Dust motes swirled lazily back into place, resettling on the floorboards around Wen Xuan like a final, indifferent shroud. He remained hunched on the floor, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around himself as if warding off a physical blow. The initial violent rush of sensory data from the dummy core had subsided, but the aftermath was a brutal landscape of pain and exhaustion.

  His head throbbed with a deep, relentless pulse, each beat echoing the phantom CRACK of the shattering core. It wasn't the dull ache of fatigue or Qi stagnation he was used to; this was a sharp, invasive agony, centered behind his eyes, making the dim light of the Repository feel like a physical assault. Nausea still churned low in his gut, and the world seemed to tilt slightly whenever he tried to focus.

  He tentatively touched his upper lip. His fingers came away stained dark red. A nosebleed. Not profuse, just a slow, persistent trickle, stark against the pallor of his skin beneath the grime. He’d never had a nosebleed from simple exertion before. This was different. This was his body reacting violently to the psychic overload, protesting the forced intrusion of alien sensations.

  Slowly, carefully, he pushed himself upright, leaning heavily against the dusty leg of the worktable. His limbs felt like lead, infused with a profound weariness that went bone-deep. It wasn't just physical tiredness; his mind felt scoured, raw, like a muscle strained far beyond its limit. The mental effort of simply being, of holding onto his own sense of self amidst the chaotic flood of the core's final moments, had drained him utterly.

  He looked around the Repository. The familiar rows of shelves, the shrouded artifacts, the deep shadows – they no longer felt silent and neglected. They felt loaded. Each object seemed to pulse with a hidden energy, a potential trigger for another overwhelming onslaught. The faint resonance he’d occasionally sensed before now felt like the rumble before an earthquake. The stillness wasn’t peaceful; it was menacing, the quiet before an ambush. Fear, cold and sharp, coiled in his stomach, overriding even the physical discomfort. What had happened was not just a strange event; it was a glimpse into a reality teeming with hidden, potentially hostile, echoes.

  He needed to understand what he had experienced. He closed his eyes, trying to recall the torrent, to sift through the chaotic data that had flooded his mind. But it was like trying to reconstruct a shattered mirror. The memories were fragmented, disjointed, overlaid with static and the overwhelming sensations of impact and monotony. He could recall the feeling of being struck, the sound of the final crack, the impression of endless endurance – but they were chaotic, lacking context or clear visual detail beyond blurred impressions of the training ground. The sheer volume and intensity had prevented any coherent processing. It was mostly noise, overwhelming and painful.

  Was there anything useful in that chaos? Anything beyond the raw sensation and the resulting pain? He focused, pushing past the throbbing in his head, trying to isolate a single clear thread from the tangled mess. It felt like searching for a specific grain of sand on a windswept beach.

  Then, something surfaced. Not the core's internal state of being, not the shattering, but a brief, repeated external observation from its fixed perspective. A kinesthetic memory, sharp and clear amidst the blur.

  It was a stance. Specifically, the preparatory stance for the First Form of the 'Falling Star Fist,' the most basic offensive technique taught to outer disciples. He saw it through the core's 'eyes' – countless disciples, over countless repetitions, adopting the stance before striking. And almost universally, they made the same tiny error.

  He saw it now with startling clarity: a subtle, almost imperceptible shift in weight too far forward onto the balls of the feet just before initiating the strike. A slight over-rotation of the hip, almost invisible, that misaligned the flow of Qi from the dantian to the fist. A tension in the shoulder that should have remained relaxed until the point of impact.

  Wen Xuan, who had practiced this very stance thousands of times himself with painstaking adherence to the manual, immediately understood the implications. The flaw was minuscule, something Instructor Rui and even the higher-level disciples likely overlooked or dismissed as beginner's clumsiness. But repeated thousands of times, viewed dispassionately by the unthinking core, the pattern was undeniable. This slight imbalance, this fractional misalignment of Qi, would bleed off a tiny amount of power with every strike. It would create a momentary vulnerability, a split-second opening just as the attack was launched. It explained the slight feeling of 'stickiness' or resistance he sometimes felt when practicing the form himself, a feeling he'd always attributed to his own poor Qi control.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  It wasn't just him. The core had witnessed generations of disciples making the same fundamental error, ingrained perhaps by flawed initial instruction passed down through the declining sect, or a misunderstanding of the original technique.

  This single, clear insight – a flaw in a basic martial stance – stood out starkly from the chaotic sensory soup of the rest of the experience. It was a piece of concrete, verifiable information salvaged from the wreckage of the overload.

  He mentally replayed the First Form stance as he knew it, meticulously following the instructions burned into his memory. Then, he overlaid the flawed version observed by the core. The difference was subtle, requiring a keen awareness of balance and energy flow, but it was undeniably there. A slight inefficiency, a tiny leak in the application of power.

  He slumped back against the table leg, breathing shallowly. He had gained something. A piece of knowledge, potentially useful, maybe even giving him a slight edge if he could correct the flaw in his own practice. But the cost…

  His head felt like it might split open. The world still had a faint, disorienting shimmer. The metallic tang of blood lingered in his throat. His Qi felt even more sluggish and scattered than usual, disrupted by the psychic shockwave. This tiny insight into a basic stance had been purchased at the price of physical pain, mental exhaustion, and profound disorientation. It was like finding a single copper coin after surviving a shipwreck.

  Was it worth it? Could he even choose to access this ability? It had happened accidentally both times – prolonged, focused contact seemed to be the trigger. But could he control the intensity? Could he filter the input, selecting useful fragments without being overwhelmed by the chaotic flood? The experience with the fossilized pillar had been crushing stillness; the dummy core was violent sensory overload. Both were incapacitating in their own way.

  The fear returned, colder this time. This wasn't a power to be cultivated; it felt like a dangerous flaw, a crack in his soul that let the weight of the past rush in and drown him. If he couldn't control it, could it happen again unexpectedly? What if he touched something truly ancient, something imbued with intense suffering or malevolent will? The dummy core was just broken equipment. What horrors might lurk in the echoes of a cursed artifact or the weapon that had slain a powerful cultivator?

  Secrecy. The thought hammered into his mind with the force of one of the core's remembered impacts. No one could know. He couldn't risk being seen as unstable, possessed, or worse, a potential resource to be exploited. He imagined Hao Jie’s scorn turning to avarice, or Instructor Rui’s weary disappointment turning to clinical interest. He imagined sect elders, desperate for any advantage in their decline, probing his mind, forcing him to touch dangerous artifacts, regardless of the cost to his sanity or soul. His low status offered no protection; it only made him more vulnerable.

  He needed to erase the evidence. He gingerly got to his feet, swaying slightly. Using the hem of his inner robe – cleaner than the outer one – he carefully wiped the blood from his nose and lip. He looked around the floor, spotted the dark gleam of the dummy core fragment under the table. He hesitated, a wave of remembered sensory violence washing over him. Steeling himself, he grabbed his discarded cleaning cloth, bunched it up thickly, and used it to carefully pick up the fragment, avoiding direct skin contact. Even through the cloth, he fancied he could feel a faint, dangerous hum.

  He quickly placed the fragment back into its smooth wooden box, closed the lid firmly, and tucked the box away again, deeper this time, behind a pile of fossilized ferns that looked unlikely to be disturbed for another century. He then took his cleaning cloth and meticulously wiped the area where he had fallen, removing the faint scuff marks and the single drop of blood that had landed on the dusty floorboards. He needed to leave no trace of his collapse, no sign that anything unusual had occurred.

  Finally, exhausted but driven by adrenaline and fear, he forced himself back towards the main hall of the Repository. He needed to appear normal, to continue his duties as if nothing had happened. He still had hours left before his shift ended, hours to spend surrounded by objects that now felt like sleeping predators.

  As he walked, the insight about the Falling Star Fist stance echoed in his mind. A tiny flaw, revealed through a painful glimpse into the past. It was a paradoxical gift – practical knowledge gained through an uncontrollable, damaging process. The price was steep, the method terrifying. But the knowledge itself… it was real. It was his. In a world where his cultivation progress was glacial and resources non-existent, could these dangerous glimpses, these fragments salvaged from the echoes of bone and wood, be his only path forward? The thought was as terrifying as it was tempting. He pushed it away, focusing only on putting one foot in front of the other, his face settling back into the quiet, unremarkable mask he showed the world, hiding the storm raging within.