Chapter 138: Failed And Repeated Attempts of The Unconscious Young Master

The first attempt began the same way the previous ones had started off.

Lu Feng settled into a cross legged position at the center of his private training building, closed his eyes, and began drawing in the ambient Qi Essence that permeated the air around him, guiding it slowly toward his Dantian with the same careful, deliberate control he’d practiced for months.

For a while, it went well. The Essence flowed smoothly, gathering in steady, obedient layers, and for a handful of breaths he genuinely believed this attempt might finally be the one that held.

Then, as it always did, the Primal Chaos Bead stirred.

He felt it before he could do anything to stop it, a sudden, ravenous pulse deep within his Dantian, as though something ancient and starving had just woken from a long, uneasy sleep and recognized food within reach.

It lashed out, indiscriminate and violent, tearing through the careful structure he’d built with such patience, consuming Essence far faster than he could ever hope to draw it in. Pain lanced through his core, sharp and immediate, and he gritted his teeth, forcing himself to hold his ground rather than sever the connection outright.

’You annoying bastard!’ He caused the Dantian he now possessed for making things so difficult for him.

He lasted perhaps thirty seconds against it this time before his vision blurred, his control shattering entirely, and darkness swallowed him whole.

He came to some time later, sprawled across the packed dirt floor, his whole body aching as though he’d been thrown bodily against a wall rather than simply overwhelmed from within. He lay there for a long moment, catching his breath, feeling the faint, exhausted stillness settling back into his Dantian as the Primal Chaos Bead retreated once more into whatever uneasy rest it required between outbursts.

He pushed himself upright, waited until the worst of the dizziness passed, and tried again.

The second attempt went much the same as the first, though he managed to hold his structure together for perhaps ten additional seconds before the Bead’s hunger overwhelmed him. He noted that small difference the moment he woke from unconsciousness again, filing it away carefully. Ten seconds wasn’t victory.

It wasn’t even meaningful progress by most measures. But it was something, a fraction more endurance than before, and Lu Feng had learned, through weeks of exactly this kind of grinding, repetitive struggle, that fractions were often the only progress available to him.

He rested again, longer this time, feeling the fatigue settling deeper into his bones with each cycle, and pushed forward into the third attempt regardless.

This time the Bead woke faster, almost as if it had grown wise to his pattern and intended to punish him for daring to try again so soon. He lasted barely fifteen seconds before it tore his control apart entirely, sending him crashing back into unconsciousness with a violence that left his ears ringing even after he woke.

He allowed himself more time to recover before the fourth attempt, forcing down a swallow of water from the skin he kept nearby for exactly this purpose, steadying his breathing until the tremor in his hands eased.

When he finally settled back into position, he approached the Essence more cautiously this time, drawing it in slower, thinner streams rather than the fuller flow he’d used before, hoping a gentler approach might delay the moment the Bead noticed him at all.

It worked, marginally. He held his structure for nearly forty five seconds this time, longer than any previous attempt, before that same hungry pulse stirred awake and shattered everything he’d built. The pain that followed felt sharper for the added length of the struggle, as though the Bead resented being kept waiting and intended to make him regret the delay.

He woke from the fourth attempt with blood on his lip where he’d apparently bitten through it at some point during the collapse, and allowed himself a longer rest before continuing, chewing slowly on a piece of dried fruit he’d stashed nearby to steady his strength before pushing forward again.

The fifth attempt taught him something new. Rather than trying to outlast the Bead through sheer patience, he experimented with letting small, controlled pulses of Essence trickle toward his Dantian in short bursts rather than one continuous stream, pausing briefly between each pulse to let the pressure settle before adding more.

It felt clumsy, uncertain, an approach he was inventing as he went rather than one he’d planned in advance. But it bought him nearly a full minute before the Bead’s hunger finally caught up to the accumulating pressure and lashed out regardless, dragging him back under into unconsciousness once more.

By the time he woke from the fifth collapse, sweat had soaked entirely through his training clothes, his limbs trembling with an exhaustion that went beyond simple physical strain into something closer to the bone. He considered, briefly, stopping there for the day. His body was clearly beginning to protest the repeated abuse, each collapse harder to recover from than the last.

He didn’t stop.

The sixth attempt was the hardest yet, both to begin and to endure. His concentration frayed almost immediately, exhaustion making it difficult to hold even the simplest structure steady, and the Bead seemed to sense that weakness, striking earlier than it had in several previous rounds. He lasted less than twenty seconds this time, the shortest span since his second attempt, and woke from it feeling as though something vital had been scraped raw inside him.

For a long moment after waking from the sixth collapse, he simply lay there on the packed dirt floor, staring up at the wooden beams of the ceiling above him, wondering to himself. ’Is continuing this any further considered wisdom or simple foolishness dressed up as determination?’

His whole body throbbed with a deep, pervasive ache, his thoughts sluggish and scattered in a way that worried him more than the physical exhaustion did.

But he thought of Iron Fang. Of Lin Laifu nearly dying in his own bed. Of the four men who’d tried to take Han Lin in broad daylight. Of a stalker trailing his carriage home through darkened streets, patient and unseen.

Whatever strength he needed to properly protect the people who depended on him wasn’t going to arrive on its own, not through rest alone, not without exactly this kind of grinding, repetitive sacrifice.

He forced himself upright one final time, swaying slightly as he settled back into position, and began the seventh attempt.

This time, he abandoned caution almost entirely, drawing Essence toward his Dantian with a steady, unbroken flow rather than the careful pulses he’d experimented with before, some exhausted, half formed instinct telling him that raw persistence might succeed where careful technique had repeatedly failed.

The Essence gathered quickly, building pressure far faster than any previous attempt, and for a long, breathless stretch he genuinely believed he might hold it, might finally push past whatever threshold kept triggering the Bead’s hunger in the first place.

Then it woke, all at once, more violent than any of the six attempts before it, as though sensing this was his last reserve of strength and intending to punish him thoroughly for daring to push this far past his limits.

The pain that tore through him this time was blinding, absolute, and his last conscious thought before darkness claimed him entirely was a distant, exhausted satisfaction that he’d lasted nearly ninety seconds this time, longer than every previous attempt combined into one measurement of stubborn, incremental progress.

He didn’t wake again on his own.

The soft light of afternoon had long since faded into the deeper amber of early evening by the time Han Lin made her way across the courtyard toward his private training building, a light shawl draped over her shoulders against the cooling air, intending only to remind him that dinner was ready and waiting.

She found him sprawled across the packed dirt floor near the center of the room, utterly still, his training clothes soaked through with sweat, a thin trail of dried blood tracking down from the corner of his mouth.

Her heart lurched painfully in her chest, and she rushed forward without hesitation, dropping to her knees beside him, hands hovering uncertainly over his still form before she forced herself to actually look, actually check, rather than simply panic.

His chest rose and fell in slow rhythm.

The breath she’d been holding left her in a rush, relief flooding through her so completely her hands trembled with it. He was alive. Simply, thoroughly exhausted, unconscious rather than truly harmed, though the state of him left her deeply unsettled all the same.

She rose carefully, smoothing down her skirts, and hurried back toward the main building rather than trying to wake him, her mind already working through what he’d actually need. She made her way first to the kitchen, where the evening’s dinner sat waiting, still warm, and packed a generous portion of it carefully into a large woven basket, adding a flask of water and a small pouch of dried fruit alongside the rice and vegetables Aunt Gao had prepared. From there she detoured briefly to her own room, gathering a thick woolen blanket from her bed before heading back out toward the courtyard.

Ye Chenxue intercepted her along the way, emerging from the direction of the main hall with a curious look at the heavily laden basket in Han Lin’s arms.

"Where are you headed with all that?" she asked.

"Lu Feng’s training building," Han Lin said, not slowing her pace. "He’s collapsed out there. Alive, thankfully, just exhausted beyond anything I’ve seen from him before. I’m bringing him dinner and something to keep him warm until he wakes on his own."

Something shifted immediately in Ye Chenxue’s expression, concern replacing curiosity in an instant, and she fell into step beside Han Lin without needing to be asked. "I’ll come with you."

Together they crossed the courtyard, the evening air cooling rapidly now that the sun had properly set, and made their way into the training building where Lu Feng still lay exactly as Han Lin had left him.

Han Lin knelt beside him again, setting the basket down carefully within easy reach for whenever he woke, and unfolded the blanket she’d brought, draping it gently over his still form with the same practiced care she brought to everything she did for him.

Ye Chenxue stood a short distance away, watching in silence, her sharp eyes moving slowly over his unconscious body, cataloguing details Han Lin likely hadn’t thought to look for.

The faint tremor still visible in his fingers even now. The way his breathing, though steady, carried a slight hitch every several breaths, as though something inside him hadn’t fully settled yet. The dried blood at the corner of his mouth that Han Lin had wiped away with the edge of her sleeve before covering him with the blanket.

She found herself wondering, watching him lie there so thoroughly spent, exactly what kind of cultivation could leave a person in this state. She’d pushed her own training hard over these past days, hard enough to leave herself sore and drained on more than one occasion, but never once had she collapsed into total unconsciousness the way he apparently had, not just once, but seven times over in a single afternoon if the state of him was any indication.

’Was his cultivation method simply different from mine, built around some approach I’d never encountered before? Or was there something else entirely happening within him, something tied to whatever unnamed struggle he seemed to be fighting silently, alone, every time he disappeared into this building?’ Ye Chenxue found herself asking questions she had no answer to.

Luckily, she didn’t ask the questions aloud. Some instinct told her the answer, whatever it turned out to be, wasn’t hers to demand tonight, not while he lay unconscious and unable to explain it himself. That answer would remain a mystery for a good while longer yet.

Once the food and blanket were properly settled, the two of them rose together, casting one last glance back at Lu Feng’s still form before quietly making their way out of the training building and back across the darkened courtyard toward the main house.

"Get some rest," Han Lin said softly as they reached the fork in the corridor leading toward their separate rooms. "It’s been a long day for all of us."

"You as well," Ye Chenxue said, offering a small nod before turning toward her own door.

"Goodnight, Chenxue."

"Goodnight."

They parted ways, each retreating into the quiet privacy of their own room, and Han Lin, worn thin from the day’s worry, found sleep easily enough not long after settling beneath her own blankets.

Ye Chenxue did not.

She lay in the darkness of her room for a long while, staring up at the ceiling, her thoughts circling endlessly back to the image of Lu Feng collapsed on that dirt floor, the blood at his mouth, the strange hitch in his breathing that no ordinary exhaustion should have caused.

Sleep, when it finally seemed to approach, slipped away again each time she felt herself drifting close to it, some restless, unshakable part of her mind refusing to let the matter rest.

So she stayed up.