The Third Layer

Dusk deepened over the stone platform at the center of the lake. Xiao Yan had lost count of how many times that withered finger had sent him flying. Ten times? Twenty? All he knew was that his clothes had been soaked with sweat and dried by the night wind, over and over again. Each time he was sent flying, he climbed back up, caught his breath, and charged again in a different way.

A fiery fist was scattered by a single finger; the afterimages of his movement technique were frozen in place by a ring. Luo Tianshen casually flicked aside the threads of fire guided by Spirit Marks, sending every one of them off course.

He even tried using the fire-control technique of ten thousand lights, splitting a wisp of flame into hundreds of strands and sending them at Luo Tianshen from every direction at once. But three feet away from him, the flames seemed to strike an invisible barrier. Spirit Marks flowed across it, deftly guiding them aside and into the lake, where they fell with a hiss.

But with every failure, he saw one more thing clearly. Luo Tianshen never used his full strength when he struck; he did not even use a tenth of it. What he used was something Xiao Yan had never seen on the Dou Qi Continent: a kind of "finesse" born from mastering Spiritual Energy, Spirit Marks, and the rules of this world to the utmost. It was precise control over power, doing the most with the least effort.

One finger could immobilize a sky full of afterimages; one flick could divert hundreds of threads of fire. His power was not necessarily all that great; he simply knew all too well how power flowed through this world.

The longer Xiao Yan fought, the brighter his heart grew, like a pitch-black room in which lamps were being lit one by one. On the Dou Qi Continent, he had relied on overwhelming force, the ferocity of Heavenly Flames, the might of Dou Techniques, and the ruthlessness to press ever forward and break finesse with brute force. But in this world, overwhelming force alone was not enough.

The rules of this world were a thousand, ten thousand times more complex than those of the Dou Qi Continent. Those Spirit Marks and laws covered everything like a vast, boundless net. Without understanding them, no matter how great one's power, one could only be like a fierce beast caught in a spiderweb: the harder it struggled, the tighter it became entangled.

After being sent flying yet again, Xiao Yan did not get up immediately. He lay on the stone platform, gasping for breath as he gazed at the night sky overhead, where stars were gradually appearing. Luo Tianshen stood at the center of the platform with his hands behind his back, making no move to hurry him.

After a long while, Xiao Yan spoke, his voice somewhat hoarse. "Senior."

"Mm."

"I think I've begun to understand something." Luo Tianshen said nothing, merely watching him. Xiao Yan sat up on the stone platform, crossed his legs, and closed his eyes, sinking his awareness into his body. There, two layers of reverse scales overlapped around that spark of the source of fire. The first layer was for guarding, and the second, bearing flame patterns, was for guiding. But at that moment, Xiao Yan suddenly felt that the two layers were still missing something.

They guarded the core and guided Spiritual Energy, but they remained separated from this world. Like a fortress built in the sea, no matter how well defended, it was still an isolated island, forever at odds with the sea around it.

What if... What if the third layer of reverse scales isn't for guarding or guiding, but for "connecting"?

Xiao Yan's Soul Power slowly gathered, and a third layer began to take shape outside the other two. This time, the patterns on each reverse scale bore some resemblance to the ring of Spirit Marks he had faintly glimpsed within Luo Tianshen's Spirit Immobilization. No longer did the patterns draw solely inward. Half faced inward, and half outward, like doors standing half open.

The inward-facing halves guided the Spiritual Energy of heaven and earth to wash over his Dou Qi. The outward-facing halves quietly sent the Spiritual Energy in his body that bore the Flame Mantra's properties into the world, where it mingled and resonated with the Spiritual Energy of heaven and earth.

On the stone platform, Xiao Yan's body suddenly trembled.

He felt it. For the first time, he truly felt this world. It was no longer a cold force that sought to assimilate and engulf him, but a vast, gentle ocean, breathing slowly. And for the first time, he found a small place of his own within that ocean.

Standing nearby, Luo Tianshen's cloudy old eyes suddenly sharpened. He could clearly sense a subtle change taking place in the fluctuations of Spiritual Energy around the young man seated cross-legged on the platform. The change was not an increase in strength, but a blending in, as if, at that moment, this world had ceased to regard him as an outsider for the first time.

Time slowly passed, and stars gradually filled the night sky. When Xiao Yan opened his eyes again, a pale light had appeared on the eastern horizon. Inside his body, three layers of reverse scales interlocked: three hundred and sixty, seven hundred and twenty, and one thousand and eighty scales, like a silver lotus blooming in three layers, gently cradling the spark of the source of fire at its center.

Assimilation: fifty percent.

Xiao Yan slowly rose from the stone platform and stretched, his joints crackling. He could feel that he was more than twice as strong as he had been the night before.

But something else concerned him more. The instant the third layer of reverse scales had formed, the slumbering wisp of pink flame deep within his heart meridian had flickered again. This time it had flickered especially fiercely, like a child about to wake, kicking hard in her sleep.

And in that flicker, Xiao Yan faintly sensed a trace of longing. Xiao Yi longed for a flame of extreme yin and extreme cold.

Xiao Yan was slightly startled, then fell into thought. Xiao Yi was a Fire Spirit formed from the fusion of six Heavenly Flames, with her principal consciousness leaning toward the Purifying Lotus Demon Flame. Among those six flames were yin and yang, cold and fierce, complementing one another to maintain their balance. But after arriving in this world, as the Heavenly Flames were assimilated, the yang flames had merged most quickly with his Flame Mantra Spiritual Energy, while the yin-cold flames had remained sluggish. Perhaps the imbalance between yin and yang was why Xiao Yi had remained asleep; she needed a flame of utmost yin to restore that lost balance.

"Senior." Xiao Yan turned to look at Luo Tianshen, who was still standing at the center of the platform. "Is there a flame of utmost yin and utmost cold on the Western Heaven Continent?"

Luo Tianshen looked at him and fell silent for a moment. Then the faintest hint of a smile appeared on his face, which had remained as undisturbed as an ancient well. "There is, in the Luo God Clan's secret realm. Next month, the Luo River Abyss will open, and the younger generation of the clan will go in to temper themselves."

With that, he turned and walked toward the lakeshore, his aged voice drifting back on the morning breeze. "If you want to go, then go with them."

Luo Tianshen walked alone through the bamboo grove by the lakeshore, the morning breeze stirring the hem of his gray robe.

He recalled the battered ancient book he had found in the clan's library many years ago, when he was still young. He recalled the brief lines about those extraordinary people who "cultivated Dou Qi, excelled at controlling fire, and were all breathtakingly gifted." At the time, he had taken them for legends, for exaggerations written by the ancients. But now, he had watched with his own eyes as a man who cultivated Dou Qi was sent flying by his finger more than twenty times on his stone platform, then, in the space of that single night, grasped something that countless geniuses of the Great Thousand World could not grasp in a lifetime.

"Connecting..." Luo Tianshen murmured. "The third layer of reverse scales-he actually thought of connecting..."

That was the final layer of the Reverse Scale Spirit-Guiding Method, something mentioned in only a single sentence in the records left by the Luo God Clan's ancestors, yet never mastered by anyone. To master it required a near-instinctive sense of the flow of Spiritual Energy through this world. That young man had not read the records; he had understood it himself from that single Spirit Immobilization.

Luo Tianshen stopped and looked back at the stone platform at the center of the lake. The slender figure was still standing quietly on it in the morning light.

"The Dou Qi lineage..." He shook his head, an indescribable emotion on his aged face. "They truly are all monsters."

When Xiao Yan returned to the courtyard, Luo Lan had long been waiting at the entrance. The moment he saw Xiao Yan, he rushed over. "Where did you go? You didn't come back all night!"

The young man had dark circles under his eyes, clearly having waited all night as well. Then he spotted the blood on Xiao Yan's clothes and widened his eyes. "Who did you fight?"

"Heh, your granduncle," Xiao Yan said with a smile.

Luo Lan's mouth fell open in a round O. Xiao Yan patted him on the shoulder. "By the way, what kind of place is the Luo River Abyss?"

Luo Lan froze for a moment, then his eyes lit up. "You're going too?!"

"Your granduncle told me to go." Xiao Yan nodded. Luo Lan nearly jumped with excitement. Grabbing Xiao Yan, he launched into a torrent of words: the Luo River Abyss was the Luo God Clan's ancestral secret realm, located in a spatial rift at the bottom of the Luo River. It opened only once every five years, and only young clan members under thirty could enter. Inside were spirit beasts, spirit herbs, and Spirit Arrays left over from ancient times. At its deepest point, there was said to be a cold flame born from an earth vein beneath the Luo River, called the Mysterious Yin Ice Flame. But no one had ever been able to approach it; anyone who entered and drew a little too close was frozen into an ice sculpture...

"Luo Feng is leading the group this time." At this point, Luo Lan lowered his voice. "I heard the Blood God Clan seems to have designs on the Luo River Abyss too..."

Xiao Yan narrowed his eyes slightly.

Mysterious Yin Ice Flame.