Chapter 1 — The Ghost Who Stayed Behind
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> "Sometimes, silence isn't peace. It's just a place where no one expects you to scream."
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The outer courtyard of the Ashen Cloud Sect buzzed with life — blades clashed, qi surged, names were called. Disciples dueled in pairs or trained in groups, their laughter bouncing off stone walls polished by generations of ambition.
Jin Sol wasn't there.
He sat alone in the shadow of a rusting shrine behind the old medicine fields, where even weeds refused to grow. His robes were plain. Dirt-stained. His presence didn't even disturb the ants crawling over his feet.
He had learned early how to be invisible. He just hadn't realized how easy it would be to disappear even from himself.
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The sect called him slow.
They weren't wrong.
He didn't grasp the Eight-Fold Palm until weeks after the others. His core circulation was sluggish, his qi density half the average. They said he lacked the flame — that inner drive all cultivators needed.
But none of them asked why.
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He used to wake at dawn to practice with the others. He used to smile when the elders passed, hoping one would nod back. But after his parents died under still-unexplained circumstances, all he received was a pat on the back and a half-broken courtyard room.
> "We'll raise him like our own," they said.
But it wasn't love that brought him in. It was obligation. His father had been the older brother of Elder Hyun, a respected figure in the sect. It was he who took Jin in — not out of kindness, but to preserve face.
The meals were smaller. The punishments harsher. And when he stumbled, no hand ever reached out — only more whispers.
> "Why is he even still here?"
> "Just wasting the sect's food."
> "He should leave on his own."
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So, he did.
Not the sect — but their expectations. He stopped trying to impress anyone. He stopped showing up.
Instead, Jin Sol wandered the mist paths at night, with nothing but his father's worn sword and a pendant left behind by his parents — the last two pieces of them he had. The sword hadn't been drawn in years. The pendant hung cold against his chest, its surface dull with age, but sometimes — when the fog was thickest — it pulsed faintly, like it remembered something he didn't.
He didn't study to catch up. He studied to endure. In secret, he traced broken formations with cold fingers, read forgotten techniques on cracked bamboo scrolls. Not because he wanted power — but because he didn't want to feel empty.
He never wanted revenge.
He just wanted to exist without having to prove his worth.