The dagger was still inside her.
His fingers had not loosened.
Blood flowed in thin, deliberate streams from the wound at her throat, tracing the carved grooves in the stone. It did not splatter. It did not pool chaotically. It was guided by channels etched long before they were born.
The hum beneath the floor deepened.
Not louder.
Lower.
Satisfied.
Even though he wasn't physically touching her, he could feel it. Her body was still warm. But he could feel the fading rhythm under her skin. Could feel it diminishing with every pulse of the formation.
He did not pull the blade out.
He did not speak.
His breathing was uneven—shallow inhales that never quite filled his lungs.
The chamber felt larger now.
Empty.
The ticking on the wall continued.
[00:18:07]
It did not stop.
It did not accelerate.
It simply counted.
Slowly, the light in the grooves shifted. The red darkened, thickened—then began to brighten from within. Gold threaded through it, spreading like veins of molten metal through crimson.
Her blood was draining.
Not violently.
Not grotesquely.
Drawn.
Her skin lost color by degrees. The faint flush in her cheeks faded. Her lips, once red, grew pale.
Too pale.
The grooves filled completely.
Every carved line now carried liquid light.
A thin mist began to rise from the formation.
Not steam.
Not smoke.
Something finer.
It shimmered, suspended between substance and memory, curling upward in delicate spirals of grey and red. The air grew dense with it, heavy against Riven's skin.
The dagger slipped from his fingers at last.
It stayed stuck in her throat.
He didn't move it.
The voice returned.
"Sit in the center."
Not loud.
Not harsh.
Not gentle.
Command.
Riven's gaze was stuck to her face.
Her eyes were closed now.
Still.
Her body looked smaller somehow. Lighter. As if something essential had already been taken.
If he refused—
If he walked away—
If he rejected it—
Then she had died for nothing.
So he rose slowly.
His knees protested. His legs felt unsteady.
He stepped away from her.
Each step across the glowing formation felt wrong.
The grooves pulsed beneath his feet as if urging him forward.
He reached the center circle.
Turned once.
Looked at her again.
Then lowered himself into the heart of the formation and sat.
The instant his weight settled—
The chamber ignited.
The mist that had hovered above the grooves shot inward all at once.
Not gently.
Not gradually.
It slammed into him.
Grey-red vapor pierced through skin, through breath, through bone.
Riven gasped—but the sound barely left his throat before the pressure hit.
His skull felt like it was splitting.
The world fractured.
Images tore through him without order, without mercy.
A small girl in a forest—alone.
Cold.
Hungry.
The taste of bark chewed to quiet an empty stomach.
An old woman's silhouette emerging between trees.
A sect gate rising tall and unreachable.
Nights spent training long after others slept.
Blisters splitting open.
Blood on practice stones.
The first time wearing a dress.
Traveling alone with a boy.
Him staring too long.
A flask passing between hands.
A flicker of amusement.
A flicker of warmth.
His own face—distorted through tears—hovering above her as red spread beneath her body.
The images overlapped.
Voices layered.
Her breath.
His breath.
Wind through trees.
Steel striking steel.
Laughter.
Silence.
Too much.
It wasn't like reading memories.
It was drowning in them.
His spine arched as pressure built inside his chest.
Something foreign was entering him.
Qi.
Grey-crimson currents forced their way through his meridians, not asking, not negotiating. They moved like liquid metal poured into channels too narrow to contain it, expanding pathways as they passed.
He felt them carve.
Not tearing flesh—but reshaping routes he hadn't known were incomplete.
His primary meridian lines flared under the intrusion. Secondary branches, long dormant or half-formed, ignited one by one. Threads of foreign qi slipped through intersections his own energy had never touched, mapping him from the inside out.
It reached his right shoulder.
The place where his arm was missing.
Pressed into the hollow absence where meridians ended abruptly in scar tissue and void as if repairing it, before eventually giving up and moving elsewhere.
Fear spiked.
If it entered his dantian—
If her qi, denser, more compressed, foreign in nature, collided with his—
His core would rupture.
His thoughts tried to clamp down.
Tried to redirect it.
But he had no control.
The inheritance moved with its own will.
But not toward his dantian.
Instead of descending—
It rose.
Up the spine.
Into his neck.
Into his skull.
Cold.
Sharp.
Wrong.
Not good.
His vision exploded into white.
The qi gathered behind his eyes, then drove inward, deeper than flesh, deeper than bone—slamming against something unseen.
A barrier.
Thin.
Fragile.
Not meant to be touched yet.
He knew what it was, even as his conscious flickered every time it slammed into this barrier.
The Mind Palace.
A realm of soul awareness that cultivators were only meant to awaken after stepping into the next major realm. The Spirit Refinement Realm.
But he wasn't there yet.
The foreign qi struck again.
The barrier trembled.
A third impact—
And something gave.
A soft, terrible pop.
Not heard with ears.
Felt.
Like a membrane bursting in the center of his being.
Everything went silent.
Then—
He was falling.
Not downward.
Inward.
Darkness stretched infinitely in all directions.
Weightless.
Soundless.
An empty expanse.
In the center of it floated a faint sphere.
Small.
Unsteady.
A cluster of dim, flickering light — like mist condensed into a fragile core. It had no limbs. No face. No shape that resembled a body.
And yet—
He knew.
That was him.
Not his body.
Not his thoughts.
Not his memories.
The thing beneath all of it.
His soul.
Unformed.
Incomplete.
More seed than self. Potential without structure. A beginning that had not yet earned its shape.
Because it hadn't.
It wasn't meant to look like anything yet. He wasn't supposed to be here. The Mind Palace was a space cultivators only properly stepped into after reaching the next major stage — and then refined until their soul developed its own characteristics.
His hadn't.
It was raw.
Just a core of pale light trembling in endless dark.
Then the grey-crimson qi appeared.
It manifested everywhere at once — threads of foreign essence drifting through the void like veins of colored smoke in still water.
It felt different here.
Not just like qi.
They converged toward the sphere.
Toward him.
The moment the first strand touched the surface of the light—
Pain.
Not physical.
Existential.
If he had to compare it to something, it would be like having his fingernails ripped out.
Like a blade carving slowly through bone.
Like ice driven into the marrow of his spine.
But even that fell short.
Because those pains belonged to the body.
This was deeper.
It felt like someone was peeling the surface off his very self — scraping at the boundary between "him" and "not him."
The sphere convulsed violently, its edges tearing and reforming as the foreign qi pressed inward.
If his body had been there, he would have been screaming.
If his lungs existed in this place, they would have ruptured from the strain.
Instead—
The pain had nowhere to go.
It didn't dissipate.
It didn't echo.
It just existed.
Amplified.
A hundred times worse than any wound he had ever taken.
And it did not stop.
The threads did not hesitate.
They pushed.
Deeper.
One after another, grey-crimson strands drove into the trembling sphere of pale light.
Each intrusion tore something open.
Each tear burned.
The surface of his soul warped under the pressure, dim light flaring wildly as if trying to reject the invasion. But the qi like substance did not scatter.
It anchored.
The strands began to weave.
Not randomly.
Deliberately.
Lines carved themselves across the sphere — thin at first, then deepening, etching into his very essence. The pain sharpened as the pattern took form, like a heated brand being pressed against bare flesh.
Except this flesh was identity.
Self.
The mark grew clearer.
Curved lines.
Intersecting strokes.
Something almost elegant.
Almost—
Riven tried to recoil, but there was nowhere to move in the void.
The brand flared once—
And began to take shape.
The lines locked into place with a violent pulse.
Light surged through the carving—
And something answered from within him.
A connection was established.