Darkness.
But not empty.
Not dead.
Ryu drifted in a void, not unlike the one he had entered during his inheritance but colder, quieter. It pulsed with something older than Qi, something that resonated beyond the veins of the world, perhaps something beyond this world. Here, there was no sky, no ground, no direction. Only stillness.
He floated without form, without breath, yet fully aware and ahead of him, like a moon suspended in ink, hovered a star.
No… not a star, maybe a collapsed one.
A singularity.
It drew in light, Qi, and memory, its gravity folding inward on all things known.
It pulsed once.
And then it spoke.
"You are not the first heir to the Void."
"But you are the first with a soul unbound by time."
Ryu tried to respond but his thoughts dissolved before they could echo.
"The crystal they used was not theirs. It was a fragment, stolen from a place beyond your realm."
"You carry two legacies now."
"One rooted in this world… and one that never belonged here."
A soundless thrum rippled through him.
The feeling of being suspended in the blackness of a void felt like a long time.
the black void rumbled and then…
He awoke.
He was lying on a jade-inlaid bed in a high recovery chamber deep within the Phoenix Royal Palace. The air was warm, laced with incense from the healing gardens beyond. Sunlight filtered through an etched lattice screen, illuminating the golden runes inscribed on the floor, Yan's handiwork, protective seals drawn in Qi-touched ink.
Ryu sat up slowly.
His Qi felt... reorganized.
Not in brute strength, but in depth. His core had expanded, spiralled outward. The meridians inside him weren't just pulsing, they curved, like orbiting rings around a quiet flame.
He looked down at his palm.
The mark remained.
Nine tiny stars revolving around a single dark flame.
He pushed a breath of Qi toward it.
The room shifted.
Just slightly, like gravity curling toward his hand, before it steadied again.
Yan stirred close by him and rushed over the moment he moved. "Ryu!"
"I'm okay," he said softly. "Just… feel strange, I'm unsure what happened."
Kalavan entered, silent as always. "Two days," he said. "You've been out for two days."
Ryu blinked. "It felt like an hour but at the same time forever."
Yan knelt beside him, inspecting the mark with furrowed brows. "I checked the royal archives. Nothing like this. Not even in pre-veil records."
Ryu's gaze remained steady. "Because it's not from here."
The room fell silent.
Kalavan leaned against the doorframe. "Another inheritance?"
Ryu shook his head. "No. This isn't from the Void Emperor. It's older. Something he might've once feared."
That evening, they gathered in the Royal Library.
Ancient scrolls lined shelves of lacquered wood, while celestial charts hung between carved phoenix pillars. In the centre stood a dust-covered projection device, an artifact from before the Collapse. With a steady breath, Ryu poured Qi into it.
The ceiling lit with stars.
But they weren't from Phoenix's skies.
These constellations spun in impossible orbits, formed of unfamiliar patterns and dark suns. Some symbols glowed in colours no mortal eye should understand.
Yan approached; brow furrowed. "This device was buried beneath the Flame Archive. Few even knew it existed."
Ryu pointed to one configuration, nine stars spinning around a central dark sun.
"That's what's on my hand."
Kalavan frowned. "Then whatever this is… it's not terrestrial. It's cosmic."
Ryu nodded. "Whatever I'm carrying, it didn't begin in this world. And I don't think I'm the first to hold it… just the first in this age to survive it."
Far across the sea, in a temple carved into obsidian cliffs, a black mirror cracked down the centre.
A cloaked woman with silver eyes touched the frame.
"The inheritance has spread beyond the anchor," she whispered.
Behind her, robed figures knelt. One word passed between them:
"Awakened."
The mark pulsed again that night, faint but insistent.
Not like a warning, more like a compass.
Ryu followed it, standing the next morning at the southern gates of Phoenix City as if pulled by instinct.
There, waiting as though summoned by fate, stood a woman cloaked in wind-worn leathers. She was small in stature, no taller than five foot four, with a compact, athletic build. Her skin was bronzed from years beneath foreign suns, her jawline soft but proud, framed by chestnut-brown hair that spilled in loose, wind-tossed waves past her shoulders. Beneath the hood of her travel cloak, her face was striking, quietly beautiful in a way that lingered, with high cheekbones, full lips, and piercing blue eyes that shimmered like dying stars.
She wore a dark slate-grey robe stitched with fine bands of silver thread, woven in unfamiliar constellations, like the sky remembered from a world long forgotten. Draped over it was a deep-blue half-cloak that swept behind her knees, fastened at the collarbone with a crescent-shaped clasp of burnished metal. Her boots were scuffed but sturdy, and her belt held a scatter of pouches, a folded map, and a charm of obsidian and copper that pulsed faintly with residual Qi.
Her presence was unnerving, not because she threatened danger, but because her Qi signature felt fragmented. Warped, stretched thin like someone who had brushed too close to a spatial tear... and lived.
She looked up the moment Ryu approached.
"I've been waiting for you," she said.
"You know me?"
She tilted her head. "Not yet. But I've felt your Qi."
She introduced herself as Elyra, a traveller not from another sect or hidden realm, but from a timeline that had broken, an echo of this world that never survived.
In the Royal Library, beneath star charts and burning lanterns, she told them everything.
"The Void Emperor wasn't trying to conquer the world," she said. "He was trying to seal something."
"And that crystal that struck you wasn't crafted here. It was a relic, ripped from a collapsed timeline."
Ryu listened in silence, palm over the mark on his hand. "Why me?"
Elyra looked at him, solemn and still.
"Because you carry the star flame. And in every version of this world I've crossed, you're the first to survive its awakening."
She spoke of a place called the Anchor Point, a convergence of spatial threads buried deep within the mountains near the eastern edge of the Myar Kingdom. A location marked only on the oldest constellation maps.
It bore no name in any current atlas.
But in the charts retrieved by Yan, it had one by proxy:
The Nameless Gate.
As the trio made preparations to leave Phoenix, Elyra grew quiet. She watched the stars at night and walked as though feeling the rhythm of the earth itself.
Yan kept her distance.
"She knows more than she says," she told Ryu. "But her silence feels like protection, not deception."
Ryu agreed.
Kalavan continued training, refining his bladework. His affinity with wind and water grew elegant, fluid yet sharp. His movement now flowed like a river cutting through time itself, his realm had improved, unknown if he was close to a breakthrough.
They were ready, they had to be.
And so, the journey east began.
Toward answers.
Toward the Nameless Gate.
And toward whatever waited beyond it.