She asked again, her voice like a storm breaking through silk, "Who are you?" The question tore through the calm air, trembling like an old wound reopening. She had crossed heaven's punishment for him once, broken through the Veil of Karma, and even now, she was at a loss, uncertain of his identity. Her anger wasn't born of hate, but of ache. She had suffered for a nameless brat whose identity she did not even know.
The boy blinked, scratching his head with an innocent helplessness. "I… forgot."
For a heartbeat, her breath stilled. Then, with a sigh, she pressed her palm to her forehead as if steadying the world. "Indeed… you forgot. I also forgot about it..."
He tilted his head, confused. "What did you forgot, miss?"
She looked away, eyes still bound beneath that crimson silk. Her lips trembled. "You will remember. In time. But something is not right with you. The threads around you… they're not whole."
He frowned, trying to understand. "Are you angry, miss? I didn't mean to… I just can't remember anything. My name, where I was… it's all hurting. Hurting—"
"Enough," she said sharply, cutting him off. "Sit down. Silence."
He obeyed, sitting cross-legged on the cloud. The soft white beneath him shifted like breath. After a pause, he spoke again, timidly, "If I made you angry, I'm sorry. I just… I don't know why, but when I look at you, I feel like I'm remembering something. Like I woke up from a dream, and you were there at the edge of it. That's why I stared."
Her silence was heavier than her words. He waited, then asked, "Miss… I forgot my name. But what's yours?"
She turned her blindfolded gaze toward him. The silk ribbon fluttered faintly in the wind. "Just shut up," she said, but her voice cracked slightly. "Your presence is hurting me."
The boy smiled faintly, lowering his head. "Sorry. I understand. I won't bother you anymore." He gripped his wooden sword tightly, its warmth anchoring him as he closed his eyes, letting the silence breathe between them.
Then the world trembled. A low rumble rose like thunder under the sea, and when he opened his eyes, he saw it. A wall of water, a colossal wave rising beyond the horizon, swallowing sky and cloud alike, racing toward them with the roar of collapsing heavens.
"Miss—!"
Before he could finish, she turned sharply. With a single motion, she kicked backward. The force was immense, the cloud beneath him exploded, sending him flying through the air like a leaf in a storm.
He screamed, "Ahhhhh—! What was that for?!"
As he fell, the roar of the tsunami grew louder. The air around him cracked with lightning; shards of ice and mist formed strange symbols in the air, seals of divine defense, breaking apart as the wave came closer.
The woman hovered above, her robe billowing like red smoke, her fingers moving swiftly in mudras. She thought to herself, "Foolish child… even the heavenly ones dare not touch this cursed water, yet he dives straight into it."
The tsunami struck with a thunderclap. He plunged downward, but before he could vanish beneath the dark water, he saw the reflection of the wave's true form. It wasn't water at all. It was a massive serpent coiled within the current, its scales like mirrors, its eyes like whirlpools of stars.
The creature opened its maw. Inside, temples and broken bells floated like bones. He slashed his sword downward, striking the serpent's reflection, but it was like cutting through memory. The wave shattered into hundreds of phantom beasts, dragons made of mist, whales of lightning, cranes with molten wings, all circling around him.
From above, the woman released a glowing seal, five rings of red light spinning around her. Each ring turned into a sigil, burning with the words of Heaven. "Disperse, forgotten spirits," she chanted softly.
Her guzheng appeared in her hands, strings humming with divine resonance. She struck once — the note split the air. The beasts cried out in pain and light burst across the sky.
He, still falling, shouted upward, "That was beautiful!"
Her face hardened. "You fool!" she shouted. "Don't talk, move!"
Before he could, the serpent's tail, made of cloud and salt, lashed upward again. She vanished from sight, reappearing near him, eyes still closed, fury blazing in silence. With one graceful hand, she caught his collar mid-fall, spun him in the air, and threw him back onto a small patch of floating cloud.
"Stay," she said coldly, forming another seal. The cloud rose around him like a cocoon, binding his body in strands of vapor, leaving only his head free.
He sighed, half-laughing, half-tired. "You know, miss… every time I meet you, I nearly die. Maybe it's fate."
....
After some time, she said nothing at first, only toyed with the wooden hat in her hands as if it were a puzzle piece. He watched her fingers trace the grain, small movements that hid a calculation. Then, abruptly, she looked up and offered, flat as a blade, "Sell it to me. I'll give you a fair price."
The words landed where words always had: against the hollow places in him. He felt them as a small stab. Don't take my things, he thought, this was given to me. "No," he said finally, slow and stubborn. "It was given to me. Money won't buy me anything out here. I'll make my own when I have land."
Her lips twitched into a smile that was neither kind nor cruel. "You brought it from the island," she observed. "That hat… it has an aura. Objects like this belong to cultivators who toy with demonic arts. They carry seeds of karma." She paused, then studied him with a clinical coldness. "But you? Useless. Your sandhis are blocked. No demonic aura to speak of. What you have is heavy karma, an anchor. That is why the pillars and beasts seek us. Because of you, the skies tear. Because of you, I am touched. If I stay tied to you long enough, I will be poisoned. I should kill you. But first, let me see your memory."
Before he could protest, before the word fear could even form in his throat, her hands closed on his head. Her fingers were cool, then electric. She pressed her palms to his temples and drew in, like a diver inhaling. Energy hummed along her arms; the guzheng at her back thrummed in sympathetic resonance. He felt the world slip sideways and then peel apart.
Inside his mind she found not a map of childhood streets or the carved faces of his parents, but a vast, black plain, a place without horizon, without sound. She materialized there as an illusionary body: her robes a ripple in midnight air, her blindfold still bound but somehow seeing. She stretched both hands forward and made the eye-gesture she used when reading souls: index and thumb joined, palms forming a ring. An array awoke at her command, six eyes, concentric, rotating in a slow, hypnotic orbit. Sanskrit letters spiralled from the rims, names of bindings and lores no living man remembered how to pronounce.
She pushed her soul-energy into the array and tried to read. Nothing answered. The emptiness was not mere absence; it was a seal, thick and viscous, like oiled black smoke that swallowed light. She tried again, harder. The eyes whirred faster, the letters burning brighter, but each probe met only the same choking dark. She felt, for the first time in years, the cold claw of utter null: no memory, no trace, no faint ember to pull.
"Impossible," she muttered. "He has no cultivation root. He never even began." The thought was a blade. She tried to retract, to pull back her spirit and found the exit blocked. Panic flared small and human at the edges of her craft. She struck and found only resistance, the kind that bruised the soul.
Her hands moved in a cyclone of mudras. The guzheng answered instantly, a string plucked became a blade, a chord spun into a shield. She struck three notes in a burst that the old songs called the "Crimson Lotus Seal" - but nothing happens... only echo was heard all over the plane.
She realized then that mere sound and seal would not unveil what had been walled by fate. This was not a simple veil; it was a karmic knot, braided of debts and oaths.
She drew her palm across the edge of a rune on her sash. The silk shimmered; an old, dangerous warmth rose beneath her skin. Without hesitation she pierced the pad of her thumb with a hairpin and let dark-red bead after bead fall. Each drop hissed as it touched the void; where blood hit, the black cloud recoiled like a beast's nostril smelling iron. Her face remained composed, but something like fear showed — not for her body, but for the price.
"Bloodroot Veil," she whispered, as her own life-force braided into the array. The six rotating eyes widened and turned inward, the Sanskrit letters whirling into a lattice. The moment her essence entered, it felt endless, an abyss without shape or light, only silence that seemed to breathe. She drifted deeper, her soul-thread trembling. Nothing… it's empty, she thought, confusion pricking her awareness. She turned, trying to withdraw, but her soul was caught, as if invisible hands gripped her from every direction.
Panic began to build. She tried again, again, pouring her energy outward, clawing at the walls of that mindscape, but every time she struck, the world merely shivered and absorbed the blow. In desperation, she unleashed Soul Pulse – Mirror Break, a burst of pure spirit-light meant to shatter illusions. Instead, black smoke erupted from the cracks, oily and writhing, wrapping around her arms like sentient shadows.
"What is this…?" she gasped. The smoke pulsed as if alive. Her voice echoed infinitely. No answer came—only her own distorted tone repeating from the dark: What… is… this…
Then the world trembled. The nothingness tore apart, splitting cleanly down the middle. On one side, a blinding white expanse stretched endlessly. On the other, a pit of pure black mist coiled and screamed like a living storm. From each half, an eye opened, white in the black, black in the white, vast as stars yet focused wholly on her.
Their gaze pierced through her, burning into her soul. Her consciousness quivered. The two voices spoke at once, overlapping, whispering and roaring:
"Kill him… kill him…"
The sound alone made her body convulse. Her veins turned cold, her heart hammering with alien rhythm. She could feel her own body, her real one, far away, trembling, possessed. A surge of Demonic Qi crawled from her chest outward, burning her meridians, dyeing her aura crimson.
"No… no, this isn't mine!" she screamed, forcing her will against the invading force. But the eyes were watching. They widened, and suddenly, she saw visions, her own memories twisted. A dark vortex yawned open beneath her feet, sucking in everyone she had ever known. Their faces, once kind, now smiled grotesquely as they vanished into the blackness, laughing and waving at her like broken puppets.
She tried to pull free, but the laughter became unbearable. Her mind shattered like glass, then she was thrown out, rejected violently from that mind-realm.
Her eyes snapped open. Blood gushed from her nose, her lips, her ears. Her veins glowed faintly red, pulsing like worms beneath her skin. Her own spirit energy went berserk, spiralling without control. Then, before she could gather her breath, her consciousness shifted again.
The air turned heavy, perfumed with iron and silk. When her vision cleared, she stood inside the Red Silk Realm.
The world stretched infinitely, stitched together with threads of living scarlet. The ground shimmered like woven fabric, and above her hung endless strands of red silk, each strand pulsing faintly, dripping blood. And within those folds… she saw them. Her relatives. Friends. Masters. Their bodies were suspended like puppets, sewn to the air by threads through their skin and eyes, their faces frozen in smiles that didn't belong to them, eyes are made by red threads, they are staring her like a void.
She staggered back, bile rising in her throat. The silk pulsed faster, responding to her fear.
From the mist ahead, another figure emerged—herself.
Same face. Same robes. But this one's eyes burned with demonic red flame, her guzheng slung across her arms, its strings humming like the whispers of the dead. Around her feet, the red threads danced like serpents.
"Welcome back," the doppelgänger said, voice layered with echoes. "Shall we finish the melody?"
The true woman tried to summon her soul energy, forming the Heaven Vein Barrier, but the ground beneath her split open. From the silk, red silk version pulled a body. A bound woman rose, young, trembling, as if just born. The silk itself was stitching her clothes, winding around her limbs, sewing life into her flesh.
"Anrong!" the real one shouted, recognizing her in horror. "Go away from her! Don't touch her—!"
The red-silk version smiled, fingers brushing her guzheng. The air shrieked. The first string snapped, yet the sound became a blade—"Blood Sonata: First Note – Crimson Lament"—tearing the space between them. The world pulsed like a heart, silk threads tightening.
Real one dashed forward, screaming, soul light burning—
but the red silk above began to move. Something huge was stirring within the weave. Faces formed, overlapping, whispering her name from every direction.
And then she saw, hanging at the centre of the realm, her mother's face, half-cut, half-sewn, eyes still wet with tears.
The guzheng's next note trembled.
The silk began to close in.
.........
The red silk woman twisted her head the way a broken doll's neck might turn, unnatural, clicking and it came toward real one with a smile that did not belong to any human face. Blood seeped from the anrong's mouth, a slow, obscene bead that hung like a crimson bead on porcelain. Rage detonated inside Real one; it was hotter than fear, sharper than grief. "I will kill you, you bitch… you… you… you killed Anrong." Her voice tore like a guzheng string.
She ripped the instrument free, fingers finding the strings as if they belonged to her veins. She poured every shard of her soul into one desperate strike—Guzheng Maelstrom: Shattering Overture—and hurled the spun chords like knives. The strings became razors of light and blood, slicing through the red mist in arcs that sang with a high, metallic pain.
The fake raised a hand, palm open, and the attack dropped harmlessly at her feet as if halted by glass. Her grin widened; she flicked an index finger and a slender rope of silk rolled from her fingertip like a tongue. It ran across the air and, with the patience of a seamstress, crawled up to the impostor's own face. The silk slid under the mouth, cleaved upward, slow, clinical and split her head from one eye to the other. The severed half, skin and hair and the suggestion of a heart, tumbled end over end and was thrown at Real one.
Seeing that detached, still-living half-portrait of the woman she loved, Real one's anger roared into something animal. "It's an illusion only… I know... I know it was just an illusion... I will tear you apart… I will not allow my heart-demon to control me… I will kill you…." She lunged, a comet of bone and will, but the severed head exploded like a pod. Silk poured out, thread after thread, writhing and sticky, catching her ankles and wrists before her boots met the embroidered ground.
"Rest," the devil sang in a voice stitched from wind and rust, "I am taking your body now… rest well… I will eat you soon." The silk tightened like a noose. It smelled of iron and old incense.
To be Continued…