Drifting Embers
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[DD]: Chapter 1.3
🕑 Added 2025-03-15 14:25:00 +0000 UTCLin Li felt a void torn into his being as the effects of the pill settled in his abdomen.
'So,' he thought, 'it was poison after all.'
The thought passed through his mind, and then darkness welcomed him in its cold, dead embrace.
X
He could hear, in the distance, droplets falling from above. They hit the water’s surface with a resounding ding, sending ripples through his senses—his mind, his body, his very existence.
Lin Li woke up.
He looked around, surprised and befuddled by the alien scenery before him. A vast sprawl of ocean stretched endlessly, extending beyond the horizon and disappearing into oblivion. Above, soft droplets of rain cascaded down, drenching his lone figure against the backdrop of the boundless sea.
'I'm standing on the ocean,' Lin Li realized with a start. But then he paused, shaking his head. 'I shouldn't be standing on the ocean, though.'
He remembered the chase—the rush, the fear, the exhilaration of escaping the forest. He remembered returning to his room and reading the letter. Then, he distinctly recalled the strange object he had identified as a pill—one he had ingested without hesitation.
"Only," he muttered aloud, "it turned out to be poison."
As the memory settled, Lin Li took another look around, wondering if this was what the afterlife looked like. He had been taught—and had himself read—that death was followed by reincarnation. That upon dying, one could wake up anywhere in the universe, as any being under the heavens. Even an insect.
Lin Li shook his head and sighed. It didn’t matter now. He had died. That was it.
As he waited for his time to arrive, so he could enter the cycle of Samsara and start his new life, Lin Li realized something strange. When he looked up, expecting to see the sky, he saw nothing. No clouds, no stars—just an empty, endless void.
"Strange," he muttered, narrowing his eyes. The rain seemed to bloom into existence above him before falling into the ocean below. A bizarre phenomenon, indeed. But then again, he had died—maybe this was entirely normal here.
Whatever the case, Lin Li couldn't shake the unsettling feeling gnawing at him. He pursed his lips, shook his head, and sighed.
"I don't know why I'm doing this, but whatever..."
Having made his decision, Lin Li folded his legs into a seated position and started meditating. He expected nothing to happen, yet to his surprise, something did.
A deep rumble echoed across the boundless space, and the water’s surface trembled violently, as though stirred by an unseen tsunami. Lin Li’s eyes snapped open, his breath catching in his throat.
"Did I do this?" he muttered. Then, horrified, he cried out, "Oh heavens, did I commit some taboo I wasn’t supposed to?! Am I going to be removed from the Cycle of Samsara now?"
One theory after another took root in his mind, each more terrifying than the last. In his panic, he didn't notice the sharp pain blooming at the back of his head—until, suddenly, his vision blurred, and darkness swallowed him whole.
X
When Lin Li woke up, it wasn’t to the feeling of wetness clinging to his body. Instead, a strange sensation hovered in his mind—an influx of knowledge that was entirely foreign to him, yet now existed as if it had always been there.
What was he to make of that?
Lin Li didn’t know, so he carefully parsed through the information floating inside his mind. As it turned out, the knowledge was rather simple. It detailed something called the Law of Accumulation and its obscure applications. In essence, it described the ability to accumulate something to an extreme degree, allowing for natural evolution and the production of things that were otherwise impossible.
Lin Li found it strange. Yet, despite the near absurdity of the concept, he understood everything it conveyed with eerie clarity.
“So… that wasn’t poison after all,” he muttered absentmindedly, shaking his head.
Since he wasn’t dead and had somehow benefited from this encounter, a slow smile bloomed across his face. Maybe that senior hadn’t been wrong after all—perhaps he had just been incredibly unlucky, like so many others before him.
Deciding to make the most of his circumstances, Lin Li chose to spend the rest of the night cultivating. Judging by his surroundings, only a short time had passed since he blacked out. He sat cross-legged on the bed, adopting a meditative posture, and focused inward.
Now that he was concentrating, he could feel the change within him. His Dantian, once simple and dormant, now blazed like a roaring hearth—though it emitted neither heat nor light. It simply felt brighter, more vivid, to his Qi senses, which allowed him to examine his body from the inside.
He knew, instinctively, what he had to do.
And so, he did.
At first, everything went as expected. The Qi from the surroundings was being sucked in through his pores, traveling along his meridians and tempering the body in the process. It was an experience Lin Li was intimately familiar with, so he allowed himself to fall into a trance.
Seconds passed, then minutes, and Lin Li noted an increase in his cultivating speed with every passing moment. His lips curled into a thin smile, a pleasant sensation coursing through his body.
Then an hour passed, and something strange happened.
Lin Li grew weak.
He paused, surprised, but considered it a fluke of his senses and resumed his cultivation.
Time passed, and he suddenly grew weaker again.
"Huh?" Lin Li had opened his eyes by now, a light of surprise passing through his pupils.
He hadn't been imagining it—he really had been growing weaker. But how could that be? Lin Li couldn't quite wrap his head around the concept.
It appeared absurd. It was absurd. But reality couldn't be denied.
Just when he was about to stop cultivating and properly investigate the cause, Lin Li felt an ache bloom in his belly.
And then, suddenly, weakness overwhelmed his body.
His entire cultivation—gone.
Just like that.
"So... it was a poison after all..."
