"If you ss this up, you will die?"
Lyra absorbed those words and let them sink in fully. Whatever lingering distraction had been left in her dissolved. Her entire focus narrowed onto Catherine, every word, every instruction, taken in completely.
"I’m going to channel Qi into you now. It will travel through your ridians and enter your Dantian. The mont it does, it will awaken your dormant Dantian for the first ti." Catherine’s voice remained level, precise. "While my Qi moves through your ridians, you’ll feel a sensation, sothing entirely new to you. I need you to use that sensation as a reference point, and begin drawing in Qi from the atmosphere the sa way, almost like breathing."
She paused, making sure Lyra was tracking every word.
"Here’s the part you need to understand. When I unlock your Dantian for the first ti, it will be extrely weak. If you don’t fill it sufficiently within the right window of ti, it will collapse, and the mont it collapses, you die. So you need to absorb Qi carefully. But you also can’t rush it. If you fill it too quickly, the pressure will be too much for the Dantian to withstand, and it will break the sa way, too little, and too much, both kill you. You’ll need to walk a narrow line the entire way through." A brief pause. "And the last thing you should know, this process is going to hurt. A great deal."
Lyra felt a flicker of fear move through her at that. And close behind it ca sothing else, doubt, old and familiar, rising before she could stop it.
Can I actually do this? Is this sothing I’m capable of? I’ve never managed to do anything properly in my entire life. Will this be the sa? Am I going to spend my whole life as nothing but a failure?
The thought sat heavy in her chest. And then her eyes found Necrotize.
He was watching her, not with concern, not with doubt, but with sothing that looked almost like anticipation. Like he was genuinely looking forward to what was about to happen. Like he had no question at all about the outco.
No one had ever looked at her like that before. Not once, in her entire life, soone watching her with that kind of expectation, that kind of certainty that sothing good was coming.
The feeling was completely new. And she found, without really deciding to, that she didn’t want to disappoint it. She made up her mind, quietly and completely, she would give everything she had.
"Alright, Lady Catherine. I’m ready. Please begin."
"That’s the spirit." Catherine smiled faintly, took a slow breath, and began.
A thread of deep red energy began flowing from her palms into Lyra’s back.
Lyra felt it the mont it entered, starting at her spine and spreading outward through what felt like channels running beneath her skin, branching through her body in directions she had never known existed. The sensation was unlike anything she’d experienced before. Like breathing for the first ti, sohow, despite having breathed her entire life.
She felt the energy converge, moving through countless small channels, all of them eventually narrowing toward a single point below her navel. Her entire lower abdon began to warm.
And then it struck sothing. Sothing round. The energy pressed against its surface, slowly working its way through, breaching it bit by bit.
So this is the Dantian.
She marveled at the discovery, sothing that had existed inside her her whole life, completely unknown to her, written in no book she’d ever read.
The red energy settled at the base of this round structure. It didn’t take up much space, perhaps five to ten percent of the total volu. The mont it stabilized, the pain began.
It started in her lower abdon, a pain unlike anything she had ever felt. It felt like sothing was tearing through her from the inside, like her entire abdon was being ripped open and pulled outward. Her whole body began to shake. Sweat broke out across her skin in beads. Blood began trickling from her nose. Every instinct scread at her to get up, to run, to escape whatever this was.
She didn’t move.
"Don’t give in to the pain," Catherine said, voice steady. "Endure it. Whatever happens, do not let your focus slip, or sothing far worse could happen."
Lyra fought to steady herself, forcing her breathing to slow despite the agony tearing through her core.
"Good. Just like that. Now, rember the sensation from when my Qi moved through you. Use that. Start absorbing Qi the sa way."
Lyra focused. She recalled the feeling exactly, the channels, the warmth, the path leading down to her Dantian. She drew in a long breath.
And began.
The sensation was different this ti. Catherine’s Qi had carried warmth. What she was drawing in now was cold, sharp, clean cold, moving through her channels and converging at her abdon exactly as before.
But when it reached the Dantian, she noticed sothing strange. Of all the Qi she was absorbing through her ridians, only a tiny fraction actually made it inside, like separating a few drops of water from an entire pond.
These drops were a pale green. And the mont they touched the red energy already settled inside, the red began shifting, turning green, spreading, growing. What had been five to ten percent of the Dantian’s volu beca fifteen, then twenty.
And as the colour changed, the pain began to ease. Not completely. But steadily, gradually, it loosened its grip.
Lyra kept her entire focus on the process, absorbing, refining, drop by drop, the green expanding through the Dantian.
Thirty percent.
The mont she crossed that threshold, the pain in her abdon vanished entirely.
Necrotize and Catherine noticed the change imdiately, the shaking stopped, the sweat stopped. Catherine spoke first.
"She’s good. Reaching thirty percent this quickly is genuinely impressive, don’t you think, Master?"
"Yes," Necrotize agreed. "It really is."
But as he said it, his gaze had already left Lyra entirely, drifting upward, toward the sky. Catherine noticed but didn’t ask why.
With the pain gone, Lyra’s focus sharpened further. The refining process accelerated.
Thirty-five percent.
Forty.
Forty-five.
Forty-nine.
And the mont she crossed fifty,
Sothing changed.
Lyra’s eyes were still closed, but she felt it imdiately, a sudden disturbance in the air around her, sharp enough to break through her concentration. The Qi essences drifting through the atmosphere around her began behaving strangely, moving in ways that had nothing to do with anything she was doing.
Elizabeth felt it too. A sudden stillness settled over everything, the air had gone completely still, the wind that had been moving through the garden all afternoon simply stopped. Not a single leaf moved. No butterflies. No birds. Everything around them seed to have gone into hiding, as though sothing enormous had just announced its presence.
And then the light began to change. Not the gradual dimming of sunset, sothing else. Sothing that didn’t belong to the natural order of the day at all.
Fww
A gust of wind tore through the garden, but it wasn’t like the breeze from before. This carried sothing else entirely. A cold that sank into the skin and didn’t stop at the skin, a cold that felt like it belonged to death itself.
Elizabeth’s eyes moved to Necrotize, who had been staring up at the sky for so ti now. She hadn’t questioned it before. Now she understood why.
She looked up too.
What she saw made her knees nearly give out.
The entire sky above the academy had turned black, choked with clouds unlike anything from that morning. These didn’t drift. They didn’t sit still. They were turning, a massive, slow rotation spanning the entire sky above the academy, a vortex large enough to swallow the whole campus whole.
Catherine looked up and saw it too. Her face went pale, her eyes wide, her mouth slightly open.
Only one na surfaced in her mind.
"...Heavenly Tribulation."
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