The temple was not listed in any record, nor spoken of in hushed tavern corners. No cultivator told tales of it. No map dared mark its place. It was a wound buried beneath layers of rot and time, nestled between the folds of a forest that had long stopped growing.
Shen Wuqing found it not through intent, but inevitability.
Like a shadow drawn to another.
He crossed the decaying archway, the air thick with mildew and old blood. The path leading inward was lined with fractured tiles, each one marked with half-formed runes, as though the language that once carved them had been eaten alive. Ivy strangled the outer columns. The statues that once stood guard lay faceless in the dirt.
No birds. No beasts. No sound.
Only the weight of watching.
Within the hollow structure, the light refused to linger. Every beam from the broken ceiling bent away, as though the sunlight itself feared what lay inside.
Wuqing stepped through.
Each footfall echoed like an accusation.
The inner sanctum greeted him with a wall of silence so profound it pressed against his ribs. Dust lay undisturbed. Candles had long since drowned in their own wax. Offerings, molded and forgotten, sat before empty pedestals where idols had once stood proud.
Now only shapes remained. Twisted silhouettes that might have been divine, might have been something else entirely.
He stood before the altar.
Beneath his breath, the world trembled.
A single statue remained untouched—an ancient effigy of a deity long erased from doctrine. Its mouth was sealed shut with iron wire, as if to prevent it from speaking a name that could no longer be heard.
The offering plate before it was empty.
Not because it had been looted.
But because nothing dared offer prayer to something that did not answer.
Wuqing raised a hand and touched the statue's chest. It was cold—not the cold of stone, but the cold of something that remembered being worshipped and had since been abandoned.
He closed his eyes.
And the silence spoke.
Not in words.
In decay.
The floor beneath him pulsed. Not alive, but rotting with memory. The air shifted. Time reversed.
Wuqing was not pulled into illusion—illusions were too clean. What greeted him was far messier.
Fragments.
A temple priest with lips sewn shut.
A congregation of monks who bled from the ears when they chanted.
Scriptures etched into skin, flayed from living bodies.
A voiceless cult that worshipped not power, not salvation, but erasure.
He watched as their final ritual unraveled.
One by one, the monks tore open their throats, trying to release sound.
But none came.
And in their silence, the statue wept.
Black tears. Heavy. Unyielding.
Then… stillness.
Everything stopped.
Wuqing opened his eyes.
The altar had changed.
The statue's iron wire had unraveled.
Its mouth was open.
Not screaming.
Breathing.
He took a step back, but the silence pressed forward.
Something had awakened.
Not with a roar. Not with a blaze.
But with absence.
As if reality had made room for something that should not return.
Wuqing understood.
The prayers had rotted.
But in that rot… a new seed had taken root.
He turned away from the altar and walked deeper into the temple.
Every step pulled him farther from the rules of cultivation.
There were no tribulations here. No breakthroughs. No cheering sect elders waiting outside closed doors.
There was only hunger.
And remembrance.
The corridors wound in impossible directions. Walls shifted behind him. Once, he passed the same mural three times—each time, the figures etched into it had decayed further.
He stopped before a room sealed by silence itself.
No door barred entry. Yet his body would not move.
Because something behind that threshold watched.
He let his breath steady.
He remembered the Skyfire children who had tried to burn him.
He remembered their voices being swallowed whole.
And he stepped through.
The room inside was a crypt.
Bones. Skulls. Fragments of shattered cores. All arranged in a circle around a single object:
A stone basin.
Inside it: darkness.
Not water. Not ink. Not energy.
Just pure, motionless, unshaped darkness.
Wuqing approached.
His footsteps didn't echo here. The space devoured sound instantly.
He stared into the basin.
It stared back.
Then it moved.
Not rippling—but reaching.
A tendril of formless shadow rose from the basin and touched his chest.
Cold.
Sharp.
Ancient.
Then—it entered.
Not violently. Not painfully. Like a memory returning to where it had once belonged.
His breath hitched.
Visions crashed through him.
A battlefield of forgotten names.
A palace beneath a sky with no stars.
A woman singing without a tongue.
A cultivator with a broken dantian who whispered to mountains—and the mountains whispered back.
The origin of the Heaven Devourer was not divine.
It was sacrilege.
Born not to ascend.
But to consume those who did.
He staggered back, gripping his robes.
His veins pulsed with shadow.
Not malevolence.
Certainty.
He understood now.
His path was not an aberration.
It was punishment.
He did not ascend to immortality.
He dragged immortality down.
The basin dimmed.
The room stilled.
He turned and walked out.
The temple didn't resist.
It had given him what he needed.
Not a treasure.
A confirmation.
Outside, the sky had darkened.
Not with storm.
With memory.
The world remembered what had been buried.
And now… it began to fear.
The first raindrop fell—not water, but ash.
He looked to the horizon.
Three days.
The tribunal awaited.
He smiled faintly, not from joy, but from understanding.
Let them judge him.
Let them speak his name with disdain.
Let them pray to gods that had already begun to rot.
Shen Wuqing was not coming to answer.
He was coming to devour.