---
A wound is not only what bleeds.
Sometimes it breathes. Sometimes it listens. Sometimes it becomes the only part of you that remembers what you were before you were broken.
Yun Che could feel it now.
The silver mark on the back of his hand did not pulse with energy like his veins had when chaos surged. It didn't shine. It didn't hum.
It watched.
---
They had returned to the highlands north of the Moon Grave—where no cultivator dared set foot without losing sense of time and space. It was a place abandoned by maps, older than sects, and laced with the dust of forgotten trials.
Jasmine stood beside a dying spring, gazing at her reflection that didn't match her eyes.
He sat in silence, his hand wrapped, but not hidden.
"You're not hiding it from me," she said finally, her voice sharp.
"No," he replied. "I just wanted to understand it first."
"And now?"
"I understand less."
She walked toward him slowly, each step careful, as if approaching a sword that might cut without moving.
"Let me see."
He unwrapped the cloth.
The mark shimmered faintly—an elegant crescent of silver, thin as breath, sharp as memory.
Jasmine narrowed her eyes. "That's not a seal."
"No. It's… something else."
He paused. "When I sleep, it pulls me into dreams I've never lived. When I move, sometimes I feel like I'm walking a path already chosen. But not by me."
Jasmine's lips parted. "Pre-scripted fate?"
"No. Older than that." He looked at her. "Like I was made to remember something the world buried too deep."
---
He stood and walked toward the cliff's edge.
"Last night, I touched the Sky Poison Pearl. Just briefly."
She flinched.
"It didn't reject me. It didn't accept me either."
He turned his palm up.
"The mark glowed. Just once. Then I heard a voice."
He hesitated.
Jasmine said nothing, waiting.
"It said, 'You are the second scar. The first was the Sword.'"
Jasmine's face turned pale.
---
"The Sword," she said slowly, "wasn't just a weapon. It was a judgment the Ancestral God left behind. The First Scar was a rift in meaning. A cut deep enough to make Heaven doubt itself."
"And I'm the second," Yun Che whispered. "A wound that breathes."
---
Beneath them, far beyond mortal sensing, a tremor stirred.
A sentience blinked awake. One that had not spoken since the fall of the Primordial War. It was not bound to a body. It was not soul or law.
It was a name that had been carved out of the world.
"He carries it."
"The scar that remembers the sword."
"We failed to erase it. Now it walks."
---
Back above, Yun Che gripped his hand as pain bloomed through his chest. The mark began to burn—not with heat, but with awareness.
And for a moment, he saw her again—
Not Jasmine.
Not any god.
But the woman of voidfire and silence, crowned with time and betrayal, holding the Ancestral Sword not as a weapon—but as a memory too powerful to destroy.
"You are the breath of what I lost," she said.
"Do not let the world sew you shut."
Then she was gone.
---
Jasmine caught him as he staggered.
"What did you see?" she asked, voice trembling.
"Not what. Who."
He looked at her.
"She's coming back. Or maybe… she never left."
---
Above them, the clouds parted.
But there was no sun.
Only a crack in the sky—shaped like a blade.
And across the heavens, written in divine memory, a single line bled into view:
> 'You are not the first to bleed. But you may be the first to live after it.'
---