The days that followed passed like slow-moving fog. Xu Tianyin and Bai Yeming did not return to any sect, city, or safe haven. Instead, they wandered the edges of the world—places so distant and untouched that even birds hesitated to fly above them.
They didn't train in the traditional sense. There were no manuals, no lectures, no qi refinement. Their cultivation was different now. It did not grow in layers—it fractured, and the cracks revealed truths that could not be taught.
They carved a path with every breath. Every memory scarred them deeper.
On the third night since the Sentinels vanished, they came upon a dead field. No grass. No trees. Just a circle of cracked earth, wide as a village, scorched at the edges.
Tianyin stepped into it cautiously. "What happened here?"
Yeming's gaze was distant. "Long ago, a cultivator walked this place with too much grief."
He knelt and touched the earth. It was dry—not just of water, but of presence. As if nothing had ever existed here, not even time.
A strange comfort spread through his chest.
"I feel it," he said. "The absence."
Yeming nodded. "We call places like this silence marks. They're not made by techniques—they're made by scars so deep they tear away reality. Most people walk around them without ever noticing."
"But we notice," he murmured.
"Yes. And someday, we'll leave our own."
He stood, something forming inside him like a whisper that wouldn't fade.
"I want to give it a name."
Yeming looked at him. "The field?"
"No," he said quietly. "Our path. This… whatever it is we're becoming."
She was silent for a long time. Then: "What name?"
He turned to her, eyes steady. "Fate-Scarring Void Path."
Yeming blinked slowly. And then she smiled—not softly, not kindly, but proudly, like she was seeing something she had waited for a long time to witness.
She walked forward until she stood beside him, and together they looked across the silent field.
"No one else will understand it," she said.
"They don't need to," he replied.
Lightning flickered in the distant clouds. The wind had changed direction.
Something was coming.
Back in the sects and cities they had abandoned, word was spreading like wildfire.
—Of a disciple who had no qi but had bested bounty hunters.
—Of a woman thought long vanished, returned with eyes darker than night.
—Of a forbidden path not seen in generations.
—Of a scar that could not be healed.
The Xu Clan placed a higher bounty. The Heavenly Jade Pavilion sent word to all its branches. Elders convened in moonlit chambers and debated prophecy.
And somewhere in the highest court of heaven, where no mortals tread, a decree was whispered into the wind:
> The boy must be erased. The woman must be bound.
Their names must vanish. Their path must not take root.
But it was already too late.
Their names had been carved—not into stone, but into silence.
And silence never forgets.