The scroll burst into blue flames in Li Fan's hands not from any ordinary fire, but from the Dao itself rebelling against the flawed characters inked upon its surface. Around him, the proud disciples of the Falling Star Sect collapsed like marionettes with cut strings, their agonized screams rising in a grotesque chorus as their cultivation bases shattered from within.
Blood sprayed across the training grounds as Senior Brother Zhang's golden core imploded, his eyes bulging with horrified realization in the instant before his body tore itself apart.
"Fascinating," Li Fan murmured, tilting his head as he observed the carnage. His fingers traced the burning parchment, untouched by the flames that consumed lesser men. The elders had called him "the Useless Scholar," a waste of resources who couldn't progress past the first layer of Qi Refinement in three years.
They never realized he'd been studying the cracks in their precious Dao all along.
Suddenly, a blade colder than winter's heart pressed against his throat, its edge parting skin with the barest whisper of contact. The scent of plum blossoms and iron flooded his senses.
"One wrong breath, and I sever your soul from this plane." The voice was silk wrapped around steel, vibrating with lethal promise.
Li Fan didn't need to turn to know who stood behind him. The way the very air trembled, the unnatural stillness of the sparrows frozen mid-flight around them there was only one cultivator in the Azure Dragon Continent who moved like death given feminine form.
Yan Mei, the Phantom Blade.
Infamous for slaughtering the entire Violet Thunder Sect to steal their ancestral manual. Legend said she'd left their patriarch impaled upon his own sword, his eyes gouged out and replaced with the very jade slips he'd refused to surrender.
And now her dagger tasted his blood.
"You," she breathed against his ear, her lips brushing his skin with terrifying gentleness, "are the rat who tampered with their cultivation manual."
Li Fan smiled. The cut on his throat deepened, a warm trickle sliding down his collar. "Tampered? No. I simply read what was actually written."
With deliberate slowness, he raised his hand ignoring how her blade bit deeper and pointed to a still-burning fragment of the scroll. "The third stanza. It instructs disciples to channel Qi through the Tian Mu point at a 37-degree angle."
A beat of silence. The dagger trembled not from uncertainty, but from barely restrained killing intent.
"Your point, scholar?"
"The human body's Tian Mu point," Li Fan continued, watching a nearby disciple convulse as his meridians turned inside out, "is positioned at 36.8 degrees. That 0.2-degree difference?" He met her gaze over his shoulder, blood now streaming down his chest. "It turns a cultivation technique into a death sentence."
Yan Mei's obsidian eyes widened a fraction. For the first time in living memory, the Phantom Blade looked... intrigued.
The moment shattered as an elder's roar shook the courtyard. "TRAITOR!"
Li Fan sighed as the Foundation Establishment elder's palm strike hurtled toward them, a tidal wave of crushing Qi that turned the stone tiles beneath their feet to powder. "Ah. Right on schedule" Yan Mei moved.
The world blurred.
One heartbeat, the elder's attack filled the air. The next, Yan Mei stood behind the man, her dagger dripping black blood onto the rubble. The elder staggered, his eyes rolling back as his shadow detached from his body and slithered into Yan Mei's sleeve.
"Disappointing," she murmured, licking the blade clean with a slow swipe of her tongue. Her gaze locked onto Li Fan with terrifying focus. "You. Come."
When he didn't immediately obey, she appeared before him in a whisper of displaced air, her hand closing around his throat. The scent of blood and something darker like stars burning in a void filled his senses as she dragged him nose-to-nose.
"Let me rephrase," Yan Mei whispered, her breath chilling his lips. "You will teach me to see these... flaws in the Dao. Or I will peel the skin from your bones one inch per day while keeping you very, very alive."
Somewhere in the distance, the Falling Star Sect's grand bell tolled a funeral knell for the dead. Li Fan smiled through the pain of her grip.
"How about a counteroffer?" Blood trickled from his nose as he activated an ancient channeling technique, his body glowing with turbulent, golden Qi. "You protect me from the rest of this doomed sect..."
Yan Mei's nails drew crescents of blood on his neck.
"...and I'll show you how to rewrite reality using the forgotten arts, alchemy, formation, weapon refinement, soul inscription."
For the first time in a century, the Phantom Blade smiled.
It was the most terrifying thing Li Fan had ever seen.