"Some die, and their souls scatter with their broken flesh.Others die… yet their hearts remain kneeling somewhere, waiting for the day their body returns to take the next step."
Night of the Third Day after the Ritual — Within the Blood Pool of the Ancient Tomb
Lâm Mạc awoke to the sound of dripping blood.
The chill in the air pierced down to the marrow, but colder still was the silence that swallowed the space around him.He lay on a blood-stained stone altar — a sacred slab used solely to erase the souls of traitors and heretics.
Yet he had not died.And he was no longer quite alive, either.
"You have returned…"
A voice echoed faintly in his mind — the same colossal figure cloaked in ash as before.This time, its face remained hidden… but its eyes burned with a dusky golden hue, deep as a bottomless abyss.
"The first death was a trial.The second… is the rite."
"Now… look back."
Suddenly, fragmented memories surged into Lâm Mạc's mind, scattered and out of order — like a broken reel of film.
An unfamiliar gaze beneath the rain, the night he lost everything.A small hand clutching his own, when the sect cast him aside.A white-robed figure passing him by, just as he teetered on the edge of death atop Mount Vô Độ.
Each glimpse came and vanished in an instant.A flicker. Then nothing.
Above the blood pool, all of the Lin Clan's elders had gathered.The clan had convened the Soul-Erasing Ritual — the final ceremony to completely destroy the lingering soul of a cripple who bore a tainted bloodline, ensuring no future calamity.
"A heretical bloodline that defies the Heavenly Dao… must not exist beneath this sky!" one elder declared.
The clan patriarch, Lâm Kình, spoke coldly:
"The blood of Thái Sơ once covered the Eastern Wasteland in ashes.Today, it shall be wiped out beneath this altar."
But they did not know…
The moment Lâm Mạc's body touched the blood pool, something deep within his blood had begun to stir — the ashes answering the call.
Within his sea of consciousness, a gate of ash slowly creaked open.
No tremor. No light.Only layers of ancient runes emerging — floating silently like decaying stardust in the void.
"If you want to live… don't learn how to cultivate.""If you want to survive… learn how to erase everything inside your blood — even your humanity."
His hand trembled.
But then, from within the sea of ash — a voice sang.
Faint. Melancholic.Feminine… perhaps?
He couldn't tell.But the sound awakened the memory of the only warmth he had known in a decade of curses.It was distant… tender… and painfully soft.
"Have I… not lost everything yet?" Lâm Mạc whispered.
The blood pool suddenly began to boil.Its color shifted from deep crimson to a pearly gray — then turned to ash, rising into the air like smoke defying gravity.
The elders recoiled in horror.
"That's… the Reversal of the Thái Sơ Path!""Impossible! A cripple can't possibly—!"
But it was already too late.
From the center of the pool, Lâm Mạc rose.
His hair drifted faintly in the air.His body remained frail — but his eyes… his eyes had become an endless storm of ash, as cold and vast as the void left behind by ancient gods.
No life remained in them.Only a quiet, burning will.
Then, a voice resonated from within his blood:
"Soul Signature detected… Host has entered the Initiation Phase of the Thái Sơ Path of Rebirth.""System Initialization: Ritual Protocol – Beginning Sequence.""First Phase: Dream-Eraser."
"It's not that I want to live…It's that those who died within me—won't let me die."
"If I was born carrying a Dao that the heavens sealed away…Then let me be the first to shatter its curse."