***
The candle flickered violently.
Lian leaned closer, her breath shallow, fingers trembling as they turned the brittle, half-burned scroll hidden beneath the Stormheart Sect's record vault. Dust fell like old snow. Even touching this was a violation of sect law—but something had drawn her here.
Something deep.
The scroll wasn't listed in any inventory. It was sealed behind a cracked jade slab, its script long faded—yet when Lian's fingers brushed the cover, lightning had sparked across her skin.
She unfurled it slowly.
At first, the language was unreadable. Strange symbols from a time before structured Dao paths—before the Seven Pillars had been formed. Before the division of righteous and demonic cultivation.
But then, a name emerged.
Written in crimson ink, the color of dried blood:
"He Who Dared Defy the Cycle."
Beneath it, a line etched so faintly it could barely be seen:
The heavens do not forget. Nor do those buried by them.
Lian's heart skipped a beat.
She had come looking for records about forbidden formations—anything that might explain Ash's disappearance, or the sudden tremor that passed through the sky just days ago. But this wasn't an ordinary outlaw cultivator.
This was a myth.
And myths, she had learned, often hid the deepest truths.
[Dreamscape – Within the Seal]
Ash's eyes opened to a world that wasn't real.
A forest without wind. Trees that swayed to a rhythm only memory understood. And a sky split in half—one part burning, the other drowned in night.
He stood barefoot, dressed not in his usual ragged robes, but in ceremonial cloth woven with patterns he didn't recognize.
Where am I…?
Voices echoed. Not loud—but persistent.
"They took everything from you."
Ash turned. Shadows drifted between the trees, wearing faces from his past—his mother's smile, the scent of his father's cooking, the warmth of his sister's hand.
"And then… they turned you into silence."
The shadows twisted. The forest blurred. Ash gritted his teeth as the ground cracked beneath him.
"Why do you still sleep, boy?"
A voice deeper than memory. Older than hate.
And yet… it came not from above, but from within.
Suddenly, the dream shifted.
He stood before the sea again.
The night it all ended.
The night he lost control.
Lightning arced across the sky. Waves surged. A battle he couldn't fully remember replayed in broken flashes. The clash of wills. The moment of betrayal.
Then—a formation.
A prison.
A seal.
He screamed.
And woke.
-------
[Temple of Chains – Crimson Mourner's Chamber]
In the lower chamber of the sunken temple, the Crimson Mourner stirred in the dark.
His eyes glowed beneath the blindfold, sensing the flare of emotion above him.
The boy was dreaming again.
Good.
Emotion was the key to unraveling suppression. A sealed mind couldn't fight back. But a grieving one… a burning one?
That was fuel.
The Mourner didn't smile. His lips had forgotten the motion. But his voice scraped across the air like broken bone.
"You are beginning to remember, child. Good. Good."
He stretched a finger, drawing an ancient rune in the dust beside him.
It glowed red.
"You are not the only one they buried."
Far above the mortal realms, an envoy in golden robes rode a silver crane through starlight. He was one of the Twelve Messengers—beings assigned by the Heavenly Dao to monitor the harmony of lower worlds.
He had been sent after the Council felt a disturbance ripple through karmic threads.
But halfway through descent, his mount reared back, screeching in pain. The sky before them shimmered.
A veil.
Not natural.
A formation layered between realms—hidden, ancient.
"Impossible," the envoy muttered. "This region was cleared during the last Purge War…"
He summoned a sigil of divine authority.
It flickered.
Then cracked.
Something down there wasn't just disturbing the world's balance.
It was shielded.
From the heavens themselves.
-----
[Stormheart Sect – Outer Peak Library]
Lian returned the scroll carefully, masking her presence.
But her thoughts were a storm.
The phrase "He Who Dared Defy the Cycle" echoed in her mind.
She'd heard it before—but only as a child's tale. A forbidden cultivator, once said to have mastered the elements and even defied fate itself, but who vanished from history.
No records.
No sect affiliation.
No body.
Some claimed he walked the stars. Others said he was swallowed by the sea.
Lian now suspected the second was closer to truth.
But what chilled her most… was the growing feeling that Ash had been connected to that legend all along.
And no one had noticed.
Except her.
---
[Ember Hollow ]
Dark clouds rolled in over the borderlands. Villagers scrambled indoors. Dogs barked. The elderly farmer who often muttered about "omens" now sat silent on his porch, eyes fixed on the trembling sea.
At the edge of a coastal cliff, a boy in tattered robes stood barefoot in the rain.
He didn't speak.
He didn't move.
But he stared east—toward the sea—toward something that now whispered in his dreams.
His name was Rui.
An orphan. A beggar. One who'd often heard tales of a boy named Ash. His older brother had once trained with him, before dying during the strange events two years ago.
Rui had always felt like something was watching him in his sleep.
Tonight, he didn't resist.
He listened.
---------
In the abyss, a second crack split open near the base of the temple's seal.
This one glowed violet.
Not from Ash.
Not from the Mourner.
But from somewhere else.
A new power… awakened by proximity.
Slumbering long beneath the sea, its time had not yet come.
But soon…
Soon, the ocean would bleed.