Lu Xuan didn't dream often.
Not since his rebirth. Not since Shi Qiran's seal fractured and the Immortal Demon God Body began to stir inside him.
But tonight, sleep found him.
Not gently.
Not quietly.
Like a gate left cracked open during a storm.
The dream began with frost—endless fields of it.
He walked barefoot across ground that didn't belong to any world he'd known. Stars hung upside-down in the sky. Trees floated root-first. Rivers spiraled against gravity.
There was no sound.
Until the air pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
He turned—and saw it.
A serpent coiled around the spine of reality itself.
It wasn't breathing.
It was waiting.
Its scales shimmered in dark silver, each etched with fractured symbols—some resembling sect glyphs(spiritual symbol), others like celestial formations long lost to war. The Ancient Snake pulsed once, and Lu Xuan felt every seal within Tianxuan tremble.
It didn't hiss.
It didn't roar.
It simply turned—its eye revealing a reflection.
Lu Xuan.
But not quite. His face flickered between flame and silence, between purpose and fury.
And in that moment… he remembered.
The Blood Lotus Sect.
The sunken temple beneath the altar room.
A petrified coil embedded in obsidian stone.
Shi Qiran had warned him not to touch it.
But he had.
Just once.
The serpent carving burned cold against his palm.
The glyphs(magical rune) hadn't pushed him away.
They had recognized him.
A mural half-erased by ritual fire showed a great serpent devouring a city etched with a name—his name.
Back then, he thought it was metaphor.
Now, standing inside this dream, he realized:
He hadn't just seen the Snake.
He'd been seen.
Long before this incarnation.
Long before restraint.
The Snake shifted.
Its coils bound the sky, looping through the Three Realms—passing between Tianxuan's mortal breath, curling through the Demon World's chaos, and brushing the gates of Heaven's silence.
Then, the Snake opened its jaws—slowly.
Inside wasn't fire.
It wasn't void.
It was memory.
Swallowed, broken, preserved.
Su Xue appeared beside him.
She wasn't flame.
She wasn't frost.
She was snow—her soul projection, translucent, barefoot, eyes distant. She didn't speak. Her robes moved without wind. She stood just close enough to watch the Snake, just far enough not to intervene.
She turned to him.
Her gaze was quiet.
Then she faded—not in light, not in shadow.
In silence.
When Lu Xuan woke, he didn't gasp.
But something inside him had stretched—not cracked, just rewritten.
His veins hummed with resonance.
Not from qi.
From memory.
By sunrise, Celestial Dawn Sect's formations flickered.
One river flow reversed entirely, breaking three meditation wards. Glyph seals crackled along the western border wall. Frost formations ignited without fuel.
Elders whispered.
"Realm instability."
But no one named it aloud.
Not yet.
Bai Yujing stood in Moonflame Hall, alone.
Before her, a scroll etched in silver flame—the kind only Void Shattering cultivators could read without consequence.
She traced one line:
"When three realms bleed in rhythm,
the guardian must not seek stillness.
Stillness invites sleep.
And sleep… awakens the Snake."
Elder Yan entered quietly.
"You saw it too," he said.
"No," Bai Yujing replied. "He did. I remember it from history. He dreams it in motion."
In the frost garden, Su Xue sat beneath a lantern tree.
Her seal pulsed faintly.
Not with warning.
But with attraction.
She whispered, "Lu Xuan," and the seal shimmered—like it wanted to speak.
Then, her palm showed an image she hadn't carved: a spiral of scales and stars.
She stared at it.
Then erased it.
Lu Xuan wandered through the archive chambers, soul core dimmed, hands bare.
He stopped before a cracked formation mirror tucked behind ancient scroll racks.
It wasn't listed on any registry.
Not sealed.
Not recognized.
But it pulsed.
Inside, he saw himself.
And behind his reflection—
A serpentine coil winding through the sky, etched with symbols from the Blood Lotus altar. The same ones he'd touched. The same ones that pulsed when he hadn't understood.
But now?
They felt like memory reaching back toward him.
That evening, Yao Lin found him at Skywater Ridge.
"You drew something," she said, holding out a parchment. "During meditation. You don't remember?"
Lu Xuan took it.
A spiral—perfect, ancient, bleeding ink from the edges.
At the center: a single symbol no one had taught him.
He nodded once.
"It's starting."
Yao Lin didn't ask what.
She saw it too.
In his eyes.
In the spiral.
Elsewhere, Bai Yujing crushed two memory pearls into liquid flame and poured it over the celestial map of Tianxuan.
Red fault lines shimmered.
Three domain threads pulsed in broken rhythm.
At their center:
Celestial Dawn Sect.
She whispered:
"So the coil returns."
In a palace carved from silence, Emperor Zhao Rui stood beside a soul bead glowing faintly.
Inside, something pulsed.
Not alive.
Just… hungry.
He turned to his courtier.
"Lu Xuan is drifting."
"And Su Xue?"
"She watches. She remembers. But she has not severed herself from the mirror yet."
"What if she chooses to protect him?"
Zhao Rui looked toward the divine map.
"Then let the Snake take both."