The cavern breathed.
Not with lungs, not with air, but with memory. The deeper Gu Yan walked, the less the world above seemed to matter. The light thinned into red wisps. Walls narrowed like closing ribs. The Hollow was not a place that waited. It devoured time.
And it had chosen to feed him something old.
His feet touched the black stone floor of a chamber he hadn't seen on any map—not that maps worked in the Hollow. Everything shifted. Paths that once looped forward now led to cliffs. Valleys reversed like mirrored glass. This place had no geography. Only will.
And the Mirror had willed him here.
The chamber opened like a wound beneath the earth. Circular, thirty meters across, with a ceiling too high to see. Runes of bone-white light circled the perimeter, forming a perfect ring. Inside it: silence.
Gu Yan stepped inside. The light flickered but did not reject him. He approached the center, where an altar stood—black slate, worn down, but unmistakably shaped by human hands. It was square, unadorned, save for scratches.
No carvings. No runes.
Just hundreds of shallow marks.
Like someone had tried to claw their guilt into stone.
The Mirror pulsed once.
"This is it," Gu Yan whispered.
No voice answered. No vision struck him. No thread floated from a corpse or memory. But something deeper stirred. Not above, not below. Within.
He laid his hand on the altar.
The surface was warm.
The warmth bled into his palm, up his arm, and into his chest. His breathing grew shallow. Not labored. Focused. He felt something slide beneath his skin—a presence. Not a parasite. Not an invader.
A confession.
> Fragment Detected.
Type: Echoed Memory.
Title: Confession Without Witness
Compatibility: 84%.
Side Effects: Guilt bleed. Temporal perception drift. Echo hallucinations.
He didn't hesitate.
He let it in.
---
The world rippled.
Not like entering a dream. This wasn't illusion.
He stood in a forest of red trees. Their leaves shimmered like metal. The sky above was not sky—it was script. Thousands of characters drifting, bleeding into each other, written in blood he could not read.
Before him knelt a man.
Or a boy.
Dressed in ceremonial white. Head bowed. Shoulders shaking.
Words drifted from his mouth, whispered not to be heard, but released:
"I didn't mean to win. I didn't mean to survive. I just wanted them to stop looking at me."
Gu Yan stepped closer. The boy didn't look up.
"He was better. Stronger. They all said so. I thought... I thought he would beat me. But when I opened my eyes, the blade was in his chest."
The leaves rustled. Not with wind. But judgment.
"I took his robe. His name. They called me genius. They gave me his place. And I forgot his name."
The boy looked up.
It was Gu Yan.
Not exactly. The face was younger. Rounder. Eyes wide with grief.
But it was him.
The forest burned away. The characters in the sky bled black.
---
Gu Yan gasped, hand torn away from the altar. Blood streamed from his nose. The confession had ended, but the guilt remained.
The Mirror pulsed again. This time, softly. As if asking: What did you see?
Gu Yan didn't answer.
Because he wasn't sure.
That memory had not been his. And yet... it had fit. Like a coat he hadn't known was tailored. There were no names. No facts. Just emotion. The echo of betrayal. The familiarity of silence. The weight of guilt with no audience.
He looked again at the altar.
And saw something beneath it.
A seam.
Kneeling, he brushed the dust away. The slate shifted. A hidden compartment. He opened it.
Inside lay a hand.
Not flesh. Glass.
The same translucent, bone-thin texture as the Mirror embedded in his side. It didn't move. Just rested, palm up.
In the center of that palm was a shard.
A second Mirror fragment.
> Artifact Shard Retrieved.
Classification: Internal Core Link.
Trait: Memory Acceleration.
Warning: Integration will result in a shift in temporal awareness.
Gu Yan took it without pause.
The shard dissolved into light, and the chamber reacted.
The runes flared. Wind screamed from the walls. The Hollow shifted again.
A path opened behind him.
A new one.
The Mirror pulsed, not once, but three times.
> Thread Tier Unlocked: Third Spiral
Conceptual Affinity: Reflection
Core Stability: 62%
Estimated Deviation Risk: Moderate
Gu Yan rose.
He did not feel stronger.
He felt heavier.
Like he had begun to carry pieces of a man no one remembered. Whose sins weren't punished. Only absorbed.
And with each step, he knew:
The Mirror was not showing him power.
It was showing him what came before power.
And the price every cultivator paid, buried beneath robes, fame, and legacy.
He walked down the new path.
Alone.
But no longer empty.
Not anymore.