Darkness. That was the first thing Jin Mu knew when he awoke. Not the comfortable kind of darkness one could fall asleep in,
but the suffocating, endless, howling void of a place where time itself felt broken. His body lay curled against stone, his head
splitting in a thousand directions. He had expected death when the Tribunal swallowed him whole, but what greeted him was far worse.
His mind had not survived intact.
Every thought, every memory, every mask he had ever worn clashed against one another. His regression, his cold pragmatism, his
softer hidden self, his rage, his despair—they all screamed inside him. And his two pathways, once neatly separated within him,
collapsed. The Black Emperor Pathway and the second Pathway that had bloomed after his awakening crashed into one another with the
force of colliding stars. He felt it tearing through him like glass shattering inside his bones. He could not tell which voice
belonged to him anymore. He was Jin Mu, and he was not. He was fractured. He was whole. He was the screams and the silence.
For weeks, he roamed without reason. The land was barren, alien—scarlet skies stretched over horizons that never seemed to end,
jagged ruins littered the earth, and strange monoliths whispered when he walked too close. He forgot how to eat. He forgot how
to sleep. His cultivation churned endlessly, merging, spiraling, mutating into something that no system of sequences or pathways
had words for. It hurt, oh gods, it hurt, as if his flesh were clay being kneaded by cruel hands. He would collapse, rise again,
collapse again. His hair grew ragged, his clothes tattered, and sometimes he laughed at nothing, laughed until his throat bled.
Madness. That was his companion. Madness, and pain.
And yet, after nearly a month of wandering, half-dead and starving, Jin Mu found something unexpected. Civilization.
Beyond the edge of a shattered canyon, where waterfalls of silver mist poured into the abyss, he saw a city. It rose like a
mirage: tall alabaster towers catching the scarlet sky's faint light, banners of cobalt fluttering in wind, and streets lit by
crystal lanterns. Music, faint and delicate, echoed even from this distance. A city alive in a dead world. His knees buckled
as he stumbled toward it, each step a battle against his screaming body. The gate guards nearly killed him on sight—ragged,
filthy, and his aura shifting violently between extremes, he looked like a demon out of nightmare. But then she appeared.
The princess.
Her name was Elara Veylen, though the people called her the Sapphire Flame. She was tall, graceful, with hair like
cascading silver and eyes the color of twilight seas. She wore armor inlaid with pale sapphire, and when she spoke, her voice
was calm and steady, as if no storm could shake it. Where others recoiled from the sight of Jin Mu, she did not. She looked
at him—not at the filth, not at the broken man trembling on the stones—but at the core of him. Something in her gaze softened.
"Bring him inside," she commanded.
He tried to speak but only coughed blood. Her hand touched his shoulder, warm despite his feverish skin. And for the first
time in weeks, Jin Mu's wild laughter ceased.
Recovery was slow. He had been given chambers within the palace, chambers overlooking the sapphire-lit city below. At first,
he raved at night, clawing at walls, hallucinating the Tribunal's whispers. The servants wanted him cast out. But Elara
persisted. She brought food herself sometimes, simple bread and broth, setting it by his bed. He could not bring himself
to look at her face without trembling. She did not press.
Days became weeks. His fractured personalities screamed less. The merging of his pathways stabilized, though imperfectly,
becoming something strange: a Pathway that did not obey old rules, neither fully Emperor nor the second unknown flame. He
had not mastered it, but it obeyed him just enough not to kill him outright. At times his eyes glowed black, at times gold,
and sometimes both at once. The palace scholars whispered of omens, but Elara silenced them. "He is my guest," she told them.
"My responsibility."
And so Jin Mu, once feared rebel and shadow, became something else: a protector. Elara named him her bodyguard, to the
shock of her court. "He is broken," they said. "He is dangerous." But she saw something they did not—the iron beneath the
madness. When assassins struck from rival houses, it was Jin Mu who stood before her, bloodied but unyielding, cutting them
down with a power none could name. When beasts of mist clawed over the walls, it was Jin Mu who dragged them into rifts of
black-gold void, his laughter echoing like a death knell.
He was not the Jin Mu of before. Not the cold tactician, not the silent sufferer, not the soft protector. He was all of
them, merged, unstable, but real. And though madness still lingered in his eyes, for the first time since waking, he felt Something close to purpose.
Elara sometimes asked him of his past. He never answered directly. How could he? The truth was fractured even to him. But
one night, as they stood on a balcony beneath the scarlet stars, she asked him again, softly:
"Who are you, truly?"
Jin Mu's answer was not what she expected. His cracked smile was tired, haunted, but clear.
"I am undeserved."
And though she did not fully understand, Elara placed a hand on his arm and did not pull away.
Yet beneath this fragile peace, danger stirred. Jin Mu's presence in the city drew whispers. The merging of his pathways
was not subtle; the air around him warped, sequences bent, and sigils flickered unnaturally. The Tribunal's shadow had not
forgotten him, and perhaps neither had his old allies. He knew, deep down, that this city could not remain untouched. And
though he had found a fragile tether in Elara's kindness, a storm was coming. One that would demand he face himself—the
fractured, the whole, the undeserved—whether he wished to or not.