Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
In the end, it’s the fire. The smell of burnt corpses overpowered by the bright flame reignites the hearts of those who surround him still. The bleak scene warps and consumes his mind until any last thought of resistance is gone, snuffed out.
He only wishes they were faster with it. He would tell them to just cut his head off but his mouth is too filled with blood to speak. Those who still have their swords continue to stab him in the chest, as if by destroying his organs or draining him of blood it’d be over soon. His body keeps regenerating, though, even against his wish to stop hurting no matter the cost. Surprisingly, he can’t help focusing on the subtle sounds around him: the bells and crystals hanging on cultivators’ swords and belts as they move, the creaking of the burned wood on the ground, the slosh of his blood-soaked clothes each time he flinches away.
One cultivator approaches with what looks like several talismans and seals in each hand, and Shen Yuan only gets to think “finally” before darkness takes him under.
When he wakes again, his mind feels hazy, disoriented. He died, or he was supposed to die. He knows he shouldn’t be awake, but not why. He was defeated, he was killed? But he’s awake. He can’t move, or see anything but a pitch black void. He can’t feel anything on his body, neither pain nor pressure, just an empty vagueness that hints at the existence of a body even if he’s not aware of it.
He’s just consciousness; Just thoughts with no anchor. No life, no existence, only a never-ending memory of despair agonizing where no one can see. He would scream if he could, he would trash around, carve his face off just to feel it, to know something’s real.
When the hours, days, months pass he starts losing himself. He is no longer just a memory, he is scrambled ideas. His mind jumps uncontrollably while his sense of identity gets eroded like stones on a stream. There is no betrayal in this place, no desire to wander, no hate, no sadness, no loneliness. When fogginess starts to settle in, when the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing, awareness running dry, he sleeps.
In the deepest of sleeps, no quite death but similar in all the ways that matter, he would have spent eternity. Forgotten by the world that created him, he’d become no more than the ghost of a name.
But fate is tricky, the world is filled with mad men, and some of them are bold enough to fight against the heavens and the earth for a second chance.