The sun rose with no warmth. Its light was red and brittle, casting fractured shadows across a desert of glass and bone. This was no ordinary wasteland.
The Crimson Waste was a cursed expanse where time faltered and memory burned. It was said that even gods had once avoided this place, and those who lingered too long forgot why they'd come—or what they were.
Li Shen stood at its threshold.
His boots crunched over sand mixed with fragments of old jade and charred feathers. Faint silhouettes moved at the horizon—then vanished. Illusions or echoes. Maybe both.
He exhaled and stepped forward.
Hours passed. Or minutes. Or days. The sun never moved. The sky remained bruised and dry.
Then Li Shen saw it.
A shrine in the sand, broken and half-buried. Its roof bore a faded sigil: the symbol of the ancient Celestial Vanguard—an order long extinct, wiped out during the Ashen War. Yet the sigil pulsed faintly.
He approached.
Inside, incense still smoldered—impossibly untouched by time.
Then a voice rang out from behind.
"Pilgrim of steel. Your shadow treads on broken oaths."
Li Shen turned.
A figure in red robes stood with a sword of flowing obsidian in one hand, and a mirror amulet in the other. Her face was wrapped in silk, but her voice was youthful—sharp.
"This shrine belongs to memory. Yours does not."
She attacked before he could speak.
She moved with grace drawn from forgotten forms. Her sword, a shifting stream of black, twisted between strikes and illusions. It reminded Li Shen of the Ashen Pact's lesser blades—but refined, elegant, personal.
Li Shen drew the Ocean Soul Blade first.
Their swords clashed with the sound of thunder buried under sand.
Water against shadow. Flow against fracture.
She vanished, then reappeared above him, striking down like a falling star.
He rolled aside, planting the Mirror Vale Blade into the ground mid-motion. A dozen reflections of himself erupted in the broken mirrors of the shrine, all moving in different flows.
She hesitated—one breath too long.
Li Shen surged forward, switching to the Eidolon Blade, a flicker of ghostlight through her mid-guard. Steel met silk, and her blade was sent flying.
He pressed the tip to her throat.
But she smiled.
"You walk the Waste with blades that remember. That's dangerous here."
Then she vanished—sand and shadow in her place.
The shrine dissolved behind him.
Li Shen stood alone again, heartbeat slowing, breath sharp.
Further into the Waste, he found a cairn of blades—swords driven into the earth in a circle, surrounding a central mound of smooth black stone.
As he approached, he saw something terrifying.
His own sword—the Crimson Feather Codex—was embedded in the mound.
He reached for it.
But the moment his fingers touched the hilt, the world inverted.
Suddenly he was standing beside himself, watching the past—his younger self on the steps of the Phoenix Monastery, being told he had no family, no lineage.
But in this vision, the master lied.
"Your blood is cursed. You are the descendant of the one who betrayed the Celestial Throne."
Li Shen staggered back. The memory was twisted—false.
Or was it?
Was this the Waste's doing?
He closed his eyes. Focused. Listened to the Whisper.
The Seventh Blade stirred, its presence silent but absolute. He drew it, and slashed across the vision.
It shattered.
The memory cairn crumbled, and the sword returned to his side.
But doubt lingered.
As dusk that did not exist began to fall, Li Shen saw the first sign of Vyrakar.
A tree made of obsidian glass stood tall in the sand, and pinned to it by a single enormous blade was a soldier—his armor charred, yet still bearing the sigil of the Sunfire Host, one of the old legions.
The blade pinning him was unmistakable.
Vyrakar—the Traitor Blade.
Its edge was sharp enough to cleave cause from effect, and its strikes could undo moments themselves. It shimmered with gold veins and a crimson core, pulsing like a heart.
The soldier's mouth moved.
"He waits… in the Veiled Hollow… where memory ends."
And then he turned to sand.
Li Shen stared at the blade.
This was bait.
The true wielder still lived—and watched.
Beyond the tree of obsidian, the sand shifted. A vast trench opened, revealing a path of stairs descending into the earth.
Rising from the edge of the trench, Li Shen saw the faint outline of a figure—tall, armored in dusksteel, his face obscured by an old imperial helm.
He did not speak.
But he drew Vyrakar from the obsidian.
The traitor who had betrayed Li Shen's bloodline… was no longer just a memory.
He was real.
And he turned, stepping into the darkness of the Veiled Hollow.
Li Shen followed.
His seven blades gleamed.
And at the edge of reality, beneath a desert that devoured truth, he prepared to face the one who had nearly broken the world.