The light from the world above died within minutes.
Stone gave way to something stranger, roots growing out of walls like veins through rotting flesh. The air grew thick with mildew and slow-moving Qi, the kind that didn't buzz or flow but clung to your skin like wet cobwebs.
Lu Tian held his breath, hand brushing the curved grip of Shidu under his robe. Even the scar-weapon had gone quiet, as if the memories inside it knew better than to speak in a place like this.
Yan Xue limped beside him, one hand pressed to her ribs. Her Qi reserves were fractured, flickering like candlelight in wind. And still, she said nothing. She didn't ask to stop. Didn't curse the Sect. She just kept moving.
They were alike, in that way.
The Rot Maw wasn't just a tunnel.
It was a grave.
Not of bodies, but of intentions.
This was where the Sect dumped everything that didn't work. Failed formation stones sparked faintly in the dust, their glyphs half-erased, leaking energy like cracked lanterns. Broken pills pulsed with unstable compounds. Spirit beast husks lined the walls, long dead, but not fully decayed, preserved by the saturation of Qi and hatred in the air.
Lu Tian remembered this place.
Barely mentioned in the novel.
One chapter. Half a page.
A footnote.
"The Rot Maw holds what the Sect wants to forget—but memory lingers, and some artifacts remember being born."
He didn't think much of it at the time.
Now, he felt the truth of it pressing against his skin.
Something was watching them.
Not with eyes.
But with awareness.
They passed through a collapsed chamber, glyphs burned into the ceiling in a language neither of them knew. Old language. Pre-sect.
Yan Xue leaned against the wall, breathing shallow.
"We need to rest," she said, finally.
Lu Tian nodded.
He moved a broken spirit furnace to block the entrance, then sat across from her in silence.
Time passed.
Their breathing slowed.
Then she spoke again, quieter.
"You knew about this place."
"I read about it."
"In a cultivation manual?"
He hesitated.
"No. Something else."
She looked at him for a long time.
Then nodded.
"You're not from here."
Not a question.
Lu Tian didn't respond.
Didn't need to.
In the quiet that followed, the Maw stirred.
A low hum echoed through the chamber, not sound, but resonance. Old cultivation energy, warped by time and rejection.
And then-
A whisper.
Not from outside.
But inside Lu Tian's Spiral.
A scar tried to open.
Not one he had earned.
A memory he had never lived surfaced for a moment, blurred, stitched from pain that wasn't his.
A boy screaming. A tower collapsing. A woman dragging her own soul out of her chest.
Then it vanished.
Lu Tian clutched his head.
Yan Xue was already up, blade drawn, back to the wall.
"What was that?" she hissed.
Lu Tian looked up slowly, the Spiral still spinning wild.
"There's something down here."
She nodded.
Then they both turned-
Because the hallway ahead pulsed.
A door appeared where none had been before.
Not carved. Not constructed.
It just... became.
A simple stone archway, dripping with moss, carved with a single mark:
—
A symbol of the number one.
Lu Tian stepped forward.
He didn't understand why, but the Spiral pulled toward it like a compass.
"Don't," Yan Xue warned. "That's not a place. That's a choice."
"I know," he said.
"But if we're going to survive, we need more than escape."
He placed his hand on the archway.
It opened.
Beyond was darkness.
And something moving.
Not with legs. Not with flesh.
With memory.
The kind of memory no one remembers having, until it wakes up on its own.
He looked back once.
"You coming?"
Yan Xue stared at him.
Then limped forward.
"I didn't walk out of that arena just to die hiding in a pit."
And together, they stepped through.
The moment Lu Tian crossed the threshold, the world lost its shape.
The air turned thick, viscous, like walking into a dream halfway through someone else's nightmare. Space twisted with every step. One moment, the corridor stretched like a tunnel without end. The next, it narrowed until the walls brushed his shoulders.
Behind him, Yan Xue breathed heavily, trying to stay upright. Her wounds hadn't healed. Her Qi was low. But her eyes never left him.
They walked in silence.
Then the tunnel ended.
Not with a wall.
With a drop.
Before them opened a vast hollow, an inverted dome filled with floating shards of stone and memory. The fragments pulsed faintly, each holding a flicker of something alive. Faces. Voices. Screams. Laughter. All broken. All forgotten.
At the center of the void hovered a figure. Not a person. Not anymore.
It had once been a man.
Now it was a collection of black threads, spiraled around a cracked dantian, hanging like the core of a shattered world. Limbs half-formed. Face stretched in three directions. Spiral marks burned across its chest. Abyss Rings, unstable, unanchored. Flickering in and out of visibility like they couldn't decide if they still existed.
Lu Tian knew what it was.
The first Spiral cultivator to fail and survive.
Not in body.
In technique.
It had poured its soul into its cultivation and collapsed before the Spiral could stabilize. The body died. The self fractured. But the technique, the scar-skill it had tried to forge, remained.
And now, it was alive.
Floating there.
Waiting.
A whisper echoed in Lu Tian's ears. But it didn't come from the figure.
It came from the Spiral in his chest.
"To take what was never meant to be passed on, you must give what you were never ready to lose."
A glyph formed in the air before him, drawn in ash and blood.
The name of the skill.
[Hollow Binding Sutra]
Lu Tian understood.
This wasn't just a skill.
This was a living idea, one that couldn't be taught, only absorbed.
And to take it would be to let it carve itself into his Spiral. A parasite. A gift. A curse.
Yan Xue reached out and grabbed his sleeve.
"Don't," she whispered. "There's no way that thing doesn't come with a cost."
"I know," Lu Tian said.
"But we need something the Sect can't predict."
"We need a weapon they burned and buried because it scared them."
He stepped forward.
And the world responded.
The floating corpse opened its eyes.
Not two.
Dozens.
Each one locked onto Lu Tian.
A voice like unraveling cloth filled the chamber.
"Will you become... my final echo?"
Lu Tian stared up at it.
And nodded.
"Yes."
The threads around the body snapped loose.
They shot forward like spears.
Yan Xue screamed something behind him, but he couldn't hear.
Pain hit, not on his skin, not in his mind, but in his memories. He felt moments being rewritten. Threads stitching across his thoughts. A boy holding a letter. A mother's silence. A hallway full of doors, now open, now whispering.
The Spiral turned white-hot.
And then everything went dark.
---
When he woke, Yan Xue was crouched over him, her hand against his chest. Her palm glowed faintly.
"You almost stopped breathing," she said. "You were convulsing for minutes."
Lu Tian sat up slowly.
His body shook.
But inside his chest, the Spiral spun slower now.
Deeper.
Changed.
A new ring had formed around the others. Pale gray, cracked, incomplete, but real.
And in his hand was a thread of black silk, thin, glowing softly. Not physical. Not illusion.
A binding.
He looked down at it.
Then saw the new text burned into the inside of his wrist.
[Hollow Binding Sutra]
• Bind your memory to another. Transfer the weight of your scar onto them.
• Effect: Target carries your pain. Target suffers instead of you, for one memory only.
• Cost: If target dies while bearing it, the scar returns twice as deep.
Yan Xue looked at him.
"What did you take?"
He looked at her.
Then at the corpse above, already turning to dust.
"His last attempt to survive."
She didn't speak again for a long time.
The dome around them began to crumble.
The walls whispered once more.
And somewhere far above, in the Sect that had buried them, the Elders felt something shift in the foundations.
A buried idea had stirred.
And it had chosen a new host.