In the heart of the Eastern Wastes, where no road dared stretch and no map laid claim, there stood an abandoned monastery, half-swallowed by blackened vines and time. It had no name. Not anymore. But it had once been a sanctuary—before its faith was buried in ash and forgotten prayers.
Xu Tianyin stood at the broken gate.
"Why here?" he asked, watching as Bai Yeming ran her fingers across the warped wood.
"Because this place remembers," she said.
Inside, the shattered halls echoed only their footsteps. Paintings had long since peeled from the walls, and every altar had been stripped of offering. But deep within the dust was something more valuable than relics—memory.
Not a memory held by minds, but one pressed into the bones of the structure itself.
Tianyin could feel it now, faint and heavy. Not pain, not power.
Just… presence.
They walked until they reached the inner sanctum. It had no ceiling anymore—only the sky, veiled in grey. Ivy ran across the altar, and a single stone tablet remained upright at its base, half-buried in earth.
Yeming knelt before it. "This was a place for the forgotten. Cultivators cast out. Priests without gods. People like us."
She placed her palm against the stone.
And the tablet answered.
Not with light. Not with sound. But with a soft tremor through the ground, and a swirl of void energy that barely brushed Tianyin's skin.
He stepped forward. "What is this place really?"
Yeming looked over her shoulder. "The first place where someone tried to erase fate."
Tianyin's breath caught.
He looked again at the tablet—and now he saw. The carvings weren't of prayers or sect teachings.
They were scars.
Memories cut into stone. Painful moments etched without artistry. Raw confessions. Words like:
> I broke the wheel but it still turned.
She chose me before the stars did.
Even if the heavens forget me, I will not.
This was a graveyard—not of bodies, but of truth. Of people like him.
He knelt beside her.
"We leave our scar here too," he said.
Together, they pressed their palms to the stone. Neither spoke. Neither cried. They simply remembered—what they had lost, what they had become, and what they would never be again.
And the stone accepted it.
A new mark appeared—unwritten, but felt. A silence deeper than the others. The silence of two people choosing to exist when the world had tried to erase them.
They sat there until night fell.
And for the first time since their path began, the stars overhead seemed brighter—not in beauty, but in clarity. Like they, too, were watching.
But from far away.
Far enough not to interfere.
Far enough to remember.