Adam had become a name on everyone's lips in Bai Village.
It wasn't spoken loudly—this was still Bai Village, after all—but the way the villagers looked at him had changed. Where once there had been kindness for some and indifference for most, now there was a trace of curiosity, respect, and even suspicion.
The younger martial artists looked at him with awe or veiled competition in their eyes. Children watched him pass as if he were some fabled hero, and the older ones… the upper echelon… they watched in silence.
Old Bai himself had turned his gaze on him during a morning session. Just a glance. But it had carried a weight that rooted Adam in place and sent a cold shiver down his spine.
Three others stood beside the old man, men Adam remembered from his last life—Grandmasters who had hidden themselves as ordinary villagers. They, too, had begun to pay attention.
But none of them made a move. No praise. No offer of guidance. Just watchful silence. They were experienced. They knew better than to place hope in a single spark, not yet.
Adam took it for what it was: a sliver of hope. A chance to change the outcome of his last life.
He doubled down on training. No—he devoured it.
Every morning before the sun rose, he was out, repeating forms until the tips of his fingers split open and bled. Every evening, when the others retired to warmth and food, Adam stood alone, absorbing dark matter beneath the moonlight.
The cold bit into his bones, but he embraced it. Pain meant growth and cold meant clarity.
Within weeks, he stabilized his realm at the initial Tier 3. But he didn't stop. He pushed on relentlessly toward mid-Tier 3, hoping to get ahead of the timeline from his last life, to gain some breathing room before tragedy came knocking again.
Seasons turned, and winter descended like a silent predator.
With it came the Winter Hunting Expedition, the same annual journey into the Hantian forests that Adam remembered all too well. The party would travel deep into the forbidden woods, hunting beasts for food, pelts, and cultivation resources. In his past life, he had joined late and contributed little.
This time, he was ready.
When the lists were posted, his name was already there. So was Lin Yao's—unsurprisingly. She had reached the peak of Tier 3. That alone made her one of the strongest among the younger generation. The party would be led by her father, Lin Kuan, and included over thirty martial artists—mostly Tier 2 and 3—with a handful of Tier 1 warriors for support.
The night before they left, Adam stood atop the outer ridge of the Bai Mountain range and looked down at the frozen forest. The stars above seemed frozen too, trapped in a breathless sky.
This is it, he thought. Time to forge myself in fire.
---
The first days of the hunt were exhausting.
Each morning began before dawn and ended only when the last carcass was hauled back to camp. The snow was knee-deep, and the beasts were far more cunning in the cold. But Adam didn't falter. He fought, he learned, and—most importantly—he killed.
Each kill left a lingering shadow on his soul, a whisper of the dark matter released when a life was taken. He absorbed it carefully, methodically. But even then, his progress was glacial. For all his effort, his cultivation barely moved.
It's not enough, he realized bitterly one night, sitting cross-legged while his breath fogged in the icy air. It's never enough.
In contrast, Lin Yao was flying.
She had always been a natural. Strong, quick, instinctive. But now, under the relentless pressure of the wild and the unspoken expectations of her father, she was pushing herself even harder.
And then she did the unthinkable.
A few weeks into the expedition, the hunting party cornered a Tier 2 beast—a massive crimson-horned bear that had recently broken through and was still unstable. Before anyone could assign groups, Lin Yao stepped forward alone.
"I'll handle it," she said.
Her father, Lin Kuan, didn't object. He merely watched, arms folded behind his back, as his daughter squared off with a beast easily twice her size and thrice her weight.
The battle was brutal.
The bear was savage, its strikes heavy enough to cave in boulders. Lin Yao danced around its blows, landing strike after strike, but her movements grew slower with each pass. Blood painted her robes. Her ribs cracked. Her legs buckled. The beast slammed her into a tree, and for a terrifying moment, Adam thought she had died.
But she didn't.
Instead, she screamed—a cry not of pain, but of defiance—and pushed back.
He watched, breathless, as her aura twisted and surged. The dark matter around her condensed and then exploded outward as she stepped into a new realm—Tier 2, the first threshold into masterhood.
She broke through mid-battle.
And only then did Lin Kuan move.
With a blur, he appeared behind the beast and cleaved its head in two, faster than Adam could follow. Blood misted the air.
But his face was stone. No praise. No pride.
He merely turned to his daughter, lying broken on the snow, and said, "You hesitated, if the bear had enough time to stabilize his realm you would've lost you life, fix that."
Then he walked away.
Adam rushed to her side. She was conscious but barely. Her breathing was shallow. Her skin pale.
"You did it," he said quietly, kneeling beside her. "You actually did it."
She didn't respond. Not right away.
Later, back at camp, as she rested and slowly stabilized her realm, Adam sat with her, offering quiet company and occasional jokes that earned faint smiles.
They didn't talk about her father. Adam knew it wasn't something he can casually bring up, instead he decided to wait for her to tell him when she felt ready. For now, he just decided to stay by her side.
Until she was summoned.
Lin Kuan, Instructor Lin, and the two other Master real martial artist that Adam recognized from his padt life called for her late at night.
She left without a word. When she returned, she was different.
Pale. Shaken. Eyes distant.
Adam stepped forward. "Lin—hey. What happened?"
She stopped him with a look. Not anger. Not sorrow. Just… ice and maybe a bit of confusion, she looked somehow lost.
"I'm fine. I just need time to think."
She walked past him without another word.
---
The following days were a haze of cold and silence.
Lin Yao avoided him entirely. No more shared meals. No more quiet sparring matches after dark. She trained alone, hunted alone, ate alone.
And her coldness wasn't borne of arrogance. It was worse than that—it was intentional, as if she were forcing herself to sever something.
It reminded Adam all too much of Nisrine. The soft voice that told him goodbye. The tear that rolled down her cheek before she vanished through the gate.
He clenched his fists. "Not again."
But she didn't look back.
Eventually, the expedition drew to a close. They returned to Bai Village with wagons full of meat, bone, and fur—but Adam felt like he had returned with less than he left with.
Lin Yao vanished into closed-door cultivation.
And Adam… was left outside once more.
For days, he felt aimless, watching his breath fog the windows of his cabin. But that helplessness—that damned helplessness—from his past life returned.
He remembered Bai Village in flames. Remembered the people he couldn't protect. Remembered the way their faces twisted in agony. The way their bodies fell one by one while he stood frozen.
I won't be that person again.
He began training the moment his body recovered.
He fought against the pressure, against the sluggishness of his breakthrough, against the doubts that crept into his thoughts.
Why was she called away? What did they tell her? Why is she acting like I don't exist?
He didn't know.
But he did know one thing: He didn't come back to this world to wallow in pain or drown in someone else's choices.
He came back to change things.
That night, as the cold wind howled outside, Adam stood at the edge of the village and looked up at the mountains beyond.
The Hantian Mountains loomed like frozen titans, unmoving and eternal.
This is the outermost ridge, he thought, suddenly certain. I know it now. I recognize the patterns in the rock. The slope of the valleys. This is where I woke up. The edge of the Forbidden Hantian Mountains.
He placed a hand over his chest.
The darkness—his darkness—was still there. Thick. Pulsing. Alive.
It wasn't just a consequence of death. It was part of him now. And somehow, it followed him from life to life. It carried memory. Pain. Maybe even power.
He closed his eyes.
"I'm going to master you," he whispered to the void inside him. "Whatever you are… I'll make you mine."
He remembered every villager who smiled at him.
And he remembered how each one of them had died.
He won't let that happen again.
Never again.