DROWNING POOL
Qiang Lian entered carrying the tea herself. She had dismissed the attendants earlier that afternoon, having no desire to let servants stand between herself and her husband.
The chamber was quiet as she approached the low table where Zhenwu sat. Beyond the open windows, sunlight stretched across the mountains in long bands of gold. Warm air drifted through the room, carrying the scent of maples and sunlit stone.
Qiang Lian lowered herself gracefully across from him and began preparing the tea.
Only after she had poured the first cup did Zhenwu finally speak.
“Li Li.”
“Mmn?”
His gaze lingered on the steam rising from the pot before settling on her.
“Where is Qiang Huifen?”
Qiang Lian did not answer immediately. She placed his cup before him, then folded her hands within her sleeves.
“Two months ago, there was an incident in Xiandao. Huifen and Haoran went to investigate.” Her tone remained composed, though fatigue threaded faintly beneath it. “The matter involved a demon.”
A slight crease formed between Zhenwu’s brows, though he remained silent.
“The two of them chose not to withdraw and report the situation.” A trace of dry displeasure entered Qiang Lians voice. “I believe you can already tell whose idea that was.”
Zhenwu exhaled quietly through his nose. Whether the sound carried amusement or disapproval was difficult to tell.
“Huifen was severely injured during the encounter. He survived only because the seal you placed upon his soul shattered.”
At once, Zhenwu’s attention sharpened.
“Where is he?”
“I took him to Hao Yang. He is currently recovering at White Carp Valley.”
For several moments, Zhenwu said nothing.
One hand rested lightly against the porcelain cup as his thoughts settled into silence.
Qiang Lian watched him carefully before speaking again, slower this time.
“Zhenwu… you must not impair our daughter.”
Her hand moved instinctively to her stomach, already protective.
“I will not allow it.”
Zhenwu lifted his eyes toward her.
“If immortality is to be her birthright, then so be it,” Qiang Lian continued, her voice steady despite the emotion beneath it. “I will not have her diminished for the sake of balance or caution.”
Zhenwu took a slow sip of tea.
He neither argued nor reassured her. Instead, he set the cup down gently and asked,
“Qiang Bifeng?”
Qiang Lian leaned back slightly.
“His soul-fire began rising two years ago. He entered seclusion on Baiyun shortly after the Xiandao incident.”
That gave Zhenwu pause.
The concern on his face this time was unmistakable.
“So young…” he murmured. “Was he prepared?”
“In many ways, yes,” Qiang Lian answered after a moment. “As much as anyone can be prepared for soul-fire.”
A sigh escaped Zhenwu.
Qiang Lian reached forward and refilled his cup.
For a time, neither spoke.
Then Zhenwu asked the final question.
“Immortal Songhe?”
Qiang Lian paused.
Of everything awaiting him after his return, this was the matter she had dreaded most. There was no arrangement of words capable of softening the truth. No political phrasing. No tactful redirection.
Only this:
“He is imprisoned within the Drownchamber.”
Slowly, she raised her eyes to meet his directly.
Zhenwu had been lifting the tea toward his lips, but the motion halted midway. He lowered the cup onto the table.
A faint smile touched his lips, yet there was no humor in it.
Without another word, Qiang Zhenwu rose and left for the Drowning Prison.
* * * * * *
The Spirit Breath Basin stood as one of the most controversial legacies of the Qiang Clan founder, Qiang Dimian, a construct born from an uncompromising vision of cultivation.
Its purpose was simple: to drive the body to its limits.
To undergo the method, a practitioner would submerge fully within the pool’s milky liquid, surrendering all sense of external orientation. In that suspended state, the body was made to endure relentless, escalating agony.
Pain served as the method. It seized every nerve and drove every instinct toward resistance. The cultivator was required to hold firm, maintaining precise control over the flow of spiritual energy despite the strain.
Progress demanded defiance. The body’s revolt was stilled. Endurance replaced reaction. Will imposed order.
Under such pressure, the mind sharpened, becoming more controlled and more exact in its command of spiritual energy.
When practiced in measured intervals, the method could yield tangible results. Energy pathways stabilized, focus deepened, and advancement, while never guaranteed, became more attainable.
Even in its earliest days, the practice divided the clan’s cultivators. Some regarded it as a necessary extremity, a tool for those willing to pursue strength without compromise. Others viewed it as excessive, arguing that refinement achieved through such suffering risked fracturing the very foundation it sought to strengthen. The disagreement was never fully resolved, and over time, the purpose of the pool began to shift.
What began as a voluntary trial took on a different character. Masters, seeing both its effectiveness and its severity, began to employ it as a means of discipline. Disciples who faltered, disobeyed, or failed to meet expectations found themselves ordered into its depths.
Resentment grew steadily. The pool, once approached with grim determination, came to be feared with something closer to dread. It no longer represented advancement, but judgment.
In time, the disciples gave it another name.
They called it the Drowning Pool.
The danger lay not only in the pain itself, but in its duration. A brief submersion tested the limits of endurance. Prolonged exposure broke them. If an individual remained within the liquid for more than a day, the outcome became increasingly certain. Those of weaker constitution would not survive the strain. Those with stronger bodies fared little better in another regard, as the mind, strained beyond its capacity to endure sustained torment, would begin to fracture. What emerged, if anything emerged at all, bore little resemblance to the person who had entered.
It was this reality that finally forced a reckoning. Qiang Zhenwu, confronting the loss of four promising disciples, each driven by ambition and determined to prove their worth, issued a decree that would redefine the pool’s place within the newly formed sect. Their deaths had not come from recklessness alone, but from a system that encouraged excess under the guise of strength.
From that point forward, the Drowning Pool ceased to function as a tool of cultivation. Its use was restricted and formalized, and it became a place of imprisonment.
Zhenwu stepped to the edge of the Drowning Pool and raised his hands, his fingers moving through a precise sequence of mudras as his awareness descended into its depths.
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His consciousness pressed steadily downward through layers of distortion until, at last, it found a heartbeat.
His senses wrapped around that fragile rhythm.
Then he exerted force.
The surface of the basin trembled.
A body rose slowly from the pale waters, suspended weightlessly in the air as unseen force lifted it free from the pool’s depths. Milky streams drained from Songhe’s robes and silver hair before dripping back into the basin below.
He did not awaken.
Songhe hung limp beneath the chamber light, his head bowed slightly forward, damp strands of silver hair clinging to the pallor of his skin. Four days of immersion within the pool had leached much of the color from his face.
His spiritual presence, once vast enough to shake mountain ranges, now resembled a ruined constellation, with half its stars gone dark.
Zhenwu lowered him carefully onto the stone floor beside the basin.
Nullroot vines had been wound around Songhe from throat to ankle, blackened tendrils coiling across his body like living shackles. Their thorns had pierced deep into his flesh, feeding suppressive poison directly into his spiritual pathways. Dampening talismans covered him in dense, overlapping layers, sealing his robes, limbs, and chest until scarcely any fabric remained visible beneath the paper bindings.
Zhenwu waved a hand.
Every talisman ignited at once, blackening, curling inward, and dissolving into ash that scattered into the air.
Songhe remained unconscious.
Zhenwu’s brows furrowed as he reached for the nullroot vines.
He removed them one by one.
Each thorn emerged stained with darkened blood. After four days within the pool, the poison had spread extensively through Songhe’s body. Even his regenerative abilities had been driven close to paralysis beneath the combined suppression of the basin, the vines, and the talismans.
When the final thorn had been removed, Zhenwu pressed two fingers lightly against the center of Songhe’s chest and closed his eyes.
Spiritual energy flowed outward from him in slow, luminous currents. Thin streams of blackened vapor seeped from beneath Songhe’s skin before dissolving into the air.
Only after the corruption had been purged did Zhenwu move again.
With a series of mudras, he cast a formation across the chamber floor. Intricate lines of spiritual light unfolded beneath Songhe’s body, spreading outward in concentric rings etched with ancient script. The formation pulsed softly as it settled into place.
Zhenwu lifted Songhe and seated him at the center of the formation in the lotus position. Songhe remained unconscious as Zhenwu seated himself behind him and placed both hands against Songhe’s back, steady currents of spiritual energy flowing from his meridians into Songhe’s damaged pathways.
Without warning, Songhe lurched violently forward, blood bursting from his mouth and splashing across the formation beneath them. Smoke curled upward from the array.
Zhenwu’s eyes narrowed.
Smoke?
He reached forward and pulled down the wet robes gathered at the back of Songhe’s neck. Dark veins spread beneath white skin, branching downward from the base of his skull in thin, twisting black lines.
This was no lingering poison from the nullroot vines.
Zhenwu extended his spiritual sense deeper into Songhe’s body, his consciousness slipping through damaged meridians and fractured pathways toward the source of the corruption.
The instant he touched it, emotion crashed into him.
Hatred.
Not fleeting anger, but hatred stripped raw and absolute. Then came terror, sharp and suffocating, followed by loneliness—vast and hollow, stretching through Songhe’s spirit like an abandoned wasteland. Beneath it all lurked shame and fixation, intertwined until they were indistinguishable.
The emotions churned together into a violent storm, battering against Zhenwu’s consciousness as he probed deeper. It was not another person’s spiritual sea.
It was the edge of a collapsing abyss.
For a moment, Zhenwu nearly lost focus. Shock tightened through him before he could suppress it.
“Da-ge…”
The word slipped from him.
Almost immediately, a crimson aura erupted from Songhe’s body with explosive force. The chamber trembled as scarlet spiritual energy flooded outward in unstable waves, and the formation beneath them blackened instantly, its engraved lines splintering as corrupted energy raced across the array like fire.
Zhenwu struck the pressure point below Songhe’s neck, driving spiritual force into the pathways meant to induce unconsciousness.
Nothing happened.
Songhe’s body slowly jerked upright, his head still lowered as crimson energy twisted around him in slow, coiling currents. Zhenwu’s hands flashed through a series of mudras. Spiritual seals unfolded around his fingers before he drove both palms forward, slamming spiritual force into the center of Songhe’s spine.
The impact reverberated through the chamber. The crimson light dimmed piece by piece until only scattered traces flickered around Songhe’s robes. He collapsed sideways onto the ruined formation, unconscious once more, while the scorched stone beneath him released faint wisps of smoke.
Silence settled over the chamber.
It felt wrong.
Zhenwu stared at Songhe for a long moment as the realization settled with quiet finality.
Spiritually, his brother was already beyond his reach.
* * * * * *
Songhe returned to himself by degrees, drawn upward through a haze by a sharp medicinal scent that burned at the back of his throat. Recognition came slowly, once his thoughts had gathered enough to name it: black water kelp, a corrosive herb reserved for cases where gentler remedies had failed to force the mind back into alignment.
The bitter fumes lingered thickly in the air.
He found himself seated upright in a bed far softer than anything he would have chosen. For a moment, he remained still, breathing slowly as sensation returned. Candlelight flickered at the edges of his vision, casting long shadows across the walls. He lifted his hands and flexed his fingers one by one, testing their movement. His joints felt stiff, but there was no weakness in them.
The room gradually came into focus: the carved edges of the low table, the familiar arrangement of the furnishings, and, most telling of all, the heavy deep-blue draperies.
The Bixia Residence.
He drew a slow breath and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The moment his feet touched the floor, soreness revealed itself, coiled through his muscles and pulling at every movement. A steady ache pulsed behind his forehead as he rose and crossed to the table. He poured himself a glass of water and drank.
The water tasted faintly stagnant, its bitterness carrying the unmistakable flavor of the black water kelp fumes lingering in the room, but he emptied the glass regardless.
His gaze shifted to the door. It stood closed, but it was not barred. The sight stirred an unwelcome memory, the irony of it not lost on him.
If the door was left unlocked, then the choice to remain or leave rested entirely with him.
He let the thought pass and moved toward it. His hand had barely reached the door when it opened from the other side.
Zhenwu stood in the doorway.
For a brief moment, neither spoke. Then something eased in Zhenwu’s expression. The tension at his brow loosened, and quiet relief settled across his features.
He stepped forward and bowed deeply.
Songhe took a moment to respond before a smile touched his lips. He caught Zhenwu by the shoulders, stopping the bow from lingering too long, and guided him upright.
“Zhenwu. You are here?” he said, his voice touched with quiet warmth.
“Da-ge,” Zhenwu replied, the word carrying more relief than formality. He gestured toward the low table. “Please sit first. I will have refreshments brought.”
Songhe nodded and took the offered seat.
Zhenwu stepped out, closing the door softly behind him. Several moments later, servants arrived in quiet succession, carrying lacquered trays veiled beneath rising steam. They arranged the dishes across the low table until its surface had nearly disappeared beneath the food. Zhenwu remained nearby, occasionally adjusting a dish himself before dismissing them.
Only when the final servant had withdrawn did he take his place across from Songhe.
The table had been prepared for two.
Zhenwu reached for the serving utensils and began placing food into Songhe’s bowl himself.
Songhe’s gaze moved slowly across the spread, recognition surfacing piece by piece. A faint chuckle escaped him before he could suppress it. Every dish had once been among his favorites, foods he had not tasted in many years. Some belonged to places he had visited only briefly; others dated back so far that he had nearly forgotten them.
Yet Zhenwu had remembered.
For a moment, Songhe recalled the last meal they had shared together. The memory had faded at the edges beneath years of distance and upheaval, but certain details remained stubbornly intact: the sound of Zhenwu’s laughter, the irritation on his face whenever Songhe neglected to eat properly, the persistence with which he had once forced warmth into otherwise cold halls.
Something tightened in Songhe’s chest, and he looked away.
Across from him, Zhenwu lifted his gaze but said nothing. He merely began serving himself as though he had noticed nothing at all.
Songhe picked up a piece of meat.
The first bite stopped him.
It tasted wrong.
Not spoiled or poorly prepared. The texture was correct, the seasoning balanced exactly as he remembered it, yet the satisfaction of the flavor never came. Everything felt dulled, stripped thin against his tongue.
The corruption within his body had progressed further than he had anticipated. Even his senses were beginning to dull.
Songhe continued eating regardless.
Across the table, he could feel Zhenwu watching him too carefully to be casual, but he gave no sign of noticing. He finished the bowl, and Zhenwu immediately filled another plate with a different dish.
Again, Songhe ate.
Again, the taste came hollow and distant.
Still, he finished everything placed before him.
When Zhenwu reached to refill his plate, Songhe took the pitcher first and poured himself water. He drank deeply, wincing faintly at the stale taste lingering in his mouth.
Only then did he look up.
Zhenwu had scarcely touched his own food.
Though he remained composed, the shock in his expression could not be fully hidden.
Songhe smiled.
“I need to recover my strength quickly,” he said quietly. “Ling Feng still requires my blood.”
The words fell with unsettling ease, spoken with the calm familiarity of long habit rather than the revulsion they should have carried.
Across the table, Zhenwu’s hand slowly tightened around his cup.