He awoke beneath a dead sky.
The trees overhead were not trees, not anymore. They were blackened bones of something ancient, their limbs twisted in agony, reaching toward stars that had long since stopped shining. The wind did not move. It watched.
He did not know his name.
His hands were torn. His robes, tattered. The faint glow of a rune pulsed beneath his skin like an echo of a forgotten fire. His body trembled, but his eyes were still—gray-gold, flecked with ember, as if something in him refused to extinguish.
Around him lay the bones of beasts. He could not remember killing them.
He could not remember anything at all.
Not who he was.Not where he came from.Not why his chest burned with a heat that did not belong to the windless night.
Only that he had survived something terrible.
And that he was alone.
The land stretched endlessly. Forests without birdsong. Rivers that ran black with memory. The sun never rose fully—only dimmed the darkness slightly. This place was not cursed. It was forgotten.
The old ones had called it the Withering Wilds, the place where sects died and beasts went to dream of blood.
He didn't know that. But his body did.
It moved without asking.
He scavenged bark from whispering trees. He drank from a stream that shimmered with the color of old silver. He stitched a wound on his side with thorns and spider thread. He built fire by instinct, not memory. It burned violet for a moment before dimming.
On the third night, the first beast came.
It was not made of flesh. It was shaped from something colder than shadow and older than fear. It crawled on too many limbs and spoke in a voice that mimicked crying.
He fought it with a jagged stone and a stolen branch.
He did not win.
But he did not die.
When the creature finally fled into the trees, bleeding black into the earth, he collapsed beside the embers of his fire. The flame flared once—unnaturally, knowingly—then settled back into silence.
And then the voice came.
It did not speak aloud.
It spoke into him, like a thought buried too deep to dig up by accident.
"Rebooting… soul-path detected."
His vision blurred.
Rings of flame spun across his eyes. The air around him warped.
Then, as if drawn from breath itself, a translucent panel of mirrored glyphs shimmered into existence before him. A fractured interface. A broken system. A piece of something divine, ruined and bleeding.
Soul Mirror: [Anomaly]
— Core Analysis...— Identity: Fragmented— Name: [Redacted]— Elemental Affinity: Flame (Unstable), Lightning (Sealed)— Talent: Undetermined— Beastlink: Dormant— Cultivation Realm: Undefined
New Trait Acquired: Instinctive SurvivorNew Title Acquired: The Ash-Woken
Memory Recovery: 0.7%
Warning: Subject has entered a realm outside the cycle of fate. Tracking failure. No celestial threads attached.
The screen cracked and vanished.
He breathed once, and the wind breathed with him.
On the fourth day, he found the ruin.
Stone steps buried in vine and frost led into the ground, where banners torn by time still hung over doorways carved with sigils too old to read. A sect, long ago. Now nothing more than moss and whispers.
But something stirred beneath.
Not anger. Not even memory.
A hunger.
He stood at the broken gate and felt the ash burn under his skin again. As if the ground recognized him. As if the place he had never seen before was waiting for his return.
He stepped inside.
The air shimmered. Glyphs sparked along the walls. His vision blurred.
And in the center of the great hall, atop a dais of shattered obsidian, sat a broken brazier.
Cold. Empty.
He touched it.
Flame bloomed. Not red. Not blue.
But white.
And in the fire's reflection, he saw a boy with no name, standing in a land that did not want him alive.
He saw himself.
And he whispered—not a memory, but a promise.
"If the world won't give me a name, I'll burn one into it."
Outside, in the distance, the beasts of the Wilds stirred.
In the heavens above, a divine eye opened—and blinked.
And in the black forests of the world's edge, something ancient smiled.