Re-birth: The Beginning after the End - Chapter 133

Chapter 133: THE TECHNIQUES PART 5
Li Hua stepped forward and felt the world hesitate. The air missed her presence for a heartbeat. She was there, but she wasn’t there. When Li Hao turned to look at her, his gaze slid past where she had actually stepped.

“Good,” Old Xiao murmured. “Now for the true test—you must learn to make the world move with you.”

He gestured, and the mist around them began to dance in unnatural currents. The siblings watched as he demonstrated, not stepping through space but letting the world accept his presence as part of its own movement. “You must blend into the fluctuations of your surroundings. The way a shadow shifts with the sun, the way mist curls with the wind. Let the world decide your position, not you.”

Each sibling approached this challenge differently. Li Wei, analytical as ever, used his mind over instinct, carefully matching his breathing to the mist’s patterns. Li Hao, who had struggled with stillness, found his rhythm in motion, his energy rolling like a tide rather than a pulse. Li Hua surrendered completely to the currents, allowing her presence to slip between the natural movements of the realm rather than fighting against them.

When Old Xiao turned to face them, none of them were exactly where they should have been. They had begun to understand that true invisibility wasn’t about not being seen—it was about making the world forget you were ever there to begin with.

Old Xiao moved through the mist like a thought through consciousness—there and gone, present and absent, each appearance making them question if they’d truly seen him at all. “Now,” his voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, “you must maintain this state while defending yourselves.”

Without warning, he launched a series of attacks—not meant to harm, but to test. Wooden practice weapons materialized from his sleeves, sailing through the air with deadly precision.

The siblings scattered, each trying to maintain their newly learned state of fluid existence while evading. It was like trying to dance underwater while keeping the surface undisturbed.

Li Wei managed three steps of perfect concealment before a dodge broke his concentration. Li Hao’s unpredictable movements served him well, but his presence flickered too strongly with each evasion. Li Hua found herself falling into a strange rhythm—present for the heartbeat needed to dodge, gone before the eye could confirm her location.

“Better,” Old Xiao appeared between them, “but you’re still thinking like solid beings. Remember Lady Wei’s lesson about becoming part of the world’s breath, Lady He’s teaching about permission barriers, Lady Xu’s instruction about existing between spaces. Movement should combine all three.”

He demonstrated again, this time more slowly. As he moved, his presence didn’t just vanish—it merged with the natural flow of air, became part of the morning mist, existed in the space between moments. “You aren’t moving through the world,” he explained, “you’re letting the world move through you.”

The siblings tried again, each finding their own way to weave together the lessons of the past weeks. Li Wei approached it like a mathematical problem, calculating the precise moments to shift between techniques. Li Hao let instinct guide him, his natural talent for chaos finally finding purpose in the unpredictable shifts. Li Hua found herself thinking of water—how it could be mist one moment, ice the next, always changing yet fundamentally unchanged.

Hours passed, and the training ground became a dance of shadows and whispers. Old Xiao increased the difficulty gradually, forcing them to maintain their concealment while dodging multiple projectiles, each one requiring a different type of evasion.

“Movement without pattern,” he called out, his voice shifting locations with each word. “Presence without form. Existence without confirmation.”

Li Wei developed a technique of appearing to move in one direction while actually traveling in another, using Lady Wei’s lessons to make his energy flow like scattered leaves in the wind. When Old Xiao threw three wooden daggers at where he seemed to be, they passed through empty air—Li Wei had never been there at all.

Li Hao turned his struggles into strength. Instead of fighting his instinct to react, he learned to fragment his presence into multiple locations, making each piece feel equally real. When Old Xiao tried to track him, he found himself pursuing echoes while the real Li Hao slipped between the gaps in perception.

Li Hua discovered something unexpected. By combining Lady He’s Permission Barrier with the movement techniques, she could make herself not just invisible but irrelevant—something the eye would pass over even if it saw her, like a shadow that didn’t belong to anything. When she moved, it was as if the world agreed to forget she had ever occupied that space.

“Now,” Old Xiao materialized in the center of the training ground, “let’s see how you handle multiple opponents while maintaining these states.”

He made a gesture, and suddenly the siblings found themselves surrounded by training constructs—simple wooden figures that moved with uncanny precision. Each one carried a different weapon, and all of them seemed to ignore the usual rules of space and time, much like Old Xiao himself.

“Remember,” he called out as the figures began to move, “you’re not trying to win. You’re learning to exist in a way that makes victory irrelevant.”

The wooden figures moved with inhuman synchronization, their attacks flowing like water around the siblings’ defenses. This wasn’t just about dodging—it was about making the attacks irrelevant by simply not being where they were supposed to be.

Li Wei found his rhythm first. Rather than meeting force with force, he let his presence ripple like heat waves over sand, making the training constructs’ weapons pass through the space where he appeared to be while he existed somewhere slightly adjacent to reality. Each strike meant for him hit only the memory of his presence.

Li Hao turned the chaos of multiple attackers to his advantage. Instead of trying to track every opponent, he let his fragmented presence draw attacks in different directions, scattering the constructs’ coordination. When three figures converged on what they thought was his location, they found themselves tangled in each other’s attacks while Li Hao slipped between their forms like smoke through fingers.

Li Hua’s approach proved the most unsettling to watch. She didn’t so much evade the attacks as she ceased to be relevant to them. Her movements flowed with such perfect integration into the space around her that the training constructs’ weapons seemed to unconsciously adjust their paths to miss her, as if their programming couldn’t quite accept her as a valid target.

Old Xiao’s voice drifted through the melee. “Better. Now maintain these states while launching your own attacks.”

This new requirement nearly shattered their carefully maintained concealment. The moment Li Wei attempted to strike back, his calculated patterns became predictable again. Li Hao’s fragmented presence consolidated whenever he tried to generate force for an attack. Even Li Hua found her carefully maintained irrelevance wavering each time she moved to strike.

“You’re thinking like warriors,” Old Xiao chided, appearing briefly beside each of them in turn. “A shadow doesn’t attack—it simply exists where darkness needs to be. A breeze doesn’t strike—it merely flows where air must travel. Stop trying to force your will upon the world and instead become the medium through which force naturally expresses itself.”

The siblings paused, absorbing Old Xiao’s words. Each found their own way to understand what it meant to attack without attacking.