Fang Yuan sat cross-legged above a frozen spring of time-path essence.
He was not meditating.
He was waiting for a question he could not ask.
"I fought Star Constellation," he thought.
"I outwitted her. Giant Sun helped. The battlefield folded. Fate Gu shattered."
The memories aligned. The logic did not.
"But who walked away?"
His scroll of battle records remained blank on that date.
His killer moves began forming gaps — not holes, but editorial hesitation.
As if the world had written that fight once... and then deleted its outcome.
"We did not lose," he whispered. "We did not win."
"We passed through the fight and woke up in a version of its consequence."
No echo confirmed it.
No Heaven punished him.
But a threadless breeze passed through his aperture.
And the Vault did not argue.
Somewhere, deep in the core of his suppressed recollection, a single starlight tremor reemerged.
It was not prophecy.
It was not dream.
It was the moment just before memory becomes myth.
And Fang Yuan understood: they had not escaped the battle.
They had entered it from the wrong side.
"It never ended," he breathed.
"It just split... into versions."
Above, in the heavens beyond recording, the echo pulsed once in confirmation.
And somewhere behind the Vault — deeper than Gu, deeper than Heaven — something began to remember the fight again.
Not to conclude it.
To rewrite where it began.