Chapter 33 — Garden of Forgotten Fates
The Garden of Forgotten Fates didn't look like any garden Shen Liang had ever seen. It was a realm suspended in flux, a hollow dome of drifting petals and suspended stone, where memory and reality collapsed into one another like fractured glass. The air shimmered with whispers—echoes of decisions never made, timelines unwound, and truths that had never been spoken aloud.
Qilin was the first to step forward, her stabilizers flaring softly as the environment reacted to her presence. The petals recoiled briefly before resettling in a spiral around her form, as if the garden remembered her—or feared her.
Yue paused beside Shen Liang, her fingers brushing his. She didn't look at him, but the tremble in her knuckles said enough. Her tether burned faintly, a scarlet halo pulsing across her collarbone. "This place... it knows what we've buried," she whispered.
"It's not just a test of strength," Lin Zhi added, scanning the dreamlike field. "It's a crucible of choice. This is where the First Architect once seeded forgotten timelines to see which ones bloomed in sorrow."
Shen Liang clenched his fists. The past few weeks had reshaped him more than any cultivation breakthrough. Between battling Hollowed incursions, unraveling corrupted tethers, and navigating the complicated web between him, Yue, and Qilin, his path had become as much emotional as spiritual.
And here, that path would be judged.
System Alert: Emotional Resonance Required.
Garden of Forgotten Fates—Trial Initialized.
The message cut through the air like a knife. The ground beneath them rippled. One by one, pedestals rose—five of them, each carved from different temporal stone. The first shimmered like molten glass. The second bore claw marks, etched with the fury of a soul once betrayed. The third was blank. The fourth bled silver mist. The fifth pulsed with a golden tether seal—Shen Liang's own mark.
"Pick one," said a new voice—cold, mocking.
A figure emerged from the shifting mists beyond the garden's edge. She wore robes of fractal light and carried a fan carved from memory shards. Her eyes were mirrors.
"The Fateweaver," Qilin muttered. "She works with the Mirror Writhe—rebels who exploit rewriting anomalies to fracture Echo Worlds and strip them for cultivation data."
The woman bowed mockingly. "You denied the isolation protocol, Shen Liang. You refused to sever the anomaly. Now you've brought your team into a convergence zone with no stable axis. How poetic."
The ground pulsed violently. Yue staggered, her tether flaring in warning. Shen Liang stepped forward, placing himself between her and the Fateweaver.
"What do you want?"
"To offer you a choice. Either surrender the anomalous tether you've been harboring—yes, I mean your sentient one—or watch the rewritten reality collapse around you. The Garden's threads are fraying. And we're not the only ones pulling."
A thin veil peeled back from the sky. Above them, a city blinked into partial existence—hovering structures, screaming echoes, lives caught mid-death. One of the severed Echo Worlds. Reality struggling to reassert itself. A dozen lives flickered between existing and vanishing.
"No," Shen Liang whispered. "You're using their memory code... you're farming it."
"Survival requires sacrifice," the Fateweaver replied with a smile.
Suddenly, the trial activated.
Petals burst into flame. The five pedestals lit up, and the team was thrown into separate emotional illusions, forced to confront tethered moments from their pasts.
Shen Liang found himself in a burnt courtyard—the ruins of his old village. But instead of silence, there was laughter. A younger version of himself sat with his mother, tending lotus stalks that glowed with emberlight.
"You should have died here," a voice said beside him.
He turned. The Architect's First Avatar stood beside him, cloaked in tendrils of logic and emotion.
"This is one of your diverged threads. You were supposed to die. Instead, your survival birthed the anomaly. And now others suffer for it."
"I didn't ask to live," Shen Liang said. "But I won't throw away what I've become. Not for balance. Not for symmetry."
The Avatar smiled. "Then endure the consequences."
Shen Liang blinked—and he was back in the Garden.
The pedestals cracked. Qilin emerged with a strange wound across her soulcore—something from her time within the original system network. Yue staggered out, eyes rimmed with tears. Lin Zhi was kneeling beside his pedestal, whispering a name none of them recognized.
But it was Shen Liang who now glowed with golden script.
System Evolution: Dual-Tether Integration Progressed.
New Path Unlocked: Emotional Singularity Node.
The Garden roared as a pillar of starlight shot skyward. The Fateweaver flinched, shielding her face.
"You fool. Do you even understand what you're awakening?"
"I don't need to understand everything," Shen Liang said, stepping forward, "only enough to protect the ones I won't let go of again."
He reached for Yue's hand. She took it.
Behind them, Qilin stood tall, her stabilizers flickering erratically. "The Garden's still collapsing. We need to rewrite an anchor point or we'll be lost between simulations."
Lin Zhi stepped forward, eyes still haunted. "Then let's write one. Together."
And in that moment, the team linked their emotional threads, forging a new anchor using raw tether energy. The Garden shimmered, paused, and solidified—temporarily stabilized by the weight of their bonds.
But the Fateweaver only laughed. "One garden down. A thousand fraying nodes to go. Let's see how long you last... before your emotions devour you."
She vanished into mist.
Shen Liang exhaled, his gaze meeting Yue's.
They had survived the Garden.
But the war for the soul of the system was only just beginning.