The Hollow did not echo.
It swallowed sound the way a corpse swallows breath—without ceremony, without pause. The air was dense, bitter with the scent of scorched minerals and rotting qi. It wasn't night, but the sky didn't know what else to be. Clouds hung low like bruises, red-veined and trembling.
From the crater near the cliff's base, a broken body moved.
Gu Yan opened his eyes.
He had expected darkness, but the world was pale. Washed out. Like someone had drained the color from existence itself. Blood clung to his lips. He couldn't feel his left arm. His robe was torn and caked in ash, revealing the charred flesh just beneath his collarbone—a raw, cross-shaped scar, still pulsing faintly with spiritual rejection.
A parting gift from the sect.
> "You are not part of this story," Elder Qiu had said, eyes dull with authority. "The Heavens made no thread for you. Walk your empty path elsewhere."
Then came the fall. Not metaphorical. Literal. A final, clean way to vanish someone like him.
But he hadn't vanished.
Not yet.
He sat up slowly. His body protested every motion, but he moved anyway. Breathing was shallow. Every inhale scraped like knives. The impact had fractured ribs, maybe his spine, but it didn't matter. Pain was useful. Pain meant he was still here.
A mirror shard jutted from the blackened soil beside him—tall as a man, half-buried like the blade of a god. Its surface was dulled, cracked, but even in ruin, it reflected.
Not his face.
Something else.
Threads. Dozens of them, faint and trembling, dancing in the broken glass like strands of golden silk. None of them connected to him. They circled, twitched, then pulled away like fearful animals sensing something unnatural.
And yet one hovered closer.
Thin. Shattered in three places. Still clinging to a corpse nearby—just bones in rusted robes, collapsed against a jagged rock. His death had been quiet. Probably meaningless.
Yet something of him remained.
Gu Yan looked at the thread. Then at the Mirror. Then back to the thread.
It drifted, waiting.
> "Is that what you are?" he asked aloud. His voice cracked. "A thief's tool?"
The Mirror did not reply in words. It pulsed—once—like a heartbeat.
A low, vibrating presence spilled into the Hollow. Not a voice, not a sound. A feeling. Ancient and watching. Curious. Dispassionate.
Then something clicked within him.
> [Mirror of Reversal Activated]
Thread Fragment Detected.
➤ Name: Stubborn Resolve (Damaged)
➤ Compatibility: 89%
➤ Status: Inert Essence.
➤ Warning: No core thread. Integration risk: HIGH.
➤ Proceed? (Y/N)
Gu Yan stared.
A cultivator would have meditated. An alchemist would have tested. A sane man would have waited.
Gu Yan had no thread.
No fortune. No place. No divine permission.
He reached out and whispered, "Yes."
The pain was immediate.
White-hot and endless. Like swallowing lightning. Like something ancient clawing through his mind with no regard for what it broke on the way.
He screamed, but only internally. His mouth stayed closed. The Hollow didn't deserve his voice.
Then—silence.
He collapsed again, twitching. His eyes rolled back, then settled.
He was still broken.
Still bleeding.
But something… had changed.
The Mirror was still. The threads distant again. But within him, a presence lingered—faint, fractured, and not his.
The bones near the rock had collapsed fully now, their thread gone. What remained of the man's existence was inside Gu Yan.
> Not stolen, he thought, chest rising slowly. Inherited.
---
The wind shifted.
Ash danced. A faint chill passed through the Hollow, brushing over his skin like a forgotten memory. His gray eyes stared up at the bruise-colored sky, and for the first time since the ceremony, he didn't feel empty.
Not whole, but no longer blank.
He clenched his hand. Felt the minor tremor pass through it.
Clarity followed.
He could still die here.
The Mirror might kill him next time. The sect might send someone to ensure the exile was complete. The world would not mourn his loss.
But for now, he could walk.
He rose to his feet with effort, spine bent, bones groaning. The blood had dried at his jawline, leaving blackened cracks along his cheek.
No hero's return.
No sudden strength.
Just one step forward.
Another fragment waited nearby, pulsing beneath the earth. Another story discarded. Another soul forgotten.
He would claim them all.
One broken thread at a time.
And when he stood before the sect again—
It would be the world that needed a thread to survive him.