"Trash without a spirit root."
"Born with no fate thread."
"Unworthy to cultivate."
They said it like scripture. Disciples with silken robes and golden hairpins. Elders with long beards and longer memories. Even passing visitors who caught sight of him scrubbing the stone steps would mutter it under their breath.
Xie Yun no longer flinched when he heard the words. They were no longer insults. They were truth, spoken often enough to become law. He had accepted them long ago — not because he believed them, but because fighting was pointless when the sky itself agreed.
The world of cultivation had no place for someone like him.
The Broken Star Sect, nestled between two cliffs in the southernmost part of the Sevenfold Mountains, had once held prestige. Not top-tier, but respectable. It was said the first sect master had shattered a falling star with one swing of his blade. The crater left behind became the sect's sacred grounds.
Now, the sacred grounds were overrun with weeds.
Once-brilliant murals depicting dragons and phoenixes had faded into cracked stone. Pillars leaned like tired men. Roof tiles fell in the wind. The main spirit array flickered even on clear days.
Once, the Broken Star Sect had boasted over a thousand disciples.
Now, it barely held two hundred — and most were low-potential recruits rejected by better sects.
Even among them, Xie Yun was lowest.
He knelt alone in the lower courtyard, scrubbing dried blood from the dueling ring tiles with a straw brush worn so thin it scratched more than it cleaned.
His hands were raw. His sleeves soaked. The morning mist had not yet lifted, and the cold bit at his skin like invisible teeth.
From the platform above, two outer disciples laughed as they passed.
"Still scrubbing floors, Yun-gui?"
"Don't mock him, he might curse you with his bad luck," the other snickered. "No fate thread, remember? Heaven didn't even bother to write him down."
They walked off before he could say anything.
Not that he would have.
His mouth was better used for silence.
He finished the courtyard slowly, rising with stiff legs and numb fingers. The outer court dormitories stood in the distance, humble and worn, but behind them, like a rotting tooth in a weathered smile, rose the Main Hall of Spirit Recognition.
He glanced up at it.
He hadn't looked at it in years.
But he remembered.
He had been seven when they brought him inside — the only time he'd ever been summoned into the hall.
The space had smelled of sandalwood and dried talismans. Robes rustled. Crystals floated above the floor like stars held in place by breath alone.
One by one, the orphans were brought before the elders to be tested.
The children before him had cried in fear. Others trembled in awe.
He had felt nothing.
When it was his turn, the hall had fallen oddly quiet.
Elder Fan — younger then, eyes not yet dulled — took the silver needle, pricked his fingertip, and placed the drop of blood onto the test scroll.
Nothing happened.
No glow. No reaction. No flow of Qi.
The elder frowned.
He pressed the needle to the boy's chest. Xie Yun had barely felt the sting.
Then, something cracked.
The needle shattered in the elder's hand.
Murmurs rose like a tide.
"Is the tool broken?"
"No, it worked on the last three."
"Try the jade stone."
The jade refused to shine.
The scroll refused to write.
"NULL," said Elder Fan, as if announcing a death.
The elders lost interest.
Xie Yun had walked out alone.
Since then, he had remained in the sect — not as a disciple, but as something less.
He cleaned latrines. Chopped firewood. Washed bedding for outer disciples who sneered at him and called him "ghost boy" or "floor worm."
No one dared expel him — perhaps out of pity, or perhaps because no one had ever formally accepted him. He lived in a spare storage shed near the back gardens. Ate leftover porridge, sometimes cold buns. Slept beside crates of damp scrolls and broken talismans.
Some said he was lucky. Most said he was cursed.
Xie Yun just endured.
He finished his morning tasks by the time the sun broke through the mist. The mountains glowed faintly golden. Birds chirped.
And still, the wind felt… wrong.
He noticed it as he crossed the bridge near the inner pools. The air carried weight. The kind of weight that made his skin crawl and the hairs rise on his neck. Leaves didn't rustle — they pressed against the branches like they were holding their breath.
The koi in the pond circled in perfect rings, eyes wide.
The senior disciple on patrol didn't even glance at him, but Xie Yun heard his mutter as he passed:
"Something's off with the sky."
That afternoon, he wandered to the cliff's edge — not the official training peak, but the abandoned rear ridge where the broken altar stood.
It was a place no one visited.
The altar had been there for generations, long before the current sect elders. Covered in moss. Cracked. Some said it had once been the entrance to a hidden inheritance. Others claimed it was cursed, that one of the past sect masters had sealed a disaster beneath it.
Xie Yun didn't believe any of it.
He just liked the quiet.
The altar didn't care that he had no spirit root.
Didn't care that he was trash.
It never whispered. Never judged.
He sat near it with a half-eaten steamed bun, staring up at the clouds, which swirled ever so faintly in spiral patterns that didn't match the wind.
Somewhere far above, the sky rumbled. But no lightning followed.
Later that night, the storm began.
Not with thunder, but with silence.
Too quiet.
Even the insects stopped.
Xie Yun was sweeping the eastern steps when the sect bell rang.
Not once.
Twice.
He froze, broom mid-air.
That bell had not rung in a decade.
The first bell shook the valley.
The second stopped the wind.
The third hadn't sounded in ten years.
By the time the fourth bell rang — a deep, bone-shaking pulse that turned the air to syrup — the sect was already in motion.
Outer disciples scrambled from their dormitories, half-dressed, clutching swords or formation fans. Inner disciples gathered on formation platforms, activating shimmering arrays of defensive light. Elders emerged from meditation chambers, robes whipping in the sudden wind, shouting orders Xie Yun had never heard before.
"Form Circle of Three Stars!"
"Draw the cloud-warding seal!"
"Protect the Seal Hall at all costs!"
He stood at the edge of the main courtyard, clutching his worn broom like it might shield him from gods. His heart beat like it wanted to climb out of his chest. His knees wanted to run. His feet refused to move.
Something was wrong with the sky.
Above the sect, clouds churned in unnatural spirals, folding inward like silk pulled into a knot. Thunder pulsed in time with the altar at the back of the mountain — deep, rhythmic, calling.
The air was no longer air. It was pressure. It pressed into skin and bone. It rang in the ears. The Qi in the valley thinned, drawn upward like threads toward the vortex in the sky.
From every formation, spiritual light flared.
"THIS ISN'T A TRIBULATION!" one elder shouted. "THIS ISN'T MEANT FOR A DISCIPLE!"
No. It wasn't.
It was aimed at the mountain itself.
At the altar.
At whatever was buried beneath.
Xie Yun stumbled back as a shockwave rippled through the earth. The central formation dome lit up, and a barrier of pale jade covered the sect like a glass bowl.
Then — light.
But not lightning.
It wasn't even bright. It was… empty. A line of pure white carved itself down through the spiral clouds, too clean, too thin, as though someone had drawn a line across the canvas of the world.
The ground screamed.
A second line followed.
And then the cliff cracked.
Stone exploded upward as a beam of white silence sliced into the rear peak.
The old temple behind the cliff shattered into sand. Trees vanished in smoke. And at the very center of the blast — at the place the sect had abandoned generations ago — the altar pulsed with silver light.
But it didn't break.
It opened.
Xie Yun couldn't think.
He moved before he understood why. His legs stumbled over stone paths, past fleeing disciples, over collapsed railings and crumbling bridges.
Something called him.
Not a voice. Not words.
Just a single thought, hammered into his chest like a second heartbeat:
Come.
He passed broken pagodas. Blood on the stones. Craters still steaming. He did not see the sword that had fallen from the sky and impaled a training dummy clean through.
All he saw was the silver glow ahead.
And the altar — once cracked and forgotten — now smooth, sharp, and standing in perfect symmetry at the edge of a burning cliff.
The air warped as he neared. His feet left the ground. He floated — not upward, not downward — just off.
Wind howled around him, but no sound reached his ears.
His breath caught.
Then—
"You have come."
A voice like breath between thoughts.
He reached forward.
The altar pulsed.
Everything shattered.
He was no longer standing.
He was falling — but not down.
There was no direction. No gravity. Only motion without time.
Then came the visions.
A field of broken swords, stuck blade-first in a mirrored plain.
A girl in white, sobbing as she vanished into a swirling seal.
A sky split into nine layers, each lit by a different moon.
A shadow standing before a book that burned as it was read.
A hand — his? — gripping a blade carved from silence.
Then came the reflection.
He stood in a void of still water. It reflected a hundred versions of him.
One with silver hair.
One with burning eyes.
One with no face.
He could feel them.
Not visions.
Memories.
"You were erased."
"But the blade remembers."
"Do you wish to live?"
His mouth opened. He tried to speak.
No sound came.
"Then awaken, O bearer of the Nameless Dao."
The blade appeared in the figure's hand.
It did not glow. It had no edge.
It was a stroke — a mark — a refusal.
It pierced him without contact.
And the world burned.
Qi poured into his veins. But it was not normal Qi. It was unaligned — wild — like wind with no direction.
It carved new meridians into his flesh. Wrote a new script across his soul.
He screamed as his dantian cracked, then filled — overfilled — with energy so foreign it made the air cry.
His eyes snapped open.
He lay at the center of a smoking crater.
The altar was gone.
Half the cliff was missing.
Stone burned. Trees smoked. The night sky glowed with cracks like lightning had tried to claw its way into the world and gotten stuck.
Around him, the last of the sect's barriers flickered — then failed.
Silence fell.
Not death.
Just a pause — as if the world itself was holding its breath.
He rose.
Slowly.
No shaking. No pain.
Just stillness.
He could feel the earth beneath him. The Qi in the air. The way light bent ever so slightly toward his left palm.
He turned it over.
A mark was carved there.
Simple.
A single jagged stroke.
A blade.
Far above, in a tower of mirrors…
A blindfolded scribe dipped a brush into spiritual ink.
But when he touched it to the Fate Scroll, the page turned to smoke.
Heaven Register Status: UNKNOWN
Fate Thread: MISSING
Spirit Root: NULL
Designation: NAMED
Violation: Unauthorized Awakening
Response: Termination Order – Immediate Dispatch
In the Ninth Hall of Heaven, where only the chosen sat, a young man with eyes of gold read the alert.
Mu Tianyou.
He was called Heaven's Crown.
The record scrawled itself into the air before him:
"A thread without beginning has begun."
"The Nameless has awakened."
He stood.
Smiling.
"So… he's alive after all."
"Let him climb. I'll be waiting."
On the edge of the crater, Xie Yun turned — and saw a man in silver robes descending from the sky.
The man bowed.
His eyes glowed.
"By order of Heaven," he said calmly,
"you are to be erased."