The voice echoed heavily inside his skull.
Zhì Yuǎn froze. He did not open his eyes. His instinct screamed for him to attack whatever was there, but reason immediately crushed the impulse. He was at the limit of starvation, struggling not to lose his mind, and someone had just torn through the chaos to invade his consciousness as if no barriers existed.
A Divine Sense capable of piercing and disregarding the Chaotic Void could only belong to something far beyond his current ability to face.
He forced his breathing to steady. Quickly, he raised barriers in his Sea of Consciousness, sealing away any hostility or killing intent. He needed to survive this conversation.
"Senior," Zhì Yuǎn's voice came out hoarse, forced through clenched teeth, but maintaining the necessary politeness. "Please forgive my lack of manners. I am somewhat indisposed at the moment."
"Don't worry, boy. I am merely an old man cleaning the filth from the spatial currents," the voice continued gently, cutting through Zhì Yuǎn's mental barriers as if they were made of paper. "You know, the Void is wild. It corrodes and destroys. But here, it has been stabilized… rather, crushed."
"The Senior is truly magnanimous…" Zhì Yuǎn interrupted himself, chest heaving as he suppressed a dry, painful cough. "I feel both honored and ashamed for wasting your precious time."
"Hahahaha… Besides being powerful for a newborn, you are also very perceptive." The voice grew louder and noticeably more amused than before.
Suddenly, the invisible perception swept over Zhì Yuǎn's foundation from top to bottom in a fraction of a second.
"Your constitution makes no sense, boy," the old man dissected what he saw with dry curiosity, picking him apart with cold precision."No divine blood, no inheritance. No spiritual bones. You have an ordinary mortal physique, yet your flesh weighs like a world. And in place of your Dantian… well, even I cannot see what's there… how curious."
Hunger violently pulled at Zhì Yuǎn's stomach. Cold sweat dripped from his chin. He clenched his fists against the dark ground, struggling to keep his mind clear before the intruder.
"It is a rather demanding foundation, Senior," Zhì Yuǎn replied directly, without trying to hide the obvious. There was no point in lying to someone who was already peering into his very depths. "If the Senior did not come to claim my life today, I beg you to overlook my lack of manners. I need to contain my own body now, or I will lose my reason before we can speak."
The old man let out a short laugh inside his head.
"Busy fighting against yourself, I see," the ancient voice did not retreat, striking the central point with surgical precision. "You believe your problem is merely the lack of energy. But what is truly cracking your mind right now is not the hunger of your flesh, boy."
"It is a Heart Demon."
Zhì Yuǎn remained on his knees, motionless. He did not try to argue and did not change the expression on his face.
"No need to hide it. I have lived long enough to recognize the marks in a man's attitude," the old man chuckled lightly, returning to a relaxed tone. "Your own insecurities are choking you. You are afraid of losing control and taking the lives of those you swore to protect. Judging by the way you locked yourself alone in this hole, I bet it is your woman."
Zhì Yuǎn clenched his jaw and remained silent. The guess struck exactly where his sanity was cracking, but apathy was his only response.
"From your tension, I hit the mark," the Senior clicked his tongue, amused. "Two women? Heavens, boy. My wife never allowed me to have any others back in the day. I don't know how you manage to…"
The old man's voice suddenly stopped. His perception seemed to bump into the absurd number of karmic threads Zhì Yuǎn had cut and sealed hours earlier to isolate himself.
"Wait a moment. More than two?" The Senior's voice rose an octave, overflowing with genuine and comical shock. "By the heavens, boy! You've barely been born and you already have so many women bound to your fate?! Are you perhaps a dual cultivator? I envy you mortals… you really live in another world. Hahahaha!"
The old man's laughter echoed loudly and carefree inside Zhì Yuǎn's head, making his skull vibrate and momentarily breaking the morbid tension of starvation in the middle of the void.
Zhì Yuǎn drew in a breath, steadying his own mind against the echo of that laugh.
"How do I resolve this, Senior?" he asked, ignoring the joke, his voice dry and ready for the next step.
"You resolve it by ceasing to fight what you are."
The Senior dropped the playful tone. The instruction descended straight and practical into the man's mind.
"I cannot see what you have in place of a Dantian, boy, but I know how a predator behaves," the ancient voice echoed without any pity. "You are treating your own instincts as if they were a plague — as though you were a monster that must be chained to protect those outside."
Zhì Yuǎn kept his jaw locked, listening in the dark.
"The more you resist your own instincts, the more your reason begins to crack. A tiger does not feel guilt for having teeth. The abyss does not apologize for devouring light. That is simply what they do." The old man sighed. "Stop caging the beast. You are the predator. Take the seat. Be the master of the hunger, not its jailer."
Zhì Yuǎn's breathing stopped for a second.
He did not hesitate. Survival instinct and pragmatism did not allow moral debates. Ever since the hunger had tightened its grip, he had been spending the strength of his own Soul to isolate the Singularity, forcing internal limits to ensure that the need to consume did not seize control of his body.
He released the limits.
The defenses he had raised in his own mind collapsed all at once. The internal suction advanced heavily, but Zhì Yuǎn did not retreat. He took his own Soul Force and plunged it directly into the predatory instinct. He stopped looking at the need to devour as a disease and accepted it as an arm or a leg. It was a part of his own flesh. He dictated when and how it would eat.
The fusion happened without any explosion.
The tightness in his chest eased immediately and the cold sweat dried on his chin. His heart, which had been hammering desperately against his ribs, slowed until it found a calm and steady rhythm in the middle of the darkness.
The Heart Demon was digested from the inside out. The terror of losing his mind and harming his own family evaporated, replaced by the cold, clear certainty of who he was.
Zhì Yuǎn slowly drew in air. His stomach was still growling in the void; the starvation in his flesh was unchanged and his body's energy remained dry. He still felt hunger, but the mental terror had completely disappeared. Control was absolute once again.
"Much better."
Zhì Yuǎn's voice came out steady, the hoarseness vanishing along with the desperation. He opened his eyes in the dead calm. His gaze was dark, serene, and perfectly lethargic.
"That was very quick," the Senior clicked his tongue inside his head, his voice exuding genuine approval. "Most geniuses take decades to digest their own Heart Demon and stop apologizing for their own nature. You are full of surprises…"
Zhì Yuǎn's mind was clean again.
With the terror swallowed, his nature took the forefront. Kneeling on the smooth ground, he turned his gaze toward the gray storm that had been frozen by his presence. His eyes focused on the particles of dark sludge. Even before expressing his gratitude, he began searching for patterns by reflex, dissecting what made that dust unravel matter.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
The Senior's voice cut through his concentration. The approving tone disappeared, replaced by a dry warning.
Zhì Yuǎn blinked, pulling his attention away from the dust.
"Why not?"
"Trying to understand chaos is useless," the old man explained. "Chaos has no root. It has no rules for you to chew on. It is both a Law and the absence of one. If you try to force your comprehension into it right now, your reason will tie itself into knots. What will be born in your chest to devour you will not be a simple Heart Demon. It will be something much worse."
Zhì Yuǎn immediately withdrew his perception.
He did not question it. He did not have energy to spend freely trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Hunger was already problem enough to solve at the moment.
"I thank the Senior for the guidance," Zhì Yuǎn replied. He lowered his head slightly in the darkness, his tone returning to polite. "I will be more careful in the future."
The old man let out a low, drawn-out laugh inside his head, like someone amused by a secret.
"You had better be," the Senior's presence began to loosen, the invisible threads of his Divine Sense slowly retreating from the man's Sea of Consciousness. "The filth I was hunting fled to this extension of the Void. For someone like me, hunting these small rats down here is almost humiliating… but even that is acceptable when the alternative is the stagnation up above."
Zhì Yuǎn remained silent. Every piece of information was useful. The old man sighed, the sound echoing distantly.
"The upper realms have been rotting from boredom lately, boy. Everyone cultivates the same laws, seeks the same inheritances, and trembles before the same dogmas. Stagnant." The ancient voice carried a sharp, predatory amusement before fading completely. "Survive. Grow. I look forward to meeting you up there in the future… because it will be incredibly entertaining to watch what someone like you will do with that…"
The contact cut off completely. Zhì Yuǎn's mind fell silent.
He was alone again.
Zhì Yuǎn slowly rose to his feet. The burning in his stomach and the pain in his ribs from starvation were worse, but his control over his own body was absolute. He pulled his presence back into himself, withdrawing the invisible weight that had been flattening the dimension around him.
The Chaotic Void immediately began to swirl again. The storm of wind and gray sludge struck his body with fury, trying to tear the tunic he wore.
But Zhì Yuǎn no longer paid attention to the chaos. He raised his right hand and tore open the empty space in front of him, opening a rift to the mortal plane. He stepped through the passage and left the darkness behind, his mind calm and focused. He needed to return to his family — and more importantly, he needed to return to cultivation. He had much to replenish.