The sky over Yunhai City had bled itself grey.
Smoke curled from shattered spires. The scent of scorched blood and broken spirit stones choked the air. What was once a city of warriors, scholars, and seekers had become a silence-soaked battlefield.
And through that silence walked Shen Riven.
His body trembled with every step. The bandages around his chest were crusted with dried blood. His right arm burned constantly — the tattoo branded by the Blood Qi Manual pulsed, but it offered no comfort. Only hunger.
He had survived. Somehow.
But the price was only beginning to unfold.
---
He reached the edge of a collapsed plaza, stepping over corpses — some torn by beasts, others clearly killed by other humans. In their final expressions, he saw fear. Rage. Madness.
How many of them were like me?
He didn't know. He didn't care.
He knelt beside a body and pressed two fingers to its chest.
There was no mystical knowledge guiding him — only instinct. His breathing slowed. He focused.
A thread of warmth stirred inside his palm.
Blood Qi.
Faint. Flickering. Like smoke from dying embers. It resisted him — not out of malice, but indifference. It had no loyalty. No system. It simply was.
Riven tried to guide it into himself.
Pain. Sharp and instant. Like hot needles under his skin.
He gritted his teeth and continued.
Why won't it obey?
That was when he realized something:
> Blood Qi could not be controlled.
It had to be understood.
---
Hours passed as he moved between the dead, practising. Failing. Again and again.
Every attempt drained him. Left his limbs weaker, his mind foggier.
But with each failure, a pattern emerged. A rhythm. The way blood cooled. The way essence sank deeper the longer a body was still. He began to notice the resonance between his breath and the pulse of Blood Qi in corpses.
It wasn't a river to channel. It was a beast to tame.
By dusk, he managed it once.
Just once.
A wisp of red light entered the lines of the tattoo on his arm. His vision blurred. His heart hammered in his chest like a war drum. The power wasn't immense — just enough to numb the pain in his ribs, just enough to keep walking.
It wasn't mastery.
It was progress.
---
He found a building still half-standing and took shelter inside. The walls were cracked. Bookshelves shattered. He leaned against a pillar and stared at the tattoo coiled on his arm.
"What are you?" he muttered.
It pulsed, faintly.
He felt the shape of it now — a cycle. Not a manual of techniques, but a method of understanding life and death.
He remembered the monstrous creatures, the Fleshspawn.
The way they bled. The way their corpses rotted faster as if something devoured them from within.
If the Blood Qi came from them too… then maybe… he could study it.
Not in battle. Not in instinct. But with intention.
He pulled out a blood-stained shard of glass and began scratching crude notes into the stone floor. Marks. Pulses. Reflections of what he felt.
---
A sound.
Behind him.
A low gurgle. Ragged breathing.
He turned.
A hunched figure stumbled into the ruins. Pale, twitching, and muttering nonsense through cracked lips. Its flesh was grey and bloated. Black veins wormed under translucent skin. Fangs — once teeth — protruded from a too-wide mouth.
Riven froze.
Not a monster. Not fully.
A ghoul.
A corrupted human — once cultivator, once proud — now reduced to feral instinct.
He had heard the rumours whispered even before the city fell:
> Fleshspawn don't just kill.
They infect.
Some bodies don't die… they twist.
And what rises again is neither man nor beast.
This ghoul — this thing — had been touched by the Crimson World. Its body is warped by parasitic Blood Qi. Not strong enough to become a true Fleshspawn… just enough to rot it alive.
It screamed and charged.
Riven grabbed the broken spear beside him.
He didn't know any techniques. Not yet.
He moved on instinct.
The first strike was missed.
The second didn't.
The rusted blade slammed through the ghoul's eye and buried itself deep.
It writhed. Then fell.
---
Riven collapsed beside it. Panting.
Then, slowly, he reached toward the corpse.
This Qi… it was thicker. Tainted. Angry. It fought him harder than anything else.
But he matched his breath. Focused. Felt the beat of his heart align with the silent rhythm of the corrupted Qi.
And just for a moment…
It yielded.
A single wisp of Blood Qi entered him.
No sudden strength. No power-up. But something far more valuable:
Insight.
A flicker of understanding in how the ghoul moved. How its body twitched. How its instincts responded to the threat.
Not a technique.
But the raw, broken skeleton of one.
The first stone on the path.
He exhaled.
> If I want to fight them… I must learn from them.
Piece by piece.
Wound by wound.
The Blood Qi Manual wasn't a spellbook.
It was a mirror.
And now, he had seen the first shard of his reflection.
---