Chapter 510: Changes (4)

Edmund of the Sinclair family stared at the weird compass pointing south in complete silence.

The room suddenly felt colder.

His fingers tightened around the edge of the wooden case as he leaned closer, as though his eyes might somehow be deceiving him.

They weren’t.

The compass was working.

After decades of remaining completely still, the ancient artifact had finally moved.

Edmund swallowed.

His mind immediately returned to the family records he had read as a child, stories he had once regarded as exaggerated legends created by paranoid ancestors.

He remembered references to the return of Qi.

He remembered warnings about animals sensing the change before humans.

He remembered descriptions of ancient artifacts awakening after remaining dormant for generations.

He had always assumed those passages were symbolic.

Now he was no longer certain.

Edmund abruptly turned toward the shelves.

The ancient manuscripts.

The sealed journals.

The family records.

Everything he had once considered historical curiosity suddenly carried a different weight.

If the compass had truly awakened, then perhaps the old records had never been mythology.

Perhaps they had been instructions.

Perhaps they had been warnings.

Edmund’s expression hardened.

He picked up the compass and held it firmly in his hand before turning toward the chamber entrance.

"Wake everyone."

A young attendant standing nearby looked startled by the command.

"Everyone, sir?"

Edmund’s gaze remained fixed on the compass.

"Everyone."

The attendant hesitated for only a moment.

"Even the elders?"

Edmund finally looked up.

"Especially the elders."

The attendant immediately bowed his head and hurried from the chamber.

The heavy door closed behind him, leaving Edmund alone once again.

He lowered his eyes toward the ancient compass.

The needle remained perfectly still now, pointing unwaveringly toward the south.

For the first time in his lifetime, the ancient artifact was doing exactly what the family records had claimed it could do.

It was pointing toward something.

And whatever that something was, its return meant that the world had changed in a way that humanity had not yet begun to understand.

.....

Thousands of kilometers away from the Sinclair estate, another ancient family was reacting to the strange changes spreading across the world. Their response, however, was very different. Where the Sinclairs were attempting to understand what had awakened, the Wen family immediately treated the phenomenon as a potential threat.

The Wen compound was enormous, occupying a secluded stretch of land that had remained in the family’s possession for generations. High walls surrounded the property, while dense vegetation concealed most of the buildings from distant observers. The compound contained modern facilities, ancestral residences, training grounds, underground chambers, and several structures whose purposes were known only to the senior members of the family.

For generations, the Wens had maintained an unusual level of secrecy. They rarely allowed outsiders onto their private grounds, and even members of the younger generation were discouraged from asking questions about certain parts of the estate. It was simply accepted as part of being a Wen.

That secrecy became absolute the moment several elders confirmed that the strange phenomena appearing across the world were connected.

The gates were sealed.

Security personnel were positioned at every entrance, and family members were instructed not to leave the compound without explicit permission. Visitors who had arrived before the lockdown were politely but firmly asked to depart. Communications with outsiders were reduced to the bare minimum, while several older members of the family immediately began contacting relatives who lived in different cities and countries.

Within hours, members of the Wen family were being summoned home.

The younger generation was understandably confused.

They had grown accustomed to the peculiar rules of their family, but even they had never witnessed anything like this. Some had been pulled away from universities. Others had been called back from businesses, military assignments, research facilities, and overseas trips.

Nobody had been given a proper explanation.

"What is happening?"

"Why are we locking everything down?"

"Did something happen?"

The questions circulated among the younger members, but the elders offered almost no answers. Their silence only made the atmosphere more unsettling.

Eventually, several dozen members of the family were gathered inside one of the ancestral halls.

The hall was old enough that its wooden pillars had darkened with age. Family portraits covered portions of the walls, their painted eyes seeming to follow the people moving through the room. Incense burned near an ancestral altar, filling the air with a faint, earthy fragrance.

An elderly woman sat near the center of the room.

She was one of the oldest surviving members of the Wen family, and although her body had become thin with age, her posture remained remarkably straight. Without saying anything, she reached toward a wooden box and removed an ancient manuscript.

The book looked as though it might fall apart if handled carelessly.

Its cover had almost completely worn away, and the edges of the pages were brown with age. Several sections had been repaired so many times that nobody could determine what the original material had been.

The woman placed it carefully on the table.

Then she opened it.

The younger members gathered around.

Most of them expected another incomprehensible passage from an old family text.

Instead, they saw a single sentence.

The words had been written in faded ink, yet they remained surprisingly clear.

When the breath returns, the sleeping blood shall hear it.

The room became silent.

The elderly woman’s fingers trembled slightly as they rested against the page.

She had read those words countless times.

For most of her life, she had regarded them as nothing more than an old saying preserved by ancestors who believed too strongly in legends.

But now, after watching the news reports and hearing the elders confirm what was happening across the world, the sentence no longer felt symbolic.

She slowly raised her head.

"Begin testing."

One of the younger members looked confused.

"Testing what?"

The elderly woman turned toward him.

"Our breathing methods."

Several of the younger members exchanged glances.

The request seemed strange.

The Wen family possessed several traditional breathing exercises that had been passed down for generations. Some were practiced as part of meditation, others as methods of maintaining physical health. The younger generation had occasionally been instructed to practice them, but nobody had ever demonstrated anything extraordinary.

They were exercises.

Nothing more.

At least, that was what most of them believed.

The elders knew better.

Or perhaps they merely hoped they did.

The family had preserved those methods because their ancestors had insisted they were important. Yet generation after generation had practiced them without experiencing the phenomena described in the oldest records.

Failure had become normal.

And, in a strange way, that failure had been comforting.

If the techniques did nothing, then the ancient stories could remain stories.

If nobody could feel Qi, then there was no reason to fear what might happen if it returned.

But that assumption was about to collapse.

The first group of young members entered a quiet training chamber.