"Every wound is a memory. And I remember everything."
It was raining again. Not the gentle kind that nourished fields or kissed rooftops. This was the rain that made you feel like the sky was weeping. Heavy, metallic, soaked with ash and regret. Each drop stung like needles against Aren Yu's ruined skin.
He walked through the mud like a man dreaming, the girl—Yin—trailing behind him, quiet as a prayer. Her eyes didn't hold fear. Not anymore. Just the dull, iron acceptance of a world that had forgotten to be kind.
They were headed west.
Not because there was safety there—he'd long given up on finding that—but because the visions always pointed westward after death. The staircase turned in that direction. The wind pulled him there.
And the brand on his chest… it itched.
Not the surface kind of itch. This was deeper. A soul-itch. The kind that whispered of buried bones and forgotten names.
Aren stopped under the skeletal remains of a burned tree. His legs ached. His ribs jutted out unnaturally. He hadn't reset them. What was the point? They never healed.
He sat down with a grunt, back against the charred trunk. The rain hissed as it hit his half-exposed lungs.
Yin sat beside him, arms wrapped around her knees. "You breathe funny," she said.
"I'm not breathing."
She tilted her head. "Then what's that sound?"
Aren listened.A rasp.Like torn bellows struggling to inhale.Ah. That.
"My lungs were burned out three deaths ago. I forgot."
"You forgot your own lungs?"
He gave a faint smile. "I've had a lot of injuries."
She frowned, eyes scanning his twisted form. "But you're alive."
"No." He paused. "I'm not."
They camped in the ruins of a roadside temple. The idol had been decapitated long ago—perhaps by invaders, or perhaps by the god itself in shame. The walls were covered in faded scriptures. Most had been scratched out.
One phrase remained, barely legible:
-- "Those who step off the path of Heaven shall be hunted by Heaven itself." --
Aren traced the words with one broken finger.
He thought of the cultivators from Lotus Forge.
Of their faces, frozen in horror as the ash consumed them.
They had tried to bind him.
But something in him had rejected it. Like a splinter of glass pushed back from the wound.
Not power. Not qi.
Defiance.
That night, Yin asked him the question he always dreaded.
"Why can't you die?"
He stared into the crumbling altar.
"I did," he said simply. "Many times."
"But you're still here."
He looked down at his ruined hands. Bones visible beneath torn skin. Scars over scars. A dozen stab wounds that never closed properly. He could feel where the sword had pierced his heart last time. The muscle twitched sometimes. Pointlessly.
"It was a mistake," he whispered.
"The Vow?"
He looked at her sharply.
Yin shrugged. "I read it in an old soldier's book. Said there was a curse called the Scarlet Vow. Said it made men walk between life and death."
"Not a curse," Aren said. "A choice. Someone made it once. Long ago. I just… stepped into it."
"Why?"
He looked at her, eyes hollow.
"I was weak. I failed. I bled out in a tomb no one remembered. And when I woke up…"He trailed off.
Yin didn't press.
They traveled on.
Villages turned to ashes. Towns to ruins. The Empire was cracking at the seams. War bands roamed the roads. Bandits, broken cultivators, mercenary sects who no longer obeyed the Nine Laws.
The heavens were quiet.
But Aren felt them watching.Always watching.
It happened on the third night.
A walled town. Still alive. Barely.A checkpoint.A bribe.A tense glance at Aren's twisted frame.
But they made it in.
He paid with a piece of a jade pendant he'd once pulled from a corpse's mouth.
Inside, the town stank of desperation. Fires burned in every alley. Women sold dried rat meat. Children huddled beneath merchant stalls.
And in the square—
A crucifixion.
Three bodies hung on wooden stakes, their limbs twisted, mouths open in silent agony. Cultivators.
Above them, a banner:
-- "Those who practice forbidden paths shall be unmade." --
Aren looked up at the bodies.
One of them still had eyes.
They stared at him.
Then—blinked.
He moved without thinking.
Up the scaffold. Past the guards.No one stopped him. They didn't even seem to see him.
The hanging cultivator's lips moved. No sound. Just a word formed by bloodied tongue and shattered teeth.
"Vow."
Aren touched his chest.
The brand burned.
The man coughed blood. A line of crimson dripped down his chin. His skin cracked as if under fire.
Then—
The man smiled.
And died.
This time… truly.
His body sagged.Ash drifted from his limbs.And from his mouth, a sliver of something dark and thin and writhing emerged—like a thread of spider silk.
It drifted toward Aren.
He didn't move.
The thread touched his chest.
And vanished into the brand.
That night, he screamed.
He screamed until his vocal cords tore. Until blood poured from his mouth. Until the stones beneath him cracked from the force of his fists.
Visions filled his mind.
A mountain of skulls.
A chain wrapping the earth.
A man made of thorns.
A spiral staircase carved from corpses, leading not upward—but downward.
At the base: a gate.
Carved into it:"Heaven is mercy. Mercy is illusion. Seek nothing."
And behind it—Eyes.
When he awoke, he wasn't alone.
A woman sat by the fire.
Dressed in rags. Hood pulled low. But her skin shimmered faintly with the sheen of cultivated flesh.
Not alive. Not dead.
She didn't look at him.
"Scarlet Walker," she said.
He tensed. "Who are you?"
"A guide," she replied. "Or a warning. Perhaps both."
"What do you want?"
She tossed something into the fire.
A bone.
It screamed as it burned.
"Others are waking," she said. "Others like you. Marked by the Thorn. They are not as kind."
Aren's voice was gravel. "Then let them come."
The woman smiled, teeth too white.
"They will. But not all who wear the Scarlet Vow remember why they took it."
She stood. Began to walk away.
"Wait," he said. "What is the Vow?"
She paused.
"The first rebellion," she said. "The only one that mattered."
And then—
She was gone.