Chapter 3 — Let the Worm Return to the Apple
The village of Vale's Hollow had not changed.
It still reeked of wet wood and ancestral failure, of lanterns lit by trembling hands and homes built on graves. The paths were narrow, like the people who walked them. Crooked beams bent under mildew. Fog rolled low, caressing the knees of barefoot children who ran without dreams.
Lucien stepped through the mist like a ghost retracing his own death.
Behind him, the trees whispered of his return. In front of him, the villagers fell quiet, their eyes sharpening into spears of suspicion. He wore no robes. No crest. Just torn cloth and a strange gleam beneath his skin—like the world's moldiest fruit, freshly unearthed.
"Isn't that the Virethorn boy?" someone whispered.
"No," said another. "The Virethorn boy had eyes like ash. This one looks like they forgot to die."
A child pointed. "Why does the shadow around him crawl?"
Lucien passed them without a word.
He walked through the village square where fate-roots had once been measured and displayed like prized cattle. A stone slab in the center still bore the symbols of old cultivator clans: Bloom, Pulse, Ember, Mirror, and Star. His name had never been carved there.
Not worth the chisel.
He turned his head, slowly, to the side. The bakery was still there—old man Firen's place. Firen, who once threw hot ash at him for lingering too long near the warmth. Lucien stepped to the side, and sure enough, the old man peered through the curtain.
Their eyes met.
Lucien smiled. Just a little.
Firen stumbled back and dropped a tray of bread.
"They cast me out," Lucien thought, "but forgot to close the door.
Now the wind howls through their bones, and they call it 'ominous.'"
At the edge of the village stood the Virethorn manor. Less a home, more a monument to diluted nobility. The gates were rusted. The garden had withered into thorn and weed.
Lucien stepped through the open gate like a thief with nothing left to steal.
The halls echoed. His footsteps sounded different now. Less like skin. More like echo wrapped in sinew. He passed portraits of ancestors who never looked down on him in life, but sneered perfectly in oil.
A voice echoed from above.
"You have some nerve."
Lucien looked up the staircase.
A boy leaned against the marble banister. Robes embroidered with silver moons. Sword at his hip. Hair tied into a noble's knot, though not a strand was out of place.
Cael Virethorn.
Not Elan. The younger cousin. The spare. The mouth.
"Did the dead forget to bury you?" Cael smirked.
Lucien tilted his head. "Still the same air in your lungs, I see. Shame it didn't take you with it."
"You walk like a corpse."
"I am. But corpses don't bow, cousin."
Cael stepped down, voice tightening. "We thought you'd scatter in the wind. And yet here you are, slinking back. Hoping for pity?"
Lucien's smile was thin.
"If I came back for pity, I'd have worn perfume."
Cael's hand moved toward his sword, but stopped.
Something in the air shifted—subtle, like a ripple in still water. Not qi. Not pressure. Just a presence that didn't belong to fate. His fate-root, once silver-threaded and refined, hissed against something unseen.
He took a step back.
Lucien stepped forward. "This house was built on rot. I've come to finish the feast."
He left the boy in silence and took a room that had once been a storeroom for training scrolls. Dust greeted him like an old lover. He sat, cross-legged, and let the Hollow Root coil tighter in his gut.
Beneath his ribs, another thread pulsed. A weak regret from one of the manor's fallen guards—an old man who once dreamed of becoming a swordmaster but died cleaning blood from Cael's shoes.
Lucien devoured the thread like marrow.
The ghost of a parry flickered through his bones.
"Even your servants dreamt louder than you," he muttered. "I'll wear them louder."
The Sect That Watches the Ashes
News traveled faster than light in cultivation realms. Especially when the light was gossip wrapped in fear.
The next morning, a black-robed stranger arrived on the village's back road. He bore the emblem of a half-shattered mirror, sharp edges dripping with bloodlight.
The Ashen Mirror Sect had noticed.
They always noticed when something twisted the threads of fate. Especially when it began in the gutter.
The stranger stood before the village's spirit shrine and touched a broken wardstone.
"It stirs," he said quietly. "The Root that should not exist."
Behind him, another stepped forward—an older woman with moon-pale eyes and fingers that dripped ink.
"Do we erase it?"
He smiled.
"No. Not yet. We observe. Let the worm eat deeper. Let it show us the weakness in the fruit."
They turned toward the manor.
In the training fields beyond the estate, a girl spun a staff in wide arcs. Her movements were clean, sharp—too precise to be merely decorative.
Her name was Sylen Morr, and she had been sent to train under the Virethorn name by the Ashen Mirror Sect. An outsider. Watching. Judging.
Her fate-root shimmered faintly when she moved: Glassthread Root, a delicate but powerful form that allowed her to see microfractures in reality—weak points, fault lines, the paths of collapse.
And yet, she couldn't read Lucien.
The moment he stepped onto the field to walk past her, her root recoiled.
Not in fear. In confusion.
He carried no destiny. No trajectory. He was not just unreadable. He was blank.
She paused mid-form, watching him pass.
"You walk like you've already fallen," she said softly.
Lucien didn't look at her.
"I have. Now I'm looking for someone to land on."
She watched him disappear into the distance.
"What kind of root binds to nothing?" she wondered.
The Mirror Stares Back
That night, Lucien stood before an ancient pool beneath the manor grounds—once used for fate-reflection ceremonies. It had long since dried up, cracked and forgotten.
But he could feel it. The pull.
He knelt and pressed his palm to the dust.
The Hollow Root surged, tendrils spreading beneath the ground like rot reclaiming a corpse. From the stone below, threads rose—faint, brittle echoes.
One. Two. Seven.
Each a fragment of someone forgotten. Each a regret not screamed loud enough to leave a mark.
He pulled them in.
Visions passed.
A girl betrayed by her master.
A boy who failed his breakthrough and burned alive.
A soldier who died begging to be remembered.
A child who only ever wanted to fly.
He didn't weep.
He laughed.
"So many dreams… trampled, swallowed, discarded.
And yet they scream louder than the ones who 'succeeded.'"
He stood, body flickering with new tension.
The air shimmered.
For a moment, the tendrils of his Hollow Root slithered into view—twisting around his spine, black and hungry.
Cael, watching from the corridor above, recoiled.
He could see them.
Not clearly—but enough to know.
Lucien was not cultivating.
He was becoming something else.
As dawn approached, a knock echoed through the Virethorn gates.
Not a peasant.
Not a beggar.
A courier from the Ashen Mirror Sect, dressed in ceremonial red and gold. She held a scroll sealed with bone wax.
Lucien answered it himself.
She handed it over, staring at him just a moment too long.
"You smell like an unburied secret," she said.
Lucien opened the scroll.
"Lucien Virethorn is summoned to the Ashen Mirror Sect.
To be observed, measured, and weighed.
Fate denied you—but we do not.
Come, and be judged."
Lucien grinned, crumpling the scroll in his palm.
"Let them watch.
The stars watched too.
Look how well they turned out."
He stepped back into the manor, leaving the scroll to burn in the lantern flame.