The scent hit Li Shen first—sweet rot, like a dying garden.
The Lotus Mire stretched before him like a drowned dream. Pools of stagnant water shimmered with strange colors. Trees, long since dead, leaned like mourners. And the mist never lifted.
He stepped lightly along the elevated roots and broken planks of old walkways. Each step disturbed the silence—and stirred the things beneath.
A single lotus floated beside him on black water.
It blinked.
Not a flower—an eye.
The mire was alive.
And watching.
Li Shen drew the Ocean Soul Blade, letting its calm presence stabilize his footing and aura. Every few minutes, he paused to breathe through his center, centering himself with the Phoenix Breathing Method. The mist gnawed at memory. And the longer he lingered, the more his mind drifted toward shadowed things.
But he pressed on.
Toward the center.
Where the Blade waited.
And where death wore perfume.
The deeper he ventured, the more the flora changed. Vines moved without wind. Petals opened at his passing. Blood-moss pulsed beneath fallen bones. He passed statues half-swallowed by peat—monks, soldiers, lovers—each twisted in a final pose of agony.
A sign appeared at a fork in the path. Carved into bone.
"She Waits in Bloom."
A soft giggle rippled through the mist.
Li Shen turned.
Nothing.
Yet petals rained from the sky—scarlet and black.
He stepped through a curtain of hanging moss and entered a wide clearing.
A garden. But not of life.
Dozens of bodies hung suspended in vines. Still breathing. Still weeping. Their skin turned to bark. Their mouths filled with petals.
Above them stood a figure in red silk.
Her hair was braided with thorns.
Her smile was made of poison.
The Blooming Widow.
"You are early," she said, voice melodic. "I was still pruning."
Li Shen narrowed his stance. The Mirror Vale Blade slid into his hand, reflecting her image—beautiful, monstrous.
"You're one of the Ashen Pact," he said.
"Am I?" She spun. Vines unraveled from her sleeves, curling like lovers. "Or perhaps I'm just a gardener..."
She struck.
Li Shen barely dodged. Her whip-like vines lashed across his cloak, and in an instant, half the clearing bloomed with venomous lotus in the shape of bladed traps.
He leapt onto a twisting root and ignited the Eidolon Blade, its spectral light searing the creeping death away.
She laughed.
Then danced.
Their duel was one of contrasts—his strikes swift and blazing, hers a hypnotic spiral of petals and poison. She floated over water without rippling it, her every step a note in a deadly ballet.
Li Shen parried three strikes at once, then launched upward with the Crimson Wings Mantle, spinning mid-air and dropping with the Tidepiercer Descent Form.
He struck.
She vanished.
And reappeared behind him.
A thorn-dagger pressed to his throat.
"Yield."
He closed his eyes.
And let go.
The Phoenix Seed at his chest pulsed—then flared.
Time slowed.
Li Shen reached inward—not to the Ocean Soul, but to the newest blade: Lúnxiao, the Astral Windblade.
He called its name.
And the stars answered.
In a single movement, he reversed their positions—an astral shift—and appeared behind her, sword drawn, strike already mid-swing.
The Widow turned—
Too late.
A shallow cut traced her back. She screamed, vines recoiling like wounded serpents.
She landed in a crouch across the mire pool.
"You carry heaven," she hissed. "But you bleed like us."
She flicked blood from her hand.
And smiled.
"You've earned it."
From behind her, the mire opened.
A lotus the size of a house unfurled. And at its heart sat the Blade of Withering Bloom—a curved sword grown from dark root and petal, its edge dripping venom, its core pulsing like a beating heart.
The Widow stepped aside.
And bowed.
"The Pact said I must kill you," she whispered. "But I wished only to see if you were... worthy."
Li Shen didn't trust her.
But he stepped forward.
And took the blade.
Pain lanced through his veins. The sword tested him—its poison seeking flaw, weakness, regret.
He did not resist.
He endured.
And the blade quieted.
Now he held six.
The garden trembled.
The Widow vanished into the mist, her voice lingering: "Your next enemy waits in stone and silence, beneath the ground where truth was buried."
Li Shen stood at the center of the corpse garden.
The swords at his back were heavy.
But he knew where to go next.
The Pillars of Hollow Silence—an underground sanctum once used by the Lotus Court, now controlled by the Hollow Council.
The place where the Seventh Blade was said to slumber.
And where the Pact was gathering to stop him—for good.