154. Cracks

For a long, silent minute, Chen Ren could only stare.

He hadn’t imagined this in any nightmare, hadn’t even known it was possible. One’s star space could be damaged?

Yet, right before his eyes, fragments of his inner world were flaking away. They peeled off like brittle paint from old wood, curling and drifting into the darkness before dissolving into motes of light. The damage wasn’t vast enough to hollow him out completely, but the sight left his chest tight and his breath unsteady. Each fragment lost felt like a piece of his foundation being chipped away.

He had only been advancing faster than expected—nothing reckless, nothing he thought dangerous. Had that really caused this? More importantly, how was he supposed to mend something he barely understood?

He forced his gaze upward. The stars above still burned in their fixed positions, their light untouched… for now. But the longer he stared, the more fragile that illusion of stability seemed. How long before their glow flickered too? How long before the cracks reached them?

Moving closer to the fractured edge, he hesitated. The break looked thin, almost harmless—like frost on glass—but when he reached out, the section crumbled under his touch. No resistance, no chance to save it. The fragments unraveled into nothingness, leaving an emptiness that seemed to hum in the void.

A pulse of frustration pushed through him. He tried flooding the break with qi, forcing it into the wound, willing it to knit back together. But the energy slid through without catching, scattering into the surrounding space as if the damage refused to acknowledge him.

His frown deepened. This wasn’t just some strain or temporary instability. It felt like a kind of injury he had no tools to repair.

And yet… his cultivation still pulsed within him, strong and stable. Even after draining himself during the trials, there had been no sign of weakness. But the silent decay before him was proof—undeniable proof—that something inside him was unraveling in a way that might never heal if left alone.

If he did nothing, his progress would halt. He might never climb further.

Even now, a dangerous whisper stirred in the back of his mind. The dense qi gathered in the space was almost calling to him—thick, rich, intoxicating. One breath, one draw, and he could break through to the foundation establishment realm. In the entire empire, how many his age could claim such a feat? It would mark him as a prodigy, a name to be remembered.

But each heartbeat he hesitated, he could feel the cracks widening, slow but constant. The temptation to seize that power warred with the dread of what it might cost him.

And Chen Ren wasn’t sure which would win.

But a sharp instinct cut through the temptation. If he tried to draw that power now, he might just cripple himself. He didn’t know what happened when a star space shattered entirely, but he knew enough to fear it. The star space was tied to his dantian, and if the damage spread there…

Death would be the least of his worries.

A frown settled deep into his features. He rubbed his temples, trying to force some kind of solution into his mind, but nothing came. His cultivation knowledge was shallow at best—he was a merchant, not some master of body cultivation or soul arts. Whatever was happening inside him was beyond the scraps of theory he’d picked up over the years.

The last thing he wanted was to prod at the wound and make it worse. So, he did the only thing that felt safe.

He shut his eyes, withdrew his senses, and let the starry expanse fade from view. The quiet darkness of his room took its place, and when he opened his eyes again, Yalan was still sitting exactly where she had been when he entered his star space.

She glanced at him, her whiskers twitched. “You’re back early. I didn’t even get to slap you awake.”

Chen Ren cringed. “Nice joke. But there’s a problem. I think we were right—my passing out is connected to my progression.”

“What happened?”

Chen Ren didn’t want to believe the words that came out of his lips:“My star space is breaking.”

That made her sit up straighter. “Breaking? What do you mean it’s breaking?”

He held her gaze for a moment, then began describing it—the flakes of his inner world peeling away, turning into drifting motes of light, the way his qi passed through the wounds without effect. By the time he finished, her brows were furrowed, but not with recognition.

“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” she admitted at last. Then, as if trying to probe for a silver lining, she asked, “Apart from that… everything else was okay?”

“Yes,” Chen Ren said, leaning back slightly. “Apart from that, everything’s fine.”

Yalan exhaled slowly. “Then it might not be too late. I’m guessing the damage hasn’t spread too far yet.” Her gaze narrowed just a fraction. “You didn’t try to skip realms again, did you?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“I doubt that,” she replied dryly. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have fractured your star space.”

He scowled. “You know I didn’t even know this could happen. You could have warned me.”

She yowled, displeased by his implication. “I had a feeling. The heavens are ruthless to anyone who tries to soar too quickly. But I thought your current problems, and enemies were enough to keep them satisfied for a while. Guess I was wrong.”

Chen Ren scratched the back of his head. “So… what now? What are we going to do? Do you have a way out of this?”

She shook her head. “No. This isn’t something I’ve ever seen in all my centuries of life. I believe the best option is to ask people we trust, people who might have an answer.”

“I don’t think I trust Hun Tianzhi enough to bring this up,” Chen Ren muttered. “And Qing He’s too far away. I can talk to her once we’re back in the village this week, but I don’t want this to get worse while we’re traveling. It hasn’t yet, but I can’t take the risk.”

“Then that leaves you with only one person reliable enough to talk to, someone who might have a clue.” she purred. “It’s just… I have no idea what price he’ll demand in return.”

Chen Ren immediately caught her hint. “Yeah… I hope he’s enjoying my novels. That might make him more willing to help.”

He pushed himself to his feet, moving toward the door.

“Already going to meet him?!”

“I don’t want to waste time,” he said over his shoulder. “Besides, I promised myself I’d keep him company for helping out during the trials. This will be a way to make good on that promise.”

***

It turned out Wang Jun had no idea about any such cases either.

For Chen Ren, that meant he wasn’t just falling off a cliff—there were spikes waiting at the bottom, perfectly positioned to skewer him on impact.

Wang Jun sat, his face looking so casual as if Chen Ren’s troubles were no more pressing than the dust motes drifting through the room. He’d listened without interrupting, nodded once, then gone straight back to reading a scroll—one of Chen Ren’s new works, a cultivator adaptation of Achilles. The man seemed utterly absorbed, eyes tracking the words with a focus that made Chen Ren wonder if the hero’s fate mattered more to him than his.

Whenever Wang Jun reached the end of a page, Chen Ren leaned over to flip it for him. The first few times, the old man had licked his tongue against the edge to turn it himself—something Chen Ren had found absurdly funny. Now, he only felt a pang of guilt.

Clearing his throat, he broke the silence. “You have zero idea? Even if you haven’t seen it before, you must have some clue. You reached the peak of cultivation.”

“One of the peaks,” Wang Jun corrected without looking up. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “But if I had to guess, it’s similar to a dantian fracture. Which, thankfully, you don’t have, but a star space breaking? Sounds very close.”

Chen Ren leaned forward. “How so?”

No answer.

Instead, the man’s gaze slid lazily toward the end of the page again, lingering there with all the silent expectation of a king waiting to be served. When Chen Ren didn’t move, Wang Jun finally lifted his eyes.

“Well?” he said, as if he were the one being inconvenienced.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“Answer first,” Chen Ren shot back.

The old man’s lips twisted into a faint frown, as though Chen Ren had just denied him a warm meal. “It’s simple. A dantian fracture is basically someone crippling you, but it can also happen when you go too hard at something yourself. You ever hear those stories of men who lose their lives to prostitutes?”

Chen Ren blinked. “…What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s the same idea,” Wang Jun said, matter-of-fact. “You push too hard, your body can’t take it, and something vital breaks. In your case, you didn’t destroy your dantian. You fractured your star space instead. Whether that’s better or worse…” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Wang Jun pointed at the scroll with his eyes. “Now, can you turn it? I’m at a very interesting scene.”

Chen Ren crossed his arms. “No. Answer one thing first—how does one fix a dantian fracture?”

That earned him a low, amused chuckle. “If you find a reliable way to fix that, every sect in the empire—and far beyond—would come begging at your door. It’s nearly impossible. The cultivator usually dies long before it can be done.”

“You said nearly.”

Wang Jun’s chuckle turned into full laughter. “Yes, nearly. In my time, there were cultivators with far too much free time… and far too many strange kinks. Some of them liked to toy with a person’s dantian the way others play an instrument—half torture, half amusement. I think those lunatics might have found a way to mend a fracture… all while getting themselves off.”

A voice cut in from the corner. “Your examples,” Yalan said dryly, “are too lecherous.”

“They fit,” Wang Jun replied without a hint of shame. “Either way, if it were hundreds of years ago, I’d tell you to find one of them. But now? I’m certain their research has either been burned or locked away somewhere you’ll never set foot.”

Chen Ren exhaled sharply. “Then what can I even do?”

The old man’s gaze lifted from the scroll. For the first time, he wasn’t half-smiling, wasn’t idly mocking. His eyes fixed on Chen Ren’s as though trying to see past the flesh and bone, straight into the soul.

When he spoke, his voice was quieter, but heavier than any rebuke.

“Honestly, kid… if I knew a way to help you, I would have already told you. Even with everything I could say about you—your arrogance, your recklessness—what you’re going through is one of the worst things a cultivator can endure. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

He paused, the silence stretching between them.

“But this time… I don’t have anything to give you.” His mouth tightened. “I’m sorry, kid.”

***

The next three days passed in a blur.

Chen Ren almost forgot the looming shadow of the Darkmoon Sect. As he’d suspected, they seemed to have quieted down, curling in on themselves to lick their wounds and rebuild from within. No assassins, no provocations—just an uneasy silence, that he knew would follow with something disastrous soon.

He filled his days with the usual work. Inspecting the alchemy workshop. Running his eyes over the account books. Even meeting with a few officials to maintain good relations, smiling in all the right places, trading polite words as though his inner world wasn’t on the verge of collapse.

But beneath the surface, Wang Jun’s words gnawed at him like a slow, relentless worm.

Every time he found a moment alone, his mind drifted back to his star space. The fractures. The motes of light dissolving into nothing. The helpless way his qi slid past the wounds without leaving the faintest trace of healing.

He doubted even Qing He would know what to do, but when he left for Meadow Village, he would ask her all the same. Some questions demanded to be asked, even if the answers weren’t there.

He checked on the space constantly, slipping in and out without effort. There was no pain, not yet. And, for now, the cracks hadn’t spread. That should have been a relief, but instead it felt like standing beneath a sword suspended by a fraying thread.

His talks with Yalan—and his own instincts—told him what he already feared: the star space wasn’t just linked to the dantian. It was part of it, a space within a space. Damage to one meant harm to the other. And if it came to that, his path as a cultivator would be cut short, maybe forever.

Maybe this was simply the way of the heavens, a punishment for daring to rise too high, too fast. With his spirit roots, he should never have reached his current realm in the first place, especially not at the speed he had.

But Chen Ren had no intention of bowing his head. To accept that would be to spit on everything he believed in.

So he kept trying. Again and again, he pushed his qi into the fractures, willing them to mend. He even tried to draw on the gathered qi from the stars themselves, flooding the space with their light and density.

That attempt earned him nothing but a sharp, piercing jolt of pain that made his breath catch. The kind of pain that warned of real, lasting harm.

He stopped immediately.

But he didn’t stop thinking about trying again.

All this simply reminded Chen Ren of one unpleasant truth—he knew very little about his own dantian.

It was laughable, really. He could recite pill formulas from memory, break down the methods to make different items from Earth with precision, and yet when it came to the most important part of himself, he was stumbling blind. If he wanted a real solution, maybe the path didn’t start with patching the cracks—it started with understanding exactly what the dantian and star space truly were.

That turned out to be harder than he expected.

Not only was his own knowledge shallow, but even others seemed frustratingly ignorant. According to Yalan, most cultivators never questioned it. They simply accepted that they had a dantian and a star space, the same way they accepted that qi flowed through meridians or that the sun rose each day. The existence of a star space within was hardly shocking in a world where cultivators could split mountains or live for centuries.

“Some do try,” Yalan admitted. “The ones who’ve hit their limit and grown too old to force another breakthrough. They become researchers, digging for answers they’ll likely never see put to use.”

Even the popular theories felt more like poetic guesswork than truth. The most widely believed said that the heavens granted a cultivator the star space as a seed—something to be cultivated into an entire universe. And when you became that universe, you’d take the final step into true immortality.

The so-called

final realm

.

Chen Ren could only stare at her after hearing that. He doubted he was anywhere close to “becoming a universe.” At the moment, he was barely holding his inner world together with both hands and a prayer.

Still, he kept pressing. Question after question. The more he asked, the more Yalan’s answers began to run dry, until she finally propped down, “If anyone would know the truth, it would be a god.”

That shut him up for a moment.

Unfortunately, Chen Ren didn’t have any particularly warm relations with the gods.

But her words sparked something in him.

He realised he hadn’t asked everyone. There was still one being he hadn’t spoken to—one who lived inside his star space itself. One who radiated heavenly qi with every breath. And if Chen Ren was right, that being would have a vested interest in keeping the star space intact. After all, no one liked their own house starting to crumble around them.

A slow grin crept onto his face. The golden dragon.

If it knew the cause, maybe it could guide him to a solution.

There was just one small problem.

How, exactly, did he call on the golden dragon?

***

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