A lonely tree stood stern atop an unmoving mountain, its roots clawing into the barren rock like the desperate fingers of a dying man. The mountain was silent, an indifferent witness to the slow rot consuming the wood. As the tree began to slowly die, its life became a testament to pointlessness—why struggle when death was already knocking at the bark? Why reach for the sun when the sap had turned to vinegar?
It started to shatter. The bark cracked like old, weathered leather, peeling away to reveal the pale, diseased wood beneath. Branches fell, snapping with the dry, hollow sound of broken bones hitting the stones. Everything within the tree died, a slow surrender to the inevitable cold of the summit.
Yet, against all logic, one small leaf remained alive. It was tucked away in a crevice of the highest branch, swaying with the frantic energy of the autumn wind. Its lush green color was an insult to the skeletal gray of the dead wood around it—a vibrant, pulsating lie in a world of truth.
Then, the wind grew teeth. A sudden gust, sharper and more violent than the rest, tore the leaf free.
The leaf drifted upon a sea of clouds, its destination unknown, its autonomy surrendered to the sky. It remained suspended in the air for what felt like an eternity, dancing on currents that cared nothing for its journey, buffeted by the whims of a tempest that saw it as nothing more than a speck of dust. Then, suddenly, the air thinned. The lift vanished.
The leaf began to fall. This was the ending of its road. Gravity, the final judge, claimed its due.
*Must I live? Must I die again? A voice echoed into the nothingness, vibrating through the leaf and the cloud and the mountain. It was a voice that had been worn thin by the passage of centuries, a voice that sounded like grinding stones.*
*If so, I must change everything. My existence was pointless. My struggles were a comedy of errors performed for an empty theater. I'm tired. Now I die.*
The voice spoke with eerie, unsettling calm, as if accepting a conclusion that had been written before the first star was sparked. It was the calm of the abyss.
*But... if I die again and am reborn, my efforts will become useless. Every drop of blood I spilled, every secret I kept, every night I spent shivering in the dark—it all becomes wasted into a pile of shit.*
The voice paused. In that silence, the leaf hit the ground. It didn't shatter; it simply lay there, soft and green against the frozen earth.
*Yet... that shit is fuel. It was not pointless. It was not useless. It was the fermentation of my own resolve. It was all about me continuing to move forward, even if the road is paved with my own failures. If I am to be a leaf, I will be the one that chokes the throat of the wind.*
Zhung's eyes snapped open, but there was no light to receive them.
He was back in the void. This was not the Realm of Nothingness where the Golden-Eyed entity resided, nor was it the hell of religious scripture. It was his own personal purgatory—the depiction of what came after death created by a mind that had seen too much. It was a space between spaces, a crack in the floor of reality where consciousness lingered like smoke in a room without windows.
It was truly nothing. Just an expansive, suffocating absence of sound, heat, and light.
Zhung stood there alone. He was formless, a mere flicker of intent floating in the dark, until the void began to churn. Figures began to materialize out of the shadows. They didn't appear suddenly; they grew, like mold spreading across bread, until their shapes were familiar—too familiar. Their faces, their gaits, the specific way they held their shoulders—everything crystallized with a terrible, HD clarity that Zhung's mind shouldn't have been able to replicate.
It was the familiarity he hated most.
Four figures fully formed in a semi-circle around him. From his first life, the two people who should have loved him but instead viewed him as a defective tool: his biological Mother and Father. Beside them stood Mei Ling, the woman who had traded his life for a wedding ring. And finally, the coldest of them all: Xain Xe, the woman from his cultivation life who had taught him that even three hundred years of devotion could be discarded like a used rag.
They began to approach. They didn't walk; they glided, moving with a synchronized, predatory purpose. Zhung tried to take a step back, but he had no feet to move. His whole body trembled with a phantom chill, though he had no flesh to feel the cold.
His dead eyes flickered. For a moment, the empty blackness of his pupils vanished, replaced by a brilliant, sapphire blue—the color of his true soul, the color of the boy who had once believed in the world.
*You coward! a voice screamed in the rafters of his skull.* It was his own voice, but younger, sharper, dripping with the rage of the brother who had hanged himself in a garage. *Don't be afraid! Look at them! Kill those bastards! Rip their throats out!*
But the spark died. The blue eyes faded back into the dead, lightless emptiness of a winter night. Zhung's expression became a mask of stone—stern, unmoved, numb, and infinitely tired. He locked his gaze on the four approaching figures, refusing to blink, refusing to offer them the satisfaction of his fear, even as the trembling in his spirit refused to stop.
He hated them. He hated them with a heat that could melt mountains. But beneath the hate was a wound that wouldn't close. Despite his cold exterior, tears began to flow from his dead eyes. They were silent, unstoppable tracks of grief that betrayed the pain he pretended was beneath him.
Then, four hands reached out simultaneously.
They didn't move fast, but they were inevitable. They clamped around his neck from impossible angles, their fingers feeling like bands of cold iron. He started to choke, the airless void closing his throat, the pressure mounting until his vision should have turned black. But there was no oxygen to lose. There was only the sensation of being strangled by the past.
Zhung's eyes never faltered. He stared into Xain Xe's cold, beautiful eyes. He stared into Mei Ling's mocking smile. He continued to lock gazes with the four architects of his misery, their forms wavering like reflections in a disturbed pond.
"Die," they said. It wasn't a shout; it was a whisper, four voices overlapping into a singular, inhuman drone that vibrated in his marrow. "Die, and let us be free of you. Die, and stop pretending you are anything more than a ghost."
The floor beneath him—the imaginary foundation of his own ego—shattered like glass under a hammer.
Zhung fell. He tumbled into a deeper, darker darkness, a void-within-a-void. As he plummeted, he looked up and saw the four figures standing at the jagged edge of the broken floor. They didn't look triumphant. They looked down at him with expressions of pure, unadulterated disgust, as if he were a stain they had finally managed to scrub away.
Then the light from that upper level vanished, and he was alone in the deep.
Zhung landed—though there was no ground to catch him—in a space so dark it felt heavy, like deep water pressing against his lungs. His eyes were truly tired now, the weight of three lifetimes of betrayal pressing against his lids like lead coins.
He began to walk. He had nowhere to go, no horizon to aim for, but he walked because to stop was to cease to exist. His gaze was emotionless once more, the tears of the previous level suppressed through a brutal application of willpower.
Then, his gaze lifted.
In the far distance, two figures materialized. They didn't radiate the cold rot of the previous four. They radiated a warmth that felt like a hearth fire in the middle of a blizzard. It was a warmth Zhung had almost convinced himself was a myth, a bedtime story told to children to make them sleep.
His expressionless facade didn't just crack; it disintegrated.
Tears began falling again, hot and unbidden, carrying with them a feeling he had labeled as "worthless" and "dangerous" long ago: genuine, raw emotion. It was a cocktail of joy, relief, and a longing so sharp it felt like a physical blade in his chest.
He had never been truly unmoved. That was the great lie of the Grandmaster. That was the armor of the Peasant Boy. He had convinced himself that he was a machine of logic and survival, but in the silence of his soul, he knew the truth. Everything he had done—every neck he had snapped, every lie he had told, every cold-blooded calculation—had left a mark. He felt the guilt. He felt the shame. He had simply buried it so deep that he thought he had forgotten the shovel's location.
Seeing these two figures, his legs moved of their own accord. His walk became a sprint, then a frantic, stumbling run.
"Brother! Master!"
His voice cracked, the words tearing through his throat like jagged glass. They were raw, stripped of the cynical barbs he usually used to protect himself.
"Wait! Please!"
But with every step he took, the two figures seemed to recede. The laws of physics in this dream were cruel; the faster he ran, the further they drifted, as if the space between them was expanding at the speed of his own heartbeat.
"No... don't leave me! Not again! Master Shin Luo! Brother, wait for me!"
He reached out, his fingers grasping at the empty air, trying to catch the hem of their robes.
There was his brother—the one who had been the only kindness in his first life, the one who had taken the path of the rope because the world was too loud and too cruel. He looked peaceful now, the marks on his neck gone.
And there was Master Shin Luo—the man who had looked at a broken, bitter boy in the cultivation world and seen a disciple worth saving. The man who had died with a smile on his face while the Heavenly Demon's claws were in his chest.
Both of them turned. They didn't look sad. They smiled at him with a calm, profound pity, as if they were watching a child cry over a broken toy. They understood the destination, and they knew Zhung wasn't ready to reach it yet.
They turned their backs. They walked forward into a brilliant, blinding light that didn't burn, but rather invited.
"NO!" Zhung screamed, but the light expanded, swallowing them whole. When the flash faded, the void was empty.
Zhung fell to his knees. In this layer, he had a body. He felt the weight of his own bones, the ache in his joints. He sobbed openly, his head bowed, his hair shielding his face. His dead eyes shifted back to that brilliant, piercing blue, fueled by the sheer force of his grief. He was no longer a cultivator. He was no longer a survivor. He was just a boy who wanted to go home to a home that no longer existed.
Then, he felt a hand.
It was a soft, warm weight on his shoulder. It didn't feel like the iron grip of the first four, nor the distant warmth of the second two. It felt real.
He looked up, his face wet with tears, and saw her.
It wasn't the mother from his first life—the woman who had screamed at him for surviving. It was Zheng Han. The woman who had found him in this life, who had looked at a silent, eerie toddler and decided to love him without condition. She stood there in her worn, peasant clothes, her hands calloused from the garden, her eyes full of a quiet, unshakable strength.
Zhung didn't hesitate. He lunged forward, hugging her waist, burying his face in her clothes. His whole body shook with the release of a decade of suppressed terror. The "Grandmaster" was gone. The "Tin-rank Cultivator" was gone. There was only a son clinging to the only light he had left in a dark universe.
Zheng Han didn't say anything at first. She simply patted his back, her movements rhythmic and steady, a heartbeat translated into motion.
"Mom... I love you, and I also hate you," Zhung whispered, his voice a hoarse, ragged thing.
In the dream, she didn't seem surprised. She didn't pull away. "Dear, don't be like that. Tell me the reason. Why would you hate someone you love?"
"I hate you for being another light," he sobbed, his grip tightening. "I hate you for making me care. I hate you for being something I can lose. Everyone I love dies or betrays me. I can't... I can't keep doing this. I can't keep opening my heart just to have someone pour lead into it. I'm so tired of losing, Mom."
Zheng Han's arms tightened around him. In that moment, the void seemed to retreat. The darkness didn't stand a chance against the gravity of her embrace. For the first time in three lifetimes, Zhung felt truly, fundamentally safe—the kind of safety that exists before the world teaches you that everything is temporary.
"You don't have to stop caring, Zhung," she whispered, her voice like the rustle of leaves in a summer garden. "Caring isn't a weakness. It's the only thing that makes the strength worth having. You don't have to stop. You just have to be strong enough to bear the weight of the loss when it comes."
"But it hurts," he whimpered.
"I know," she said. "But you are my son. And you are stronger than the pain."
Flash.
Zhung's eyes shot open.
The transition was violent. One moment he was in the warm embrace of a dream-mother; the next, he was staring at a ceiling of rough-hewn wooden beams.
He didn't move. He lay perfectly still, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. Tears were still flowing down his face, hot and stinging. His eyes were still that brilliant, sapphire blue, vibrating with the residual emotion of the nightmare.
He blinked. Once. Twice.
With a brutal, practiced effort, he slammed the iron doors of his mind shut. He forced the grief back into the cellar. He visualized the blue color of his eyes draining away, replaced by the flat, lightless black that was his armor. The tears stopped. The warmth faded. The "effective" Zhung returned.
He sat up slowly, his body protesting with a chorus of aches. He frowned as he surveyed his surroundings. *This was not the hut in Black Water Village. This was a room built with precision—well-constructed beams, clean plaster, the faint scent of expensive medicinal salves in the air.*
He looked down at himself. He was wearing a white silk hanfu, high quality and soft against his skin. His back was wrapped in professional bandages, the dressing damp with a cooling ointment that took the sting out of the bandit's knife wound.
*I am in a merchant's house,* he deduced instantly. Li Mei. She followed through. *She didn't just dump me at a temple; she brought me to her family's resources.*
He checked his internal state. His Heart Aperture was pulsing steadily, the demonic blood circulating through his system, knitting his flesh back together with a speed no mortal could match. The punctured lung was already sealed, though his chest still felt tight.
*I survived. The gamble paid off.*
He closed his eyes for a moment, the image of Zheng Han in the dream flickering in his mind. He pushed it away. He couldn't afford to be the boy who cried in his mother's arms. Not here. Not in the den of vipers that was the Gue Empire's social hierarchy.
He needed to be the hero Li Mei thought he was. And he needed to be the monster the bandits knew him to be.
While Zhung recovered in the Western Frontier, the heart of the Gue Empire beat with a cold, rhythmic precision.
In the Gue Manor, a fortress of white stone and blue-tiled roofs that overlooked the Imperial Palace, a man sat at a desk made of ironwood. He was approximately thirty-two years old, his features sharp and aristocratic, his black hair pulled back in a topknot secured by a silver dragon pin.
This was the Elder Prince. To the public, he was the Iron Prince—the man who had stabilized the border and secured the succession through a series of ruthless political maneuvers.
His eyes were blue. Not the pale blue of a summer sky, but the brilliant, piercing sapphire blue that Zhung's eyes had shown in the dream.
He was surrounded by documents—tax levies, troop movements, reports from the secret police. He signed them with a flick of his wrist, his expression a mask of bored efficiency.
A knock at the door.
"Come in," the Prince said, his voice as cold as a mountain stream.
A guard entered, his armor clanking softly. He knelt, his head bowed. "Elder Prince, the task you assigned has been completed. The dissenters in the southern province have been... relocated. The records have been purged."
"Good. You may go."
The Prince didn't look up. He didn't offer a word of praise. He waited until the door clicked shut before he allowed his shoulders to sag.
The Iron Prince vanished. In his place sat a man who looked older than his years, a man whose soul was tired. He reached into a hidden drawer in his desk and pulled out a small, silk-wrapped frame.
He unwrapped it with the tenderness of a man handling a butterfly's wing.
It was a portrait of Zheng Han. It was the same face Zhung had seen in his dream, though younger, her eyes bright with a hope that the Prince had long since forgotten how to feel.
*Eighteen years,* he thought, his thumb tracing the curve of her jaw in the painting. Eighteen years since the fire. Since I made the choice to let you believe I was dead.
He remembered the smoke. The screams of the coup. He had known then that if he stayed with her, she would be a target. She would be the lever his enemies used to break him. So he had vanished into the shadows, fought his way back into the palace under a different name, and clawed his way to the top.
*I did it for you, Han, he whispered to the empty room. I became a monster so you could remain a person. I built this empire of blood so that one day, I could bring you into a world where no one could hurt you.*
He looked at the painting, his blue eyes shimmering with the same "weakness" Zhung had just fought to suppress.
*But where are you? My spies can't find you. Did you survive? Did our child survive?*
*Although I saw you... I couldn't find you again.*
He had no way of knowing that the woman he loved was currently scrubbing floors in a noble garden only five miles away, clutching a bag of seeds and dreaming of a son who was currently covered in bandit blood and wolf fur.
The Prince wrapped the portrait back in silk and hid it away. The mask returned. He picked up his brush and returned to his documents, a man of iron once more.
Outside, the wind howled through the capital, a restless, wandering thing that carried the scent of autumn and the echoes of a thousand broken promises.
The game was moving. The pieces were falling into place. The father was waiting for a family he feared was dead; the mother was looking for a future she feared was gone; and the son was waking up in a bed of silk, ready to burn the world down to achieve his goal.
**End of Chapter 13**