The path to the northern caves was one he knew well — one he had walked dozens of times over the past months while gathering herbs and firewood, or exploring the valleys and ridges with the cautious curiosity of someone learning a new home.

But today, everything looked different.

The forest seemed to press in closer, the ancient spirit pines looming overhead like silent witnesses to his passage. Their bark was deeply furrowed, dark with age, and their branches created a canopy so thick that the morning light came through in scattered shafts of gold, turning the forest floor into a patchwork of shadow and illumination. The air was cool and smelled of pine resin and rich earth and something else — something faintly rotten that grew stronger with each step northward.

The birds were too quiet.

That was the first thing he noticed. In six months of mountain living, he'd grown accustomed to the constant background chorus of avian life— the cheerful chirping of sparrows, the raucous calls of crows, the melodic songs of the colorful mountain finches that flitted between branches like living jewels.

But now, there was only silence.

Not the peaceful silence of snow-muffled winter or the respectful silence of a forest at rest.

No, this was a waiting silence. An absence. It was as if every living thing with sense enough to flee had done so, leaving behind only the trees and stones to bear witness.

Chen Mu's hand drifted to the sword at his back, fingers brushing the rough wood of the handle. The touch brought a strange comfort — the weapon's weight was a reminder that he was not entirely defenseless in the face of whatever danger he was walking towards. The rust-eaten blade wasn't in the best shape — it probably wouldn't survive more than a few hard impacts. But it was still something.

The iron spear in his other hand was a far more reliable weapon. It felt heavy — but its weight was a solid, reassuring presence. It was a simple, practical soldier's weapon, its cast iron shaft meticulously oiled and polished by the hands of Chief Tian's father and grandfather, its steel head kept meticulously sharp, a keen, leaf-shaped blade designed for both slashing and deep, piercing thrusts. It lacked the strange comfort the rusty sword enjoyed in his mind — but it possessed a different kind of virtue: reliability. Against a charging spirit beast with supernaturally tough hide, Chen Mu's innate combat knowledge told him that the reach and focused power of a spear — firmly planted into the ground — would be far more effective than a clumsy slash from a rust-pitted blade. Spears were a natural tool for killing boars, and he was grateful to have it with him.

He climbed steadily, following game trails that grew increasingly disturbed. The signs of the beast's passage became more evident with each li traveled — trees scored with deep gouges from massive tusks, their bark torn away in long strips that revealed pale heartwood beneath. Boulders that had sat undisturbed for centuries, now pushed aside as if they weighed nothing. The ground itself was torn up in great furrows, as if some enormous plow had been dragged through the forest by a drunken giant.

And everywhere, there was that smell.

It grew stronger as he climbed — a thick, corrupt reek that combined rotting meat with something worse, something that made his nose wrinkle and his stomach turn. It was the smell of wrongness, of corruption in the spiritual sense as much as the physical. He'd smelled nothing like it in his brief six months of memory, but something deeper — some instinct buried in his bones — recognized it instantly.

Corruption. Demonic qi. Spiritual pollution.

The words rose unbidden in his mind, accompanied by a knowledge he shouldn't possess. The Boar King was not just growing strong. It was being poisoned by its own power, its cultivation twisted by the Frontier's Breath and its own beastly dispositions. Without the comforting safeguard of nearby Sect cultivators — who would frequently send Outer Disciples on missions to dispatch problematic spirit beasts before they became true regional threats — this boar's nascent spiritual awareness had taken a dark turn indeed. It was becoming something cruel. Something that killed not for survival but for pleasure.

And it would only get worse with time.

Chen Mu paused at a small clearing where sunlight broke through the canopy, taking a moment to check his equipment. He took a drink from the waterskin, letting the cool water settle his stomach. The sun had climbed quite high now — it must be somewhere around the early afternoon. Time moved strangely in the forest, measured as it was by vague, subjective impressions and the angle of light through the tree canopy. How long had it been since he'd left the village? An hour? Two? It felt both longer and shorter — time compressed by the steady rhythm of walking, expanded by the weight of what lay ahead.

He was putting the waterskin away when he heard it. Distant but unmistakable. Not bird or wind or rustling leaves.

Something heavier.

Something large moving through underbrush with the confident crashing of a creature that feared nothing.

Chen Mu's hands tightened around the iron spear shaft.

The sound came again. Closer now. The rhythmic crack of breaking branches. The wet snort of something drawing breath through a massive snout.

And then a smell — fresh and overpowering, rolling through the forest like a physical wave.

The Boar King was hunting.

And it had found him.

The beast emerged from the undergrowth like something from a nightmare given flesh.

Chen Mu had thought Da-Li's description was exaggeration — the panicked embellishment of a wounded man's memory. But if anything, the hunter had understated the creature's terrifying presence.

The Boar King stood easily three times the height of a man at its shoulder, its body a massive barrel of muscle and bone covered in coarse hair that bristled like wire. Its hide wasn't the brown or gray of normal boars but a sickly mottled pattern of black and dark green, as if corruption had painted itself across its flesh. The tusks — heavens, the tusks — curved up from its jaw like twin swords of yellowed bone, each one easily as long as Chen Mu was tall, their points wickedly sharp.

But it was the eyes that truly captured his attention.

They glowed.

Not with the reflected light of normal animal eyes catching the sun, but with their own internal radiance — a deep, bloody red that spoke of intelligence and malice in equal measure. They fixed on Chen Mu with an intensity that was almost human in its focus, its awareness.

The beast understood what it was looking at. Understood that this small creature standing before it was prey. Understood, perhaps, that this particular prey was different from the others — it was standing its ground rather than fleeing, was holding a weapon rather than cowering.

And the understanding brought not fear, but joy.

Chen Mu could see it in the way the beast's lips peeled back from yellowed teeth in what could only be described as a smile. In the way it pawed at the ground with hooves the size of dinner plates, scoring deep gouges in the earth. In the way its massive head lowered, presenting those sword-like tusks, positioning for a charge.

It's been waiting for this, Chen Mu realized with cold clarity. It's been hoping for this. For prey that fights back. For a challenge.

The spiritual corruption had done more than make the beast cruel. It had made it bored. And boredom in something that powerful was perhaps more dangerous than simple hunger.

They stood facing each other across perhaps twenty meters of forest floor, and Chen Mu felt time slow to a crawl. Every sense seemed to sharpen, to expand. He could see the individual hairs on the beast's hide, count the scars that marked its flanks from previous battles. Could hear his own heartbeat, steady and strong, pumping blood through his veins with mechanical efficiency. Could feel the weight of the heavy iron spear in his hands, the balance point, the way the grip had been worn smooth by someone else's hands in some forgotten time.

And he could feel something else. Something he'd touched only briefly before in his dawn practices — that strange awareness at the edge of consciousness. That sharpness that felt like the world coming into focus.

Intent, his instincts whispered. This is what they call Intent. The bridge between will and action. The space where thought and perception become reality.

But his contemplation was cut short by the Boar King's scream.

It was the same sound Da-Li had described — a distorted, horrible mixture of animal rage and something that sounded almost human. It echoed off the trees with enough force to shake loose needles and send smaller birds — those few that had remained in the area — fleeing in panicked clouds.

And then the beast charged.

The ground itself shook. That was Chen Mu's first coherent thought as three tons of corrupted spirit beast launched itself forward with terrifying speed. The ground actually shakes. How is that even possible? How is anything that big moving that fast?

Chen Mu's hands moved with automatic precision, countless hours of training guiding them with an effortless mastery he didn't remember acquiring. He took the spear from his shoulders and planted it — butt-end driven deep into the earth, angling the point forward and slightly upward, bracing the shaft against his hip and shoulder in the classic boar-hunting stance.

This was a technique as old as warfare itself, designed to let the beast's own momentum become its doom.

Let it charge. Let its weight and fury work against it. The bigger they are—

The Boar King hit the spear at full speed.

And the iron point, lovingly maintained through three generations of Chief Tian's family, did penetrate! Chen Mu felt the impact travel up the sturdy cast iron shaft — felt the steel point bite through the beast's hide, felt it sink into the muscle beneath.

But only barely.

The spear, which should have been driven deep by the beast's momentum, by simple physics and the laws of force and mass, stopped after penetrating perhaps a hand's breadth. The hide was simply too thick. The muscle too dense! The corruption that had twisted the beast's flesh had also hardened it, turning ordinary tissue into something approximating spirit iron in durability.

The Boar King's charge didn't even slow.

Chen Mu's eyes widened in panic. He released the spear and threw himself to the side, desperately rolling away — because the alternative was being crushed beneath the massive bulk of the enraged beast. He came up in a crouch just in time to see the Boar King wheel around with disturbing agility.

The spear — Chief Tian's precious family heirloom, the weapon that had protected generations — still jutted from the beast's shoulder. A shallow wound. A bit painful, perhaps — but far from crippling.

The Boar King looked down at it. Looked at the shaft of solid, cast iron protruding from its flesh. And then, with what could only be described as contempt, it raised one massive hoof and brought it down upon the spear shaft.

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The sound of the metal snapping was sharp and final —CRACK— like the breaking of bone. The spear shattered cleanly, the steel point remaining lodged in the beast's shoulder while the rest of it scattered across the forest floor as useless fragments.

The Boar King's glowing red eyes fixed on Chen Mu again — and this time, there was something new in them. Not just hunger or rage or corrupt joy.

Satisfaction.

It had broken his weapon. Demonstrated that mortal tools were useless against its superior flesh. Established dominance in the most direct way possible.

And now it would finish what it started.

Chen Mu's hand went to the rusty sword at his back, drawing it in one smooth motion. The blade rasped against the deteriorating scabbard, and when it emerged into the dappled sunlight, it looked more like a piece of junk than a weapon — pitted with corrosion, edged with rust, the balance probably thrown off by decades of decay.

And yet, it was the only decent weapon he had left.

The Boar King charged again, and this time, Chen Mu didn't try to plant himself. Didn't try to meet force with force. Instead, he moved — not away but toward the beast, sliding underneath its massive bulk with inches to spare, the world becoming a blur of motion and coarse hair and the overwhelming stench of corruption.

His sword came up as he passed beneath, striking at a weak point: the joint where the front leg met the body. The rusty blade bit — not particularly deeply, but enough. There was a spray of dark blood, and the beast's charge faltered, its leg buckling slightly as it crashed into a massive Spirit Pine with bone-jarring force.

Chen Mu rolled to his feet, already repositioning, his mind cataloging data with clinical precision even as his heart pounded. The joints are vulnerable. The corruption has made the beast stronger, but it hasn't had time to temper its connective tissues. Strike there. Focus there. Avoid the tusks. Stay mobile. Don't let it—

He didn't see the tail coming.

Far from an ordinary wild boar's tail, the massive, whip-like appendage caught him across the ribs with the force of a smith's hammer — lifting him completely off his feet and sending him crashing into a boulder with enough impact to drive the air from his lungs in a painful whoosh.

Stars exploded across his vision. Pain — bright and immediate — bloomed in his left side.

Something had cracked.

Multiple somethings.

His ribs felt like they'd been used as a xylophone by an enthusiastic but untalented musician.

And what in the Nine Hells was a xylophone? Never mind that now! Get up. GET UP! If you stay down, you'll die!

He pushed himself to his feet through sheer force of will, tasting blood in his mouth, his left side screaming with every breath.

Broken ribs. At least two, maybe three. His breathing would be compromised. His mobility reduced. His ability to defend the left side significantly impaired.

The Boar King was already turning — and this time, Chen Mu saw something new in its glowing red eyes.

Not just rage or corrupt joy, but… respect.

This small creature had hurt it. Had drawn blood. Had demonstrated that it was more than simple prey. And that recognition brought with it not mercy, but escalation.

The beast lowered its head, and Chen Mu felt the spiritual pressure in the clearing intensify. Saw the sickly green light beginning to gather around the Boar King's form, coalescing like poisonous fog. The air itself seemed to thicken, to press down with weight that had nothing to do with normal atmosphere.

It's breaking through?!

Right now, in the middle of combat, it's forcing its cultivation to advance. It's pushing itself toward true spirit beast status because I've given it a reason to. Because I've made it take me seriously!

The realization was both horrifying and absurdly flattering. He'd come here thinking to maybe — possibly, with great luck — wound the beast enough to drive it away. But he'd done more than that. He'd pushed it. Made it feel threatened enough to risk everything on a combat breakthrough.

Which meant he was about to face not just a corrupted spirit beast, but, possibly, a genuine demonic beast in the midst of achieving greater power.

I'm so dead.

The thought was strangely calm. Clinical. Like observing the thunder clouds and noting that rain was likely.

The green light around the Boar King intensified. Its movements became faster, more fluid. The red glow in its eyes brightened until they looked like burning coals. And then it charged again, and this time, it moved with a speed that should have been impossible for something that massive — a blur of corruption and rage and newfound power that left furrows in the earth and made the air scream in its wake.

Chen Mu raised his sword — the pathetic, rusty blade that looked more like garden refuse than a weapon — and then, because certain death didn't mean you had to die passively, because his body apparently still knew how to fight even when his conscious mind had given up hope, he moved to meet it.

Not meet it head on, of course — that would be suicide. After all, three tons of corrupted spirit beast versus two hundred or so pounds of mortal flesh was a calculation with only one possible outcome.

But meeting the charge didn't have to mean a contest of strength.

The Boar King thundered toward him, the ground shaking with each impact of its massive hooves, dirt and pine needles exploding upward in its wake.

Ten yards.

The heat radiating from its corrupted breakthrough washed over Chen Mu in waves, making sweat spring instantly to his skin despite the cool mountain air.

Five yards.

Time seemed to slow — not freeze, not like it would later with the stick, but stretch like honey pulled between two hands. Chen Mu could see everything with crystalline clarity: the way foam flew from the beast's mouth, the pattern of scars on its hide, the exact angle of those sword-like tusks aimed at his center mass.

His body knew what to do. Had always known.

One yard.

Chen Mu moved.

Sideways — gliding away to the left with a speed and precision that transcended conscious thought, his feet finding purchase on blood-slicked earth as if they'd practiced this exact movement tens of thousands of times.

Which, for all he knew, they had.

The Boar King's bulk rushed past him, so close that coarse hair scraped against his shoulder, so close that the displaced air spun him slightly on his axis. Close enough to smell the corruption — that thick, rotting-meat reek mixed with something sharper, like hot metal and ozone.

And as it passed, Chen Mu's body was already moving, was already committed to the strike before his conscious mind could even fully process what it was doing. The rusty sword came around in a tight arc, aimed not at the heavily protected chest or the armored head, but at the flank — where muscle was thinner, where the hide stretched over ribs, where the passing beast's own speed might achieve what Chen Mu's hands alone could not.

The blade met flesh.

And sparks erupted.

Bright orange-white sparks that looked like those thrown from a blacksmith's anvil, cascading in a shower of light where corroded steel struck corrupted hide. The sound was all wrong — not the wet impact of blade meeting flesh but the harsh screech of metal-on-metal, as if Chen Mu was trying to cut through armor plating rather than living tissue.

And then, the blade shattered.

The rust-weakened metal simply gave up under the strain, fragmenting into a dozen pieces that rained to the forest floor like orange snow. Chen Mu was left holding nothing but a handle and about six inches of broken tang.

He stared at it for a stupid, frozen moment.

Well. Fuck.

The Boar King turned around, screamed in triumph and reared up, preparing to bring its full weight down on the small creature that had dared challenge it. Those massive hooves were positioned to crush, to pulverize, to turn flesh and bone into paste on the forest floor.

Chen Mu dove backward — or, rather, tried to. His broken ribs chose that unfortunate moment to remind him of their existence, sending a spike of pain through his side so intense his vision went monochrome for a heartbeat. His evasive roll was clumsy, uncontrolled, and he came up in a sprawl instead of the fighting crouch his body had intended.

The hooves came down where he'd been a moment before. Cratering the earth. Sending up a spray of dirt and pine needles.

He scrambled backward on hands and knees — provoking new and interesting agonies with every movement — and fetched up against a tree. His hand closed on something — a branch? A root? He didn't look, just grabbed it and pulled himself upright, gasping through the pain, trying to clear his vision, trying to—

The Boar King was ducking its head down in preparation to charge again.

Because of course it was. Why would it stop? After all, it had all the advantages now. It had broken his weapons. Injured him. Cornered him against a tree. This was the beast's moment of triumph, the kill, the—

Chen Mu looked down at what his hand had grabbed.

It was a stick.

A simple, fallen twig about as thick as his thumb and as long as his forearm. Dry and brittle, probably ready to fall off the tree at any moment before a desperate man had grabbed it seeking support.

A stick, he thought, and something about the absurdity of it made him want to laugh.

I'm about to die, and I'm holding a stick?

The Boar King was charging again. It was close enough now that he could see the individual hairs on its snout, could smell the hot reek of its breath, could see death approaching with absolute certainty.

And in that moment — stretched out like honey poured in winter, each heartbeat lasting an eternity — Chen Mu's thoughts took a rather strange turn.

He looked down at the broken sword handle in his left hand. Looked at the stick in his right. Looked at the charging beast to his front.

And thought:

What is a sword, really?

The question echoed in his mind with strange resonance. What was a sword? A bit of metal, shaped and sharpened, certainly. But was that what made it a sword? Or was the metal just... a container? A vessel for something more fundamental?

That strange cutting energy he'd touched during his morning meditations…. it didn't come from any blade. After all, at the end of the day, a blade was just… a shaped stick. A bit of inert matter given form by a smith's hammer. The energy — the Intent — came from him. From his own will. From his understanding that his goal was to sever, to divide. To cut.

Four yards now. Three.

If the Intent comes from me... if I am the source of the cutting force, the will to sever...

Two yards.

...then in essence, the real sword…

…is me.

The understanding crashed over him like a wave of ice-cold water, shocking and absolute. "The sword" was not the pathetic, broken thing in his hands. The true weapon was not an external tool he wielded. The true sword was inside his own mind. It was an extension of his intent, his will given form and function.

And if that is true...

One yard.

...then I don't need a metal blade at all!

Chen Mu raised the stick — the simple, ordinary twig that had no spiritual properties, no special qualities, nothing but cellulose and water and the basic structure that all wood shared.

And he willed a cut in the world. With a foolish, irrational belief; with every fiber of his being; with an absolute certainty that transcended logic or reason; he imposed his understanding onto reality.

Sever.

There was no visible energy. No light show. No dramatic spiritual pressure or manifested power.

And yet, the world itself seemed to freeze.

Everything stopped — the Boar King mid-charge, the pine needles drifting down from branches above, his own breath caught in his lungs. Time itself paused, waiting, and in that suspended instant, Chen Mu felt something fundamental shift.

And then, the world... parted.

Chen Mu felt it — felt reality itself yield to his Intent like butter before a hot knife. Felt the conceptual divide between "together" and "separate" become blurred. Felt the fundamental binding forces that held matter intact simply... give way.

The Boar King, charging forward with all its corrupted power and newly achieved cultivation, suddenly found itself in two pieces.

The cut was perfect. Vertical. From the top of its massive skull straight down through the center of its body, dividing it with geometric precision into symmetrical halves. For a fraction of an instant —a single, impossible heartbeat— those halves continued moving forward, still held together by momentum and, perhaps, by sheer ignorance of their own fate.

Then gravity — and the beast's internal blood pressure — reasserted themselves.

The two halves of the Boar King exploded apart with a wet, horrible sound, while still traveling forward, propelled by the beast's final charge. They separated just in time to form a Chen Mu-sized gap between them, crashing to the forest floor on either side of him in a great flood of blood and viscera. The massive tusks, still glowing faintly with a corrupt, poisonous light, plowed furrows in the earth as the body parts skidded to a stop.

But the cut hadn't stopped with the beast.

Behind where the Boar King had been — where Chen Mu's will had traced that impossible line through space — a massive boulder sat. Or rather, had sat. The ancient stone, easily five times the height of a man, worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain, now bore a perfectly straight line down its center.

For a moment, it simply sat there, divided but not yet fallen.

Then, with a sound like distant thunder, the two halves of the boulder also slid apart. They toppled in opposite directions, revealing surfaces so smooth they looked polished, as if a master stone-cutter had spent years achieving such perfection. There were no rough edges. No fracture patterns. Just... separation. The concept of "whole" replaced by "severed" along a single, geometrically-perfect plane.

And still, the line continued. In the distance — far beyond the split boulder — Chen Mu thought he could hear the distant echoes of freshly-cut, falling timber.

As for the stick in Chen Mu's hand, it had simply… stopped being a coherent object, rapidly disintegrating into a small cloud of sawdust that drifted away on the breeze. He stood there, his hand still raised, staring at the space where the Boar King had been.

Then his legs gave out.

He collapsed to his knees, the adrenaline that had kept him moving finally abandoning him, leaving behind only pain and exhaustion and a bone-deep weariness that had nothing to do with physical fatigue.

He'd just done... something.

Something that shouldn't have been possible. Something that violated every understanding he had about how the world worked.

He'd killed a fully awakened spirit beast — a creature in the midst of a breakthrough no less; a monster that had been seconds away from achieving true power — with a stick.

Or rather, with his will alone. With a Sword Intent so pure and focused that reality itself had yielded to it.

What am I?

The question echoed in his mind as he knelt there in the spreading pool of the beast's blood, surrounded by the bisected corpse, staring at his empty hands.

What in the Nine Hells am I?

Around him, the forest was silent. Even the wind had stopped, as if nature itself was holding its breath, waiting to see what would happen next.

But Chen Mu had no answers. Only questions. Questions that multiplied like dividing cells, each one spawning a dozen more.

If he could do this much now — as an apparently powerless mortal with no martial cultivation or Ling Qi to speak of…

...then what had he been capable of before, when he still remembered who he was?

As the sun began to set, Chen Mu knelt in blood and sawdust, staring at his hands, and slowly began to understand that the peaceful dream called Chen Mu had been exactly that — a dream. A fiction. A comfortable lie he'd told himself while the truth waited patiently in his bones for the day when pretending would no longer be possible.

That day had come.

And there was no going back.

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