Tinnitus. Not a sound, but the tomb of sound—a deep well. Lin Yi stood at the bottom of the well, hearing his own blood slowly crawl along the inside of his skull. He had won. The Heavenly Dao altar had collapsed into a ring of charred, jagged ruins. Ashen silver fragments of rules, like dead fish scales, were embedded in the cracks of the fissured floor tiles. The air smelled of blood rust, thick, mixed with a certain sandalwood scent scorched by high heat, forming a nauseatingly sweet and cloying odor. He tried to circulate his spiritual energy to soothe the burns on his left arm. His meridians echoed emptily. Exhale. Inhale again. Each breath felt like swallowing broken glass, with faint tearing sounds coming from deep within his chest. No spiritual energy. Or rather, there was some, but that power no longer belonged to him—it hung just outside his skin, like a soaked cotton robe, heavily wrapping around him, tighter and tighter. Victory should have been warm. At this moment, he only felt cold. Lin Yi looked down at his own palm. The crimson rune in the center was flowing in reverse, retreating from his wrist toward his middle finger, its color fading from deep red to dark brown. He had seen this fading three years ago when his spiritual root shattered. It was a sign that power was leaving the body. But this time, he felt no fear. Only something deeper—emptiness. He didn’t know what he should live for next. The object of his vengeance had dissipated. Xiao Han, the personified enemy of the Heavenly Dao rules, had turned into an ashen silver vortex trap, which he himself had woven into the nascent form of a new order. And then? "And then…" His voice was hoarse, mostly swallowed by the deep well of tinnitus. Lin Yi closed his mouth. His fingertips unconsciously tapped against his knuckles—*tap, tap, tap*—forming a unique rhythm. This was a quirk when he thought, but now it felt like knocking on an empty drum, receiving no echo. He took a step. His right knee emitted an abnormal, light crack, as if a ligament had already snapped, held together only by forcibly tensed muscles. Lin Yi did not stop. He walked toward the relatively intact black stone in the center of the altar—the pedestal that once bore the Heavenly Dao covenant. A fresh crack ran across the stone surface, from the top all the way to the base. A dim golden light seeped from within the crack—the remnants of the "Fate-Reversing Flame" he had left behind, fused with the new rules. He reached out and touched the crack. A burning sensation came from his fingertips, but it wasn’t intense—more like a reminder. Staring at the dim golden remnants, Lin Yi suddenly realized: there was no warmth in this light. It shone but did not burn. It existed but did not grow. It was a specimen of order, essentially the same as the ashen silver vortex Xiao Han had left behind in the end—both were attempts to fix everything in place. The only difference was that one was cold, the other warm. What had he won? This thought pierced his recently relaxed nerves like a thorn. Lin Yi abruptly withdrew his hand, retreating half a step. His boot crushed a fragment of a rule. The crisp sound was especially jarring in the dead silence. Footsteps came from behind. Very light, but steady. Not Su Wanqing—her steps always carried a hint of cautious hesitation. Nor Shi Meng—that guy walked like a mountain bear moving, making the ground tremble slightly. These footsteps belonged to someone who didn’t need to conceal their presence, yet didn’t want to startle anyone either. Lin Yi did not turn around. His back stiffened, and the tapping rhythm of his fingertips quickened by one beat. The newcomer stopped three *zhang* away. No words. Lin Yi caught a scent: aged ink fragrance, mixed with the bitter aroma of medicinal herbs, and—very faintly—the smell of blood. He recognized this combination of scents. For three years, by the cold pool in the back mountains of the Lin family, he had smelled it from this angle countless times. "Mo Chen." Lin Yi turned around. The Mute Master stood at the boundary between scorched earth and rubble, his figure more hunched than remembered. He wore a faded gray robe, the hem blackened by the blast wave from the altar’s collapse. His face was calm—a calm that was not comforting, not congratulatory, but a temperatureless, almost dissecting-table-like direct gaze. His eyes were sharp as knives, capable of seeing through disguises—they were now seeing through the emptiness Lin Yi tried to wrap in The handwriting was deep, the knuckles white from exertion. "I once was—" Lin Yi's breath caught for a moment. Mochen continued to write. Wind poured in through the cracks in the altar ruins, whipping up fine ash, but the characters remained clear. "You." Two words. Then he paused, lifting his head to meet Lin Yi's gaze. There was no pity in those eyes, only a weary calm born of long years. Lin Yi felt his stomach clench, a foreboding chill creeping up his spine like icy water. Mochen lowered his head and continued writing. "Reached the summit." The wind grew stronger. The edges of the characters began to scatter. Ash on the scorched earth writhed like a living thing, trying to cover the three words. Mochen's fingers moved faster, blood seeping from beneath his fingernails. "And then" He stopped. His left hand rose, pressing against his own throat. Lin Yi's gaze involuntarily followed that hand. There was a scar on Mochen's Adam's apple. He had seen it before but never looked closely—it wasn't a tear, not a burn, but an incredibly neat, clean line, as if sliced open by the sharpest blade in one stroke. The scar was old, its edges pale, but so smooth it was almost artistic. Mochen's right hand moved again. This time, he wrote slowly, each stroke like cutting his own skin. "Cut out" "My own" "Tongue." As the final stroke was completed, a sudden, fierce gust swept through the altar ruins. The characters on the scorched earth were utterly scattered, leaving only a few shallow finger marks, soon covered by fresh ash. As if those words had never existed. Lin Yi stood where he was. The ringing in his ears deepened. He heard his own heartbeat—slow, but heavy, like someone pounding a broken drum inside his chest with a hammer. "...What does that mean?" His voice was hoarser than he expected. The words came slowly, carrying a deliberately formed pressure—a habit when he was tense, but now that pressure was directed more at himself. He was asking a question whose answer he feared. Mochen did not answer. He slowly rose to his feet, brushing the scorched earth and gravel from his knees. His movements were unhurried, so unhurried it was almost cruel. Then, he drew from his sleeve a palm-sized black stone slab—Lin Yi recognized it as the tool the Mute Master used for carving characters to communicate. Mochen carved a name into the slab with his fingernail, then turned it to face Lin Yi. On the slab were only two words. "Cang Ming." Lin Yi did not recognize the name. But his spiritual sense—that near-intuitive insight into energy flow and the gaps in rules—let out a scream the instant it touched those two characters. Not fear, but resonance. Within the stroke structure of this name was a rhythm, a cadence that shared the same origin as the bloody sigil in his palm. "The first generation Heaven-Defier?" Lin Yi pressed. Mochen shook his head. Not a denial, but a "not enough." He returned the slab to his sleeve, then raised his right hand, pointing to the other end of the altar ruins. Lin Yi followed the direction of that hand. Yun Zhi was curled up beside a broken stone pillar at the edge of the altar. Her moniker was "Dream Weaver," but now she resembled a puppet whose strings had been cut, her arms tightly clutching her head, her knuckles digging deep into her disheveled hair. Her body trembled violently—not from cold, but from something more internal tearing her apart. Lin Yi could hear her sounds—not speech, but a breathy noise between a sob and a roar, broken and intermittent, like a rusted machine forced to operate. "She's... remembering something?" Lin Yi took a step toward Yun Zhi, but Mochen's hand barred his way. The Mute Master shook his head, his eyes clear: *Not now.* Then, his fingers traced a gesture in the air—one Lin Yi had never seen before. Not the divination gestures of the Heavenly Secrets Pavilion, not any known sect's secret sign. It was a cutting motion. From throat to chest, a single slash downward. Lin Yi froze in place. He suddenly understood the meaning of that gesture. Not "don't speak." It was "I am cutting the truth out from within her." Yun Zhi's dream-weaving ability, her nightmares, the "memory fragments not her own" she repeatedly mentioned—those weren't side effects of illusion arts. They were sealed truths. And now, with the altar collapsed and the constraints of the Heavenly Dao's rules weakened, those sealed memories were rebelling against her. Mochen lowered his hand. His gaze shifted from Yun Zhi back to Lin Yi, then—very slowly—he nodded. It was Lin Yi felt a wave of dizziness. It wasn’t physical weakness, but a cognitive weightlessness. The symbols he had chased his entire life—“defying heaven to change fate,” “breaking through the heavenly laws,” “rising again”—were now being recoded. If Mochen was telling the truth, if the name of the first generation’s Defier, “Cangming,” shared the same origin as the blood-colored runes, then “defying heaven” itself was not rebellion, but part of the trap. Every breakthrough, every act of “defying heaven,” was adding bricks and mortar to some more ancient seal. He looked down at his own palm. The blood-colored rune had faded to a pale brown, but its outline was still clear. He had once believed it was a mark of power. What did it look like now? Like a keyhole. Lin Yi’s fist clenched, nails digging into his palm. He didn’t feel anger. Anger required a clear target. At this moment, he only felt a bottomless nausea, as if he had swallowed the dregs of his lifelong faith, only to discover those dregs had never been digested, fermenting in his stomach all along. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?” He asked Mochen. His words were slow, each one squeezed from between his teeth. It wasn’t an accusation, but something more despairing—the revulsion of realizing he had been watched, experimented on, cultivated as a “seed” all this time. Mochen took another stone slab from his sleeve. Carved words, flipped. “Said” “You’d believe?” Lin Yi stared at those two words. He wanted to say “Yes.” But his lips didn’t move. Because he knew the answer. The Lin Yi of three years ago wouldn’t have believed. The Lin Yi of a year ago wouldn’t have believed. Even before stepping into this altar, if Mochen had told him “defying heaven to change fate is a trap,” he would have considered it a conspiracy by the Mute Master to shatter his Dao heart. Mochen put away the slab and pointed at Yun Zhi again. This time, his gesture carried a sense of urgency. Yun Zhi’s trembling intensified. Her head tilted back, her spine arching into an unnatural curve, her lips parting wide without making any sound—then, suddenly, her eyes flew open. Those eyes held no focus. The pupils had dilated into a pitch-black abyss. But her lips were moving. She was speaking. No, she was repeating a name. Lin Yi’s spiritual senses caught the vibration frequency of that name, perfectly matching the “Cangming” on Mochen’s slab. “Cang… ming…” Yun Zhi’s voice was not her usual husky, magnetic tone. It was an older, more shattered timbre, as if transmitted from a faraway place through a body not her own. Her fingers pulled free from her hair, clawing wildly in the air as if touching some unseen structure. Then, her gaze—those unfocused eyes—suddenly locked onto Lin Yi. “This… is not… your power…” Yun Zhi said. Each word carried the metallic sweetness of bloody froth. Her body pitched forward, hands bracing on the scorched earth like a dying beast. “This… is… your… chains…” Lin Yi’s tinnitus peaked at that moment. He couldn’t hear any other sound. But he saw Mochen’s lips moving—the Mute Master never spoke with his lips, but now he was repeating a shape. Lin Yi read it. “Go.” Go to her. Go receive the truth. Go complete the final step of verification as a “seed.” Lin Yi didn’t move. His legs felt nailed into the scorched earth. Not out of fear. Because of something more complex—the sudden realization that every choice he made now might have already been written into some more ancient script. If he walked toward Yun Zhi, he was acting according to Mochen’s guidance. If he turned and left, he was acting according to the script of “refusing to be manipulated.” Whatever he did, he was within a framework. That realization made him want to laugh. But he couldn’t. Yun Zhi’s pupils began to contract. That ancient timbre was fading, her own voice—shattered, sharp, real—resurfacing. “Lin Yi…” She called his name. Not “Ziyuan,” not any polite address. It was his given name, like a blunt knife chopping into wood. “Come… see… what you’ve really won…” Lin Yi’s tapping fingertips stilled. He took the first step. The scorched earth crumbled beneath his boots. The smell of blood-rust grew stronger. He walked toward Yun Zhi, toward the Dreamweaver who was using her last shred of clarity to Yun Zhi spoke. Her eyes finally had focus, but that focus was too deep, like two wells that went straight down to the earth's core. "Don't close your eyes." Then, she dragged him in. It wasn't an illusion. Lin Yi knew the moment his consciousness began to fall—this wasn't a dream woven by Yun Zhi; this was her real, sealed memory that she was experiencing. He felt his consciousness like a pebble, thrown into a boiling bronze furnace. There was no fire inside the furnace, only something older than fire: the primitive form of rules, pulsing like blood vessels, emitting a low-frequency tremor that made his teeth ache. He saw. A figure stood before the furnace. Its back was slender, clad in an ancient robe completely different from this era. The figure turned around, its face blurred, but there was a clear curve at the corner of its mouth—a vicious grin. Its hands were forging something, and the outline of that thing was exactly the same as the bloody rune on Lin Yi's palm. The First Generation Heaven-Defier. Cang Ming. He was forging shackles. Not to break the Heavenly Dao, but to replace it. Using a new lie to replace the old lie. And every subsequent generation's "heaven-defying," every "breakthrough," was adding a fresh stroke of blood-ink to these shackles. Lin Yi wanted to scream. But his vocal cords couldn't make a sound in this memory. He could only watch, only feel, only be filled with the truth. Then, he saw Mo Chen in his youth. The Master of the Celestial Secrets Pavilion stood at the other end of the furnace, wearing an expression identical to the current Mute Master's—that kind of pitiless calm. Young Mo Chen said something, but in this memory, sound was stripped away. Lin Yi could only see his lips moving. Then, he saw Cang Ming's smile deepen. And then, he saw Mo Chen raise a knife himself. A flash of blade light. Blood gushed forth. But it wasn't red blood—it was something thicker, darker, like cursed ink. Mo Chen's glottis was slit, so clean it was almost artistic. His eyes, in that moment, met Lin Yi's eyes—across countless years of memory. Those eyes were saying: "I was once you." Lin Yi's consciousness began to rise. Not by his own control, but because Yun Zhi's power was waning; she could no longer sustain this shared memory. But in the last instant before leaving, he heard a sound—not a visual compensation, but a real sound surfacing from the depths of his own memory. It was himself. Himself three years ago. At the moment he was struck by the "Heavenly Punishment" during the Heaven-Bestowed Ceremony. He heard himself scream. And the waveform of that scream completely overlapped with the voiceless gasp Mo Chen made when his glottis was slit in his youth. Lin Yi's eyes snapped open. He was still on the altar ruins. Yun Zhi's hand had already let go; she lay collapsed on the ground, her chest heaving violently like a fish thrown ashore. Mo Chen stood three steps away, the scar on his throat appearing exceptionally clear in the twilight. The wind had stopped. The ashes no longer danced. The entire world fell into an eerie, vacuum-like silence. Lin Yi looked down at his own palm. The bloody rune had completely faded, leaving only a faint brown outline, like a healing scar. He suddenly understood. "Defying Heaven to Change Fate" was not rebellion. It was the oldest lie. And he, Lin Yi, styled Ziyuan, a discarded genius youth, the "resurgent rise" he had pursued all his life, was merely the latest host of this lie. Victory, like a soaked cotton coat, finally drowned him completely. But he did not fall. His spine remained straight, though his knees trembled. He looked at Mo Chen and asked in an extremely slow, drawn-out tone: "You cut out your tongue to stop spreading the lie." Mo Chen nodded. "Yun Zhi's nightmares are sealed true memories." Mo Chen nodded again. "Then I..." Lin Yi paused. His fingertips began tapping against his knuckles again, but the rhythm had changed—no longer the pressing cadence of thought, but a more chaotic, struggling rhythm. "The rune on my palm, the strange visions I see with every breakthrough, my so-called 'Fate-Defying Flame'..." He didn't finish. Because he already knew the answer. Mo Chen took out the final stone tablet from his sleeve. Inscribed characters, flipped over. "You are the first" "to come this far" "and still have a choice." Lin Yi stared at those eight characters. His stomach cramped, but his mind—that near-cruel rationality that always surfaced in desperate straits—began She had appeared at some unknown moment. Perhaps she had been there all along, just overlooked by him. Her face was pale, her lips pressed into a thin line, her hands gripping the corners of her clothes tightly—this was her peculiar habit when nervous. But her eyes were bright, a brightness not of joy but of something more resilient: she was waiting, witnessing, preparing to accept any outcome. She didn't speak. She just looked at him. And Lin Yi suddenly realized that in this world saturated with lies, Su Wanqing's very existence was the truest order. She had no spiritual roots, no background, no ambition to "defy fate." She simply—lived. Protected those around her. Believed in the simple conviction that "man can conquer heaven." This thought fell like a seed into the scorched earth of his heart, burned by truth. Mo Chen moved. He didn't approach Lin Yi but walked toward Yun Zhi. The Mute Master crouched down, using his withered fingers to brush aside the sweat-soaked hair clinging to Yun Zhi's forehead. His movements were gentle but carried the precision of an examiner inspecting a specimen. Yun Zhi's breathing gradually steadied, but her eyes remained open, something within the depths of her pupils slowly reorganizing. Mo Chen raised his head, looking at Lin Yi once more. His fingers traced a new gesture in the air—not cutting, but guiding. Pointing to Yun Zhi, to Lin Yi, then to the sky. Lin Yi understood. Yun Zhi's deconstruction was not yet complete. She had "remembered" the truth of the first Defiers' seal, but more memory fragments remained trapped deep within her consciousness. And Lin Yi, as the only "host" who had coexisted with the blood-colored runes until the very end, was the only one who could help her complete the final deconstruction. But this also meant he had to enter that nightmare again. Face Cang Ming's sneer once more. Confirm again that everything he had pursued his entire life was a trap. Lin Yi stood up. His right knee made a louder, faint cracking sound, but he ignored it. He walked to Yun Zhi and crouched beside Mo Chen. His fingers hovered before Yun Zhi's forehead, sensing the faint tremor emanating from beneath her skin—traces of rule fragments coursing through her nervous system. "Can you do it again?" He asked Yun Zhi. His voice was calmer than he had imagined. Yun Zhi's lips moved. Her voice was very soft, but each word was as clear as broken glass scraping against stone: "This isn't... about whether we can..." She struggled to prop up her upper body, one hand gripping Lin Yi's wrist, the other pressed against the scorched earth. Her fingernails were packed with black ash. "This is... what you must..." "See clearly..." Lin Yi closed his eyes. He felt Yun Zhi's fingers tighten, felt her consciousness like a net enveloping him once more. He didn't resist. He knew that this time, what he would see was not merely the first Defiers' conspiracy. What he would see was the complete structure of this trap—and his own place within that structure. Mo Chen stood up and took a step back. His gaze shifted from Lin Yi to Su Wanqing, then back to Lin Yi. For the first time, something resembling "anticipation" appeared in the Mute Master's eyes—but that anticipation was not a desire for an outcome; it was the relief of a long experiment finally reaching its end. Yun Zhi's voice echoed in Lin Yi's ear, as if from deep underwater: "Remember..." "Don't close your eyes." Then, darkness swallowed him once more. But before completely plunging into the nightmare, Lin Yi felt the warmth of another hand—warm, dry, carrying a faint bitter scent of herbs—grasping his other hand. That hand was small but held on tightly. It was Su Wanqing. She didn't speak. At the moment he fell into the abyss, she simply told him with her palm: I am here. Lin Yi's consciousness sank into the searing heat of the bronze furnace. And this time, he was no longer alone. The phantom burn of the bronze furnace still lingered on Lin Yi's fingertips—that heat was no illusion; Yun Zhi's backlash was burning the nightmare's price into reality. He looked down at her. The Dream Weaver lay curled on the scorched earth, her fingers digging deep into her own hair, as if trying to claw something out from her skull. Her lips moved, repeating the same syllable over and over, no sound, only the spasm of her mouth shape. "How much longer can she hold on?" Lin Yi asked. Not to anyone in particular, but to the only person in these ruins who might know the answer. Mo Chen did not write. The Mute Master simply raised a hand, pointing first to his own throat, then to Yun Zhi's temple. The movement was slow, like a rusted machine operating for the last time. Lin Yi understood: her glottis had no physical wound, but her "voice"—the source of her ability as the Dream Weaver—was being torn apart by fragments of the seal. Yun Zhi was not losing the ability to speak; she was losing the ability to "embroider." From now on, every word she spoke would be naked truth, no longer able to weave illusions or use obscurity as armor. For her, this was more cruel than death. Lin Yi crouched down. His knee hit a piece of broken altar stone, the pain sharp, yet it gave him a perverse clarity—his body was still here, still receiving feedback from this world in a mortal way. He grasped Yun Zhi's wrist, feeling the frenzy of her pulse, like a bird trapped inside its skin. "One more time," he said. His speech was slow, each word weighed. "Take me in. One last time." Yun Zhi's eyes reddened. Not a precursor to tears, but a sign of capillaries rupturing under high pressure. She shook her head, strands of hair sticking to the corner of her mouth like seaweed entangling a drowned person. "You will... die." Her voice was like sandpaper grating on wood, every syllable carrying the metallic sweetness of bloody froth. "I've already... deconstructed the seal... If you go in again... you'll be burned to ash..." "Not the seal," Lin Yi said. "You. Your memories. Your real memories." He paused, his fingertips unconsciously tapping on Yun Zhi's wrist bone. It was a habit when he was thinking, a rhythm with a sense of pressure, but now it seemed like he was calibrating her heartbeat. "You said there were scenes in your nightmares that didn't belong to you. The furnace, the bone knife, the smile of the first Heaven-Defier." His eyes never left her. "But what if they weren't 'not yours'? What if they were the sealed truth that belongs to everyone?" Yun Zhi's pupils contracted. Mo Chen moved. The Mute Master took out a stone tablet from his robe—not new, its edges worn, its surface covered in dense, fine carvings, like parchment written on and erased countless times. He used a charred branch to write on the tablet, the characters hurried but carrying a ceremonial gravity: "Her sect was not exterminated." Lin Yi took the tablet, his fingertips brushing over the indentations. "It was silenced," Mo Chen continued writing. "Those who spy on the seal must become part of it. She thought she awakened her Dream Weaver ability while fleeing, but in truth, the seal was choosing a new vessel. Her entire life is the seal's process of propagation." Yun Zhi let out a whimper. Not a human sound, but a raw, primal lament of an animal stripped of its fur. Her fingers suddenly tightened, her nails digging into the old wound on Lin Yi's palm—the place where the bloody runes once resided, now only a faint brown scar remained. The world tilted again. This time, there was no tunnel, no folding. It was a direct fall. Lin Yi felt his consciousness being dragged into a deeper, more viscous space, as if falling into a well filled with blood. When his vision cleared, he stood on an endless plain. The sky was an inverted furnace, its hearth burning not with flames, but with the faces of countless cultivators. They were screaming, laughing wildly, their faces showing precisely calculated expressions of ecstasy at the moment of breaking through realms. In the center of the plain knelt a person. Young, upright, the arrogance between his brows making Lin Yi's stomach cramp again—the first Heaven-Defier. But he was not forging shackles now; he was... pleading. He knelt before an enormous rune, larger and more ancient than any Lin Yi had ever seen, like a mountain range growing from the earth. The patterns of the rune were not carved; they grew—countless generations of blood vessels, nerves, obsessions, entangled, calcified, and ultimately formed into an organic entity over a vast expanse of time. "I regret it," the voice of the first Heaven-Defier surged from all directions, carrying the resonant hum of metal. "I thought reaching the summit could change the rules, never realizing the rules only need one person at the peak to maintain their legitimacy. I became its sturdiest pillar." He looked up, toward Lin Yi's direction. Or rather, toward the direction of all who would come after. "So I cut out my tongue. So I destroyed my own glottis. So I turned myself into a warning—but a warning is also part of the story, and the story is part of the fuel. When you see Lin Yi wanted to retreat, but found his feet already swallowed by the plain’s soil. That soil was not dirt—it was congealed memory, the regret of countless generations of “Defiers of Heaven” who, after reaching the summit, chose silence, chose compromise, chose to become the next generation of gatekeepers. Their feet had taken root here, their voices had rotted here, their existence compressed into the organic matter that sustained the runes’ operation. “Every time.” The First Defier’s mouth began to bleed, yet his smile grew ever more expansive. “Every time someone shouts ‘defy heaven and change fate,’ the runes pulse once. Every time someone breaks through a realm, the runes grow an inch. This is not a conspiracy—it is an ecology. You are not victims. You are participants. Accomplices.” The illusion trembled. Lin Yi felt Yun Zhi’s life force draining away at an accelerating rate—she was forcibly maintaining this depth, using her own soul as fuel. He had to make a choice before the collapse: either believe all of this, abandon his power, admit that his entire life was part of an ecological cycle; or refuse to believe, seize the Fragment of Heaven’s Path, use even greater power to prove he could become the exception. “Ziyuan.” Su Wanqing’s voice pierced through the membrane of the illusion once more. This time her hand did not grasp his wrist, but covered his eyes. Her palm was warm, carrying the bitterness of medicinal herbs and the crisp cleanness of soapwort, shielding him from the burning faces within the inverted furnace. “You don’t need to prove anything anymore.” The same sentence, the same tone, the same grammar that did not belong to this world. But this time, Lin Yi heard what lay beneath the sentence—not trust, not admiration, but weariness. It was Su Wanqing, as a survivor of this world, weary of the very act of “proving.” She had seen her parents die proving the dignity of their small clan, seen Shi Meng burn proving the worth of a rogue cultivator, seen Yun Zhi tear her soul apart proving the reality of illusion arts. She knew that “proving” was the system’s cheapest bait, the admission ticket that made people willingly walk into the furnace. Lin Yi’s fist clenched. His nails dug into his palm, piercing the skin, blood flowing down his fingers into the plain’s soil. The soil absorbed his blood, the runes began emitting faint pulses—the system was still working, still anticipating his anger, his resistance, his next round of “defiance.” He opened his fist. Not a slow, dramatic release. It was the almost rude, self-mocking slackening of an ordinary mortal deciding no longer to participate in a game he could never win. He actively severed the connection to the Fragment of Heaven’s Path—that connection was not a visible cord of light, but something deeper, like an umbilical cord. The moment it was cut, he felt his internal organs shifting, his bones contracting, the meridians that had been stretched open by spiritual energy for seventeen years deflating like leaky leather sacks. No glory. No enlightenment. Only a physiological nausea, like a hangover, like withdrawal, like waking from a long fever. The illusion was collapsing. The First Defier’s smile froze, the faces in the furnace extinguished, the plain’s soil cracked. As he fell, Lin Yi opened his eyes and saw Yun Zhi’s face close—she was crying, bloody tears mixed with sweat streaking her cheeks, yet the corners of her mouth held the same slackness of withdrawal as his. “…It’s over.” Her voice was hoarse. Not a statement, a question. “No.” Lin Yi’s voice was like sandpaper, like a broken bellows, like the voice of any mortal stripped of spiritual energy’s enhancement. “It’s only beginning.” He lay on scorched earth. The sky was a real gray-blue, no runes, no anomalies. Su Wanqing’s arm cushioned the back of his head, protecting him from sharp stones. Mo Chen knelt beside him, fingers hovering over his neck, seemingly checking his pulse—a mortal’s pulse, slow, irregular, laughably fragile. Footsteps sounded in the distance. Heavy, hurried, carrying the coarse texture of the streets. Shi Meng rushed out from the edge of the ruins, clutching something—not a cultivator’s robe, but coarse cloth, an old robe worn by mortal escort guards, carrying the smell of sweat and tobacco. He cursed, voice cracking: “I ran three streets… three streets to find one that wasn’t burnt…” The robe was flung over Lin Yi. Its weight was real, its temperature real, the loose threads digging into his collarbone real. No one asked him what he would do now. Mo Chen passed him a The wind swept over the ruins, stirring up fine ash. Somewhere, an ordinary seed rolled from Su Wanqing’s sleeve and came to rest in his open palm. A rough husk, a real weight. He gripped it with fingers that no longer held spiritual power, his knuckles turning white. The sound of his cultivation receding roared within him. His golden core shattered, his meridians recoiled, as if someone were pulling out and reshaping his bones one by one. Lin Yi knelt, his ten fingers digging into the scorching earth, hearing the laughter that squeezed from his throat—hoarse, broken, yet carrying a kind of almost cruel clarity. He had become the first pawn to willingly jump off the chessboard.