The city had no sky.
What loomed above was neither cloud nor void, but a lattice of pale flesh and blinking eyes—some weeping, some screaming, all watching. The heavens here had been sewn shut by the collective agony of a thousand unborn memories, and Shen Wuqing stood in their gaze like a thorn embedded in eternity's tongue.
He did not flinch.
His foot pressed deeper into the blood-wet soil, and the wind recoiled as if scorched by his presence. This was the sixth sect devoured in silence. No names left. No banners waving. Only the husks of maternal corpses and infant bones ground to dust beneath his advance.
The ninth bell of grief tolled across the atmosphere. It was not metal that rang, but a head—an elder's severed skull, swung on sinew and soul-thread by invisible hands. Each toll shattered illusions. Each toll exposed another layer of the city's lie.
And still, beneath the torn womb of this sacred site, something crawled.
It was not divine. Nor human.
It whispered in a voice older than stars.
Come down. Come home.
Wuqing descended.
The stairs leading underground bled with each step, as if his feet were razors dragging across living memory. This temple had once been a cradle, a place where blind saints offered their children to a faceless doctrine. Now, the doctrine was devoured, and its bones sang with guilt.
He entered the chamber beneath the chamber.
And found… a child.
Not infant, not fetus—but a malformed boy wrapped in scrolls made of umbilical cords. His limbs were bound with silken ropes of maternal hair, and his eyes were sewn shut with jade needles. He did not breathe. Yet he wept.
Wuqing tilted his head. The hunger within him stirred, not from starvation—but from recognition.
This boy was… familiar.
And then, the chamber breathed.
A colossal hand made of remorse pressed against the wall. The stones wept blood. The voice returned—no longer whispering, but chanting, louder now, as if it had waited countless eons for him to arrive.
He eats not for power, but to forget.
He walks not forward, but to unbirth.
He is the Womb-Eater, the Son That Shouldn't Have Been.
Wuqing stepped closer.
The child turned its head—though its neck cracked like ice splitting across a frozen lake. The jade needles fell from its eyelids, and beneath them: not eyes, but mouths. Rows of tiny, trembling mouths filled with teeth too sharp for innocence.
And then, the child spoke.
"You were me once."
The walls collapsed.
The chamber vomited light.
And Shen Wuqing was pulled—not through space, but through memory. Not his own, but the city's. Every scream ever choked, every prayer ever twisted, every cradle that rocked without lullaby—they flooded his marrow.
He saw—
A woman giving birth to void.
A priest drowning infants in silence.
A city choosing blindness over truth.
And in the center of it all: a name scratched out of every scripture, a name the city had carved from its collective tongue, a name that could only be spoken now by silence itself—
Wuqing.
The child opened its mouth-eyes wider.
And bit.
Into his soul.
Wuqing staggered.
Not from pain—but from the sudden clarity. This child was the scar left behind when he was discarded. Not a sibling. Not a clone. But the echo of his infancy—what was thrown away the day he was deemed too cursed to live.
He reached out.
And touched its chest.
It beat once—just once—and the sound was a scream layered beneath aeons of restraint. The child writhed, but not in agony. It danced. Spasmed. Its ropes of hair caught fire. Its scrolls unraveled. Symbols of forgotten dao spilled across the ground, each one spelling a truth more vile than the last:
"To live is to abandon. To grow is to erase. To ascend is to devour."
Wuqing knelt.
Whispered, "I remember."
And then, he devoured.
Not the flesh, but the grief. He pulled the weight of the city's sins into his lungs, inhaled every broken lullaby, every orphaned prayer, every drop of sacred milk that had turned sour on unweaned tongues.
The child did not vanish.
It merged.
His spine cracked. His eyes bled. His voice disappeared, not because he lost it—but because he no longer needed to speak. He had become the language of erasure.
Above, the city began to crumble—not from destruction, but from shame.
The sky-eyes wept molten apologies.
And yet, one name kept echoing from corpse to corpse, whispered by the dying mothers and the silenced fathers—
"He came back."
Wuqing rose.
The blood around him did not stain his robes; it adorned them. The boy within him still wept, not from sadness, but release.
And Shen Wuqing smiled.
A rare thing.
A cruel thing.
For now, he had memory.
And memory was the cruelest blade.
He walked toward the spiral of flesh and light that awaited beyond the chamber. A path carved from the regrets of a generation. Each step he took erased a century of doctrine.
Each breath silenced another god.
As he passed through the mouth of the world, the city collapsed behind him—not into rubble, but into forgetting. The stones no longer remembered their shape. The names no longer remembered their syllables.
Only one truth remained.
He had returned.
And in his return, the sky forgot to exist.