Chapter 12 – Shadows in the Ring
The training fields of the Dawnyu Sect buzzed with clashing wooden staffs, grunts, and sharp instructions carried through the crisp morning air. Yet even amidst the noise, a strange silence seemed to follow Zhen Hu as he stood at the edge of the sparring grounds. His robes, a little darker than most—black tinged with faint, unnatural silver veins—moved only slightly in the breeze.
He wasn't used to the way others looked at him now. Some held quiet suspicion. Others, awe wrapped in ignorance. But none of them knew the truth.
Aelira's voice, smooth as flowing water and distant as a dream, echoed in his thoughts.
"Let them come to you. Feel what they fear. Learn not the forms they teach, but the instincts they suppress."
Zhen Hu's first opponent was taller, a mid-tier Aethonix disciple with the kind of confidence born from years of drilling forms. His strikes were fast, clean—textbook perfect.
Zhen Hu's own movements were shaky, reactive. His stance was too wide. He tripped once. Blocked late. Took a blow to the ribs that rattled him to the bone.
He bled. But he didn't fall.
The second match wasn't any better.
He was thrown, swept, slammed, mocked. But there was no frustration in his eyes. Only calculation. His breath came slower with each defeat. Not from fatigue, but from focus.
He began to notice things.
The twitch of a shoulder before a lunge. The momentary tightening of a jaw before a sweeping kick. The hesitation in a disciple's footwork when they feared overcommitting.
By the fourth match, he wasn't reacting anymore.
He was predicting.
Somewhere, watching from the elevated pavilion, Zhen Hu's father sat in silence, arms folded, brows heavy. Elders stood behind him, quiet. They watched with narrowed eyes—uncertain if what they were seeing was progress or something else entirely.
Elder Juon murmured, "He learns quickly. Too quickly."
"Not in technique," Elder Qiao replied. "In something deeper… almost primal."
Zhen Hu's sixth opponent was one of the sect's top outer disciples, already preparing for the Inner Disciple Examinations. She attacked with fierce speed—wind-type techniques slicing the air in bursts. The ground cracked under her steps.
Zhen Hu should've lost.
But as her palm neared his chest, a surge of black mist flickered from his back. Nytherion energy, almost imperceptible, danced along his spine.
In a flash of motion, Zhen Hu bent backward unnaturally—dodging by a hair's breadth—and swept her leg with a movement not taught by the sect. It was instinct, laced with something else.
Her body hit the ground with a thud.
A gasp swept through the disciples.
And then came the whisper.
A fragment of the forbidden move.
Just a flicker. Just a shape. A strand of death-born intent that snapped out of him before he even realized.
Aelira appeared at his side in that moment, visible only to him, her long translucent robes swaying like a ghost on the wind. Her face bore no pride.
Only a warning.
"You cannot unleash what you cannot control. If that move breaks free before you are ready, you will burn away your soul trying to wield it."
Zhen Hu said nothing. Sweat dripped from his brow, mingling with the blood on his lip.
He bowed to his fallen opponent and offered her a hand.
She hesitated. Took it.
Their eyes met, and in hers, he saw confusion... and fear.
Not of pain. Not of shame.
But of him.
Back at the pavilion, Zhen Hu's father watched with a clenched jaw.
"He's hiding something," he said at last.
"Something…" Elder Juon echoed, "…or someone."
As night fell, Zhen Hu sat cross-legged beneath the old spirit tree on the training hill. His body ached. His muscles screamed. But his mind was calm.
The whispers from the dead leaves beneath him whispered back.
And Aelira's voice hummed like a lullaby through the void in his soul.
"Soon, you must choose what kind of monster you will become."
He opened his eyes.
The moon was full.
The path to the examination was now clearer.
But the path to himself… darker than ever.