The scroll pulsed like a living heart.
For years, it had been silent—its seal unbroken, its secrets unknowable. But here, beneath the Forbidden Capital, in the Nameless Hall carved from pre-dynastic stone, it stirred in Shenhai's satchel like a creature awakening from centuries of sleep.
Jinhai stood before him, her flaming eye dimmed with reverence. Around them, the defiers of fate held their breath.
"It has waited for you," she whispered. "Even I could not open it. Only the one whose thread was never meant to exist."
Shenhai stepped forward.
He drew the scroll slowly. The cloth binding it had grown brittle, but shimmered faintly with what looked like stardust. As he unwrapped it, the seal—once inert—began to smoke with threads of golden-red light.
Meiyan and Baimu stood at his side.
"You don't have to do this," Meiyan murmured.
"I do," Shenhai replied. "I need to know who I am."
And with that, he placed the scroll upon the altar of cracked stone… and broke the seal.
⬖⬖⬖
The scroll unraveled in silence, revealing characters that bled into the air—living calligraphy, etched in a tongue that predated the dynasties. The letters shimmered, shifted… then settled into words Shenhai somehow understood.
Not with his eyes.
But with memory.
The Severing Record
"The name forgotten is not dead. It waits beneath the world. It is the thread that refused to be tied."
Images flooded his vision:
A battlefield of stars.
A Weaver of Fate burned alive.
Li Zhen—the Stormblade—standing at the edge of a crater, bleeding, sword shattered, scroll in hand.
Then came a voice.
"Shenhai."
Not spoken aloud. Not even inside his mind.
It was deeper than thought.
It was inheritance.
"You are not my son by blood alone. You are my blade reborn. I stole this memory from the Loom itself. I severed your fate before you were born—so that you could choose your own."
Shenhai's knees buckled. The scroll kept unfolding, now glowing with a strange crimson-gold flame.
It showed the truth of the empire:
The Loom of Fate, beneath the palace, is fed by the souls of the condemned.
The Emperor is not one man—but a role, endlessly passed on through fate-weaving, preserving a single, unbroken identity across centuries.
And beneath it all, slumbering in the deepest coils of the capital's foundations:
The Unweaver, kept dreaming by the stolen names of those whose fates were sacrificed to maintain the Empire's control.
Shenhai clutched his chest.
He felt every name that had been fed to the Loom. Every stolen thread. Every orphaned soul.
Meiyan steadied him. "What is it?"
His voice shook. "This scroll… it's not a weapon. It's a name. My true name."
The scroll pulsed once more—
And then burned into ash.
All except a single word, left seared into the altar:
Zhenhai.
"The Sea That Cuts."
The name his father had meant for him. The name removed from history.
A name with the power to sever fate itself.
That night, alone by candlelight, Shenhai stared at his reflection in a shallow bowl of water.
He saw not a boy from a fishing village.
Not an orphan.
Not a rebel.
He saw a blade. A legacy.
And a choice:
Wake the Unweaver—and shatter the Loom.
Or seal it forever—and let the empire remain.
But either way…
He would no longer be silent.