Chapter 6: The First Secret Cultivation

The waste heap behind the alchemy pavilion reeked of failure.

It was where discarded pills, shattered cauldrons, and ruined herbs were dumped—failures of apprentices and disgraced elders alike. No one went there willingly. The fumes were toxic. The ground was scorched and unstable. Even the insects avoided it.

Ashen Wu stepped carefully among the debris, his tattered servant robes soaked from an earlier downpour. His stomach gnawed at itself. His limbs felt like they were made of rusted iron. The Heaven-Eating Scripture inside him pulsed in response, subtle as a heartbeat.

"Feed…"

It was whispering again.

"Feed…"

But on what?

He crouched near a shattered urn, its black contents dried into tar. A cracked pill lay half-buried in the dirt, its surface green with mold and chipped from age. The rank stench of sulfur clung to it.

Any sane man would leave it there.

Ashen picked it up.

It was a Qi-Gathering Pill, or at least it used to be. Weak, failed, and long spoiled—but he didn't care. It was a treasure to him. Trash to others, but to one who had nothing, even poison was worth the risk.

He stared at it for a moment, lips trembling.

This was madness.

But so was hunger.

He popped it into his mouth.

The pain was instant.

The pill burned like poison. His throat seized up. His chest spasmed. He collapsed to the ground, clutching at the mud, convulsing.

His vision flashed red.

Poisoned, he realized. It was toxic, mutated by exposure and time. But he couldn't stop now. The Heaven-Eating Scripture didn't just tolerate pain—it demanded it.

"Feed on the agony," it whispered. "Transmute the rot."

His body shook violently. Blood dripped from his nose. But something inside him lit up—a flicker in the void where a spiritual root should've been.

A spark.

A taste.

A thread of qi, corrupted and foul, but real.

The pain sharpened. His body screamed, but his mind locked onto that flicker, clung to it, devoured it like a dying man licking dew off stone.

He focused, forcing the black mist within his soul to swirl. His internal void responded—no root, but an insatiable hollow. And that was his path.

To devour, not absorb.

To consume, not channel.

The tainted qi entered his system and did not settle—it was broken down. Shredded. Reduced to primal essence.

And the void accepted it.

His bones groaned.

His vision dimmed.

But something shifted.

He lay there for what felt like hours, curled in the filth, shivering. Steam rose from his body. The moldy pill had tried to kill him—but the scripture had twisted its gift.

He was alive.

And stronger.

Not by much.

But stronger.

He staggered back to the servant quarters after dark, his skin clammy, eyes bloodshot. No one noticed—no one cared.

They'd see only a half-starved boy crawling into a moldy straw bed, likely sick from bad water or bruised from another punishment.

But Ashen smiled.

A thin, trembling smile.

Because he had done it.

He had cultivated.

That night, the scripture gave him his first vision.

In the dream, he stood before a black sun. Around it, stars flickered—then were consumed. One by one, they vanished, drawn into the void.

A voice whispered:

This is the true root—the Null Root. The end of all things. Born not from earth, water, or flame, but from the void between stars.

You are not broken.

You are empty—and emptiness cannot be bound.

When he woke, the world felt sharper.

Colors bled more vividly.

Sounds pulsed like waves.

And within his chest, the Heaven-Eating Scripture whispered again—not with words, but with hunger.

The next day, he returned to the heap.

He found another failed pill—half-melted and reeking of rust.

He swallowed it.

The pain was less this time.

He could feel the shift—his body, once fragile and stagnant, was beginning to adapt. The scripture made no promises of safety, only progress through suffering. Each ruined pill he devoured was a gamble, a wound, a sacrifice.

But it was working.

His steps grew lighter.

His strikes, though still weak, no longer trembled.

The servants began to notice.

"Didn't that kid limp last week?"

"Looks like he got lucky with a healing draught…"

"Nah, he's still trash. Just too dumb to die."

Ashen ignored them.

He no longer moved like a cripple.

He moved like a man with purpose.

At night, he sat in silence, meditating in the shadows. Not with a core to circulate qi—but with a hunger that called it in from whatever source it could find.

The scripture provided no mercy. Only devouring.

But in a world that had given him nothing, it was enough.

He whispered to the cracked mirror before him, its surface still haunted by the image of his past self.

"I will climb again," he said softly, eyes like embers.

"Even if I must crawl on shattered bones and feast on filth."

"I will rise."

The reflection nodded once.

And the void within pulsed again.

•

Beast Bone Elixir

The dead of night wrapped the Broken Sect like a shroud. No wind stirred. No footsteps echoed. Only silence, thick and heavy, breathed through the valley.

Ashen Wu moved through the shadows, barefoot and breath shallow, navigating the outer sect's twisting servant corridors. His path was memorized—not from maps, but from punishment. He had cleaned every hall, scraped every pot, and been slapped for stepping where he shouldn't.

Tonight, he would step there anyway.

The Forbidden Chamber of Bones lay beneath the old slaughter yard. No one used it anymore—not since the beast tamers died out. The disciples had moved on to more refined cultivation methods, but whispers claimed the old chamber still reeked of marrow and madness.

He slipped past the rotting bamboo gate.

Down a cracked stone staircase.

Into the dark.

The air grew thick with the smell of old blood and forgotten rituals. Runes—faded but still clinging to the walls—hummed faintly as he passed. He didn't know what they once meant. Maybe warding, maybe binding. Now, they were just scars of power that had been buried and left to rot.

Ashen reached the chamber.

Inside: scattered bone piles, broken cauldrons, blood-stained racks, and a rusted brazier in the center of the floor. The walls wept condensation. Something pulsed faintly in the dark, as though the room itself remembered pain.

He didn't hesitate.

From his stolen satchel, he pulled out two cracked beast bones—ribs from a mountain tiger spirit beast, swiped from a training field days before. Along with them, a small vial of coagulated blood, swiped from an injured outer disciple during a hunt.

It wasn't clean.

It wasn't proper.

But the Heaven-Eating Scripture didn't demand purity. It demanded sacrifice.

Ashen broke the bones into smaller shards, arranged them inside a half-melted bronze pot, then poured in the blood and what little water he had. He placed the pot atop the brazier and, using flint and stolen fatwood, sparked a fire.

The flames hissed.

The concoction bubbled.

The chamber filled with a stench so foul it could have awakened the dead.

Ashen closed his eyes, sat cross-legged, and began to breathe in rhythm with the bubbling pot. He didn't have a proper cultivation manual anymore. He didn't need one. The Heaven-Eating Scripture stirred, unfolding from his soul like an ancient hunger yawning awake.

Devour the marrow. Distill the will. Take what beasts once held.

The fumes, thick with blood qi, coiled around him. Normally, a body without a spiritual root would reject such filth. It would fester. Rot. Kill.

But Ashen had no root to block it.

Only a void.

The fumes entered him—not as energy, but as offering.

And the void drank.

Pain lanced through his spine. His stomach twisted. He gagged once, then twice, coughing up black phlegm that sizzled against the stone. But still he sat. Still he breathed.

And the marrow elixir boiled on.

He felt his body tremble. His vision blurred.

But within the darkness of his mind, something cracked.

A wall.

A barrier.

And behind it, deeper awareness.

The world inside him was not empty—it was devouring.

The tainted qi from the elixir swirled in, scraped against his insides, and was ground down. Reduced to nothing. Reformed into something new—darker, heavier, not clean but pure in intent.

The marrow of a beast… turned into fuel.

And the void roared.

For hours, Ashen sat.

The fire died down.

The pot hissed once, then cracked.

Steam filled the chamber.

And Ashen's eyes snapped open—sharper now, clearer. His limbs ached, but beneath the pain was strength.

A second layer of qi.

Crude. Thin. But real.

Enough to fight a novice.

Enough to start.

Ashen rose, legs trembling, and staggered toward the stone basin nearby. He splashed his face with cold water, stared into the reflection.

For a moment, he didn't recognize himself.

Gone was the hollow-eyed servant boy.

In his place, a flicker of the man he used to be—Ashen Wu, once condemned, now reborn in blood and secrecy.

He dried his face with a stolen rag and left the chamber, sealing the door behind him.

The Broken Sect still slept.

The disciples dreamed of glory.

The elders forgot the servant quarters existed.

No one noticed the boy slipping back into his moldy bedding, stinking faintly of marrow and ash.

But in the darkness, the Heaven-Eating Scripture whispered again:

"More."

Author's Note:

This chapter marks Ashen Wu's first successful alchemy attempt—if you can even call it that. He's forging his path not with proper technique, but with raw instinct, stolen scraps, and the forbidden scripture sealed in his soul. Every step forward is one the heavens would reject. But for Ashen, rejection is not the end—it's fuel.

Please leave power stones !!!