"Ren Zu once stepped into a field that had no beginning.
When he tried to leave, no one knew he had ever been."
The wind whispered like a forgotten name.
Jia Lin stood at the edge of the Threadless Divide, where the sky lost its color and the soil no longer remembered touch. The grass beneath her shimmered like spun glass, slicing the sunlight into threads of nowhere.
She had walked for days. Or had it been hours? Time unravelled behind her, and the path she'd taken dissolved into blankness.
There were no echoes. No scents. No signs of life.
Only that strange, ancient stillness — like a world paused just before a memory.
And in the center of it all, embedded in a stone as pale as worn bone, lay a single Gu worm. It curled like a symbol Jia Lin almost recognized: the glyph for origin, twisted backward.
Her breath caught. Her pulse slowed.
Drawn, she knelt. She touched it.
And the world blinked.
A heartbeat of pure clarity washed through her. She saw a hundred versions of herself standing in this same moment — as conqueror, as corpse, as myth.
Then everything vanished.
Her pouch of minor Gu dissolved to ash. Her name fluttered out of memory like torn paper in a windless field.
The Gu vanished into her palm. And a weight settled in her mind.
"Final Step Gu acquired.
You have taken the first step.
It will not be remembered."
She turned. There was no path. Not even her shadow followed.
And far above, in the pale sky, a single thread twisted — not moved by wind, but by forgetting.