Chapter 20: Beast Qi

The sky tore open in silence before the sound could catch it.

From the battlements of Forge Front, soldiers froze mid-march, mid-command, mid-breath as a bloom of violet-red light erupted across the eastern horizon. The distant ruin — once a sealed tomb of steel and memory — had become a funeral pyre visible for miles.

The explosion thundered seconds later. The shockwave swept across the earth in a rolling wave, toppling tents and snapping chains. The light lasted longer, casting the mountains in the hues of a dying sun.

The report came minutes later, etched in cold authority across all channels:

" Ruins team lost. No survivors."

The soldiers at Forge Front didn't weep. They didn't speak. But the silence that followed felt like the kind used for graves.

Kaelren — the Fleshstorm — was gone.

Wind scraped across the balcony of the Ashwalker Citadel, high above Blood Gloom City.

Aelvara Zavrekh stood at its edge, her white-gold mask reflecting the fading light as if it could trap it there forever.

The moment the message reached her, she dismissed it without a word. No visible reaction. No gesture of mourning.

She stood still.

A statue sculpted in ice.

Her lavender eyes tracked the red glow on the horizon.

She remained unmoved. But inside her chest, something shifted — like a blade slowly turning.

Later, in the privacy of her quarters, she closed the doors and removed the mask.

She didn't speak. Didn't scream.

Instead, her fingers trembled as she pressed her hand to the stone wall.

Cracks split outward beneath her palm.

Her breath stuttered once — shallow, quiet.

Then she whispered, as if saying the words might unmake them:

"You were mine and now your gone?"

She stared out the window into the void of the coming night.

Elsewhere…

Kaelren's eyes opened to green light.

The sky above him glowed like emerald flame, filtered through towering trees that bent the horizon into spirals. Every breath he took was laced with scents he couldn't name — rich earth, iron sap, and something older than time.

He sat up slowly, groaning, body aching from the inside out.

The ground beneath him was soft — moss and roots, pulsing with life.

But it wasn't just the world that had changed.

His body was no longer his own.

Fur — thick, black— rippled over his arms. His muscles had doubled in density, each movement heavier, more powerful. His fingers had claws now. His chest felt heavier, broader, like armor had been carved into his frame. His legs thick like tree trunks. He was taller. Wilder.

He stumbled toward a shallow puddle and dropped to one knee.

When he looked down, the face staring back was something between man and beast.

A powerful simian jaw. Sharp, red eyes with slitted pupils. Fangs behind closed lips. Wild, black fur swept back from his face.

And crowning it all — a ring of golden fur encircling his head like a halo of fire. A crown of gold.

Not a symbol.

Not a gift.

Born of him.

Kaelren's hand drifted toward his abdomen.

There was no dantian.

No Qi.

No trace of the path he had once walked through cultivation. He felt relieved.

But when he closed his eyes and reached inward—

He felt it.

Beast Qi. Hot. Savage. Alive.

And at the center of it, where his dantian used to be, pulsed a black sphere—the Beast Core, fused to his very being. It radiated wildness, instinct, the hunger of something ancient now beating inside him.

But it wasn't the only thing.

Beneath the feral heat, deeper in the marrow of his bones and the spirals of his blood, he felt something else.

Still there.

Still burning.

The Gene Refinement Sutra.

Etched into his cells. Carved into the very lattice of who he was.

Though his ablity to refine Qi had been burned out, though his spiritual roots had been severed, his blood still carried the mark of that path. His body was still climbing it. Still evolving. Still refining.

He no longer walked the path of Qi cultivators.

But he still walked the path of Gene Refinement.

Only now, he walked another too.

He was a beast.

His hands trembled.

His chest rose and fell.

"I'm alive," he whispered.

Then, lower:

"But what am I now?"

No answer came.

Only wind through trees too tall for memory.

Only silence in a world that didn't know his name.

Kaelren dropped to both knees, clutching the dirt in his clawed hands.

And then — from deep in his gut, from his bones, from the aching thing that had once been a man — he howled.

A sound no human could make.

A cry that split the trees and scattered birds into the strange green sky.

A sound that said:

I am still here.

But I am not the same.

With that he fainted.

Kaelren awoke beneath a sunless sky, the trees above gnarled like frozen screams, bark black and glistening as if slick with old blood. Mist clung low to the ground, thick and damp, wrapping the ancient forest in a silence that wasn't peace, but warning.

His body pulsed—foreign, savage.

He staggered upright, clawed toes digging grooves into the soil. The fur along his arms bristled reflexively, his golden crown glinting faintly in the moon light. Every muscle felt coiled. Tighter. Heavier. No—denser.

And then it hit him.

Where once he'd channeled Qi through structured meridians, now something else moved—raw, wild, untamed. Beast Qi.

It didn't hum like Heaven's. It snarled.

He reached inward to grasp it—wrong. Like grabbing a lightning bolt mid-strike. The power flared of its own accord, rushing through his limbs not with obedience, but instinct. His tail lashed behind him as his pupils dilated, catching every detail in the brush. A rustle. A flicker. Movement. He dropped into a low stance before his mind even caught up.

Beast Qi didn't flow like a river. It rampaged. It wasn't guided by will—it was will. Pure. Primal.

Kaelren growled, a sound that vibrated in his chest without thought.

This… this wasn't control. It was balance atop a storm.

He moved through the forest on all fours at times, upright at others, learning by doing—by failing. He punched a tree and cracked its bark in half… only to have the rebound force nearly dislocate his shoulder. He tried to leap over a ravine and overshot by thirty feet, crashing into a cliffside with enough force to crater it.

But slowly—bit by bit—he began to understand.

He wasn't a man in a beast's skin.

He was the beast now.

And the Beast Qi responded not to plans or tactics—but to emotion. Hunger. Rage. Desire. Fear. Every time he thought like a human, the power resisted. But when he felt, when he let go of control, it surged to life like wildfire in dry grass.

He hunted. He sprinted. He roared.

Then came the stillness.

He sat on a moss-covered rock beneath a twisted canopy, chest rising and falling with deep, unhurried breaths. A memory flashed—him cooking beast meat in his home in Blood Gloom City. Using precise cuts. Feeling human.

He opened his clawed hand and stared at it.

The fingers were longer now. Callused differently. Muscles layered beneath the fur like coiled rope. And there, on his forearm, were faint golden veins pulsing with power. Not man. Not beast. Something else.

He didn't cry.

Not because it didn't hurt—but because crying was something a human did.

He lowered his hand and exhaled.

"I died twice," he murmured. "Once on Earth. Once in Vel'Drakka."

His voice was rougher now. Lower.

"And this… is whatever comes next."

The words didn't bring peace. But they brought stillness. A fragile truce between memory and instinct.

hours past—time in the ancient forest was hard to measure. The mist never left. The light he saw hadent returned yet.

While hunting a horned lizard-beast, Kaelren felt a tug in the earth beneath his feet. A vibration—not sound, but resonance. He paused, sniffed the air, and followed the pull. Something beneath the soil called to him.

He found it in a collapsed ridge—roots tangled over what looked like an old entrance. It wasn't natural. Rectangular stone, weathered but carved. Not a den. A door.

Kaelren shoved the overgrowth aside, pried open the cracked slab, and descended into darkness.

His feet padded silently over dust-choked stone. The temperature dropped. Walls were carved with symbols—spirals, claws, beasts mid-transformation. He couldn't read them, but his instincts twitched with recognition. Not knowledge. Memory. As if something buried in his blood remembered what his mind did not.

Deeper in, the ruin opened into a circular chamber. Broken statues lined the edges—beast—each in a different pose of war or worship. One was shattered entirely, but the back wall had a carving untouched by time.

It was… him?

The figure had his golden crown of fur. His jawline. The same fusion of ape and warrior. The same forward-leaning stance. Beneath it, a map carved into the stone—a wide continent surrounded by storm-churned seas, wild terrain, and bestial domains.

It wasn't Vel'Drakka.

Kaelren stepped back, heart pounding—not with fear, but understanding.

He was at the orgination of bloodlines the land of beast.

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