The city was called Guzhen, though no one remembered why. Even before Shen Wuqing's presence spilled into its stone-veined streets, the name had eroded like a whispered curse spat at dusk—familiar, yet meaningless.
It stood atop a plain of dead ash, once blessed by rivers of spiritual light that no longer flowed. Cracked lanterns swayed from poles like broken necks. The people here did not pray. They survived by forgetting.
And then, he arrived.
Shen Wuqing did not walk through the gates.
The city opened for him.
Its gates, forged from blackroot iron and sealed with hundred-layer talismans, folded inward like paper under the weight of silence. The guards dissolved—no blood, no flame, just a compression of existence until they became a memory never written.
The wind did not howl. It held its breath.
In that breathless pause, reality remembered fear.
The first scream came from a mother.
Not because she saw him, but because her child began to vanish from her arms—not into mist or void, but into a sudden hunger that did not ask permission.
The child's flesh pulled inward, as if every cell recognized its devourer. Bones bent backward in impossible reverence. Eyes wept ichor. Then there was silence. A silence shaped like a child. Then nothing at all.
Shen Wuqing's eyes did not move.
But the hunger inside him blinked.
No bell rang.
No horn called the guards.
And still, they came—draped in rusted armor and desperation, wielding blades that sang of stale glory. They charged not for victory, but for the illusion of control.
Wuqing raised no hand. His body remained untouched by aggression.
But the space around him shifted.
As if the world, in its deepest code, rewrote its laws.
The first ten swords reached him—and shattered, not upon impact, but before it. Metal cried as if embarrassed by its own futility. The wielders crumbled, knees bending backward, mouths opening to chant names they had forgotten.
Wuqing whispered.
"Eat."
The syllable was not command. It was natural law.
Their souls obeyed.
Not with rebellion, but relief.
The city began to remember what it had buried.
In basements sealed by seven generations, mothers began to bleed from their eyes. Not out of pain, but from something deeper. Recognition. Their infants, still unborn, kicked in rhythms that mirrored heartbeats not their own.
Shen Wuqing walked slowly, each step crushing layers of forgotten grief.
Every building he passed bent slightly, as if afraid to stand straight in front of him. Roof tiles slid off in quiet panic. Shadows fled their own corners.
In a quiet alley, an old man knelt.
He was blind. But his blindness had seen more than sight could bear.
"You've come," he rasped.
Wuqing paused.
"You waited?"
The old man nodded, throat trembling. "They said you'd bring the silence. I planted bones in the soil for years. Fed them. Prayed to nothing. I—I hoped you'd devour me last."
Wuqing studied him.
"Then you'll be first."
And he was.
The man wept joyfully as his form evaporated into strands of forgotten time, flowing into Wuqing's still frame like rivers returning to an ocean they didn't know they missed.
By nightfall, the city had no pulse.
Not because it died—but because it was digested.
Every cry, every echo, every scream that once danced through its corridors was absorbed into Wuqing's soul like blood into dry cloth. He tasted memories that had no owners. A hundred generations of suffering fermented into one perfect note of despair—and he drank it whole.
He sat atop the city's altar, where once Daoists bled sacred beasts to beg the heavens for favor.
Now, Shen Wuqing fed the altar with silence.
He closed his eyes.
And the Sky listened.
Somewhere beyond the tapestry of stars, entities stirred. Not gods. Not demons. Things that predated both. They felt it—the echo of a silence that did not belong to creation.
A silence shaped like hunger.
A silence named Wuqing.
He dreamed.
But his dreams were not his.
They were stitched from the devoured.
A woman relived the burning of her child. A father carved out his own tongue to avoid naming betrayal. A boy waited by a river for a mother who had long become part of the water.
Wuqing walked through these dreams like a surgeon through a cadaver.
Dispassionate. Precise. Unforgiving.
But in one dream… he hesitated.
A girl. No older than ten.
She did not cry.
She did not scream.
She stood before him, her form stitched from memories he should have forgotten.
"You're not supposed to be here," she said.
Wuqing's voice was a grave. "And yet I am."
The girl tilted her head. "Will you eat me too?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you're already part of me."
She smiled.
It was the most terrifying thing he had seen that day.
He awoke.
The sky above Guzhen bled rain.
But the droplets evaporated before touching his skin.
Beneath him, the city pulsed—not with life, but with potential.
He had devoured enough to ascend.
And yet, he did not.
Because he felt it now.
A second hunger.
Not his.
But something old.
Something that had watched him from beyond the stars, waiting for his threshold to break.
Something that now smiled.
Across the realm, cultivators screamed in meditation. The moment Shen Wuqing broke Guzhen, the spiritual threads of thousands trembled. Techniques they had practiced for centuries began to rot from within. Their minds were no longer their own.
He had not attacked them.
But by devouring Guzhen, he had digested a pattern—a spiritual sequence embedded in their collective dao.
And now it belonged to him.
A sect elder, once peerless in sword dao, fell from his meditation peak, vomiting black petals. His disciples cried out, but found their tongues no longer obeyed. A child tried to write a talisman, but the ink devoured the paper and the child's finger.
Shen Wuqing had not cursed them.
They had done that themselves.
By building their dao on foundations stolen from others.
Foundations now digested by one who did not forget.
He rose.
His aura shifted.
Not in power—but in flavor.
Where once his presence echoed like a void, now it bled memory. To look at him was to remember things you never lived. To hear him speak was to question your mother's voice.
The sky cracked.
Not from thunder—but from resistance.
He had not ascended—but the world could no longer contain him.
In the far north, an Oracle wept blood over a shattered mirror.
"He has begun to fold time," she whispered.
A monk beside her collapsed, clutching his own name, which now turned to dust.
"Wuqing… devours not just what is… but what might have been."
And in the city once known as Guzhen, now a crater of memories echoing in endless silence, Shen Wuqing raised his hand.
Not to destroy.
Not to command.
But to invite.
He spoke one word.
And the Heavenly Tribes, long hidden beyond the stars, heard him.
"Come."