The disciple's body hit the far wall with a sound like snapped wood. Bones cracked. Blood spattered across the hanging wires of the flickering ceiling light.
Jian Wuxin stood still, his breath calm.
His palm trembled—not from fear, but from limitation. His Qi was faint. His body was weak. That strike had cost him. But it was enough to make a point.
The disciple groaned, clutching his ribs. "Y-You… were a cripple. You weren't supposed to—"
> "Supposed to die quietly?" Wuxin's voice was flat.
"To hang in silence, stink like waste, and rot like a shameful memory?"
He stepped forward.
The disciple flinched.
> "Get out," Wuxin said. "Before I discover how much your sect values dead weight."
The boy didn't need a second invitation. Limping, wheezing, wide-eyed, he stumbled down the stairs and into the mud-flooded alley, cursing under his breath.
Then, silence.
Again.
Always.
---
The lightbulb above Wuxin flickered once more. Then died completely.
The world was dim.
Still.
He turned to the corner of the room. To the chair. To the pipe.
He stared at it long, his eyes sinking beyond it, into something deeper than the room itself. Something older than memory.
---
⚫ The Days Before Death
Shen Mo had been a quiet boy.
The kind of quiet that isn't mistaken for peace. The kind of quiet that comes from trying to disappear, as if stillness could protect you.
In the orphanage, silence was survival. Speaking meant attention. Attention meant pain. The caretakers were loud men with heavy hands and even heavier debts. Boys like Shen Mo were shadows they beat when they couldn't reach their own reflection.
He was clever, though.
He learned to hide in the library. The books were old, mold-ridden, most falling apart. But they taught him things even the caretakers didn't understand.
They taught him patterns.
That everything broke eventually.
That pressure makes cracks.
That people, too, have fault lines.
He watched the world like a scholar hiding in a battlefield. Every word someone spoke, every shift of the eyes—Shen Mo memorized them like scripture. It didn't save him. But it explained the suffering.
Even back then, he had ideas he couldn't articulate. Not clearly. But he thought them. He thought:
> "Everyone is running toward something. But they never ask if what they're running toward was ever worth the sprint."
He thought:
> "Most pain isn't about what happens. It's about being the only one left to feel it."
He thought:
> "If you scream every night and no one hears you, are you screaming… or are you just broken glass in a quiet house?"
And eventually, he thought:
> "Maybe the world already ended. Maybe it ends for everyone at a different time, and mine just came early."
When he was twelve, they said he had no Spirit Root. A defect. A birth error. A divine rejection.
And just like that, no sect would touch him.
Even the worst ones laughed.
He still remembered the Ironblood Elder who tested him, his fingers greasy, teeth rotting, voice hoarse from spirit wine:
> "Tch. You'll be lucky to sweep a sect floor before you starve."
No one helped him walk home that day.
---
Wuxin—now Shen Mo—ran his fingers along the pipe above the chair.
The dust stuck to his skin. There were still grooves where the noose had bitten into the metal.
He stared up at it. Then whispered:
> "You were alone."
His voice was heavy with mourning—but not pity.
> "You didn't die because you were weak.
You died because the world makes silence louder than screams."
He turned away.
Then sat.
Cross-legged.
Eyes shut.
---
Inner Cultivation — Tempering the Void
Inside his soul, his Dantian pulsed with unstable light. The meridians he'd opened were flickering now, beginning to stabilize into fixed channels.
The Sea of Qi within him was forming—not the vast oceans of past life, but a cracked basin, barely filled.
But something strange was happening.
The inner world—usually a calm plain or quiet void in early stages—was shifting.
Rocks floated. Wind cut sideways. Gravity bent in corners.
It was chaotic. Twisted. But… responsive.
It was shaped by his thoughts.
And his thoughts were sharp.
> "The world rewards lies with comfort," he murmured into the dark.
"But truth… truth is a dull knife. It doesn't cut. It buries."
The Qi inside him shivered.
He exhaled—and with it, his will bled into the inner space.
He remembered the first sword he ever forged in his last life. Not a real weapon, but one made from condensed Qi and resolve—a spiritual blade that reflected his inner truth.
He raised his hand.
> No weapon came.
But something else did.
A faint crackling in the air. Like static. Like friction between reality and meaning.
And the first idea of a Dao began to form.
It wasn't the Void-Edge Sword Dao of before.
It was something colder. Deeper.
A Path born from surviving silence. From observing cruelty. From understanding pain not as a weakness—but as a natural property of existence.
Not his sword style.
Not his power.
Not his pride.
But his essence.
> "What grows in absence becomes real.
What suffers without witness becomes true."
> "I do not seek strength to rise above.
I seek it to look down… and finally understand."
The Dantian pulsed violently.
His Sea of Qi trembled.
His Dao had begun to stir.
---
Meanwhile, Elsewhere
Back in the Ironblood Sect's outer city tower, the disciple who had fled from Shen Mo stood trembling before his Elder.
> "He… I swear, Elder Gao, he—he struck me! With Qi! Five meridians, minimum!"
The elder raised a brow. "That worm? The suicide boy?"
> "It wasn't him anymore."
Elder Gao turned toward the window. His spiritual sense expanded outward across the city's western slums.
Then—
> He felt it.
A ripple. A crack in the silence of the Qi around Shen Mo's building. Not loud. Not large. But sharp. Focused.
A Qi signature, but not like any other.
It was like someone had taken a blade and carved a line between life and death—and dared the heavens to cross it.
> "…Contact the Inquisition Hall," Gao said finally.
"Someone's stolen a soul."
---
Back With Shen Mo
The candles had gone out.
Only moonlight lit the room now, silver across the floorboards.
Shen Mo opened his eyes.
> "I am no longer the boy you let die."
He stood.
His breath was cold. Steady.
He didn't glow with power. He didn't rise into the sky.
But he stepped forward—and the floor beneath him didn't creak anymore.
It listened.