"Some dreams do not come to let you sleep...They come to remind you—you were never meant to exist."
Lâm Mạc – Unconscious After Shattering the Bone Meridian
After vanquishing the Divine Envoy Tử Lân, Lâm Mạc's body crumbled like ash caught in the wind.
He collapsed, drained of all strength, his soul adrift in a boundless, pale void.No light.No direction.Only a single, haunting sensation—Someone… was calling him back.
"Lâm Mạc…Your blood… is not merely a sin.It is… an origin."
He stood amidst a desolate realm.The sky above woven of ash and screams,the land scorched into dead, cracked veins of earth.
At the center of that wasteland—someone knelt.
A figure in ashen robes, white hair falling like frozen rain.His flesh charred, yet his form endured.Each bone exposed, shining faintly with silver-gray light.
"You are… me?" Lâm Mạc murmured.
"I was the first… to walk this path.""When I died, the Dao remained unfinished.""But now that you live again… the ashes may finally rise."
Lâm Mạc felt it—this was no mere memory.It was a remnant held within his bloodline,an image preserved by ancestral will… waiting to be passed on.
The figure spoke:
"The Thái Sơ is not a path to power.""It is a Dao to rescue a soul that the heavens themselves rejected."
He had once been a great cultivator of the Upper Realm—erased by the Heavenly Daofor forging a system of cultivation that defied innate roots, fate, and bloodline.
"You are the last of our blood…""Born from a voiceless vengeance."
"But remember this:Should you falter, the Dao will turn against you.For Thái Sơ… was born from pain that refused to die."
When Lâm Mạc awoke, he was no longer the man he once was.
His eyes… did not simply look at the world—they pierced through it,as if glimpsing something long buried beneath ten thousand years of doctrine.
He whispered to himself:
"Thái Sơ is not a path.""It is a question… no one has ever dared to answer."
As he rose to his feet, an image flickered through his mind—A woman in white, standing upon a lotus platform of ash, gazing at him from afar.
But the warmth once in her eyes…had frozen into glacial silence.
"You… have truly returned?" she asked.
Lâm Mạc looked to the horizon choked with ash, and whispered:
"Who… is calling me?"