Shen Wuqing stood at the edge of a shattered landscape. Behind him, the temple was nothing but rubble. The place where divine wrath once burned with righteous fury now lay quiet, a void where mercy had once been dreamed into existence. Yet, the silence here was not a relief. It was a symphony of despair, an elegy sung by the bones of the dead, the echo of those who had prayed for salvation only to be consumed by it.
His steps were slow, deliberate. Every movement was a defiance of the world that refused to die. He walked through the ashes of what had been, not as a conqueror, but as a force of nature, indifferent to the remnants of what others had believed in.
A shadow stirred at the edge of his vision. It was not the whisper of a fading spirit or a flickering ghost of memory. No. It was the figure of a man, stumbling toward him from the broken streets of the fallen city. His clothes were torn, and his face bore the marks of desperation, the marks of someone who had lived too long in the shadow of Wuqing's existence. The man's eyes were wide, filled with a mixture of fear and something else—something older, darker.
Wuqing did not speak. He did not need to.
The man, breathing raggedly, dropped to his knees before him. "You… you were once one of us, Wuqing," he gasped, voice cracking. "Why have you become this… this monster? Why devour the divine? Why erase the names of those who once walked in light?"
Wuqing's lips curled into the faintest of smiles, the kind that could break a person without lifting a finger.
"You speak of names," he said softly, his voice low and cruel, "but do you know what a name truly is? It is nothing more than a fleeting sound, an echo of a thing that was never meant to exist. A name is a tether, binding you to a lie. A lie you have chosen to believe."
The man trembled, his fingers twitching as if reaching for something—perhaps for salvation, or perhaps for the remnants of his lost faith.
"You were born to die, just as I was," Wuqing continued, stepping closer, his presence suffocating, "but unlike you, I do not weep for the inevitable. I do not beg for mercy."
The man's eyes widened with a flash of recognition, but before he could speak, Wuqing raised his hand, and a blade of nothingness manifested from the depths of his palm. It was not a sword, not a weapon. It was a concept, a void, a sharpness that cut through the very fabric of reality.
The man flinched, but Wuqing did not strike.
Instead, the dagger hovered in the air between them, its edge a shimmering blackness, pulling at the very air around it.
"What is this?" the man whispered, his voice barely a breath.
"This," Wuqing said, his eyes cold and unwavering, "is the Dagger Named Regret."
With a flick of his wrist, the blade twisted through the air and slashed across the man's chest. But it did not tear through flesh. No, it did something worse. It unraveled the man's very essence. The regret he had lived with, the guilt that had bound him to this world, was cut away, leaving nothing behind but an empty shell.
The man fell, his body collapsing like a puppet whose strings had been severed. His eyes, once filled with terror, now stared blankly at the ground, unseeing. His name had been erased, his existence forgotten.
Wuqing did not look at him again. He did not need to.
Behind him, the city was still crumbling, the last remnants of a world that had been held together by faith and hope. But all of it, every last piece, was now being consumed by the same hunger that had driven him to this point.
A familiar presence lingered at the edge of his senses, a whisper on the wind. Wuqing turned, his gaze shifting to the horizon.
There, standing on the steps of what had once been a grand hall, was someone he had not expected to see. A familiar face, one he had thought lost to the depths of time.
It was a woman, her features as sharp as a blade, her eyes dark and filled with the weight of a thousand years. She wore the robes of a disciple, but not from any sect he knew. Her presence was an echo from a past long buried, a reminder of the things he had left behind.
"Shen Wuqing," she said, her voice cold and without warmth. "You have truly become a monster. But I am not here to beg for mercy, as they did."
Wuqing said nothing at first. His eyes flicked to the dagger still hovering in his hand, and then back to her.
"You came to stop me?" he asked.
"I came to remind you," she replied, her voice steady, "that you are not the only one who has suffered. That you are not the only one who has been forced to devour the world. You think yourself above all of this, above the pain, above the sacrifice. But there was a time when you were one of us."
Wuqing's eyes narrowed. The shadow of recognition stirred within him, but he pushed it aside.
"Those who walk the path of the void," he said, his voice cold, "do not look back."
"You misunderstand," she said, stepping forward. "I am not here to remind you of the past. I am here to remind you of the price you have paid. You speak of regret, but you have forgotten your own. The Dagger Named Regret is not just a weapon of destruction. It is a reflection of your own heart."
Wuqing's grip tightened around the hilt of the dagger.
"Do you think I fear my own regret?" he asked. "Do you think I care for the things I have lost?"
The woman's gaze softened for a moment. "No," she said, her voice quiet. "But I think you are lying to yourself. I think you have forgotten what it is to live. And in forgetting, you have begun to devour not just the world—but yourself."
Wuqing raised the dagger high, and for a moment, time seemed to stop. The air thickened with the weight of what was about to happen, but before he could strike, the woman vanished.
For a heartbeat, there was only silence.
Then, the ground beneath his feet trembled. The sky, once dull with the weight of death, began to stir. A wind howled through the city's ruins, sweeping the ashes into the air like the last breath of a dying god.
Wuqing lowered the dagger. The woman's words echoed in his mind, but they did not pierce him. They only fed the hunger that had never stopped gnawing at his soul.
"Regret is a concept," he whispered to the wind. "And I am the one who consumes it."
The city, the sects, the gods—all of them had been devoured.
And yet, the hunger remained.
He turned and walked away from the ruins, his footsteps leaving no trace, for the earth itself had forgotten him.
Behind him, the Dagger Named Regret remained, floating in the air, its edge gleaming with the light of a thousand unspoken sins.
But Wuqing had already moved on.
And the world, for all its devouring, had forgotten its own name.