## Chapter 163: Mountainfall Escape
The world was sound and fury.
Li Chang'an didn't run. He fell with the mountain. Stone screamed as it sheared away from itself. The grandmaster's final roar of rage was swallowed by the thunderous groan of collapsing foundations. Li Chang'an was a leaf in a hurricane, tumbling through a storm of dust and debris.
He'd aimed his Void-Shattering Palm not at the grandmaster, but at the mountain's ancient fault line, the one his comprehension had whispered to him about in the split second before annihilation. Now, he rode the consequences.
A beam the size of a tree trunk grazed his side. He felt ribs bend, not break, but the air left his lungs in a wet gasp. Shrapnel of carved jade cut lines of fire across his back. He tasted copper and dust.
Not dead. Not yet.
He twisted in mid-air, a desperate, graceless motion. The void energy he'd expended still thrummed weakly in his meridians. He couldn't manipulate space, not now, but he could feel it—the pockets of emptiness between the tumbling rock, the hidden cavities the mountain's death was revealing.
He saw it: a dark maw yawning open as a slab of the palace floor peeled away. Below was not more rock, but emptiness.
He stopped fighting the fall and dove into it.
The noise cut off as if severed by a blade. He plunged into cold, damp darkness, followed by a torrent of rubble. He hit water—icy, shocking—and was driven deep. The impact was a second collapse inside his own body. Something in his shoulder gave with a sickening pop. The world narrowed to the burn in his lungs and the crushing weight of the mountain settling above him.
Instinct, honed by a hundred comprehended movement techniques, took over. He kicked, one-armed, following a faint, upward current of air. His head broke the surface with a ragged, sucking inhale. He was in an underground river, flowing through a cavern. The ceiling shuddered, sprinkling more stone into the water, but it held.
For now.
He dragged himself onto a narrow, slick ledge, his body a map of fresh agony. Every breath was a knife in his side. His right arm hung useless. He lay there, shivering, listening to the mountain die above him.
Minutes bled into an hour. The tremors subsided. The only sounds were the drip of water and the ragged saw of his own breathing.
Alive.
The word had weight. It was a cold, hard fact in the dark.
He pushed himself up with his good arm, back against the rough cavern wall. The grandmaster's face flashed in his mind—not the rage, but the moment before. The absolute, unshakable certainty in those ancient eyes. Li Chang'an had thrown everything he had at him: perfected techniques, void manipulation that would make a master weep. And it had been like throwing pebbles at a fortress.
But even fortresses had weaknesses. Foundations could be undermined.
He closed his eyes, ignoring the throbbing pain. He didn't meditate on his injuries. He meditated on the fight.
His [Heaven-Defying Comprehension] didn't need scrolls or teachers. It needed data. Experience. And he had just been given a masterclass in overwhelming power.
He replayed every second.
The grandmaster's void energy hadn't just been stronger; it had been older. Denser. It didn't cut space; it rejected it, creating zones of absolute authority where his will was law. Li Chang'an's own void techniques had sputtered and died in those zones, like flames deprived of air.
But there had been a rhythm to it. A pulse. The grandmaster's power wasn't a constant tsunami. It was a tide. It swelled with his movements, with his breaths, and ebbed ever so slightly in the moment between intention and execution. A gap measured in heartbeats. A flaw not of skill, but of mortality.
And the grandmaster's body… Li Chang'an focused on the memory of their final clash. The old master's palm, suffused with enough energy to vaporize steel, had met his own Void-Shattering Palm. In that nanosecond of contact, Li Chang'an's comprehension had screamed something at him.
The grandmaster's physical vessel was… straining. The immense void energy he commanded was contained by a frame that was, while incredibly fortified, reaching its limit. His skin had held a faint, almost imperceptible translucency under the peak of his power, like porcelain stretched thin over a blazing light.
He's a kettle about to scream, Li Chang'an realized, the thought crystal clear in the pain-hazed dark. All that power, and the spout is sealed shut.
A strategy, fragile and desperate, began to form in his mind. Not to overpower. To overfill. To turn the grandmaster's greatest strength into the poison that would burst him from within.
But first, he had to move.
Gritting his teeth, he focused inward. His spiritual sense traced the damage. Three cracked ribs. A dislocated shoulder. A web of minor fractures along his right forearm. Internal bruising that painted his organs in shades of agony. A standard healing pill would take days to mend this.
He had no days.
He reached for the dregs of void energy still circulating in his system—the residual power from his desperate techniques. It was wild, unstable, and inherently destructive. Useless for healing.
Or was it?
His comprehension talent ignited.
Void is not just destruction. It is potential. The emptiness before creation. What if…
He didn't try to soothe his injuries with the energy. He commanded it to unmake the damage.
It was a insane, counterintuitive leap. He visualized the cracks in his bones not as breaks to be fused, but as imperfections to be erased. He guided the volatile void energy to the site of his dislocated shoulder, not to push the bone back, but to momentarily negate the misalignment, to create a fleeting null-point where the injury simply… wasn't.
A white-hot, cleansing fire erupted in his shoulder.
He bit down on a scream, his jaw clenched so tight he thought his teeth would powder. It felt like his joint was being dissolved in acid and re-forged in the same instant. There was a wet, grinding snap.
Sweat poured down his face, mixing with the grime and blood. He slumped forward, panting.
Tentatively, he moved his right arm.
It moved. Stiff. Sore as all hell. But the blinding, nauseating pain of the dislocation was gone. It was just a deep, profound ache.
Shock held him still for a moment. He'd just… comprehended a new application of void energy. A healing method that shouldn't exist.
He turned his focus to his ribs. The process was slower, more delicate. He used wisps of void energy to target the microfractures, not healing them, but conceptually skipping them back to a state of wholeness that existed a minute before the beam hit him. It was like editing the narrative of his own flesh.
The knife in his side dulled to a heavy throb.
He opened his eyes in the utter darkness, a wild, incredulous laugh bubbling in his raw throat. It wasn't perfect healing. It felt more like a temporary rewrite, a patch job on reality itself. His body was still exhausted, his spiritual energy nearly depleted. But he was functional. In hours, not days.
The void energy within him, once a fading echo, now felt different. It had been… integrated. Tempered by the insane act of self-repair. It hummed in his core, quieter, deeper, a strange new hybrid of destructive potential and regenerative paradox.
He stood up on shaky legs. The cavern stretched before him, leading deeper into the mountain's gut. Somewhere above, a grandmaster thought him buried under ten thousand tons of rock.
A ghost of a smile touched Li Chang'an's lips, hard and sharp in the dark.
You wanted to see heaven-defying talent, he thought, flexing his newly-usable hand. A faint, shimmering distortion—like heat haze over a desert—rippled around his fingertips before fading.
Let's go for round two.
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