The winds of Qingling no longer carried his name. Where once the words Dao Wei had cut through the heavens like a sword unsheathed, now, they echoed only in the corners of memory, buried beneath fear, silence, and betrayal.
Months passed like dying embers in a long winter, and with each, the world shifted.
In the mortal realm's East, power had grown rotten with victory. The fragile balance once held between sects and clans lay in ruin. Where firelight once danced across the peaks of great cultivation halls, now only smoke rose, thick, black, and unrelenting, a mourning veil cast over broken temples and bloodied stones.
The Demonic Clan had emerged from their obsidian halls like shadows made flesh. Their banners, red as flayed skin, were nailed into the mountainsides where rival sects once flew their proud crests. Those who resisted were slaughtered. Those who submitted were chained.
And beside them, unseen, unsung, but ever-present, walked the Du Clan.
Not in open war. Not with a blade drawn. But with whispers in the ears of kings. With seals placed upon edicts. With scrolls that silenced rebellion before it could scream. Behind silk curtains and ceremonial incense, the Du Clan guided the fate of the East like puppetmasters behind divine veils.
In time, it became difficult to remember how it had once been.
The Eastern martial alliance had fractured. The Dragon Sect had fallen, their mountain cracked down its spine by a ritual gone wrong. The Celestial Light Sect, once a place of peace, had burned for three days and three nights. Even the Sword God Sect, now a hollow shell with its name blackened from the records, was nothing but ash and stone, its survivors scattered like leaves before a storm.
Among the broken lands, black-armored patrols marched in grim columns. Demonic beasts, once driven into hiding by the will of Heaven, were now tamed and collared, ridden by commanders who bore the sigils of both demon and mortal alike.
It was no longer a realm of light and law. It was a realm of dominion.
In this new order, the name Dao Wei was forbidden to speak aloud.
Those who remembered him did so only in quiet, behind closed doors, hearts heavy with uncertainty.
In a lonely shrine nestled deep within the Forgotten Range, where the snow never melted and no birds ever sang, a young girl knelt before an altar of cracked jade. She had no sect robe, no rank or title. Only a sword strapped to her back, and a look of fierce determination that had not dulled despite the world's cruelty.
She lit a lantern.
Then another.
And another.
Until the shrine's interior glowed with a hundred tiny flames.
Before her, etched into the stone altar in quiet defiance, was a single name, carved by trembling hands into sacred rock: Dao Wei
"I don't believe it," she whispered, voice cracking like thin ice. "You wouldn't die like that. You never would."
The flames flickered. But did not go out.
In a mist-wreathed courtyard near the Imperial Capital, beneath the painted eaves of a haunted pavilion, Dugu Lingxue stood motionless. The wind tangled her pale blue robes around her legs, and the plum blossoms overhead continued to fall, unaware of politics, grief, or fate.
She stared at a single leaf caught in her palm.
Her maid approached, bowing low.
"My lady… news from the East. The last holdout sect was wiped out this morning. The Demon Sect rules everything from the Burning River to the Serpent Spine Mountains."
Lingxue nodded but said nothing.
After a long silence, she whispered, as if to the falling blossoms, "He was supposed to return."
Her voice, usually cold and reserved, trembled like a blade held too long in winter.
"Perhaps…" she paused, closing her eyes. "Perhaps we were the ones who broke him."
Elsewhere, in the blackened halls of the Demonic Clan, victory had soured into suspicion.
Within a throne room carved from volcanic stone, the Draconic Ancestor lounged atop a throne of writhing chains, fingers absently tapping a chalice filled with something far darker than wine.
"The Demon Sect grows too bold," he murmured. "They forget who forged the fire they now wield."
An elder at his side bowed. "Shall we remind them, Lord?"
The Draconic Ancestor's eyes flared crimson for a heartbeat, then dimmed.
"Not yet. Let them clear the way for us. Let them sit in their illusion."
He stood, the chains groaning beneath him like tortured spirits.
"For soon, the Abyss will open again. And what returns from it… will not answer to them."
With Dao Wei fallen, the Mortal World had crowned new tyrants, rewritten the rules, burned the old oaths, and pretended to forget.
But in truth, it had only buried its fear.
Meanwhile, elsewhere far from the abyss, the cherry blossoms drifted gently, painting the air in petals of soft pink and ivory. Time moved slower in the Divine World's Sunflare Grounds, as though eternity paused here to breathe.
Beneath the vast boughs of an ancient cherry tree, its roots coiled like dragons beneath the stone, two figures sat in quiet repose. One old, one ageless. One like winter's calm, the other like spring's mischief.
Master Lin's robe shimmered faintly with celestial runes, pale blue with silver lining, a garment reserved for the truly ascended. His beard flowed like falling snow, and his expression held the patience of one who had lived a hundred mortal lives.
Across from him, Master Jovez sipped from a thin porcelain cup, legs lazily crossed, hair untamed, eyes glinting like moonlight off rippling water. His robes, though less formal, carried subtle sigils of ancient sects long thought extinct.
Their tea, brewed from the Morning Dew Blossom that only bloomed once every thousand years, sent delicate spirals of fragrant steam into the air.
"Jovez," Master Lin murmured, lifting his cup but not yet sipping, "The mortal world has grown dark. They say Sword Childe is dead. A demon, they whisper now. A curse reborn. But I have read the stars, and the stars are never silent. They burn with restlessness."
Master Jovez chuckled, tilting his head. "Mm. 'Demon' is a word thrown by cowards. They fear what they cannot bind. The boy's powers... chaotic, divine, forbidden, are merely... incomplete. He is the storm before the shape."
Lin finally drank, then set the cup down gently, his gaze drifting skyward. "But even you must admit, his last transformation was not of this world. The gods did not bless it. The abyss claimed it. What sword can be forged in such depth and not be shattered?"
Jovez leaned forward, the mischievous glint in his eye turning thoughtful. "Perhaps it was never meant to be a sword," he said quietly. "Perhaps what rises from the abyss will be something else entirely. Something older than gods. Something the Divine World itself forgot."
Master Lin blinked. The petals above them shuddered slightly, though no wind stirred.
Jovez continued, fingers tracing the rim of his teacup. "Tell me, Lin. Have you studied the ruins beneath the Moonless Temple? The ones sealed?"
Lin's voice dropped, cautious. "Only what remains in the sealed scrolls. Forbidden knowledge. Dated long before the Divine Records."
Jovez smiled without humor. "Before gods, there were Ancients."
Silence fell.
Not the silence of stillness, but the kind that follows an earthquake. A pause in the breath of the world.
"You jest," Lin said finally, though his voice lacked certainty.
"I do," Jovez said with a grin. Then his smile faded. "But I also do not."
He looked toward the distant horizon, where the sky shimmered with floating islands and rivers of divine Qi.
"Sword Childe—he may yet be the first in an age to awaken the blood of the Ancients."
Master Lin sat very still.
The cherry blossoms stirred again. This time, the breeze was real.
Unbeknownst to them, a circle of young disciples hidden behind a nearby stone lantern held their breath. They had come seeking wisdom, perhaps a few scraps of overheard techniques, but what they'd found? Was a whisper of prophecy. A tale not found in any scripture.
"What's an Ancient?" one of the bolder ones whispered, eyes wide.
Another shook her head. "Doesn't matter. If our Masters are worried, it means something big is coming."
Far above them, the Divine Sky trembled. A single cloud of obsidian black and edged with crimson, drifted over the Sunflare Grounds.
It should not have been there. And yet, it moved with intention.
Neither Jovez nor Lin noticed, but both went silent. Their Qi rippled in subtle harmony, like the strings of a guqin drawn tight before a performance.
Jovez glanced up suddenly. His eyes narrowed.
"Did you feel that?"
Lin stood slowly, his cup forgotten.
"…Yes."
Meanwhile, And far below the mortal world, and deep beneath the worlds of men and gods, where no light dared go, where time frayed and space bled like wounds that never healed, in the shattered silence of the Bottomless Abyss, Dao Wei remained…or at least his essence.
Drifting.
Suspended in a cocoon of forgotten energies, his body barely clinging to its form.
The silver halo that once crowned him now hung in pieces, scattered like rings of a fallen star. His six elemental orbs, fractured and empty, hovered in slow orbits around him, pulsing faintly like the last echoes of a dying heartbeat.
He did not stir.
Within the darkness, dreams crept like snakes, visions of fire and ash, of laughter turned to screams, of thrones crumbling into bone. He floated deeper into the Abyss, past the layers where memory faded, into places even gods would dare not name.
In the far reaches of this void, unseen by fate or fortune, something stirred.
Something ancient—Waiting. Its presence did not touch him. Not yet. But it watched.
However, sound shattered the stillness.
Once.
Then again.
A pulse. Not of heart, but of something beyond words.
Dao Wei's body twitched within the cocoon, his fingers curling ever so slightly. As his sea of consciousness began to disintegrate.
However, far below him, unseen in the ink-black void, a second pair of eyes opened.
Not crimson. Not gold. But a deep, endless white, like the first frost that ever fell upon creation.
Above it all, high in the Divine World's shimmering heights, the ancient cherry tree at Sunflare's training grounds shed a single blossom—its petals turning silver as they fell.