**Chapter 2 — The Root That Should Not Be**
The black tendril coiled tighter around Lucien's ribs with every trembling breath. It pulsed in rhythm with his heart, not feeding on blood, but something deeper: despair, silence, memory. Another tendril budded beside it—thicker, darker—splitting off like a forked tongue. Lucien's vision blurred, his skin cold, but it wasn't pain that gripped him. It was transformation.
He felt the world shift. Not physically. Spiritually. As though some veil had torn. He fell to one knee, breath hitching, and the ancient stones beneath him began to glow faintly with forgotten glyphs. Not enough to illuminate—just enough to *remind*. Remind him that something older than fate once lived here.
Then, like dust lifting from a slumbering tome, a **vision** unfolded.
---
The ruins were whole again.
He stood at the heart of a radiant temple—the same one, but untouched by time. Spirit-banners flowed in unseen winds. Celestial lanterns hovered, casting prismatic light across the chamber. Disciples in starlit robes knelt in meditation circles, glowing from within as starlight wove into their bodies.
Lucien could *see* their roots—not just physical, but metaphysical. **Fate Roots**, the divine anchors gifted by Heaven at birth or through awakening, each unique in shape and affinity.
A golden-haired girl meditated beneath a spirit tree. Her root grew like blossoming sakura petals made of light, each one singing a note only fate could hear. This was a **Qi Bloom Root**. Through it, she cultivated harmony, growing weapons and armor from divine flora. Even her sword shimmered with living vines.
Another youth, eyes closed, stood on thin air. Constellations circled his wrists, each pulse aligning with a star above. His **Celestial Pulse Root** allowed him to absorb astral rhythms—his very breath calibrated to the heavens. Each exhale summoned light. Each step moved with cosmic law.
And then there was the boy cloaked in silence. Eyes like eclipses. Skin marked with void sigils. His root was not bright. It was *still*. Heavy. A **Gravemarked Root**. Lucien watched him lift a boulder with no hands—just the pressure of his presence bending gravity.
These were Heaven's children.
And then the vision cracked.
---
Lucien gasped, reality rushing back. The temple was again a ruin, overgrown and forgotten. The spirit tree had rotted. The banners were ash. The starlit disciples were corpses buried in moss.
And he? He was never meant to be among them.
---
But something pulsed beneath the bones of the earth.
The statue before him—a broken figure holding a rusted sword—vibrated faintly. Not with life, but with *resonance*. Lucien didn't move. He just *listened*. And in the silent void, a whisper crawled through him:
> *"Pluck the thread of the forlorn."*
He extended his hand. Not physically. Inwardly. Spiritually. His **Hollow Root**, invisible but coiled within him, stretched out like a parasite, a black vine weaving toward the statue's base. He felt it latch onto something fragile.
A **fate-thread**.
Faint. Cracked. Nearly gone.
The dream of a fallen cultivator, long since perished, but not yet erased.
The thread fought. Weakly. Then broke.
Lucien reeled.
Visions not his own stabbed into his mind: A lone warrior on a cliff. A blade flashing under moonlight. A single name spoken to the stars before death claimed him.
He knew the name now.
He knew the technique.
It was not complete.
It was *enough*.
His hand moved.
A phantom sword slash tore through the air, not powerful, but precise. A ripple of wind followed it. The stone before him cracked, a clean diagonal line. The motion faded, the knowledge slipping, decaying like a dream upon waking.
> "Your dream died," he murmured. "I wear its bones."
The Hollow Root pulsed with satisfaction.
The first stage had begun:
**Thread-Gathering.**
---
Lucien fell to his knees again, not in pain but *revelation*. He could see them now—the forgotten threads. Dozens. Hundreds. Each a story that never reached its climax. The dreams of the discarded. The paths of those who failed.
Where prodigies channeled Heaven's will, Lucien would channel *regret*.
His root would not grow upward toward divinity.
It would spiral downward into the void.
From the shadows of the broken temple came another whisper:
> "You are not granted destiny. You *bind* it.
> You do not reach toward the stars.
> You hollow them out and wear their masks."
Stage two awakened:
**Hollow-Binding.**
A technique etched itself into his bones. It had no name. Just a sensation—the knowledge that he could temporarily *become* what another was *meant* to be. A flicker of skill. A surge of memory. He could borrow the scent of greatness from a forgotten corpse.
It would not last long.
It would not be clean.
But it would *work*.
---
Far from the ruins, in the Virethorn estate's marble halls, a boy in violet robes trained beneath moonlight.
**Elan Virethorn** was everything Lucien was not. Blessed with a **Heavenroot Affinity**, his cultivation had bloomed by age ten. Now seventeen, he stood among the top ranks of the Golden Lantern Academy. His swordplay was elegant, his qi refined, his posture regal.
He paused, staring at the stars.
> "Why do I feel uneasy?" he muttered.
His sparring partner, a noble girl from House Miraxis, chuckled. "Perhaps your cousin's failure weighs on you."
Elan's eyes narrowed. "Lucien is not my cousin. He is a scar on our name."
"And yet..."
Elan sheathed his blade. "I sensed something severed. Something wrong in the flow of fate."
He looked to the east. Toward the ruins where Lucien had been cast.
For a moment, he swore the stars there flickered.
---
Night deepened, and with it, the air thickened. Lucien wandered beyond the temple's ruins, toward a dead glade where moonlight dared not touch. The Hollow Root within him pulsed, hungering. It sensed something nearby.
A low snarl echoed through the trees.
From the mist emerged a spirit beast—mangy and twisted, but still dangerous. Its form was that of a night-stalker, a wolf-shaped predator made of smoke and shadow, eyes glowing red with old hatred. A **Low-tier Wraithfang**, often used as trial beasts for first-stage cultivators.
Lucien should've fled.
But the Hollow Root urged forward.
The beast lunged, claws shimmering with spiritual venom.
Lucien moved—not fast, but with intent. He reached inward, pulling on the newly bound thread from the fallen sword cultivator. Pain screamed through his bones as another's memory surged into his limbs.
He was no longer himself.
For a breath, he was a swordsman.
He stepped aside, pivoted, and slashed with nothing but his fingers extended—tracing the shape of a phantom blade. The air hissed. The beast yelped, struck along its flank by a cut it couldn't see.
Lucien gasped, knees buckling. The echo of the bound technique was already fading.
But the beast was wounded—and furious.
It circled.
Lucien gathered another thread—this one from a shattered bow at the edge of the glade. A hunter's regret. A missed shot. A dead son.
He pulled it in, feeling the archer's last breath.
When the Wraithfang charged again, Lucien leapt to the side, fingers mimicking a draw. A shard of spirit-light flared from his palm, piercing the beast's eye.
The creature howled, thrashed, then fell.
It did not vanish. It crumbled into spirit dust, returning to the forest.
Lucien collapsed beside it, panting.
> "I am no swordsman.
> I am no hunter.
> But I remember the dead.
> And they fight through me."
The Hollow Root stirred like a pleased serpent.
In the heavens, a flicker passed through the threads of fate, unnoticed by the divine.
But the forgotten roots below the earth? They trembled.
---
Lucien stood beneath the open sky, the wind cold against his skin.
He had no spirit weapon.
No bloodline technique.
No ancestral guidance.
Just a black tendril growing behind his ribs, pulsing with hunger, bound to the **bones of forgotten fate**.
He was not gifted.
He was *cursed*.
And yet, in the quiet, he whispered:
> "The world will remember me.
> Not as a light.
> But as the thing that swallowed it."