The day began like any other.
Morning dew clung to the wheat fields that cradled the village in quiet embrace, and the sun, slow and unbothered, slipped over the eastern ridge like a lover unwilling to leave the bed. His daughter's laughter carried from the garden where she worked beside her mother, small hands sinking into warm soil as she hummed a tune half-remembered from lullabies. Just beyond the house, his son practiced with a wooden staff, the movements clumsy but earnest—echoes of techniques glimpsed from wandering warriors passing through seasons ago.
He watched them from the porch, seated on a stool carved decades ago by hands that once crushed the throats of saints and tore hearts from heroes. The wood groaned beneath his weight, not in protest, but in shared memory. Like him, it bore scars that didn't fade.
Still, something stirred beneath the gentle calm. Not fear. Not warning. Just… a shift. As if the breath of the world caught for half a heartbeat.
The birds paused in their song.
The wind tasted different.
He felt it then—thin threads of presence pushing through the edges of his wards, slipping past the cracks he'd deliberately left to avoid suspicion. The stillness had teeth. The Eternal Sky Pavilion was moving sooner than he'd expected. No longer testing. No longer watching.
They had come to take.
Or to kill.
Twenty-four cultivators entered the range of his senses, each cloaked in surgical precision. Three battalion leaders stalked at the center of their formation. And above them all, a single golden envoy, aura folded inward so tightly it vanished against the world's skin.
There were no flags. No banners. No flare of colors to mark allegiance. But the shape of their approach gave them away—the crescent formation designed to surround rogue bloodlines. Not to intimidate. To neutralize.
From inside the house, his wife watched his shoulders shift, the way his hands curled as though remembering something old. She said nothing. She didn't have to. Instead, she turned, calm as ever, and moved toward the children.
"Go to the cellar," she said, voice even but firm.
The boy hesitated, reading something in her tone. "Is it—?"
"Now."
They obeyed without protest. There was no panic, no sobbing or clutching at her robes. Just the clean, terrifying trust that only children could give. And that, more than anything, made his chest tighten.
He stepped down from the porch, bare feet pressing into the dirt path that led toward the northern tree line where the cultivators wove their way around shrine markers and broken stones. They avoided the old spirits, careful not to disrupt the deeper layers of the land. They were trained well. Quiet. Intent.
The envoy was the first to step clear of the treeline—a man in his prime, face sculpted and serene, hair silvered not by time but through alchemical refinement, a cosmetic mark of rank in the Pavilion. His steps were measured. Hands empty. Power carefully hidden beneath layers of ritual restraint.
He bowed with grace learned from centuries of diplomacy. "Good morning, elder. We are representatives of the Harmonious Sky Sect."
The lie passed through the air like smoke.
He didn't respond.
The envoy's smile deepened, though it grew tight at the edges. "There have been rumors of unusual energy disturbances in this region. Possibly the residue of a cursed item or… the presence of an unregistered beast. We are here only to investigate. Peacefully, of course."
Silence lingered.
"Then, with your permission, we would like to examine the local families. Particularly the children. As a precaution. For their safety."
That was enough.
He raised one hand, almost lazily.
And the world bent.
Time didn't stop. He never liked to stop it entirely—it broke too many threads and left echoes behind. But a simple loop, a subtle slow of perception and flow, wrapped the world in molasses. The cultivators moved like submerged fish, steps suspended mid-breath, eyes frozen in half-blinks.
He stepped forward until he stood face-to-face with the envoy.
There was a moment—long and private—where he considered ending it. A single thought and the man's body would twist apart, his bones folding inward like parchment burned too fast.
But restraint, he reminded himself, was also a form of violence.
He leaned in close, close enough that the envoy would never know whether the words came from dream or memory, and whispered:
"Tell them this:
The next time they come to my door,
they won't leave with memories.
Only corpses."
A flick of the wrist. The loop snapped.
Reality surged forward with a quiet gasp.
The envoy staggered, finding himself ten paces back, palms trembling, cold sweat matting his collar. He didn't understand what had happened—but his instincts did. They screamed at him, primal and loud.
Run.
But obedience held firm. Orders had been given.
And the Pavilion did not suffer cowardice.
The blades came next. Sigils drawn into the sky. Sealing talismans activated in flawless synchrony. Twenty-four lights flared golden, converging into a hexagram above the village—a formation designed to suppress anything beneath Celestial Stage.
A mistake.
He hadn't been Celestial in centuries.
His breath shifted, deepened.
And the world around him recoiled.
His shadow lengthened, dragged behind him like a living wound. Then it split. Once. Twice. Ten times. Dozens.
Figures emerged—tall, silent, and robed in midnight's cloth, their eyes empty, their edges flickering like torn parchment against a flame. Fifty in total.
The Three Thousand.
Or what remained of them.
Only fifty were needed now.
The cultivators hesitated. A flicker of recognition crossed the face of one commander, as if memory was trying to unearth a name long buried.
And then came the understanding.
It was already too late.
The shadows moved.
No screaming. No clash of metal or fire.
Just silence.
The kind of silence that crushed sound before it could form.
Blades shattered before meeting flesh. Talismans crumbled into ash. Spiritual cores twisted inward, collapsing with a whimper. There were no remains. No corpses. Even the air refused to remember the fallen.
The envoy collapsed to his knees, hands shaking, lips moving in denial. His final formation—half-formed—dissolved like mist in dawnlight.
He looked up, eyes wide, pleading.
"You—what are you?"
There were no words.
Only a sensation.
A hunger so vast it could not be filled, a voice that spoke not to his ears but to the marrow of his bones.
I am the echo of your sins.
Then he was gone.
Erased.
And the wind returned.
A while later, he sat again on his stool, sipping from a cup his wife had quietly placed beside him. The field before him was undisturbed. The wheat swayed gently, whispering secrets only the soil could understand.
No bodies.
No traces.
No one in the village had seen or heard a thing.
She sat beside him without a word, her hand brushing his.
"You let them come close," she said after a time.
"They would've sent more if I struck too soon."
"They'll send more anyway. An army this time."
"I know."
A pause. Her head rested against his shoulder.
"Will you run?"
"No."
"Then we stay."
He looked down at her, at the quiet certainty in her eyes, and the storm inside him stilled.
"Thank you."
She smiled faintly. "You don't need to thank me. I married the monster. I knew what came with him."
A chuckle escaped his lips. Rusty, but real.
Far above them, in the highest sanctum of the Upper World, the Elders of the Eternal Sky Pavilion stood in silence. An entire battalion had vanished. No residue. No echoes. Just absence.
One of them whispered, voice brittle. "There is only one being who erases without trace."
Another added, "But he perished. Burned out centuries ago."
A third, robed in gold and authority, stepped forward. His power pressed the walls into trembling silence.
"No," he said, voice like judgment. "He did not perish. He slept."
And with a gesture, he turned to the sealed altar at the center of the chamber. Chains of obsidian ringed the stone. Upon it, etched deep and jagged, was a single name they had buried in the dark.
A name that should not echo again.
But names hold power.
And this one had begun to stir.
The Glutton.