The Realm of Severed Fate stretched endlessly before Yi Zhen, a wasteland of cracked skies and inverted rivers. Stars ran backward in the firmament. Moons rose from below. This realm obeyed no heavens, answered to no balance. It was everything he wanted.
Yet something unsettled him.
With each step deeper, the black lotus behind him—his mark of ascension—pulsed unevenly, as though resisting its own bloom. The land groaned beneath him, not in reverence, but in memory.
A collapsed altar lay ahead, half-buried in obsidian dust, crowned with decayed banners bearing languages long forgotten. A statue stood at its center—towering, faceless, cloaked in shattered chains.
Yi Zhen approached.
He extended his hand to the base of the monument, and with the gentlest brush of Inverse Qi, the stone hissed and cracked apart, revealing a hidden inscription carved in deep, dried crimson:
> "To the Fourth who walks backward… we all return to the beginning."
His breath caught.
"Fourth…?" he whispered.
His fingers trembled as he traced the edges of the inscription. The Inverse Dao—his own creation, his own rebellion—had a number?
The winds stilled. The realm dimmed.
Above, in the dark skies of Severed Fate, glowing names flickered into existence. Thousands.
All bearing a single trait.
Each name was carved backward.
Yi Zhen's heart slowed.
At the center of them all, larger than the others, glowing with a light that felt… intimate:
> YI ZHEN. IV.
His knees struck the ground. The air felt colder than death.
"No. This can't— I forged this path. I was the first to sever fate."
The statue loomed over him. And then… it split down the middle with a thunderous crack. Dust and bone erupted, revealing a corpse sealed inside its core. Mummified. Barely intact.
But the face…
The face was his.
Yi Zhen reeled, stumbling backward. The black lotus on his back screamed in resonance, vibrating violently.
"No—NO!"
Words were carved into the corpse's chest, burned in soulfire:
> "You will walk as I did.
You will kill as I did.
You will ascend as I did.
And when you stand here, you will read this and realize—
You were never breaking the wheel.
You are the wheel."
The skies flashed white. The corpse's jaw cracked open and a black pearl rolled out—pulsing with residual Inverse Qi. Yi Zhen reached out and touched it—
And in a blink—
He stood within memory.
A place that was not a place.
A battlefield, endless, drowned in flame.
Another Yi Zhen—face older, eyes dimmer, but identical—fought against the Heavens themselves. Solar beasts, Dao gods, cultivators beyond peak. And he won. And he died. And he was reborn.
Again. And again.
Again.
Yi Zhen gasped, eyes flying open in the present.
This wasn't ascension.
This was containment.
The Inverse Dao was not a rejection of fate. It was a mechanism. A script. A cycle designed by the heavens to take those who rebelled and give them the illusion of freedom, only to trap them in endless loops of rebellion and collapse.
He hadn't escaped.
He had followed the path perfectly.
The black lotus behind him bloomed fully—its petals were not shaped like flames or blades.
They were mirrors.
Each reflected a version of himself, dying in different realms. Sliced, burned, frozen, obliterated.
The truth landed like thunder in his soul.
He was not the one who inverted fate.
He was the one who kept it intact.
Yi Zhen stood slowly. The mirror-lotus quivered.
He clenched his fist—and for the first time, the Inverse Qi inside his veins hesitated.
He looked up to the torn heavens.
And spoke.
"I won't walk this path again."
His voice echoed across the void.
And something deep within the Realm of Severed Fate stirred.
A new path shimmered into being—faint, undefined, veering not left nor right, not backward or forward.
Something never walked before.
Yi Zhen took a single step—
And the lotus behind him cracked.