Prologue
At the summit of the Ten Thousand Altar, where the stars bent like reeds in the wind and the heavens sang with the clashing of paths, he stood alone beneath a burning sky. He was once called the Pathlord, God of Ten Thousand Ways—he whose footsteps wrote laws into rivers and mountains, who could pluck a thunderbolt like a string and play the world a song.
He had a heartbeat like a drum of war. Every beat shook a different principle. At one pace, he was the Sword Path; at two, Formation; at three, Alchemy; at four, Karma; at ten thousand—silence, because there was nothing left that was outside him.
Beside him stood his Dao companion of a thousand eras—Qinglian, whose name meant lotus upon still water. She had walked the worlds with him when they were young and famine-mad, when he was but a rough boy with the audacity to devour the wind, when they cut their palms and swore in blood to climb past the sky or die trying.
"The altar wakes," she murmured, lashes trembling. Her fingers touched his wrist, and the pulse between them became a bridge.
He reached, not with hands, but with the totality of who he was. The Ten Thousand Paths uncoiled like dragons, each with a temper and a secret. They rose around him as pillars of light. The universe tilted in respect. Even Heaven's Dao, the cold will that steers the tides of fate, lifted its gaze.
So he did not see the knife until it was already in him.
It was not steel. It was a filament of clear light, drawn from the purest spring of the heart. A Heartspring Needle refined over twenty eras of still meditation, used not to kill, but to splice. It slid through the seat of his Dao as softly as a hair drifting upon water.
"Qinglian." His voice cracked, not from the wound, but from the memory of their laughter under plum blossoms on the day they named each other Dao companions.
Her eyes were wet. She pressed the needle deeper. "Forgive me."
She shoved him, not off the altar, but through it. The altar folded like paper around him, a closing scroll. The Paths shuddered and dimmed. Heaven's Will bent its head and whispered a secret that smelled like cold iron. The god fell.
As he tumbled from the summit of the Ten Thousand Altar, the Pathlord tore a wheel of light from his chest. It was his core, the Ten Thousand Path Wheel, each spoke etched with a law. He thrust it into the river beneath creation in defiance. He gave it one last command.
Find me.
A single scale followed the wheel—a sliver of azure, crescent-shaped, that rang like a bell as it fell. The world was a drum. He was the drumstick. He struck one last time and shattered.
Darkness, then a boy coughing blood in a world that had forgotten his name.