The Ink Bamboo Forest was a place of exile, located at the absolute edge of the Heavenly Sword Sect’s domain. The bamboo here did not grow green; it grew pitch black, the stalks absorbing the ambient yin energy of the earth until they were as hard as iron and as cold as ice. The air was perpetually choked with a thick, grey mist that blocked out the sun. It was a graveyard for the sect’s failures. It was here that Lu Chen was sent to die.
Chen lay in the mud, his white scholar’s robes stained brown and crimson. He was eighteen years old, a young man who had once possessed a mind capable of memorizing ten thousand Daoist scriptures. But a sharp mind meant nothing without the physical aptitude to channel spiritual Qi. His meridians had been naturally narrow, and three days ago, they had been completely shattered by Zhao Feng, an arrogant inner sect disciple who took offense to a mortal scholar correcting his interpretation of a martial text.
Zhao Feng had struck Chen’s chest, shattering his spiritual roots and crippling him permanently. The sect elders had looked the other way. A crippled mortal was trash; Zhao Feng was a genius. Chen was unceremoniously tossed into the Ink Bamboo Forest with nothing but the clothes on his back.
Coughing violently, Chen dragged himself toward the hollow of a massive, dead bamboo root to seek shelter from the biting, acidic rain that had begun to fall. Every movement was agony. His chest felt as though it were filled with shattered glass. He was starving, freezing, and dying.
As he pulled himself into the hollow, his bleeding hand scraped against something hard and unyielding buried in the dirt. It wasn’t a bamboo root. Chen weakly brushed the mud away, revealing a slab of smooth, jet-black stone about the size of a book. It was an inkstone, the kind scholars used to grind ink sticks, but it was incredibly ancient, its edges carved with intricate, terrifying depictions of demons and gods screaming in agony.
Chen’s blood smeared across the surface of the stone.
Instantly, the surrounding temperature plummeted. The stone began to hum, a low, vibrating frequency that rattled Chen’s teeth. The blood on the surface did not dry; it began to bubble and glow with an eerie, crimson light. The stone was absorbing his lifeblood, grinding it into a thick, luminous liquid.
A voice, ancient and echoing like the rustling of dry parchment, filled his mind. “The sword is but a crude tool of the flesh. The brush is the architect of reality. You who bleed upon the Void Inkstone, do you seek to write your vengeance, or will you let your story end in the mud?”
Chen’s eyes widened. He could feel his life force draining into the stone, his vision going dark. But the anger that had been simmering in his shattered chest flared to life. He did not want to die a crippled failure. He wanted to tear the heavens down.
“I will write,” Chen gasped, his voice barely a whisper, yet filled with absolute conviction.
“Then take up your brush, scribe of the void.”
Knowledge flooded Chen’s mind, a torrential downpour of archaic characters, brush strokes, and the profound mysteries of the Myriad Heavens Calligraphy Art. Orthodox cultivators absorbed Qi into their meridians to empower their bodies. This art bypassed the physical vessel entirely. It used the soul to shape Qi, and blood-ink to bind it to reality.
Chen had no brush. Desperate, he ripped a splinter of hard, black bamboo from the root beside him, chewing the end until it frayed into a crude, fibrous brush. He dipped the makeshift brush into the glowing crimson pool of his own blood on the inkstone.
He focused his mind, drawing upon the newly implanted knowledge, and painted a single, glowing red character in the empty air in front of him: ‘Heal’ (愈).
The character hung suspended in the dark hollow, burning like a small sun. Suddenly, it shattered into a mist of red light that washed over Chen’s broken body. The agony in his chest vanished. His shattered ribs knitted back together, and while his meridians remained destroyed, his physical vitality was completely restored. He took a deep breath, the cold air no longer stinging his lungs. He was alive. And he possessed a power the martial world had long forgotten.