The mist clung to the thatched rooftops of Misty Village, dense and unyielding, as if the heavens themselves had forgotten to breathe. Nestled deep between two sleeping mountain ranges, the village was a place the world had long abandoned — no roads led to it, no travelers passed through, and even bandits saw no value in its hidden quietude.
In the gray veil of early morning, a boy walked alone along a narrow trail winding up toward the Forbidden Forest. His steps were careful but practiced, his posture slouched beneath the weight of a rough-woven basket strapped to his back. He was dressed in threadbare robes, patched and faded, his face obscured beneath a hood pulled low.
He was known only as Li Shen — the mute.
No one knew where he came from. The villagers whispered tales of a cursed child born under a blood moon. Others said his tongue had been cut out by a demon as punishment for a crime he committed in a past life. Children threw stones when they saw him; adults turned away, muttering prayers to avoid bad luck.
But Li Shen didn't flinch. He never made a sound. Not when he was struck. Not when he bled.
He just kept walking.
---
He reached the treeline by midday. The Forbidden Forest was a place of myth and caution. Its name came from the old tales — ancient beasts, withered spirits, and the remnants of war between long-forgotten cultivators. Even the woodcutters avoided it.
But Li Shen knew its edges like his own shadow. It was here he foraged for rare herbs to trade for scraps in the village. He navigated past black pines and mossy stones until he reached the roots of an enormous ancient tree, its bark twisted like coiled dragons, its surface etched with deep grooves of time.
As he leaned in to harvest a crimson-flowered Spiritleaf, the ground beneath him crumbled.
There was no time to react.
The forest floor gave way with a deafening crack, and his body plummeted into darkness.
---
Pain.
Sharp and immediate.
He hit a stone floor hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. For a long moment, there was only silence. Then — light. Faint and pulsing, like a heartbeat. It came from deeper within the cavern into which he'd fallen.
Groaning, he pushed himself up. His ankle throbbed, but it wasn't broken. The basket had been torn from his back, its contents spilled across the ground. He ignored it, gaze fixed on the light ahead.
Drawn by instinct, he limped forward.
The tunnel walls began to glow with faint blue runes as he moved deeper. They were ancient — from an era before language, etched by forces not meant for mortal eyes.
Then he saw it.
At the center of a circular stone chamber floated a lotus.
Not an ordinary one. Its petals were black as midnight, edges rimmed with violet flame. It hung in the air, rotating slowly, as if suspended in water. Around it, six chains forged from radiant spirit metal shimmered with binding runes, keeping the lotus trapped in place.
Li Shen stood frozen.
He had no cultivation, no spiritual sense, no training. Yet he felt the weight of the thing before him. It was alive. Ancient. And… it was watching him.
Suddenly, a voice echoed inside his mind — soft, feminine, and immeasurably old.
> "You… are not marked by fate. You are… empty."
Li Shen's eyes widened. He stumbled back. No sound escaped his lips — he had never spoken, never been spoken to like this.
> "An empty vessel… born in silence, cursed by heaven… You are what I have waited for."
He fell to his knees, clutching his ears though the voice came not through sound, but within.
> "Do you seek power, child?"
He hesitated.
Then, trembling, he nodded.
> "Do you seek to carve your name upon the stars — even if it means defying the very heavens that shaped you?"
Another nod.
> "Then accept me."
The chains surrounding the lotus began to shiver.
Cracks formed in the runes.
One by one, the bindings shattered into dust.
As the final chain broke, the lotus surged forward in a blur of black light, piercing straight into Li Shen's chest.
He convulsed. Every nerve in his body screamed. Symbols burned across his skin like living flame. Visions flooded his mind — stars collapsing, mountains crumbling, entire sects reduced to ash by a single flicker of black petals.
Then silence.
And darkness.
---
When he awoke, he was lying on the stone floor. His chest burned, and his hands trembled. He could feel something inside him now — pulsing like a second heart, hidden deep within his dantian.
He looked at his reflection in a shallow pool beside him.
His eyes… had changed.
They were still dark, but now rings of violet spiraled within his irises, glowing faintly.
He could see things he hadn't seen before — the residual energies of the cave, the lingering aura of ancient cultivators, the thread of his own fate.
Except…
There was no thread.
He had none.
No karma. No spiritual lineage. No celestial design.
He was outside of fate.
And in that moment, he smiled.
For the first time in his life — he smiled.
---
He didn't know how long it took to climb back out of the collapsed earth. The passage seemed to close behind him, as if sealing away the secret once more. By the time he returned to the edge of the forest, the sky had darkened. Mist returned to swallow the world whole.
He made it back to Misty Village just as the last fires were being lit.
But something was different.
The old drunk who had always spat at him when he passed stared this time — then stepped aside in silence.
A group of boys who used to throw stones at him froze as he walked by, frowning, uncertain.
They felt it.
Even if they didn't understand it, they felt it.
Li Shen… had changed.
---
That night, in the single candlelit room of the hut he called home, Li Shen sat cross-legged. The black lotus pulsed within his dantian, releasing a soft, rhythmic thrum.
Memories that were not his began to surface — cultivation techniques lost to time, forbidden arts of soul refinement, bloodline sealing, karmic inversion…
And at the center of it all — his new power:
Fate Absorption.
By touching another cultivator's fate-thread, he could steal fragments of their luck, their skills, even their destiny.
He didn't just grow stronger — he rewrote the stories of others.
And his own.
The lotus whispered to him as he sat still, a breath in the void.
> "You will not walk the path of those who seek enlightenment. You will not chase immortality for peace."
> "You will become the calamity that devours the sky itself."
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