The blade didn't speak again.
But it didn't need to.
It waited.
When Lu Tian walked, it weighed heavier in his robe. When he slept, it pressed cold against his thoughts. It was like keeping a memory alive too long, one you didn't want, but didn't dare forget.
Yin Zhi survived.
That was intentional.
Dead men caused investigation. Broken ones caused whispers.
And whispers, in the Crimson Soul Sect, were sometimes sharper than swords.
No one confronted Lu Tian.
But the way the guards looked at him changed.
The way the workers made space for him changed.
Even the vats seemed quieter when he passed.
He had become a shadow with weight.
But weight needs balance.
By the third night, his dreams had turned jagged.
Not nightmares.
Replays.
His father's hands. His mother's back. Mo Yao's broken grin. Lian Feng screaming with a hole in his stomach.
And the hallway again. Endless. Door after door, all closed.
At the end of it, a voice.
Not his. Not the blade's.
Something older.
"You are building a weapon out of yourself. Do you know how to stop once it's sharp?"
He woke choking.
Not on air, but on silence.
There was blood on his pillow. He didn't remember biting his tongue.
When he sat up, Elder Yi Qing was already standing at the door.
She didn't knock. She didn't explain.
She just said: "Come."
Lu Tian followed.
They walked in silence through four levels of the sect's western understructure. Past dead prayer halls and sealed tunnels humming with Qi corruption.
At the bottom, there was a chamber lit by a single spirit lantern, the light flickering like it was scared to be there.
In the center: a circle of ash and bones.
Elder Yi Qing stood at the edge, arms folded, her black robes hanging like smoke.
"Put it down," she said.
Lu Tian unwrapped the blade.
It pulsed once. The air got colder.
She nodded.
"Do you know what you've made?"
Lu Tian said, "A scar-weapon."
She walked closer. Not afraid. Just cautious.
"You've made something worse. Or better. Depending on what side of death you stand on."
She crouched beside the weapon.
"This is not just a tool. It has reached Convergence."
He frowned.
She looked up.
"When a scar-weapon begins to whisper, when it calls you, shapes your dreams, guides your hand, it means your Spiral has begun forming a Symbiote."
He stared at her.
She stood again, dusting her hands.
"The Root isn't just remembering. It's becoming. Every skill, every scar, every weapon, it's trying to make sense of you. Trying to finish what you've started. And if you don't take control…"
She tapped his chest with two fingers, just above the Root.
"It will."
Lu Tian stayed still. Thinking.
She studied him for a long time.
Then she said something soft. Something that didn't sound like a teacher, or a cultivator, but like someone who'd buried too many people with potential.
"You think pain makes you strong. It does. But if it becomes the only thing you recognize, then everything else inside you? That dies quietly."
Lu Tian looked down at the blade.
He could still feel the silence of Yin Zhi's throat under his hands.
Still feel the memory pressing outward.
He said nothing.
And that silence said everything.
Elder Yi Qing nodded once, like she already knew how this story ended.
"Wrap it. Walk carefully. The Root feeds on memory, but it grows through choices."
As he turned to leave, she added:
"You've survived the Abyss. Now let's see if you can carry it."
Some things you name because you love them.
Some, because you're afraid of them.
And some, you name because you're trying to keep them from becoming you.
Lu Tian sat in the dark, the wrapped blade in front of him like an old sin given shape.
It hadn't moved. Not since the last use. But he could feel it inside him now.
Not just when he touched it.
All the time.
It was like carrying a second self. One that didn't breathe, but remembered everything he wanted to forget.
He stared at it for a long time before he spoke.
"I'm giving you a name," he said. His voice came out hoarse.
"I don't know if that's smart. Or safe. But I'm doing it anyway."
He unwrapped the blade slowly.
The moment it hit air, the temperature in the room dropped.
No movement. No pulse.
But the memory in his chest, the one that had shaped the blade, shivered.
Lu Tian reached out and placed one hand over the weapon.
"I'm naming you... Shidu."
The word didn't come from his mind. It came from somewhere deeper.
It meant loss with no witness.
It meant a death no one acknowledged.
And when he spoke it, the blade pulsed once.
Just once.
Then settled.
He exhaled.
Naming it made it real.
Made it his.
But it also made something else clear.
This wasn't a tool.
It was a shadow. And it had grown long behind him.
Every scar-skill. Every memory carved into the Spiral. Every drop of pain refined into something sharp, it all had weight.
And now that weight had form.
Shidu wasn't just a weapon. It was a part of him that had broken off, like a shard of mirror holding the worst angle of the truth.
And that mirror could cut.
He closed his eyes and tried to meditate. But the Spiral wouldn't let him.
It had begun to spin faster.
Each ring orbiting the Root. Each skill whispering for purpose.
They weren't passive anymore.
They wanted more.
More scars. More meaning. More of him.
Because that was the truth of Abyss Root cultivation, wasn't it?
You didn't build strength.
You remembered it.
You dug it up from places that hurt to touch and made weapons from the pieces you found.
And now-
He wasn't sure which pieces were still him.
In the silence, a memory surfaced uninvited.
Not one he had used. Not one he had chosen.
He was younger. A different city. Cold pavement under his knees.
He held a fruit in both hands, too bruised to sell, too hungry not to eat.
A stranger's voice said: "Did you steal that?"
He looked up. Said nothing. Too ashamed to lie. Too scared to confess.
The man turned. Walked away.
Lu Tian had forgotten that moment.
He didn't choose it.
So why had it returned?
He reached for the Spiral.
Checked the scars.
It wasn't from any of them.
Which meant…
The Root had reached deeper.
Past the cultivated pain.
Past the memories he'd used.
It was pulling from everything.
He wasn't just cultivating through trauma now.
He was being remade by it.
Piece by piece, the Spiral was no longer a method.
It was a mirror.
And Shidu was the first reflection.
Lu Tian opened his eyes.
His hands were shaking.
But not from fear.
From certainty.
He stood, wrapped the blade again, and whispered to it one last time before tucking it away.
"You're not just a part of me anymore."
"You're the part I'll point at the world when I stop pretending I was ever meant to be saved."