Above the mountains of the eastern provinces, the stars dimmed—not because of clouds, but because of hesitation.
Something in the heavens had started to blink.
Not in wonder.
But in fear.
Zongyuan Sect remained unaware.
Its disciples still practiced their formations.
Its elders still recited mantras.
The bells still chimed on schedule.
But these motions had grown mechanical.
They no longer meant anything.
As though the sect had become a corpse pretending to breathe.
And beneath its quiet halls, the echo of a name long-erased whispered through the cracks:
Shen Wuqing.
Not spoken.
But remembered.
He sat beneath the gnarled tree in the Forbidden Courtyard, where the roots had grown too ancient to obey the soil.
His eyes were closed.
But he saw everything.
Not through sight.
But through absence.
When a bird flew overhead, he saw it by the shape of sky it interrupted.
When a disciple walked nearby, he perceived them by the scent of fear they didn't know they carried.
When the wind moved through the branches, he did not hear it.
He felt what it had forgotten to say.
A voice broke through the silence.
"You're not meditating," Lan Caixia said.
She had approached without announcement.
Wuqing didn't open his eyes.
"I never was."
She sat beside him. Not too close.
Just within the range of honesty.
"You've changed."
"So has the world."
She hesitated. Then asked what no one else dared.
"Do you even remember who you were?"
A pause.
"I remember the pain of being someone," he said, voice low.
"And now?"
He turned his head slowly, eyes still closed.
"Now I only remember what they took from me."
Caixia looked down.
"The sect… they're starting to forget each other. Names vanish. Lineages collapse. Elders meditate for hours and wake with no memory of the technique."
"I know."
"You're doing this?"
Wuqing finally opened his eyes.
They were not glowing. Not dark.
Just… empty. Like mirrors held too long in a burning room.
"I am not the one devouring," he said.
"Then what is?"
"The silence that made room for me."
In the distant west, a cloaked man knelt before a mirror carved from divine obsidian.
His reflection flickered.
Behind it, an ancient seal pulsed erratically.
"The Void-Devourer… has awakened," the voice from the mirror said.
"And yet… no realm has collapsed."
"Because it does not devour matter. It devours remembrance."
The cloaked man lifted his head.
"Then it must be severed before it becomes myth."
"And how do you sever what has already been forgotten?"
No answer.
In Zongyuan, Elder Yan stood before the Inner Council.
His beard had turned gray overnight.
"The sect is unraveling," he said plainly.
"By what?"
"We don't know."
"Who?"
He paused.
A name lingered on the tip of his tongue.
But when he reached for it, he felt teeth.
Not biting.
Just waiting.
"I… don't remember."
The others murmured.
Only Lan Tianyi dared say it.
"Shen Wuqing."
The moment he spoke the name, two elders fainted.
Another began to vomit water.
The Head Disciple fell to his knees, clutching his chest.
Tianyi watched it all without blinking.
He had said the name every night in secret, just to build resistance.
He did not fear forgetting.
He feared remembering too much.
Back beneath the gnarled tree, Wuqing pressed his palm against the soil.
It did not resist.
He whispered a name.
Not his.
A girl's name.
One of the first he had consumed.
He had tried to forget her.
But part of her had remained.
It lived beneath his fingernails.
In the slight quiver in his breath.
In the way he sometimes hesitated before stepping forward.
And now, it spoke.
"If you keep walking this path… you will become me."
Wuqing did not reply.
Because part of him already had.
Lan Caixia watched from a distance.
She did not understand his cultivation.
Did not understand why the birds avoided him.
Why the ground beneath him never bore prints.
But she understood sorrow.
And Wuqing carried it like armor.
Silent. Invisible.
But always between him and the world.
That night, a scroll exploded in the Archive Hall.
No one had touched it.
It was a genealogy record.
An elder tried to recall what clan it belonged to.
He failed.
Then forgot his own name.
Then fell into a coma.
In a realm beyond mortal perception, a divine being opened its third eye.
It saw the tremble in causality.
The erosion of fate-lines.
And for the first time in a millennium, it uttered a phrase forbidden in the Upper Cosmos:
"A devourer walks without hunger."
Wuqing stood at the boundary of the sect.
Not crossing.
Just watching.
A storm brewed in the distance, but no clouds moved.
He raised a hand.
The rain stopped midair.
Not out of reverence.
But out of confusion.
Even the elements had begun to forget how to reach him.
Behind him, a shadow approached.
It knelt.
"Your path is open," it said.
Wuqing did not look.
"What do you see ahead?" he asked.
The shadow answered.
"Oblivion."
"Good."
He lowered his hand.
The rain resumed.
Only on the world.
Never on him.
Far away, the cloaked man lit a candle.
"I will go," he said.
"Alone?"
"I was born to forget."
"And what will you bring with you?"
The cloaked man smiled faintly.
"A name."
And then it vanished from his lips.
At the heart of Zongyuan, the Sacred Bell cracked.
It rang once.
Then shattered.
It had not been touched.
But it had remembered too much.
And that… was unforgivable.
That night, Shen Wuqing dreamed.
Of a palace with no walls.
Of stars weeping blood.
Of a woman with eyes like frozen time, holding a child she could not name.
He walked past them.
Not out of cruelty.
But because he, too, no longer remembered why it mattered.
When he woke, a single word lingered in his mouth.
He spoke it aloud.
And the air folded in on itself.
He had named something that should never have been born.
And it had heard him.