Theon's breath came slow and ragged, each inhale scraping against his lungs like sandpaper. The oppressive weight of his body pressed him into the scorched earth of the Voltaic Blaze Canyon, the air itself humming with residual energy. His work wasn't done yet.
Three lines remained.
He needed to mirror the line from his collar to the outline of his rib on the right side. On the left, he had to trace the line around his spine to his pelvis and form the path extending to his shoulder plate.
He couldn't afford to rest. His meridians had already begun adapting to the lightning that ravaged them. If he stopped now, allowing his body to stabilize, he would forever be stuck with an unbalanced system.
A guttural growl rumbled in his chest. Theon forced his focus inward, a laser beam of will. The midpoint of his spine pulsed with raw agony, the wound he'd torn open moments ago already knitting itself shut. He couldn't allow that. With a silent snarl, he slammed his will against it, splitting the flesh anew.
Lightning Lu surged through the fresh pathway, a white-hot river carving its way toward his shoulder plate.
The universe demanded symmetry. Now that the new meridians had been forced open, energy rushed to fill them, seeking equilibrium to balance the two sides of his body. Theon's role was no longer to force the flow—only to keep it from spiraling into chaos.
Two more.
Spine to pelvis. Collar to rib.
He bit down hard, his jaw aching as he focused on the first path, his body screaming in protest. Each new meridian was harder than the last. His stamina was nearly gone. Lu crackled around him like a caged beast, the air itself alive with electricity. Blood seeped from his eyes, his nose, his lips—he was on the brink.
And yet it was then.
Exactly then.
Lightning Lu surged through his collar on the right side, far more ferociously than before. It was as if a thousand needles punctured his core, disrupting the delicate equilibrium he'd painstakingly cultivated. His body convulsed uncontrollably, and his vision blurred. The pain was indescribable.
For a heartbeat, Theon teetered on the edge of annihilation, slowly fading.
It couldn't end like this. He wouldn't allow it.
He moved.
With inhuman resolve, he ripped open another meridian on his left side, letting the lightning rampage freely. A desperate gamble. A brutal, suicidal solution.
His body had become a lopsided battlefield - right side bloated with searing Lu, its meridians torn open like ravaged riverbanks after a flood, while the left languished as a barren channel, its few fragile pathways experiencing a drought under the strain. The imbalance itself had birthed this new tempest, the energy's desperate scramble for symmetry now threatening to tear him apart from within. And so what was the solution to that ?
Simple.
Flood the drought.
Ravage the left to match the right.
It was madness—but in those fleeting milliseconds between stability and annihilation, madness was all he could muster.
Theon's mental fortitude was pushed to its limits as he willed the lightning Lu to follow the precise patterns required to mend the unintended deviation to his rib outline while simultaneously directing the path from the middle of his spine to his pelvis while simultaneously forcing his meridians on his left to be pierced whenever they could.
Every strike against his inner walls sent jagged lightning through his nerves. His vision whited out. His teeth ground hard enough to crack.
One final push.
With the last dregs of his strength, Theon slammed the remaining pathways into alignment. The connections held—but at a cost. His meridian system now resembled shattered glass, webbed with countless micro-fractures from his desperate gambit.
A ragged breath caught in his throat. He'd stabilized the crisis...only to trade it for a hundred smaller ones. He was exactly where he started: an unbalanced meridian system.
But he was alive. And if he was alive, he could fix it.
The new divergent paths were shallow things—mere centimeter-deep scratches along his primary meridians. They required no guidance, no conscious effort to maintain, they couldn't go deep enough to affect anything truly vital. It was a small mercy, his body understood what his mind no longer could.
As consciousness slipped through his fingers like sand, the lightning Lu in his body took advantage of all it could to balance itself. Theon could only watch from some distant corner of his mind.
…
The lightning Lu rampaged unchecked, each pulse tearing at his already fragile pathways.
…
Hours passed. Theon's posture, once tense and determined, had long crumbled. He slumped to the floor, his body unable to bear the strain any longer.
Inside, the lightning Lu pierced his meridians wherever it could. But even as Theon's higher cognition faded, his body's survival instinct was more than enough. Instead of the lightning Lu going near any vital organs, it instead carved new pathways through his arms, tracing luminous filigree patterns beneath his skin.
One after another, they formed a web of intricate lines across his arms and shoulders, spider-web thin, like the spreading branches of a tree. The energy surged through them, branching outward in search of balance.
Time became meaningless in the Voltaic Blaze Canyon. The once-deafening energy storm condensed into a shimmering nimbus around Theon's motionless form, the calm after destruction. His body had achieved through autonomic adaptation what his conscious mind could not - a brutal, imperfect equilibrium.
Theon's consciousness floated in a liminal space between being and nothingness. His body might as well have belonged to someone else. Awareness had dwindled to a single straining thread, connecting him to reality by the barest filament of will. To focus, to truly examine his condition, would be to snap that final tether. He simply couldn't. So his mind stood empty, hollowed out, scraped clean, containing nothing but the base instinct: He had to survive, he had to hold.
Time stretched and warped as he balanced on that knife's edge, every heartbeat a monumental effort to maintain the fragile connection. The darkness whispered promises of rest, of sweet oblivion, and oh how his shattered being longed to answer.
But still, he held.
For one more breath.
Then another.
Until he couldn't. Until his humanity reclaimed him.
The thread snapped.
Exhaustion crashed over him like a collapsing star, that final glorious surrender to gravity's pull. The world dissolved into velvet blackness, the Voltaic Blaze Canyon's howling winds fading to silence.
Darkness claimed him, a gentle, velvet embrace.