The wind carried the scent of bloodless time.
Not rot.
Not decay.
But something older than death.
Shen Wuqing stood at the edge of a dried lotus pond. The petals were long gone, and the water had forgotten its name. Even the frogs, once proud of their croaks, had vanished.
He wasn't meditating.
He was remembering.
And that, in itself, was dangerous.
A voice returned. Not from the world. Not from a soul he had devoured.
But from beneath the bones of his mind.
"You were not always called Shen Wuqing."
A hand reached toward him—small, feminine, trembling.
"You have no pulse," she whispered.
He was still a child then.
Not more than seven.
Yet his eyes were already silent.
The girl had lived in a shrine built on forgotten ground.
No sect claimed it.
No spirits blessed it.
Even ghosts did not linger.
She had no family.
No name.
Only a mirror she cleaned every morning, waiting for it to reflect something that mattered.
That was when he arrived.
Crawling.
Bleeding.
But not crying.
"Who are you?" she had asked.
He hadn't answered.
Because he didn't know.
So she gave him one.
Liánxū — The Continued.
A name too gentle for what he was becoming.
He stayed. For weeks. Maybe months. Time had been soft then, like fruit left out too long.
They didn't speak much.
But sometimes he would wake in the middle of the night, hands covered in shadows that writhed.
She never asked.
She only brought warm water. Washed the blackness from his skin. And whispered stories into his ears—stories of heavens that wept, of gods that bled, of names that cursed.
He listened.
Not because he believed.
But because he feared silence more than lies.
One day, she vanished.
No farewell. No trace.
Only her mirror remained.
When he touched it, he saw himself.
But his face was wrong.
It had too much light. Too much humanity.
So he broke it.
Each shard reflected something truer.
A mouth he didn't recognize.
Eyes that saw without permission.
A face with no pulse.
Back in the present, Shen Wuqing knelt. He held a single lotus petal in his hand.
It was made of ash.
"I once had a name," he whispered.
"But it was too soft to survive me."
In the Zongyuan Inner Hall, Elder Tianyi read an old scripture aloud.
It wasn't a cultivation manual.
It was a forbidden record.
"In the Western Dead Sky, a child was born without shadow, without cry.
He fed on memory. He walked without path.
He was named by none. He named none.
But he remembered… everyone."
Lan Caixia entered the room.
"You're reading prophecy?"
"No," Tianyi replied. "I'm reading history... that hasn't happened yet."
"You're starting to sound like him."
He looked up.
"Then maybe it's time we stopped fearing him."
She paused. "What do you mean?"
"If we're to survive, we must do what none have done—remember him without breaking."
Back at the dried pond, Wuqing stood.
He had not aged since that day in the shrine.
Not visibly.
But inside, centuries had passed.
Each devoured soul had left a scar not on his body—but in the space around him.
Like invisible teeth marks on reality.
And now, the mirror girl's voice returned.
"You were not a boy."
"You were a question."
"And I named you to silence the world."
He closed his eyes.
And the silence answered.
Far in the north, an immortal beast screamed.
Its fur fell out. Its blood boiled.
Not from battle.
But from remembering a boy it had once ignored.
In the 7th Sky Mirror Palace, an ancient cultivator stared at his reflection and saw Wuqing's face instead of his own.
He clawed at his eyes.
But they no longer belonged to him.
Wuqing walked toward the sect boundary again.
Each step he took rewrote the path behind him.
Lan Caixia followed. Not out of trust.
But because everyone else had forgotten why they feared him.
She stopped.
"What's your real name?" she asked.
He looked at her.
And for a brief moment, the ash petals around him froze in mid-air.
Then he spoke.
"My name… is what's left when all others are devoured."
That night, three stars fell.
They didn't burn.
They broke.
And the world pretended it didn't notice.