The second gate did not knock.
It split. Without warning, without ceremony. Wuye had been meditating under the tree near the cave — the only tree brave enough to grow this high, its roots curled into the cliffside like gnarled claws. His hands were folded over his dantian. His breath was calm.
Then the void inside him opened like a door unhinging in a hurricane.
His mind plunged.
He didn't fall into memory this time. He fell into meaning.
There was a hospital bed.
Not his. Not Earth's.
An ornate bed, silken, surrounded by candles. A twelve-year-old boy lay dying — the original Wuye — pupils dilated, tongue swollen, blood crusting around his lips.
Above him, a man's shadow.
Crown glinting.
Voice low.
"You understand this isn't personal."
Then the dream shifted. The boy became him — but older, broken, sword in hand, standing over a battlefield of his own making. Corpses of lords and rebels alike.
The voice came again.
"But you said you wanted to change the world."
He opened his mouth to answer And found it sewn shut. A thousand threads of memory — Earth, Empire, death, betrayal — pulled tight across his face and the world whispered:
"What name do you wear?"
He woke screaming.
Sweat-soaked.
Bleeding from his nose and gums.
Master Yan knelt beside him, pressing a hot cloth to his chest. His hands were trembling. Not with panic. With restraint.
"You nearly didn't come back," Yan said.
Wuye coughed blood. "What… was that?"
"The second gate," Yan said. "The Door With No Lock."
Wuye wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. "Then what was I trying to open?"
Yan didn't answer at first. Then: "Yourself."
He passed Wuye a bowl of black tea.
"I've seen cultivators break at the second gate. Saw one kill himself. Another became a mute. One simply forgot her own name and wandered into the desert."
Wuye drank slowly, the liquid bitter as memory.
"I saw everything," he murmured. "Him. Me. Earth. The prince dying. The man surviving. They're not separate anymore."
"They never were."
Wuye looked at his hand. Pale, calloused but not his.
Not really.
"Then who am I?"
Yan gave him a long, unreadable look.
And said, "That's the first true question you've asked."
After that night, Master Yan no longer corrected Wuye's stances. He simply watched. When Wuye misstepped, the old man said nothing.
When Wuye faltered, or bled, or lost balance, Yan only brewed tea and said, "Try again."
Wuye began to understand. Sword training was no longer about movement.
It was about witnessing.
The blade was not just something he held. It was a mirror. A wound. A vow.
He began dreaming less of pain, and more of choices. A hallway filled with locked doors and one door that stood always ajar, waiting. Sometimes, he thought he saw himself standing inside it.
Smiling.
Other times, it was someone else.
The turning point came in silence.
Wuye was practicing Void Severance: Form Two — Drawn Without Drawing— a strange, almost invisible motion that mimicked unsheathing a sword that wasn't there.
He moved slow.
So slow it hurt.
Every joint rebelled. Every breath was a war.
Then, without warning— The sword appeared.
Not physically. Not even spiritually but in his intent.
It was there.
Yan sat up straight. He watched as Wuye finished the motion and exhaled.
The air rippled.
A clean slice.
A pinecone, hanging from a branch ten feet away, fell cleanly in two.
No blade had touched it.
No Qi had been released.
Just intent.
Yan said nothing for a long time.
Then stood.
Walked over and dropped to one knee.
Not as a gesture of submission but of completion.
"You've learned the first cut," he said quietly. "The one that comes before power."
Wuye stared down at his hands.
"…I didn't feel anything."
"Good," Yan said. "Feeling is a lie. Knowing is the blade."
That night, they sat at the fire again.
It crackled low. Outside, snow fell without urgency — lazy, half-hearted, as if even winter was unsure whether to continue. Wuye finally asked the question he'd been holding.
"Why did you take me in?"
Yan sipped his tea. "Already answered that."
"No. You said you were curious. That's not why you stayed."
The old man said nothing but his hands trembled.
"…I had a son," Yan said at last. "He was twelve when they killed him."
Wuye's breath caught.
Yan's voice was a whisper. "He refused to kneel. So they broke his legs. Said it was for harmony. He bled out in the square. I wasn't allowed to gather his body."
Silence fell.
"I came here to rot in peace. To forget I was ever a father. Then you crawled into my cave and bled like him. Looked at me like him. Lied through your teeth like him."
Wuye said nothing.
He couldn't.
"I hated you for it," Yan said. "Still do, some days."
Wuye lowered his head. "Then why train me?"
"Because I want one thing before I die." Yan's eyes glowed in the firelight. "To see the throne that killed my boy fall and I think you'll be the one to do it."
They didn't speak again that night but in the silence, something changed. Wuye slept dreamless for the first time in weeks and when he woke, Master Yan was waiting outside with a box.
An old lacquered box, sealed with three iron clasps.
He handed it to Wuye.
"Inside is your blade," Yan said. "The real one."
Wuye's hands trembled as he reached out.
"I'm not ready."
Yan smiled — faint, tired and proud.
"No," he said. "But you're becoming."
Wuye stared at the box.
Three iron clasps. The lacquer worn down, edges chipped. Not ornate. Not sacred. Just old — like everything in this cave. Like the man who held it out with trembling hands.
He took it.
The box was heavier than it looked.
Inside, a weight that had waited for years. Maybe lifetimes. He didn't open it. Instead, he held it to his chest and looked up at the man who had saved him — not out of mercy, but because even ruin can recognize itself in another.
"I'm not your son," Wuye said softly.
"I know."
"I won't kneel."
"I wouldn't trust you if you did."
A long pause passed between them. The kind that only exists at the edge of something irreversible. Then Yan said, voice quieter than before, "When you do draw that sword… it won't just cut your enemies."
Wuye nodded. "It'll cut me too."
The old man didn't deny it.
"Good," he said.
That night, Wuye sat alone by the fire, the box in his lap, unopened.
He didn't touch the clasps.
Didn't reach for the blade inside. Instead, he stared into the flames — and imagined, for the first time, the shape of the world he wanted to carve. Not a throne. Not even a grave.
Something else.
Something without a name.