Zhuyan Realm, One Week After the Crimson Dream.
The dream had ended. But the crimson echoes still lingered.
Yi Mochen stood at the edge of a shattered plateau at dawn, where mist coiled like dying serpents. Blood had dried in uneven trails across his robes, and the Pale Widow's final whisper still throbbed behind his eyes:
"They will come for you now, little Mochen."
He didn't move. The wind stirred the ashes behind him—ashes of men, of memory, of silence. The Bone Lantern pulsed dimly from his satchel, as if remembering too.
His breath hung in the morning air. Thin. Shallow.
The physical weakness gnawed at his limbs. Ever since invoking the Crimson Seal during the Red Feather cultist's execution, his blood ran like frost through broken veins. Every movement demanded calculation. Every heartbeat risked collapse.
"I am not ready," Yi Mochen whispered to no one. "But the world comes anyway."
---
— Years Ago, the Emerald Light Sect Gates
He had been twelve. Covered in grime, barefoot, holding a marrowless bone.
"Please," young Mochen begged the guards at the gate. "I can carry water. I can—"
The elder disciple sneered. "Eat that bone. If you can make it bleed, maybe we'll consider you."
Laughter. Stones thrown. Blood on his lips. Shame buried deep.
But he did eat the bone.
And years later, he made them bleed.
---
— Eastern Ridge, Bone Lantern Forest
He walked slowly through a ravaged grove of blackened trees. Birds avoided this place. Even worms didn't burrow here. Every root stank of spiritual corrosion.
The Bone Lantern pulsed again.
"Why do you still glow?" he asked it. "There's no one left to remember them."
The Bone Lantern pulsed brighter, and he saw a brief image—not from his eyes, but from memory:
A woman in pale robes, impaled by his own crimson blade. Her lips had trembled.
"You still could've been more than this, Mochen…"
He crushed the memory with a breath. Not now.
---
Xiangxiu — Imperial Capital
Inside a jade-walled chamber beneath the Imperial Court, eight sect masters and three hidden dynasties convened.
A scroll unrolled before them, crimson wax stamped with the sigil of the Empire.
One by one, each master pressed their ring into the wax. Their condemnation was not about guilt. It was about precedent.
"He did not kill the Crown Prince," the Lord of the Black Phoenix Sect said.
"But he sent the dagger," replied Lady Shuang of the Windless Peaks.
The Red Feather assassin's death had been public. But the whispers afterward were darker: that the assassin had been lured by a dream. That the dream bore crimson plumage. That Yi Mochen was walking a path beyond death.
---
On the Road — A Masked Visitor Arrives
Yi Mochen sat beneath a dead tree, eyes closed, when a boot crunched beside him.
"You look like death, Yi Mochen."
He opened one eye. "You wear a mask. Still ashamed to be seen beside me?"
The masked figure crouched, offering a flask.
"You burned down a sect, assassinated a prince, and are now hunted by the realm's strongest cultivators. I'm not sure whether to kneel or run."
Mochen didn't drink. "What do you want?"
"To warn you. The joint extermination force is moving. They're coming from three directions. Heaven's Spear Sect leads the northern wing. Dao Mirror Sect the south."
"And the east?"
The masked one hesitated. "Silent Sect. Their leader awakened."
Mochen's gaze turned sharp.
"She hasn't moved in forty years."
"She has now."
He stood, slow but sure. "Good. Let them come. Let the Silent rise. The world has forgotten why silence exists. I'll remind them."
---
Flashback — The Night of the Slaughter
The Emerald Light Sect had been silent as he entered its gates that night.
Some recognized him. Some even smiled.
But his eyes had changed. They no longer held youth.
The crimson blade sang.
One by one, they fell. His former master tried to invoke a karmic bond.
"I did everything for you, I gave you everything! Yet you repayed me with this!" the old man cried.
"Are you really the one talking about repayment? You gave me nothing but shame," Mochen replied.
A final slash. Then silence.
He did not weep. The Bone Lantern did.
---
Present — Yi Mochen's Mindscape
That night, he dreamt again.
The Pale Widow sat at the edge of a broken lake. Her eyes were glass, her fingers string.
"You dream too much, little Mochen."
"I dream what the world forgets."
She gestured, and twelve graves appeared behind her.
"Memory is rebellion. And rebellion needs pain. You have enough pain, don't you?"
"Perhaps more than enough."
"Then what will you do when they come?"
"Let them have a taste of their creation."
The lake turned red. The stars vanished. The dream ended.
---
Dawn — Bone Lantern Awakens
He woke before sunrise.
The Bone Lantern was pulsing like a heart. Nearby, the ground was etched with unfamiliar sigils—ones he hadn't drawn.
"Tracking formation," he muttered.
He'd been found.
He limped to his feet, biting back pain. He couldn't fight. Not now. Not directly.
But Crimson Dao was never about direct paths.
---
Most cultivators chased stages: Vein Forging, Pulse Awakening, Mind-Sea Realization, Nascent Path, and beyond.
But the Crimson Dao walked alongside corruption. It consumed memory, rewrote karma, devoured lineage.
Yi Mochen couldn't match them in raw strength. But in memory, he was a god.
He remembered every scream. Every betrayal. Every name.
And in the Crimson Dao, memory bled into reality. Whether it's his own memory or of the others.
---
As the extermination force entered the Bone Lantern Forest, their leader from the Heaven's Spear Sect raised a hand.
"Wait. The air here—it's amiss."
A sound echoed.
A baby crying. Then laughter. Then screams.
"Formation trap?" someone asked.
"No…" the elder whispered. "These are echoes."
Crimson feathers fell from the trees.
And behind them, a sigil pulsed into being. Not ink. Not blood. Memory.
One of the disciples collapsed, clutching his skull.
"I can hear them. I can hear them dying—"
The elder raised his spear, but his shadow twisted, elongated.
Yi Mochen was not there.
But his memory was.
---
Elsewhere — The Silent Sect Awaits
Atop a cold mountain, the Silent Sect's leader opened her eyes after forty years.
"Crimson…" she whispered. "The first betrayal walks again."
A disciple approached. "Should we move, Honored Ancestor?"
"No. Not yet. Let them strike. Let them fail. Then bring me his bones."
---
— Yi Mochen Watches from Afar
On a cliffside overlooking the battlefield, Yi Mochen sat wrapped in rags.
He watched the crimson feathers swirl.
He watched their memories unravel.
And he whispered:
"I am not your villain. I am not your hero. I am Yi Mochen."
A red spark flickered on his fingertip.
He pressed it into the Bone Lantern.
It glowed.
The forest screamed.
It wasn't the sound of birds or beasts, but of bark splitting, of roots twisting in agony. The land itself reacted, as if ancient veins pulsed awake beneath the ground. Crimson tendrils of mist rose from the earth—silent, reaching, sentient. Yi Mochen stood unmoving, watching as the trees around him curled inward like charred paper, their leaves blackening into ash.
The Bone Lantern pulsed at his side, no longer warm, but icy, flickering with unnatural life. He drew a breath, slow and deliberate. Even now, the Crimson Seal carved into his spine throbbed—its pain was the toll for survival, for defiance.
But the seal had not broken. Not yet.
He could feel them coming—Qi signatures pressed against the horizon like thunderclouds. From the south, a Heaven-Step cultivator from the Azure Vein Sect. From the east, the twin-headed hounds of the Bai Clan. From above, shadows that were not shadows—sky-faring talismans of the Dawn Temple.
The joint execution force had begun their descent.
"They're late," he murmured.
Behind him, the Bone Lantern shimmered again—and a ghostly image flickered into being. A woman, draped in crimson robes that moved like smoke, her expression unreadable, her eyes full of hate—and longing.
Yi Mochen turned.
"Shuyin..."
The illusion did not answer.
But memory did.
---
Four Years Ago.
The moon hung low over the Emerald Light Sect's southern pavilion. Yi Mochen, barely past his sixteenth year, crouched beneath the hanging peach blossoms, watching her.
Shuyin.
She was the Sect Master's adopted daughter. Everyone spoke of her elegance, her sword technique, her spiritual affinity with phoenix fire.
But he knew her differently.
That night, she'd pulled him into the garden's shadows, one hand against his chest, her fingers trembling with the tension of forbidden things.
"You shouldn't be here," she whispered.
He smiled. "You always say that. And yet, you wait."
She glanced away. "They'll kill you if they find us together."
"Let them."
"Don't joke. You're nothing to them, Mochen. A foundling with no bloodline, no surname worth fearing."
He touched her face. "But I am something to you."
She didn't deny it.
That night, under the pale light of twin moons, they kissed for the first time. There was blood on his knuckles from earlier—he'd been punished for refusing to bow before an elder. She had cleaned the wounds, then kissed them.
Her touch was fire, but not the kind that warmed. It burned slowly, creeping beneath the skin, into the heart.
A week later, she turned away when he was flogged in the courtyard.
A month after, she watched from behind a veil as he was cast into the Bone Caverns for disobedience.
And when he returned—alive, changed, unrecognizable—she was the first blade to meet him in combat.
"I begged them not to kill you," she had said, voice shaking. "But I will not defy them again."
He had disarmed her in three strikes.
And then he had walked away.
---
Present.
The ghost faded. But her scent remained in the back of his mind—fragrant, distant, and filled with ash.
Yi Mochen turned as a shadow descended between two dead trees.
A man in blue robes stepped forward, spinning a long spear etched with rotating sigils.
"You are Yi Mochen?"
"I am what's left," Mochen answered.
The man didn't laugh. "I am Hui Shen of the Azure Vein Sect. I've come to claim your head."
Mochen's voice dropped. "Then leave your name, Hui Shen. The dead should be remembered."
The wind answered first—howling through the bones of the forest, rustling through memories not yet buried.
Then came the clash.
Hui Shen lunged.
Yi Mochen stepped into the strike. His body screamed, his veins protesting, but he moved with purpose. Not grace—purpose. Pain laced every breath, every muscle burned with old poison and suppressed fury.
But he did not yield.
The Crimson Dao did not teach yielding.
It taught remembrance.
And he remembered every strike, every betrayal, every face that looked down on him.
His blade met Hui Shen's spear—and the forest erupted with sound.
---
Above, the sky darkened. The gods, perhaps, turned their gaze once more toward the cursed boy with no sect.
The cursed boy who remembered everything.
And below, the Bone Lantern flared with new light.
The execution had begun.
---