.
Jin Mu's first steps beyond the shrine felt surreal. Each echo of his footfalls along the flagstones was a reminder: he was back, and everything he had failed to prevent still lay ahead, unmade. The sun was warm on his shoulders, but he could not shake the chill that clung to the edges of his mind—like the ghost of a blade pressed to his throat.
Down the hill, disciples were setting up formations for morning training, planting copper tokens that flickered with the low glow of Spirit Patterns. Even now, he could feel the layered energies humming in the earth. They were crude constructs, only able to draw thin threads of the world's vitality—but to a boy of seventeen, even that would have been awe-inspiring.
He paused and closed his eyes, reaching deeper.
Beneath the shallow currents that lesser cultivators scraped at, there was a deeper ocean. Principles. Concepts. Orders older than any sect or dynasty. That was what true power meant: not simply harvesting stray motes of spirit force, but claiming the law itself as a blade.
His mind drifted to the Black Emperor's edicts, etched into his memory across a thousand lives.
"All cultivation is the theft of what does not belong to you."
"To be strong is to impose your will on what is."
"Mercy is a luxury of the untested."
He opened his eyes, the valley seeming smaller by comparison.
This time, I will not flinch from what must be taken.
In this world, power was not a gift—it was a negotiation with reality itself. Every cultivator, from the humblest talisman scribe to the grandmasters who could raze cities with a gesture, advanced by binding themselves to a fragment of cosmic law.
For some, it was the law of the flame: heat, hunger, the endless cycle of consumption.
For others, the law of stone: immovable, unyielding.
And for a rare few—those like Jin Mu—it was the law of Order itself.
He remembered the first time he had claimed a law as his own. His body had nearly torn itself apart under the strain. Even in this life, the echo of that agony lingered in his marrow. The higher the law, the more terrible the price of wielding it. That was why the Pathways had been devised—structured sequences of progression, stepping stones for mortal bodies to ascend without immediate obliteration.
Most sects only possessed fragments of a Pathway, incomplete or corrupted. But the Black Emperor's lineage held a complete inheritance—a roadmap from the first spark of awakening to the throne of godhood.
And the first step of that path was waiting for him: the Lawyer Sequence.(Dw Its Loosely Inspired from Lotm)
The irony was not lost on him. The sequence began with the manipulation of language and perception—soft power. But in time, it became something far harsher.
I must be ready to walk every step, he thought. Even into corruption.
By the time Jin Mu reached the eastern stair, the outer disciples were assembling in ranks. He passed them without a glance, feeling their stares on his back. A few recognized him—another orphan of war, a boy with no patron to shield him from the sect's more predatory elders.
He could feel their scorn as tangibly as a blade. In this world, weakness was not pitied. It was hunted.
Once, in a naive lifetime, he had believed the sect existed to uplift humanity against the tides of demon tides and celestial beasts. He knew better now.
The sect was a machine for distilling power from flesh and spirit, consuming generation after generation in the pursuit of ascendancy. If you were useful, you were tolerated. If you failed, you were discarded.
His gaze drifted to the youngest disciples—children barely tall enough to lift a training spear. A girl in tattered robes struggled to keep her footing under the weight of a bronze practice sword. When she fell, the overseer cracked his staff across her shoulders, leaving a welt.
Her eyes stayed dry.
Some of us learn early, he thought.
And some never learn at all.
Jin Mu turned away, heading instead toward the oldest wing of the sect: the Silent Archive. The great library was built into the cliff face itself, its doors flanked by guardian statues older than most kingdoms. Even at dawn, the air near the entrance was dense with pressure—a hush that pressed against the lungs.
He passed the threshold and inhaled the familiar scent: ink, old leather, the faint copper tang of preservation talismans.
In the past, he had spent decades here, poring over scrolls most dared not touch. Now, he did not have the luxury of slow scholarship. Every catastrophe he remembered—from the famine wars of the southern steppes to the resurgence of the Eightfold Plague—was already stirring in unseen corners of the world.
At a dark oak lectern, he found the Codex of Ascendant Seals, its lacquered cover etched with runes that shimmered when he traced them with a fingertip. Here were the seeds of his Pathway—rituals, contracts, the first bindings of law.
He closed his hand around the spine.
I will not beg. I will not plead. I will take.
Outside the Archive, the morning was sharpening into midday. He emerged into sunlight, his satchel heavier with forbidden texts. The wind gusted up the steps, carrying voices from the training field—Shen Yan's laughter, the barked orders of the overseer, the dull rhythm of practice strikes.
A life he had once accepted as inevitable.
He paused at the edge of the terrace, looking back at the shrine.
This place made me strong, he thought. But it also made me blind.
Below, the girl with the bronze sword had risen again, her thin arms shaking with the effort of holding the blade aloft. Jin watched her take one hesitant step, then another, until the overseer's voice cracked like a whip—
"Again!"
Jin Mu's hand closed around the talisman in his sleeve. For a moment, he was tempted to turn away. But that had been the error of his old selves: always waiting for the right time, always believing he could save the innocent after he secured his own power.
He stepped forward instead.
The overseer turned, surprise flickering across his face as Jin raised his voice.
"She will train without your hand upon her."
The courtyard fell silent.
"And who are you to decide that?" the overseer sneered.
Jin Mu let the talisman fall from his sleeve, catching it in his palm. A fragment of Order.
Someone gasped. The overseer's scorn faltered.
"I am the one who will rebuild this sect," Jin said, his voice cold as winter stone. "And your cruelty ends here."
The tension broke like a strained rope. Voices rose—confusion, disbelief, a few startled cheers. The overseer stepped back, his eyes flicking to the satchel of forbidden texts. He understood, in that moment, that Jin Mu was no longer simply another junior disciple.
As Jin turned away, he felt the first flicker of something dangerously close to hope.
This was how it began: not with grand proclamations or godlike displays of strength, but with small defiance. A refusal to accept the world's cruelty as fate.
If I am to carve a new order from this rotten soil, he thought, I must start here.
And as he descended the steps toward the archives once more, the sun climbed higher over the valley, gilding the old stones in hard, merciless light.