Chương 3: What the Eyes Cannot Unsee

Ch 3: What the Eyes Cannot Unsee I don't know how long I knelt there before the System spoke. WARNING Host Mental State: Critical EXTREME EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY DETECTED Heart Rate Rising... Qi Flow Unstable... Synchronization Becoming Erratic... Host is advised to calm down. Calm down. A laugh tore out of me, hollow and broken.

"How?" My father's severed body lay in front of me, and somewhere in this ruin my mother was still a prisoner, and this, this thing that had ridden along in my skull across two lives, wanted me to calm down. The air went heavy around me before I'd finished the thought. Every disciple within thirty meters turned to look, pale-faced, at a ten-year-old boy.

"... What is that pressure?" someone whispered.

"It's coming from the Young Master?" Something older than rage was waking up behind my eyes. Pain split through my skull like a blade turning inside it, and when I pressed my palms to my face, my fingers came away streaked with blood. The blue glow of the Eyes of Apex deepened, and thin gold cracks began spreading through the color, like sunlight forcing its way through a sealed door. Across the courtyard, the assassin who'd killed my father went still.

"... Those eyes," he said, and for the first time since he'd appeared, something in his voice had gone uncertain.

"What are they?" It wasn't my cultivation that had rattled him. It was the sense — however faint — that whatever he'd spent a lifetime hiding had just been laid bare in front of a child. A last notification unfolded, its letters carved from something darker than the ordinary blue interface. SYNCHRONIZATION THRESHOLD ACHIEVED Emergency Authority Activated... Searching Legacy... Legacy Resonance Found.

DRAGON SLAYER ART Status: Compatible Host Condition: Insufficient Recommendation: DO NOT USE Probability of Permanent Disability: 99. 97% I read it once. I didn't need to read it twice. My eyes rose to the man who had taken my father.

"... You," I said. My voice barely carried, and it didn't need to. The assassin's grip tightened on his blade.

"What — a child? You're going to fight me?" I didn't answer. I bent down, wrapped my fingers around a sword some other man had already died holding, and lowered myself into a stance I'd practiced a million times across two lifetimes. The wind died. The disciples around us stopped breathing. Even the birds had gone silent. The assassin's smile faded, replaced by something his instincts understood before he did.

"... Who," he said, taking an involuntary step back, "are you?" I raised the sword. It trembled — not with fear, but because this small, unfinished body had no business bearing what was about to move through it.

"... Dragon Slayer," I said. The heavens above the mountain rumbled in answer.

"First Verse." There was no explosion. No dazzling light. Only one step forward, and a single line drawn through the air faster than thought. The assassin's pupils shrank.

"What—" A thin crimson seam opened across his arm before his sentence finished. He staggered back nearly twenty meters, boots carving trenches into the stone, and stared down at the blood running from his own sleeve as though it belonged to someone else.

"I was... injured?" A master assassin, a cultivator who'd stood in the Purple Knight Realm for years, wounded by a ten-year-old boy. He didn't understand it. I barely did either — every meridian in my arm felt as though molten iron had been forced through it, and the sword nearly slipped from my hand at the effort of holding it upright. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

WARNING Meridian Damage: 38% Muscle Fibers Torn Bone Fractures Detected"Who taught you that?" the assassin demanded, voice climbing. I said nothing. There was nothing left to say — my father lay behind me, his blood still warm on my hands, and this man was the reason. He vanished, reappearing on top of me with the black blade already swinging for my throat. Probability of Death: 99. 99% Immediate Evasion Recommended Father. I'm sorry I couldn't save you. But I can still save Mother.

I closed my eyes and gave the strike everything I had left — every strand of Qi, every fragment of strength, every ounce of whatever passed for a soul in a body this young.

"... Dragon Slayer," I whispered again.

"Final Verse." An ancient pressure rolled down off the mountain peaks, and even the assassin's face went bloodless.

"No," he breathed.

"This sword intent — it can't—" I stepped forward. One line, traced clean through the air. Silence. The assassin stood there for a moment longer, blade still raised, and laughed.

"That's it?" Then his eyes went wide, and a thin silver line opened across the whole length of his body.

"No. Impossible—" He came apart without a sound. No blood. No scream. Just silver dust, carried off by the wind, as though he'd never been anything at all. Then the cost came due. The sword dropped from my fingers. Clang.

I looked down at my right arm and found almost nothing left of it — muscle torn open from shoulder to fingertip, bone showing through skin that had already stopped trying to hold itself together, blood running out onto the broken stone in a way that didn't seem like it was going to stop on its own. CRITICAL WARNING Host has exceeded physical limitations. Right Arm: Destroyed. Emergency Preservation Activated. Host entering collapse. Darkness crept in from the edges of everything.

Then, one more window, calmer than the rest. EMERGENCY MISSION Objective Incomplete. Protect Your Mother. Target Status: Alive. Location... Detected. Mother. That was enough.

"No," I said, forcing myself upright with my one working arm.

"I can't fall yet." Every step after that sent fresh agony through what remained of my body. Blood marked the stone behind me the whole way. I called on the Eyes of Apex again, and gold spread across my sight until walls stopped being walls at all — the entire sect turning transparent, floors and hidden passages and the threads of Qi running through everyone still left alive, most of them already gone quiet, until one faint blue light remained, deep beneath the ruins of the main hall.

"... Mother." I staggered toward it. Disciples called after me. Elders tried to stop me. Their voices came from somewhere very far away.

"Young Master, you mustn't move — your injuries are fatal—""Move," I said, and something in the way I said it made the old physician step aside without another word. There was nothing childlike left in my eyes for him to argue with. Bodies littered the corridor deeper in — broken swords, shattered pillars, burning banners. The Heavenly Sword Sect looked less like a home now than like a kingdom after the end of the world. I reached what was left of the main hall. Half the roof had come down.

Through the cracked tiles, the Eyes of Apex caught a hidden thread of Qi — deliberately concealed, sealed beneath the floor. Len Fan's memories answered before I had to ask: an emergency refuge beneath the hall, reserved for the Sect Master's family, its entrance known only to three people. Father. Mother. And me.

"... So this is where they hid you." I pressed my hand to the broken stone, and the damaged formation groaned to life. A staircase opened into the dark, cold air spilling up from somewhere below, and I went down without hesitating. The chamber beneath was quiet except for the faint glow of spirit lamps against stone walls. Broken chains lay scattered across the floor. The prison door had already been forced open. Too late?

"... Fan'er?" My whole body went still.

"... Mother." She stood at the end of the corridor, robes torn, one wrist still trailing a broken shackle. The moment she saw me, her eyes went wide with a horror that had nothing to do with the enemies who'd taken her.

"Fan'er!" She was halfway to me before she stopped — her gaze catching on the ruin of my arm, the blood soaking through what was left of my robes.

"... What happened to you?" I tried to smile. My mouth wouldn't do it. Instead, for the first time since I'd stood before dragons and kings and death itself without shedding a single tear, I felt them come anyway.

"I..." The words wouldn't come out right.

"I'm sorry. I couldn't save him. Father. He's—" She went still. For a long moment she said nothing at all — didn't cry, didn't move — and then a single tear slid down her cheek as she looked up at the broken ceiling, as if searching for a man who wasn't coming back through it.

"... You fool," she whispered.

"You promised we'd grow old together." Her voice cracked on the last word, and instead of breaking, she wrapped both arms around me and pulled me in like she was afraid I'd disappear next.

"My son," she said.

"You came back. That's enough." That was the last thing I heard. Whatever I'd been running on until then finally gave out all at once. The sword had already left my hand; now my knees did too, and the last thing I felt before the dark took me was warmth — the plain, ordinary warmth of a mother's arms, closing around what was left of me.