> [Location: Deep Marsh Cavern – Echo Hollow Below Relay Ruins]
Participants: Jiang Han, Yan Feng
Weapon: Echofang (Flame Legacy Blade – Bound)
Status: Training Initiated – Forbidden Sequence I: Flame Disobedience
Warning: Lessons taught under Yan Feng will destabilize system compliance. Proceed with full mental anchor.
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The Hollow of the Flamebreaker
Jiang stood in the hollow chamber, shirt soaked with sweat, flame threads twitching across his arms like angry lightning veins.
> "You said I needed to train," he muttered. "This isn't training. This is punishment."
Yan Feng stood barefoot in the center of the circle, eyes closed, flame coiled like smoke at his shoulders.
> "You've been taught to channel your fire," he said, voice calm. "To obey its rules. That was your first mistake."
He turned.
> "We don't obey the flame."
> "We bleed with it."
Jiang surged forward, drawing Echofang and slashing in one breath.
The blade struck—
And passed through Yan Feng's afterimage.
---
First Flamebreaker Drill
The next hour blurred into fire, collapse, and recovery.
Yan Feng's drills weren't coordinated moves or patterns—they were extractions.
He forced Jiang to strip away his flame habits—every defensive reflex, every channeling sequence learned since awakening.
Each time Jiang tried to compress his flame the way the Sovereign System taught him, Yan Feng punished it—sending raw feedback through his threads, painful and volatile.
> "Your flame is trapped in a cage shaped like power," Yan Feng snapped. "Break it."
> "How?"
> "Let it act before you do."
---
The Crack in Control
It finally happened on the 21st repetition.
Jiang's spark flared—not in reaction, but in rebellion.
A ghost-surge of flame burst from his back, forming two arcing wings—unfinished, asymmetrical, but free.
Yan Feng smiled for the first time.
> "Good."
> "Now do it without dying."
---
Soulburn Meditation
That night, Jiang lay in the mist grass outside the cave, chest heaving, threads still unstable.
Echofang rested across his knees, whispering old echoes.
He closed his eyes and let the pain cycle back through him, not resisting.
That was part of the training, too.
He heard a voice—not Yan Feng's, not Long Chen's.
His own.
> "If I burn too fast, I die. If I don't burn at all, I become them."
"But if I burn just right…"
"I wake the flame that remembers why we started."
---
Yan Feng's First Story
As dawn rose over the dead relay tower, Jiang found Yan Feng sitting by a pool of stillwater.
> "You're not like they said you were," Jiang said.
Yan Feng glanced over. "No?"
> "They said you were cold. That you turned your back on Long Chen."
Yan Feng looked back at the water.
> "I did."
Jiang frowned.
> "Why?"
Yan Feng's eyes sharpened.
> "Because he thought the flame was the answer to everything."
"But I saw the cost. And I wanted to live."
A pause.
> "You're stronger than he was, you know."
Jiang blinked. "What?"
Yan Feng rose.
> "Because you're not just carrying his dream."
"You're willing to question it."