CHAPTER 163: CH-163: KNEW IT

The Feilun Sect’s mountain gates still trembled with echoes of the storm.

Where once serene skies had crowned the sect’s sprawling peaks, now the heavens bore scars of fire and thunder. Chasms split the earth in jagged lines where lightning had seared stone into glass. The training fields, where disciples once sparred in orderly rhythm, were blackened with ash. Even the ancestral statues of Feilun’s founders bore cracks, their faces lit eerily by the fading glow of residual thunder-essence.

In the heart of the devastation, Tian Shen sat cross-legged. His breath came slow, but his body radiated an oppressive weight, as though his veins still carried remnants of the storm.

He had broken through.

From the Core Reinforcement Realm, he had forced his way—violently, unrelentingly—into the Utopian Core Realm.

His Core pulsed within him, no longer a small bead of condensed essence but an ocean condensed into one radiant sun, glowing beneath his dantian. And yet... that sun was unstable. Lightning still cracked around its edges, a storm that resisted being tamed.

Feng Yin stood some paces away, her robes torn by stray blasts from the earlier tribulation. Her hand hovered near her chest, her qi flow still rattled from having shielded disciples during the height of Tian Shen’s storm. But her gaze was locked entirely on him.

To her, Tian Shen looked less like a cultivator and more like an ancient monument—part man, part storm, part unyielding stone. His hair, still damp from the rain, clung to his face. Sparks leapt now and again from his skin, as though refusing to leave him even though the tribulation had ended.

"Tian Shen..." she whispered, almost involuntarily.

The name felt different on her tongue now. Not just a companion’s name. Not even a fellow disciple’s. But a word heavy with consequence.

When she first met him, Tian Shen had been... raw. Stubborn. Reckless at times. He fought with desperation rather than elegance, as though every battle was proof against the world itself. But what she saw now was not merely desperation. It was dominion.

The storm no longer hunted him. He had devoured it.

...

The Sect’s elders gathered on the ridge.

Elder Su’s face bore calm, but his eyes betrayed pride—a quiet pride only another cultivator of his caliber could understand. He had watched over countless disciples striving for breakthroughs, but Tian Shen’s was unlike anything preserved in the sect’s annals.

"This boy..." muttered Elder Qiao, his beard trembling. "To provoke a tribulation of that scale simply for stepping into Utopian Core Realm... I fear the heavens see him as something beyond mortal law."

"Or," another elder said gravely, "the heavens see him as a threat."

Their words carried unease. For Tian Shen’s storm had not only consumed the sky—it had nearly swallowed the sect itself. The lightning had carved through the defensive formations, shredded entire orchards, and shattered the flow of several leyline nodes. Had Tian Shen faltered even slightly, Feilun Sect might have been left in ruins.

Yet amid the whispers, Elder Su stood unmoved.

"Power always draws fear," he said. "But it is not fear that builds sects. It is resolve. Tian Shen carries both."

His words silenced the gathering.

Down below, Tian Shen opened his eyes.

The storm had quieted, but not vanished. Within his gaze, arcs of violet lightning crackled faintly—signs of a cultivator whose dao had begun etching itself into his marrow.

He exhaled slowly, sending ripples through the shattered courtyard.

"Too violent," he murmured to himself. His own voice sounded foreign, distant. "If I force it further, I’ll break apart before reaching perfection."

His qi circulation had changed drastically. In the Core Reinforcement Realm, he had been tempering, reinforcing, adding steel to his foundation. Now in the Utopian Core Realm, it was no longer about reinforcement—it was about dominion. To take the chaos within and shape it into a reality others would bow before. His storm had the strength to crush—but not yet the serenity to endure.

He clenched his fist, feeling the spear-callus in his palm ache.

"I need balance," he thought. "Or I’ll drown in my own thunder."

Feng Yin approached quietly, her steps cautious as though approaching a wild beast that might lash out at any sound. But when she saw him exhale, the violent arcs dimming slightly around his frame, her worry softened.

"You didn’t just survive," she said softly, kneeling beside him. "You conquered it."

Tian Shen turned, his expression unreadable for a moment. Then he gave the smallest of nods.

"Conquered?" He shook his head. "No. Not yet. A conqueror rules. I... am only holding on."

His honesty unsettled her more than arrogance would have. It showed that beneath all the thunder and fire, Tian Shen remained painfully human—aware of the knife-edge he balanced upon.

Feng Yin’s hand brushed against the hilt of her sword. She didn’t know why, but her chest tightened. For all her cultivation, for all her clarity of heart, she knew her own limits. And she realized with startling force—Tian Shen was stepping past them.

Not as a rival. Not even as a comrade. But as someone becoming untouchable.

Night fell upon the mountain.

The Sect Master called for Tian Shen’s presence, but Elder Su intervened, saying, "Let him stabilize." No cultivator who had just wrestled with the heavens could be ordered about like a servant, not even by the Sect Master himself.

So Tian Shen remained within the training grounds, surrounded by charred earth and faintly glowing lightning-scars. Disciples dared not approach, though many watched from afar. His breakthrough had changed something intangible in the sect’s air. Awe mingled with unease, admiration with fear.

Yet one person did not keep her distance. Feng Yin returned with a lamp and set it quietly beside him. Its light flickered across his face, chasing away the last traces of the storm’s shadow.

"You don’t have to face this weight alone," she said.

He glanced at her, the edges of his storm-worn features softening. "And yet you followed me into it. Even when I nearly burned the sect with my madness."

Feng Yin smiled faintly, though her eyes glistened. "Then I’ll follow again. Even into madness."

The silence between them spoke louder than thunder.

...

By dawn, Tian Shen began the delicate process of stabilizing his Core.

He drew in qi, but unlike before, it resisted him—veins of lightning coiled and cracked, testing his will. His cultivation no longer felt like sipping water; it was like drawing storms into his lungs, shaping them before they tore him apart.

Hours bled into days. Feng Yin remained near, offering her own qi in harmonization, guiding his turbulent flow with strands of her serene spiritual essence. Together, they found rhythm—his violence tempered by her calm, his storm balanced by her steady light.

At last, Tian Shen’s breathing steadied. The arcs around him dimmed into faint glimmers. His Core no longer howled. It pulsed, radiant yet ordered, a sun bound in storm-forged chains.

He opened his eyes, and for the first time since the tribulation, he looked... whole.

The elders returned once more, this time with less fear in their gazes.

"He has stabilized," Elder Su announced. "What remains is growth."

But whispers of the hawk-banner forces had already begun to stir in the sect. Scouts spoke of movements in the distant valleys, rumors of generals who commanded not just men, but monstrous war-beasts clad in black iron.

And in the council chambers, one conclusion grew clearer with every report:

When the hawk-banner came, the Feilun Sect’s shield would not be its formations, nor its elders, nor its prestige.

It would be Tian Shen.

Feng Yin knew it too. Knew all too well.

That night, she found him standing at the highest peak, his spear leaning against his shoulder, the stars mirrored faintly in his storm-marked eyes.

"Do you feel it?" she asked.

He nodded without hesitation. "The world doesn’t wait. It’s already testing me."

Her hand brushed lightly against his. "Then let me stand with you. Whatever storms come next—don’t bear them alone."

For a long moment, Tian Shen said nothing. Then he lifted his gaze toward the horizon, where thunderclouds still gathered faintly in the distance.

"The heavens have already claimed me as theirs," he murmured. "But if you’re willing... then perhaps I’ll claim a piece of this world for us."

And for the first time since the storm, Tian Shen smiled, just slightly enough.

The smile was brief, almost fragile, but Feng Yin caught it and held it in her heart like a lantern against the coming dark. Below the peaks, the valley winds carried the faint clang of iron and the distant rumble of drums—ominous heralds of the hawk-banner army’s march.

The Feilun Sect braced, disciples whispering of war and ruin. Yet on the peak, Tian Shen’s gaze did not waver. The storm had marked him, the heavens had tested him, and now the world itself approached to measure his worth. His fingers tightened around the spear. "Let them come.