Damon's Ascension-Chapter 109: War In Xiangyang 10

The gesture was neither warm nor hostile, but rather wholly indifferent to the maxims of reality.

Damon accepted the token and scroll with one hand, bowing slightly, the action taken not out of reverence, but acknowledgment.

Behind him, Sun Liang’s mouth was half open.

"W-What? No test? No ’show us your will’ or ’lift this burning incense with your tongue’?" he whispered, voice low.

Chen Yuan frowned. "He didn’t even ask for a name..."

Xue Rou said nothing, her eyes locked on the monk’s outstretched hand as if expecting him to pull it back and declare it all a joke. Of course, no such thing occurred.

Damon turned around calmly and walked away, the scroll tucked under his sleeve.

Back among the noise of the Sect Square, the contrast was jarring. Disciples continued to shout slogans while weapons clanged against either training dummies or other weapons.

Nearby, another pair of Iron Banner Hall and Heaven Dew members were mid-argument about territory lines.

While those factions continued their quarrel, Damon had walked into the most feared sect’s booth and walked away with their secret technique like it was a formality.

Chen Yuan was the first to recover. "I... I don’t know what just happened, but I feel like we skipped fifteen plot arcs."

Sun Liang blinked. "Is it... is it always like this with you?"

"Not really... usually it’s harder," Damon replied dryly.

He glanced at the scroll and token in his hand, his expression unreadable. "Come, let’s return to the villa before anything else happens."

As they moved through the crowd, some glanced their way with curiosity, others with veiled apprehension. Damon knew that word would spread quickly, that the barbarian scholar from afar had joined the Zen Sect with no trials, no ceremony, no welcome.

And that, more than anything, would shake the foundations of the sect alliance in the region.

Back at Crane Ridge Villa, Damon entered his study alone. The scroll lay unrolled before him, its ink faded but legible, written in a series of sparse lines more philosophical than instructional.

’Empty Soul Palm – Zen Sect Legacy Martial Art’

["The hand is not the weapon. The self is not the fist.

Strike not at the body, but the thread between breath and being.

Disrupt the essence, and the form must fall.

Emptiness is the greatest blade."]

Damon’s fingers trailed the last line and he could already feel the profundity within. He felt he could understand a little of the way the technique bypassed force entirely. Looking at the words within, it was not about raw power, but about understanding.

He was not sure this was to his benefit, but it was time to find out if 5 points in Mentality were as useful as he hoped before entering.

This Empty Soul Palm served two purposes, as a cultivation mantra as well as religious guidance. The ’martial’ aspect of it, in terms of the offense ability, was just a bonus, a set of subsequent moves based on the source.

Damon sat cross-legged and began to recite this mantra over and over again while trying to clear his supersonic thoughts.

With each recitation, he felt his mind and body sink deeper and deeper into the starry sky like a void, where there was nothing but silence, a few scattered bits of light in the distance from imagined stars, and himself, floating in the middle as a bright point of light.

None of the bright points of light in the distance—the stars—were real, but the bright point of light that made up his existence in this visualization was entirely real.

That was Damon’s first realization.

As he drifted deeper into the meditative state induced by reciting the Empty Soul Palm mantra, the void around him remained still with cold indifference.

The stars—those flickering lights dotting the expanse—were not celestial bodies, but fractured reflections of thoughts, regrets, and moments of self that clung to his being like leeches.

Damon’s breath slowed in the real world as his body fell into a deeper state while his soul began to sink into the visualized space.

The words of the mantra echoed inside him, not necessarily as raw ’sound’ but as a sort of abstract ’meaning’.

"Strike not at the body..."

One of the stars in the distance zipped over like a bullet, striking into the light that formed his soul, causing a memory to surface.

The scene was of a small skirmish in the ’Nightmare’ version of the Pra River Instance 1, when he crushed a fellow African man’s ribs with a direct blow, only for the man to laugh madly with his lungs full of blood while he clutched Damon’s arms with his last strength.

At the time, Damon had brushed it off, moving to kill another using his super speed and ice abilities, but with the silent introspection brought about by this void, he realized a simple truth.

That was not victory... that was just noise.

"...but the thread between breath and being."

The manifestation of that thread now shimmered before him, faint as well as spirit-like, and it wasn’t actually his own thread that linked his breath and being, but his concept of it.

This was the line that tethered spirit to flesh, a thread hidden in every living thing that moved, that clung to survival.

To disrupt it... was to unmake the self without harming the shell, or the famous soul destruction. freewēbnoveℓ.com

Following his instincts in this induced visualization state, Damon breathed in, but this breath was vastly different from any he had ever taken in his life.

This was a breath taken, not from lungs, but from within, from his very essence, and with it, came a stream of power that the ancients always spoke about, but modern humans could not comprehend—the Qi essence.

In the real world, around his meditating form, the area around him began to blur as the air grew still, and sound deadened. Even the wind outside stopped grazing the plum blossoms while the koi beneath his study’s open window slowed in their swim, suspended as if caught in a moment between blinks.

Damon’s body had not moved, yet an invisible pressure began to radiate outward and unlike the fabled killing intent or even raw energy like what the Energy Flintlock output, this one felt... immaterial.

Like a... like a deliberate void in the shape of a man.

At the peak of his practice, with the newly formed Qi essence charging through what could be assumed to be his meridians—because these passageways were definitely not arteries, veins, or capillaries—he repeated the final line of the mantra one more time.

"Emptiness is the greatest blade."

And then, everything that was spreading outward suddenly rushed back and collapsed into silence.

Within his mindscape, the last thread connecting him to sensation snapped with an audible crack as his point of light that made up the self dimmed and reformed, not as a singular mass of ego and intent, but as a perfectly hollow shell containing infinite potential.

And in that hollowness... Damon pushed forward, not utilizing his fists and not a single movement of his muscles.

The pushed power was just his intent, his ego, thoughts, memories, dreams, and ambitions shaped into a palm.

The void quaked as a phantom of himself appeared across from him, eyes lifeless and its form perfect, his mental mirror.

Damon extended one hand and the palm moved half an inch, causing the mirror-Damon to split, not in blood like flesh nor in light like the spirit, but like glass struck from within.

The thread between his body and spirit had been reformed, stronger than ever and radiating with a mystical light.

In reality, Damon exhaled a breath of air that was mixed with purple and black which caused the air around him to shiver faintly.

His body, without moving, glowed ever so faintly along the edges in a strange distortion, like heat rising from pavement and outlined his silhouette.

Then he opened his eyes, which no longer had that silver light of Silver Eclipse’s influence nor the glint of divine power.

His current gaze was mostly calm and full of depth, empty of anything but what made him Damon, his real self.

Damon understood many things in this moment when his eyes opened, and the premier was that he had reached the peak of the entry stage in the Empty Soul Palm in a single night.

Outside, in the courtyard, Xue Rou and Chen Yuan paused mid-training.

"I... just felt something," she shared slowly, glancing toward the study with a frown.

Chen Yuan nodded. "Like a hush. Like everything held its breath."

Sun Liang peeked out from under a scroll. "What a strange dream. It felt as if a hand touched my chest and I couldn’t speak for what felt like hours."

All three stared toward the closed study.

Then, the door opened and Damon stepped out in plain robes, hands folded behind him, face in a soft smile of satisfaction as he walked past them like nothing had happened.

But when a falling plum blossom brushed against his shoulder and touched the palm of his right hand...

The blossom didn’t crumple.

It simply... vanished.

Not burned.

Not sliced.

It ceased to exist... as though it had never been.

Sun Liang’s eyes twitched. "That’s... not normal."

"No, that’s the Empty Soul Palm," Xue Rou whispered.

Chen Yuan looked up, startled. "Already...?"

Damon stopped at the top of the garden stairs and glanced back. "Come, we head to the Zen Sect’s outpost in the Sect Square."