top-floor room of Dormitory 7, Lin Wei sat in the center of a complex diagram he'd spent the last hour carving into the stone floor. He didn't use a chisel; he used a brutal, alternating current of frost and fire that left the rock smelling of ozone and burnt earth.
He wasn't just meditating; he was building a dam.
"System," he grunted, the sweat on his forehead instantly freezing into tiny beads. "Initiate Siphon-Reversal. If this city wants to drink from me, I'm going to make it choke on the bill."
[Warning: Siphon-Reversal Protocol is high-risk. This will alert the Academy's surveillance arrays. Suggestion: Use the Jade Token as a lightning rod. Channel the 'Void' through the Lin Clan's origin.]
Lin Wei reached into the phantom heat of his chest, grabbing onto the hum of the jade token that had become more a part of him than his own ribs. He stopped fighting the city's parasitic pull. Instead, he leaned into it. He threw his meridians wide open, a move that would have been suicide for any standard Qi Gathering student. He invited the Imperial Qi to rush into his body like a flash flood.
The pain was transcendental. It felt like his veins were being injected with crushed glass. The Imperial Qi was rigid and structured—designed to bolster those with royal blood—and it violently rejected the chaotic dual-core system Lin Wei carried. But Lin Wei didn't try to store it. He didn't want it as it was. He pushed the incoming torrent into the "Dead Zone"—the hollow, violet space between his fire and ice cores.
Inside that Void, the Imperial Qi was shredded. It was stripped of its "Royal" signature and reduced to raw, nameless essence. Then, the Phoenix fire burned it clean of toxins, and the Absolute Ice froze it into solid, usable power.
[Qi Absorption: +500... +1200... +5000... Personal Domain Established.]
A violet ripple expanded from Lin Wei's chest, hitting the stone walls with a silent thud. The dampness in the air vanished instantly. The frost on the left wall and the smoke on the right settled into a perfect, eerie equilibrium. The air inside the room was now four times denser than the air outside, a sanctuary of pure, unadulterated power. He could feel the 4th Layer of Qi Gathering pulsing just a heartbeat away, his foundation widening like a canyon.
A faint scratching sound came from the door.
Lin Wei didn't open his eyes. The violet fire in his veins told him exactly who was there. "Han Ye? You're early. I haven't even had my morning tea, and I'm not in the mood for another lecture on ice roots."
The door didn't open. Instead, a voice whispered through the shattered wood—thin, reedy, and carrying that distinct metallic tang he had smelled in the Northern Mountains.
"The Void does not belong to you, Lin Wei," the voice hissed. "You are a thief holding a key you don't understand. The Shadow is already inside the walls. The Phoenix is just a bird in a cage."
Lin Wei's left eye snapped open. A beam of arctic light sliced through the darkness, hitting the door with the force of a sledgehammer. The wood exploded into splinters, but the hallway was a ghost town. Empty. Only a single, pulsing red crystal fragment lay on the floorboards, identical to the one he had seen in the ritual crater back in the Veins.
[New Alert: Shadow Cult Infiltration confirmed.]
[New Objective: Survive the Placement Exam. Identify the Cultist among the students.]
Lin Wei stood up, his violet eyes glowing like twin stars in the dark. He walked to the doorway and crushed the red crystal under his boot. The violet fire and ice vaporized it before the toxin could even hiss.
He looked down at his hands—one trailed by wisps of white steam, the other by a faint, orange heat shimmer. The 1-star talent "loser" should have died in the arena, or the mountains, or the carriage ride. But he was here. And the system was right about one thing: he was a monster.
"The Shadow wants a key?" Lin Wei whispered to the cold, empty hallway. "Tell them I'm coming to the exam. And I'm not bringing a key—I'm bringing the whole damn door down."
He sat back down, the violet light in his room intensifying. He had four hours until dawn. Four hours to become the nightmare the Imperial Academy didn't know it had invited inside. The Imperial bloodline wanted to siphon the world; Lin Wei was going to show them what happened when the world siphoned back.