The path eastward twisted into lands few dared to name—no sect had ever claimed these ridges, no kingdom ever taxed its silence. The land here was still, as though time had once come this far and simply… stopped.
Xu Tianyin and Bai Yeming walked side by side through a corridor of ancient pine trees. Their branches curled like fingers, and even the wind moved strangely, blowing in patterns that did not match the seasons.
Here, even nature held secrets.
"Do you feel that?" Tianyin asked, pausing beneath a crooked arch of stone, its surface marked with timeworn sigils that no longer glowed.
Yeming nodded. "This place is too quiet. It's not the calm before a storm… it's the quiet left after one."
Tianyin crouched and pressed his hand to the earth.
The void pulsed beneath his palm—soft, slow. Not a wound, but a whisper. And deep beneath that whisper, he felt something impossible:
Someone else had walked this path.
Not recently. But long ago. Another who carved fate from silence. Another who had scarred the world just by existing.
He looked up at Yeming. "There was someone like us here."
Her eyes narrowed. "How long ago?"
"I don't know. But they left something behind."
They moved carefully now, deeper into the glade, past warped stones and skeletal ruins of meditation halls. At the center, they found it:
A circle of standing stones. Eight in total. Each one cracked down the middle.
The ninth stone—the one that should've completed the ring—was missing.
Tianyin approached the center. "This was a gathering point."
Yeming scanned the stones. "It wasn't for a sect. This wasn't an order or a clan."
She looked at him. "It was a communion."
He stepped into the center of the circle—and his breath caught.
His vision shifted.
The world around him shimmered and then split—briefly, impossibly. For the span of a single heartbeat, he stood in a different time. A dozen figures surrounded him, cloaked in gray, none bearing swords or artifacts. Just robes worn thin by time and wind.
They weren't speaking.
They were remembering.
And Tianyin could feel what they remembered:
A child born under a shattered star.
A city consumed not by fire, but by collective silence.
A name so powerful it had to be forgotten to protect the world.
Then the vision collapsed, and he was alone again. Sweat lined his brow.
Yeming caught him as he stumbled. "What did you see?"
He shook his head. "It wasn't a vision. It was a memory the land refused to let go of." His voice dropped. "They walked our path. A long time ago. But it ended here."
She looked around slowly. "They tried to erase it."
"They failed."
Beneath his feet, the ninth stone—once missing—shimmered into existence.
Not physically. But through the void. He stepped closer and placed his palm against the air where it would have stood.
The stone appeared only for them.
Its surface bore only one symbol: a simple circle cut through by a jagged line.
Yeming traced it with her eyes. "A scar over infinity."
And below it, four words in the old script—visible only to void-touched eyes:
> We walked without gods.
Tianyin exhaled. "They weren't erased. They were buried so deep the world forgot they existed."
Yeming's voice turned cold. "And now that we've found them, others will know too."
He turned to her, brow furrowed. "You mean the sects?"
She shook her head. "Worse. The ones above the sects."
Thunder rolled in the distance, though no stormclouds hung in the sky.
Tianyin felt it too now—a pressure so ancient, so immense, it didn't weigh on his body or mind. It weighed on reality.
"What is that?" he asked.
Yeming stared up at the empty sky. "A being who cannot descend, but whose gaze can still reach. We've gone beyond sect law. We're waking up the Forgotten Witnesses."
He tensed. "What are they?"
Her voice was steady. "Punishments the heavens no longer control. Created in eras that were erased for a reason."
Tianyin stepped back into the circle, breath shaky. "Are we in danger?"
"We were always in danger," she said gently. "But now we're visible. The scars we've made… they can't be ignored anymore."
They left the glade before nightfall, leaving behind the ninth stone that only they could see. As they descended into a narrow canyon, Yeming whispered:
"From this point on, Tianyin… every step we take is rewriting the shape of history."
---
Meanwhile, far above, in a shrine that existed only between dreams and death...
A figure cloaked in gold and ash opened its eyes.
It had no name, only a title spoken by old prophets: the First Witness.
Its fingers curled slowly as it gazed down through the veil between worlds.
And somewhere, deep within the carved halls of the Central Heaven Bureau, the prophecy scrolls began bleeding ink.
The scribes screamed.
The future was no longer writing itself.
It was being cut.