Preparing New Moves, Mistaken Practice Ascends

Just past midnight, the stars were gradually thinning.

Chen Wuya still stood at the edge of the high platform, the five fingers of his right hand slowly curling inward. The faint pattern of force in his palm had yet to dissipate. The soft sound from the Misaligned Force his fingertips had traced striking the stone seemed to still echo in his ears. He neither moved nor spoke, merely turned his hand over and stared at the thin streak of blood seeping from the edge of the cut—the bead of blood slid down the lines of his palm and dripped onto the sand, making it tremble ever so slightly.

He froze for half a breath.

It was no illusion.

The sensation of detonating earth-force in the dunes last night had returned, clearer this time. The Misaligned Force no longer darted about in restless agitation. Instead, it seemed to possess a pulse of its own, surging softly through his meridians and quietly answering some invisible rhythm beneath the ground.

"Pouring rivers back..." he murmured, reciting a line from the fragmentary volume of the Canglang Art, before suddenly laughing. "Water flowing uphill is how it returns to the sea? Then I'll make it burst from the bottom of the sea straight into the sky."

He sat cross-legged right there at the edge of the training ground and closed his eyes to regulate his breath. The true qi within him was sluggish; several attempts to forcibly guide the Misaligned Force into the earth ended in failure. On the third try, sweetness welled in his throat, and a thread of blood seeped from the corner of his lips. Yet he noticed something strange—after every failure, the force inside him was invisibly corrected. Its path was chaotic, but it always managed to skirt around the most