Night pressed its cool face against the world like a lover who'd forgotten how to be gentle. Moonlight spilled across the fields in silver waves, painting everything in shades of bone and shadow. An ancient autumn tree on the ridge bowed its brittle limbs to a wind that only ever knew how to come from the north, its leaves whispering secrets to the darkness. Mountains kept their silence, standing like old gods who had stopped answering petitions centuries ago, their peaks cutting sharp lines against the star-scattered sky.
In a low, thatched hut at the edge of the village, the air had gone thin and cold.
Zhung woke to pain.
Not the sharp, immediate agony of fresh injury, but the deep, grinding ache of bones trying to knit themselves back together, of flesh that had been torn and roughly stitched, of a body that wanted to heal but lacked the resources to do it properly. His left arm hung heavy in its crude sling, a dead weight against his side that pulsed with every heartbeat.
He tried to sit up. Failed. The world tilted sideways, nausea rolling through his stomach. Sweat broke across his forehead despite the cold.
*Three days,* he counted, testing his memory against the fog of pain. *Three days since the wolves. Mother returns tomorrow.*
Tomorrow. The word felt like a deadline, like a noose tightening around his neck.
He forced himself upright through sheer stubborn will, biting down on a scream as the movement sent lightning through his shattered arm. The room spun. He waited for it to stop, breathing carefully through his nose, counting each breath until the world steadied.
Getting dressed one-handed proved to be its own special torture.
He fumbled with his shirt, trying to guide his injured arm through the sleeve. The fabric caught on the bandages. He pulled. The bandages shifted, and fresh blood seeped through the linen, warm and wet against his skin.
"Fuck," he whispered—the adult curse feeling strange in his child's mouth, but entirely appropriate for the situation.
He started over. Slower this time. Left the injured arm out of the sleeve entirely, draping the fabric over his shoulder instead. His fingers shook from effort and pain as he tried to tie the simple knot that would hold the shirt closed.
The knot defeated him.
He stared at the loose fabric, at his trembling right hand, at the useless weight of his left arm, and felt something hot and terrible building in his chest. Not quite tears—he was too dehydrated for tears—but something worse. Frustration that bordered on despair.
*I lived three hundred years in a dream,* he thought with bitter clarity. *Mastered techniques that could split mountains. Taught disciples who became legends. And now I can't tie my own fucking shirt.*
He laughed then—a small, broken sound that belonged to no child.
*Stop,* he commanded himself coldly. *Emotion is waste. Problem-solve.*
He examined the situation with forced calm: two pieces of fabric, one functional hand, the need to secure them together. He couldn't tie a knot, but he could use his teeth.
He held one end of the fabric in his mouth, pulled the other with his right hand, and slowly—painfully—worked the material into something resembling a knot. It was ugly and loose and would probably come undone within an hour, but it held.
"Victory," he muttered through fabric-clenched teeth, and meant it.
The small triumph carried him through the next series of challenges: finding water to drink (spilling half), eating yesterday's rice (cold and hard, but calories), and changing the bandages on his arm with supplies he'd hidden beneath the floorboards.
That last task nearly broke him.
The old bandages had stuck to the wound, dried blood acting like glue. He had to soak them in water, then peel them away slowly, feeling each fiber separate from raw flesh. The pain was transcendent—white-hot and all-consuming, pushing him to the edge of consciousness.
He didn't allow himself to scream. Screaming would alert neighbors. Neighbors would ask questions. Questions would lead to his mother finding out what he'd done.
So he bit down on a strip of leather, tasted his own blood as his teeth broke the skin inside his mouth, and breathed through the agony until the old bandages came free.
The wound beneath was... bad. Not infected yet—the cauterization had prevented that—but angry red, swollen, leaking clear fluid that might be lymph or might be the beginning of infection. The stitches he'd done by firelight looked even worse in daylight: crude and uneven, some too tight, some too loose, a butcher's work rather than a healer's.
But they held. The flesh was closing, however imperfectly.
He cleaned the wound with boiled water that had cooled overnight, applied the last of the stolen medicine—a paste made from herbs whose names he didn't know but whose properties he remembered from a life that may never have happened—and wrapped his arm in fresh bandages.
The entire process took over an hour and left him shaking with exhaustion, soaked in sweat despite the cold morning air.
When it was done, when the arm was secured again and the evidence hidden away, he allowed himself to collapse back onto his pallet.
The ceiling stared down at him, indifferent.
*This is the reality,* he thought with crystalline clarity. *Not grand battles or cosmic philosophy. Just pain and persistence. One small task after another, each one barely manageable, all of them necessary.*
*This is the Broken Path. Not dramatic declarations, but methodical problem-solving while your body screams for you to give up.*
He smiled then—small and cold and satisfied—because he hadn't given up.
He closed his eyes, intending to rest for just a moment before beginning the day's next impossible tasks.
Sleep took him like a predator taking prey.
---
The dream came uninvited, sliding into his consciousness like a knife between ribs.
He was back in the Cultivation World—not the peaceful ending surrounded by disciples, but *before*. Decades before. On the Ashen Plains where the ground was glass and ash, where the air tasted of old violence.
The battlefield materialized around him with terrible clarity: the clash of techniques, the screams of dying cultivators, the acrid smell of burned flesh and spiritual energy gone wild. He moved through it with the easy confidence of someone who'd fought a thousand battles, his body responding to threats before his mind consciously registered them.
Mid-tier cultivator then. Strong, but not yet the grandmaster he would become.
He saw her across the battlefield—Xain Xe, his wife of fifty years, fighting with the grace that had first captured his attention in the training grounds. Her red eyes flashed as she cut down a demon-path cultivator, her movements efficient and beautiful.
Then he saw the trap closing around her.
Three demon cultivators, coordinating their approach, herding her toward a position with no escape. His heart seized with fear—not for himself, but for her. For the woman whose laugh made even the harshest winters bearable, who had stood with him through sect politics and cultivation tribulations and the slow climb to power.
He abandoned his position and rushed to her aid, technique already forming in his hands, ready to save her—
The blade struck him from behind.
He staggered forward, blood pouring from his shoulder, confusion replacing fear. He turned, expecting to see a demon cultivator he'd missed.
Instead, he saw Xain Xe standing where she shouldn't be, sword in hand, blade red with his blood. The three demon cultivators he'd thought were attacking her stood calmly behind her, their stances relaxed, waiting.
Not her attackers. Her *allies*.
Time seemed to stop. The sounds of battle faded into a dull roar that might have been his own pulse. There was only her face, her red eyes that he'd loved for fifty years, now looking at him with an expression he'd never seen before.
Not hatred. Not even cruelty.
Just... calculation. And something that might have been regret, if regret could coexist with determination.
"Xain Xe..." His voice came out broken, confused, still not quite believing what his eyes were showing him. "What—"
"I need the Heavenly Pearl," she said simply. Her voice was steady, matter-of-fact, like she was discussing the weather rather than driving a sword into her husband's back. "Master Shin Luo entrusted it to you before he died, didn't he?"
The words didn't make sense. He blinked, tried to process, failed.
"The Pearl can be transformed into the Demonic Pearl," she continued, stepping closer. Her sword remained pointed at him, unwavering. "With it, I can resurrect my true husband. My *first* husband, who died a century before I met you."
The ground beneath him seemed to tilt. His blood dripped onto the glass-ash ground, hissing where it touched, each drop marking time in a moment that stretched toward eternity.
"Your... first husband?" The words felt foreign in his mouth, like speaking a language he'd never learned.
"Jiang Wei." Her voice softened when she spoke the name, carrying a warmth he'd thought she reserved for him alone. "We were married for only three years before the Heavenly Demon's forces killed him. I've spent the last century searching for a way to bring him back. The Demonic Pearl is that way."
Zhung stood there, bleeding, watching her face as she spoke about this other man—this Jiang Wei who had been dead for a century but still commanded more of her heart than the living husband standing before her.
"Did you..." He had to stop, clear his throat, try again. "Did you ever love me?"
The question hung in the air between them like a sword suspended by a thread.
She was quiet for a long moment, her red eyes meeting his directly, and he saw the answer before she spoke it.
"Once," she admitted finally, and the mercy in her honesty hurt worse than any lie could have. "In the beginning, I thought perhaps I could. You were so earnest, so devoted. I thought maybe that would be enough. That I could learn to love you the way you loved me."
"But?" The word came out barely above a whisper.
"But every time I looked at you, I saw what I'd lost. You were kind, Zhung. You were good. You were everything a woman should want in a husband." She paused, and in that pause he heard the world ending. "You were the comfortable choice. The safe choice. The man I married because I needed to move forward, not because I couldn't imagine life without you."
The three demon cultivators shifted slightly, hands moving toward their weapons, but she raised one hand to stop them. This moment, apparently, belonged to her alone.
"The Pearl," she said again, extending her empty hand. "Give it to me, and I'll make your death quick. Painless. You can die believing you fell heroically in battle. Your disciples will remember you well. I'll make sure the sect honors your memory."
*Your disciples will remember you well.*
The words should have meant something. Should have offered comfort. Instead, they just revealed how thoroughly she'd planned this. How completely she'd thought through every angle, every consequence—except his actual *feelings*, which apparently hadn't factored into her calculations at all.
He looked at her—really looked at her—and saw a stranger wearing a familiar face. Fifty years of marriage, countless moments of supposed intimacy, thousands of small kindnesses and shared struggles, and he'd never truly known her. Had never been allowed to know her, because the real Xain Xe had always been oriented toward a dead man's memory.
*I was a placeholder,* he realized with sudden, terrible clarity. *A body to fill the space beside her while she dreamed of someone else. Fifty years of my life spent being a substitute, a stand-in, the understudy who never knew the lead actor was coming back.*
Something in his chest broke—not his body, but something deeper. Some fundamental belief about the world, about people, about the possibility of trust.
The pain in his shoulder was nothing compared to this.
He reached into his robes with his good hand and pulled out the Heavenly Pearl—a gem the size of an eye, pulsing with condensed spiritual energy that made the air around it shimmer and distort. Master Shin Luo's final gift, entrusted to him with dying words: *"Guard this with your life. Heaven would see it destroyed."*
He held it up so she could see it clearly, watch it glow in the battlefield's dim light.
Her eyes locked onto it with an intensity that made her previous expression seem lukewarm by comparison. This was what she truly loved—not Jiang Wei's memory, really, but the *idea* of reclaiming what death had taken from her. The Pearl represented power over death itself, and that power had consumed everything else she might have once been.
The three demon cultivators tensed, ready to attack if he refused to hand it over.
Zhung looked at the Pearl. Looked at Xain Xe. Looked at the life he'd built over fifty years—the marriage he'd believed was real, the love he'd thought was mutual, the future he'd imagined with such naive certainty.
All of it a lie. All of it ash and glass.
"You know what I realized?" he said quietly, his voice carrying clearly despite the distant sounds of battle. "I thought Master Shin Luo gave me this Pearl because he trusted my strength to protect it. But I think he knew. He knew what it could do, how it corrupts everyone who learns of its existence. He gave it to me as a test—not of my strength, but of my wisdom."
"Zhung, don't—" Something almost like alarm entered Xain Xe's voice.
"He wanted to see if I'd be wise enough to destroy it rather than let it fall into the wrong hands." He smiled then—a terrible expression that had nothing to do with happiness. "I failed him while he lived. Let me honor him in death."
He closed his fist around the Pearl.
"NO!"
Xain Xe lunged forward, her cultivated speed faster than mortal eye could follow. The three demon cultivators reacted simultaneously, techniques already forming to stop him.
Too slow.
Zhung poured every ounce of his mid-tier cultivation into his closed fist, channeling pure Chi through his dantian to crush the Pearl with a force that should have been impossible, compressing centuries of accumulated spiritual energy into a space too small to contain it.
The explosion was catastrophic.
Light and force erupted outward in a wave that scoured the battlefield clean. The three demon cultivators simply ceased to exist, vaporized before they could even scream. Xain Xe was thrown backward, her protective techniques barely saving her from complete annihilation, her body tumbling across glass-ash ground like a discarded doll.
Zhung felt his own body breaking—ribs cracking, organs rupturing, his Chi channels searing as the Pearl's energy burned through them like acid. He was thrown across the battlefield, landing hard enough to crack the glass beneath him.
He couldn't move. Could barely breathe. Each shallow inhale brought new waves of agony.
But through blood-filled vision, he saw Xain Xe staggering to her feet in the distance. Saw her look at where the Pearl had been—where nothing remained but scorched earth and dissipating energy.
Saw her face twist with an anguish that she'd never shown for him, only for the loss of her last chance to reclaim the dead.
She met his eyes across the devastated space between them.
No words passed between them. What was there to say?
She turned and fled—toward the demon-path territories, becoming a traitor to every oath she'd ever sworn, choosing exile and hunting over a life where she had to look at the man who'd destroyed her century-long dream.
Zhung lay broken on the glass-ash ground, tasting blood and ash and the bitter triumph of spite, and whispered through shattered lips:
"If I cannot have truth... then no one shall have power."
He'd woken weeks later in the sect's healing halls, his body repaired but his Chi channels damaged, his potential future already written in the cracks of his shattered meridians. The official story—the one he'd helped craft—was that Xain Xe had died heroically, sacrificing herself to save civilians.
He'd lied because the truth was too humiliating. Because admitting he'd been a fool for fifty years would have destroyed what little remained of his pride. Because his disciples looked at him with such respect, and he couldn't bear to see that turn to pity.
So he'd buried the truth and spent the next two hundred years teaching others while keeping everyone at a safe distance, building walls around his heart that no affection could breach, becoming the kind master who was never quite reachable, never quite human.
He'd succeeded at everything cultivation promised—except peace, except trust, except ever believing in love again.
---
Zhung woke gasping, his child's body drenched in cold sweat.
The hut's ceiling stared down at him, rough wood and nothing more. No battlefield. No Xain Xe. No Pearl exploding in his fist.
Just pain, fever, and the slow approach of dawn through gaps in the roof.
He lay still, letting his racing heart slow, forcing his breathing back to normal. The dream had felt so real—more than memory, more than imagination. Like reliving the moment exactly as it had happened, with all the pain of the original experience intact.
*Was it real?* The question surfaced unbidden. *Or was the cultivation world itself just a coma dream, and this memory is a dream within a dream?*
He pushed the thought away. It didn't matter. Real or false, the lesson was identical: trust was for fools, love was currency, and anyone who claimed otherwise was either lying or hadn't lived long enough to learn better.
His stomach clenched with sudden nausea. He rolled off the pallet just in time, vomiting into the chamber pot he'd placed nearby for exactly this purpose. Nothing came up but bile and water—he hadn't kept much food down in the past three days.
When the spasms passed, he sat back against the wall, shaking, hugging his injured arm against his chest.
*Two lives,* he thought with cold clarity. *Two betrayals.*
*Mei Ling in the modern world, who left me for a man with better prospects, who looked at me with those same calculating eyes that measured worth in money and status.*
*Xain Xe in the cultivation world, who used me for fifty years while dreaming of a dead man, who saw me as the 'comfortable choice' rather than her actual choice.*
*Different worlds. Different circumstances. Same lesson: I was never valued, only utilized. My love was never the point—I was just convenient, just... there.*
The pattern was too clear to ignore. Two lives, two women, both teaching him that affection was just another word for transaction, that intimacy was just long-term strategy, that the person who trusted was always the person who lost.
*And here, in this third life?*
He thought of his mother—of Zheng Han, who had held him as a baby, who worked her hands raw to keep him fed, who asked nothing in return except that he stay alive and safe. Who looked at him with simple, uncomplicated love that expected no payment, demanded no performance.
The only person across three lifetimes who had never used him.
*If she's real,* the thought came unbidden, cold and paranoid. *If she's not just playing a longer game than the others.*
He forced himself to stop that line of thinking before it could take root. That way lay madness—the kind of paranoid isolation where you trusted no one and ended up alone by choice rather than circumstance.
*No,* he decided firmly. *She's real. She's the one light remaining. And I will protect that light even if it costs me everything else.*
Even if it meant becoming the monster Heaven feared. Even if it meant walking the Broken Path until his soul froze solid. Even if it meant sacrificing every soft part of himself until only the functional remained.
She was worth it.
She had to be, because if she wasn't—if even that love proved false—then there was truly nothing left worth preserving in any world, any life, any reality.
He forced himself to stand, ignoring the protests of his body. Dawn was coming. Mother would return tomorrow. He needed to be functional enough by then to hide what he'd done, to smile and play the dutiful son, to maintain the mask that had become so practiced it felt more real than his actual face.
He moved through the small hut, mechanically cleaning up the evidence of his three-day struggle—the bloodied bandages burned in the fire, the vomit disposed of, the chamber pot emptied and washed in the river before dawn fully broke.
Each task was its own small torture, but he accomplished them all through sheer stubborn persistence.
*This is cultivation,* he thought with bitter amusement. *Not flying through clouds or splitting mountains. Just forcing a broken body to keep moving when every cell is screaming to stop.*
By the time the sun crested the mountains, painting the sky in shades of gold and rose, the hut looked ordinary again. Clean. Innocent. The hiding place of a normal boy who'd been home alone for three days and missed his mother.
He practiced his smile in the reflection of the water bucket—wide and bright and utterly false, the perfect mask of childhood innocence.
Perfect.
He stepped outside into the cool morning air, breathing deeply despite the ache it caused in his ribs. The village was waking around him—cooking fires being lit, animals being tended, the ordinary sounds of ordinary lives continuing their ordinary patterns.
He walked to the edge of the village, to where the northern road emerged from the forest. The road his mother would travel tomorrow. The road that would bring back the one person he'd decided was worth protecting, worth preserving whatever remained of his humanity for.
*I am neither saint nor demon,* he thought, watching the sunrise paint the world in gentle colors. *I walk the Broken Path—the road between extremes where every choice is conscious, every action deliberate.*
*I will be kind when kindness serves justice. I will be cold when cruelty wears compassion's face. I will protect what matters and let the rest burn if necessary.*
A cold wind came down from the mountains, carrying the scent of ice and stone and ancient things that had never learned to care about human struggles.
Zhung stood in that wind and smiled—not the false mask he'd practiced, but something genuine and terrible, an expression that belonged to someone who'd been broken twice and refused to break a third time.
"If fate tries to take her," he whispered to the indifferent morning, "then I will become strong enough to fight fate itself. Not for revenge. Not for power. Just to protect the one light that remains."
Behind him, the village continued its morning routines, unaware that one of its children had just made a vow that would echo across the Three Realms.
In the distant Heavenly World, the immortals continued their games, watching mortal struggles with amused detachment.
They did not yet know that one small piece had moved out of position on their board.
They would learn.
But by then, it would be too late to move it back.
---
**The next day, late afternoon...**
Zhung sat on the flat stone by the river, the same spot where he always fished, though today he held no pole. His left arm remained in its sling, hidden beneath a loose shirt. The bandages underneath were fresh, the wound beneath them still angry but showing signs of proper healing.
He heard her before he saw her—the familiar rhythm of her footsteps on the path, the soft humming of an old lullaby she'd sung to him since he was small enough to be carried.
His heart clenched, and for a moment—just a moment—the cold calculation fell away and he was simply a boy who'd missed his mother.
"Zhung!"
He turned, and his practiced smile came easily now. "Mom! You're back!"
Zheng Han dropped her travel bag and hurried toward him, arms already opening. He stood and let himself be hugged, careful to keep his injured arm positioned so she wouldn't feel the bulky bandages beneath his shirt.
She pulled back, hands on his shoulders, looking him over with the critical eye of a mother who could spot a lie at twenty paces. "You look pale. Have you been eating properly?"
"Yes, Mom. I made rice every day, just like you taught me."
"And sleeping? You have circles under your eyes."
"I stayed up late reading a few times," he admitted—a small truth to sell the larger lie. "Old Lu lent me a book about famous warriors. I couldn't put it down."
She frowned but seemed to accept this. "Well, I'm back now. I'll make you a proper meal tonight—pork stew with those herbs you like. How does that sound?"
"That sounds perfect."
She hugged him again, and this time he allowed himself to hug back with his good arm, pressing his face against her shoulder the way a child would, hiding the expression that didn't quite match the innocent performance.
*I will protect this,* he thought with absolute certainty. *This warmth, this genuine care. Even if it costs me my soul.*
*Especially if it costs me my soul.*
"Come on," she said, taking his hand—the right one, the functional one. "Let's go home. I have so much to tell you about the city! They had the most amazing street performers, and I saw a merchant selling silk that cost more than our house..."
She chattered happily as they walked, and he listened with apparent attention, making appropriate sounds of interest and surprise, playing the dutiful son with the ease of someone who'd worn this mask across multiple lifetimes.
Behind them, the river kept flowing, carrying its secrets toward an ocean it would never reach.
And in his chest, where the strange mark pulsed with persistent warmth, Zhung felt something settle into place—not hope, not quite, but purpose. Singular and unbreakable.
The Broken Path had found its first fixed point, its North Star in an otherwise directionless journey.
Everything else—cultivation, power, revenge, transformation—was secondary to this one simple imperative:
Keep her safe. Keep this light alive.
Whatever the cost.
---
**That night, after dinner...**
The pork stew had been as delicious as promised, rich and warm and full of familiar spices that made the hut smell like home. Zheng Han had talked through the entire meal about her trip, and Zhung had listened attentively, asking questions at appropriate moments, laughing at her descriptions of merchant haggling and city chaos.
A perfect performance of normalcy.
Now she slept in their shared room, her breathing deep and even, exhausted from three days of travel and trading.
Zhung lay on his own pallet, staring at the ceiling, wide awake despite his body's fatigue.
His arm throbbed with dull, persistent pain that the day's performance had made worse. He'd hidden it well, but maintaining the facade had cost him. Fresh blood had seeped through the bandages at one point, and he'd had to excuse himself to tighten them before the stain became visible through his shirt.
*This is the reality of the Broken Path,* he thought, feeling the weight of his choice settle more heavily. *Not grand battles or philosophical revelations. Just lying to the person you love most to protect them from the truth of what you're becoming.*
He thought about the hunter's guide hidden beneath the floorboards in the abandoned shed. About the cultivation manual he'd traded away. About the wolves that had shattered his arm for nothing—no divine blood, no demonic essence, just ordinary mutations and wasted risk.
*I'll try again,* he decided with cold certainty. *When the arm heals enough to be functional. When I've studied the patterns more carefully. When I've found beasts with better odds of carrying valuable bloodlines.*
*I'll gamble again, because the alternative is staying weak, and weakness in this world is just another word for victim.*
Outside, an owl called—lonely and distant, hunting in the darkness.
Zhung closed his eyes and let sleep take him, knowing his dreams would bring no peace, no comfort, just the endless replay of betrayals and lessons learned in blood and bitter truth.
But tomorrow he would wake. Would smile. Would play the dutiful son.
Would take one more step forward on a path that had no clear destination, only the promise that each step was his own choice, made with open eyes and frozen heart.
The Broken Path.
Cold and lonely and impossibly difficult.
But his.
**End of Chapter 6**