Fractured Mandate of Heaven I

Zhe Ran stirred as dawn's pale fingers finally shone upon his face. The Tome pulsed like a secondary heart, its binding now grown through with mycelial networks that mirrored his decaying circulatory system. Each throb sent fractal patterns crawling across his fungal-riddled skin, geometric proofs of entropy written in blight. Its pages rustled with anticipation, whispering of truths yet to be devoured; Zhe Ran's hand, more root than flesh now, reached for the book with trembling urgency.

"Don't." Mei-Xing's voice cracked like dry riverbed clay, her eyes fluttering open from the half-lotus position. The meditation circle around her smoked faintly, its purification sigils warped into obscene parodies by leaking spores. "Haven't we suffered enough beneath this... this cancer of wisdom?"

Zhe Ran's laughter rustled through the chamber like wind through dead bamboo. "Suffered? My dear wife..." His remaining human teeth clacked like funeral chimes as mandible-like growths twitched beneath his jaw. "We've only begun to taste the truth."

Mei-Xing's sword found his throat before his root-twisted fingers could grasp the Tome. Black pollen trickled from the wound, each granular truth-particle hissing where it struck her blade's edge.

The chamber's air curdled into thick miasma, equal parts decaying flesh and the bitter almond scent of forbidden knowledge. Dust motes transformed into miniature battlefields mid-air, Confucian maxims clashing with Daoist paradoxes in silent explosions that left fractal scorch marks on the walls.

"Show me," Mei-Xing commanded through clenched teeth, her blade hand trembling with the effort to hold position—the corroded pommel no longer acting as counterweight. The sword's fuller pulsed with trapped qi, its once-pristine handle now veined with black hyphae. "Show me what could make even you break oath."

Zhe Ran's laughter became a wet gurgle of peony petals and clotted blood. "You want to truly see your beloved sect's true face, righteous one?" The Tome's pages began flipping wildly, their parchment edges bleeding ink that pooled like crude oil across the floor. "Then behold the harvest of your precious doctrines!"

As the corrupted scripture pressed harder against his sternum, reality stirred with the nauseating unspooling of layered truths. The chamber walls dissolved into memory-ichor, revealing the sect's Hall of Ancestral Records reforming around them. Mei-Xing gagged as familiar faces swam into focus—Great Uncle Peng lecturing on Mencius while flaying a dissident scholar alive, Auntie Ling reciting the Five Constants as she force-fed mercury "purification" elixirs to wailing disciples.

The vision deepened. They stood spectral before Zhe Ran's initiation trial, watching his younger self kneel before the Jade Purity Altar. Mei-Xing choked back a gasp as she saw what her living self had missed—the ceremonial sword wasn't cleansing him, but implanting something. Meteor-iron filaments wormed into his meridians, writing invisible command characters directly into his qi pathways.

"Your virtue..." Present-Zhe Ran whispered through time's veil, fungal tears eating tracks down his face. "...was always another kind of rot."

The Tome's pulse quickened, its pages now shrieking with the voices of ten thousand censored scholars. Young Zhe Ran opened his mouth to scream, and black dahlia blossoms exploded from his throat in place of sound. 

The memory fractured.

Mei-Xing's sword arm faltered. The blade drew a crooked line of sap-blood across Zhe Ran's neck as she recoiled, robes smoking where memory-ichor splattered the silk. Through the disintegrating vision, she saw the present-day Tome had partially fused with his chest, its brass fittings replaced by twitching insectile legs that scrabbled against his ribs.

"More?" Zhe Ran crooned, tendrils emerging from his eye sockets to caress the screaming scripture. "Shall we taste how your purity fared under pressure, xián qī?"

The chamber reassembled itself in nauseating stop-motion. Mei-Xing's stomach roiled as she recognized her own private meditation garden materializing around them—but warped, seen through the Tome's hungry perception. Her prized white chrysanthemums now sported humanoid faces that wept pus and recited Legalist edicts.

"Enough!" Her sword clattered to the floor as she clutched her temples, the blade's impact sending up a mushroom cloud of disintegrating morality tales. "This... this isn't..."

Zhe Ran caught her collapsing form with arms that bifurcated into root and bone. "Truth never is, beloved." His breath smelled of decaying libraries, of bookworms eating through centuries of carefully curated lies.

The Tome shrieked in agreement, its pages chewing through the last vestiges of Zhe Ran's humanity. Somewhere beneath the fungal growths and swarming spores, Mei-Xing felt the faintest tremor—a human pulse, or perhaps just the memory of one.

And suddenly, the world shifted.