The alleys of Lin'an stretched into darkness, bathed in a pale, almost sickly light from the hanging lanterns. The air was dense, heavy with nocturnal humidity and the muffled whispers of closed taverns. Mó Wúqióng walked with no apparent purpose, but his steps guided him toward an old place, one familiar in its solitude: the river.
He reached its banks after a long while. There, the quiet waters glided in charged silence, as if the city itself were holding its breath. He sat down, crossed his legs in lotus position, and closed his eyes.
The memory did not take long to surface.
He saw the mountain again.
It was not a mere memory: it was an image seared into the twists of his mind like a brand. The mist crawled between the black pines like silent specters. The wind lashed the peaks and howled between the cliffs. Up there, all was silence and pain. Up there, there was no room for the weak.
It was five years ago.
Mó Wúqióng, then twenty-five, had climbed the forbidden mountain alone, driven by a single idea: to survive… no, to transform. To escape the beast within him, or tame it. He no longer knew which.
He reached the summit out of breath, legs bleeding, palms scraped raw. And there, beneath the imposing shadow of an old gnarled pine, he saw him.
The monk.
An old man, silent, sitting in lotus position, unmoving like a rock, as if he were part of the mountain. His bald head gleamed under the dim light. His eyes were closed, but his presence imposed silence on everything around him. He had no name, no title. But his aura… it was that of a man who had transcended the world's chains.
Mó Wúqióng collapsed to his knees in the snow.
His body was robust, forged by suffering. But his heart… his heart was a well of ashes. He placed his forehead to the ground and whispered, voice trembling:
"Please… teach me how to become stronger. Teach me how to survive."
The monk did not answer.
On the first day, Mó Wúqióng waited.
He remained kneeling until sunset. He did not eat. Did not drink. He stared at the man seated before him, as unshakable as a forgotten god. Snow accumulated on his shoulders. The wind slapped him endlessly.
But he did not move.
"I have no master. No home. No future. All I have left is this void."
The monk briefly opened one eye. A black, unfathomable well. Then he closed it again without a word.
On the second day, hunger bit harder.
Mó Wúqióng shivered. His lips were cracked. His breath turned to icy mist. But he remained kneeling. He was no longer a man: he was a silent scream addressed to the universe. A call for meaning.
"You live in the void, master… I come from it."
He coughed blood. But did not retreat.
On the third day, the pain became a constant veil.
His knees bled. His back bent under the cold. But Mó Wúqióng refused to fall. He murmured through clenched teeth:
"I didn't come here to die… I came to rebuild myself."
The monk did not flinch.
On the fourth day, at dawn, the silence broke.
The sky was milky, colorless. Mist curled around the trees. Mó Wúqióng, face hollow, eyes dry and filled with determination, was still there.
And finally, the old monk stood.
He approached slowly, as if each of his steps answered a rhythm only he knew. He stopped before Mó Wúqióng, who did not even raise his eyes. He had no strength left. No words.
The monk observed him for a long moment, then spoke:
"You have emptied your heart. You do not beg for strength… you already contain it."
He knelt in turn, placed a parchment-like hand on Mó Wúqióng's skull.
"You will bear a new name: the Child of the Void."
That name echoed within him like a broken gong. Not a mockery. Not a judgment. A statement.
The monk added:
"For from the void, one can transcend… or be lost forever."
Then he stood, turned his back, and returned into the stone sanctuary without another word.
Mó Wúqióng understood then that he had been accepted.
Not as a disciple.
As a trial the old monk had deemed worthy to begin the long path of purification.
Days turned to weeks, then months. And soon, two entire years had passed on the mountain, in a world suspended outside of time.
Every day, Mó Wúqióng was pushed to his physical limits, then forced to exceed them. Dawn pulled him from his frozen meditation well before the sun pierced the mist, and until dusk, his bones, his muscles, his flesh were tested. He had to run barefoot in the snow until his legs trembled, climb steep cliffs blindfolded, hang above the void to learn to master fear. Not a single day without falls. Not a single night without pain. But never did he collapse. Never did he beg for mercy.
Mó Wúqióng's body, once ravaged by street wounds and wandering, had hardened. His once thin muscles had gained the density of knotted wood. His joints, once sore, had been oiled by the silence of wind and effort. He had learned to breathe beneath the snow, to control his internal heat to meditate on the edges of icy cliffs, to stretch his nerves like bowstrings until he became one with silence.
His heart beat to the rhythm of the mountain. His mind, once chained by the instinct of survival, had found fragments of stillness. A fragile form of balance.
But the monk's teaching went far beyond mere physical training.
During those two years, Mó Wúqióng learned to survive in the most extreme conditions. The monk taught him how to distinguish healing herbs from silent poisons, how to treat wounds with simple leaves, how to feel in the throat of a cold wind the promise of a storm. He showed him how to listen to the birds' cries to foresee the beasts' movements, read the stars to navigate without a compass, fish in black waters in silence, without disturbing the river's fragile balance.
He taught him to feed from the world, to blend into it, to vanish if needed.
Every gesture, every breath, every silence between two heartbeats was a lesson. A way to reconnect with a world he thought he had forever lost.
Gradually, Mó Wúqióng became a self-sufficient man. Clear-headed. Capable of surviving where others would perish at the first frost or the first height.
And yet, despite it all, one piece was still missing. One essential fragment the monk refused to grant him.
For never, ever, did he teach him to kill.
Mó Wúqióng had never fed on hatred. It was not vengeance that drove him. He did not seek to make others suffer, nor to enact justice. He simply wanted to complete what he saw as necessary. An intimate mission. A liberation. He believed — perhaps naïvely — that once this task was fulfilled, he could finally lay down his arms, kneel, and breathe. Find peace.
One day, after an exhausting training, he knelt before the monk. His body trembling. His face covered in sweat and dust. But his gaze clear, without bitterness.
"Master. I am ready. Teach me now how to strike to take life."
The old man remained silent for a long time. Then, calmly, he replied:
"That is not your destiny."
Mó Wúqióng did not shout. Did not beg. He remained kneeling, fists clenched on his thighs. His mind was calm, but the void within him still called out. That dull, persistent sensation, like a chasm under his feet that could only be filled by crossing a certain threshold.
The monk never gave in. He repeated tirelessly that killing was just one more weight on the shoulders of an already burdened man. That the art of murder, once learned, could never be unlearned. It was not a tool, but a pact. An invisible commitment that forever altered those who used it.
But Mó Wúqióng knew. He knew that the peace the old master preached would not be enough to quiet what had rumbled in his belly since childhood. He did not want to become an executioner, nor a demon. He simply wanted to find the key that would open the last door. The one behind which his own peace lay hidden.
He had listened. He had respected. But he could not stay.
He had to descend the mountain.He made his decision one morning, as the first snows of winter blanketed the mountain in white. He descended the monastery steps without a sound. No farewell, no words.
He thought the old monk was still asleep.
But hidden among the rocks, veiled by pines, the man with shadowed eyes watched.
And as Mó disappeared into the valley, he whispered to himself:
"Go, my child… fulfill your destiny. Show me the result."
Mó Wúqióng did not hear him.
He only heard the wind.
It rose suddenly, sharp and swift, lifting the snow into a light swirl. It carried the old man's final words like a secret into the peaks. And when silence fell back upon the mountain, there was no trace of the old monk left. As if he had never existed. As if, with that icy gust, he had dissolved into the very air of the mountain.
Back in reality, Mó Wúqióng opened his eyes.
The Lin'an river still flowed, undisturbed, indifferent to his memories. The reflection of the moon shattered on the waves like fragments of his past.
He placed a hand on his chest. The void was still there. Different, but always hungry.
He had left the mountain to follow a dark path, that of assassination, convinced that only blood could soothe his pain.
He now knew that this choice had condemned him.
But he regretted nothing.
The Sleeping Reaper was born that day.
But no matter the name he was given — he accepted them all.Because above all, he remained Mó Wúqióng.And that, no one could ever take from him.