Mo Xuan didn't sleep that night.
After the lesson was over, after Qiren had drifted into uneasy rest by the dying fire, the old man stood alone in the cold and watched the snow fall.
His breath fogged the glassless window. His thoughts didn't.
In the silence, old things stirred. Old names. Old wounds.
And finally… the words came.
"I wasn't always like this," he said the next morning, his voice quieter than the wind. "Wasn't always broken."
Qiren looked up. He hadn't expected him to speak. Not like this.
"I was born in Liuchuan," Mo Xuan continued, "where the rivers braid like veins across the land. A place where time flows gently… and never stops."
He sat, slowly, as if the weight of memory was heavier than his body.
"My family were healers. Flow monks. We treated people who forgot who they were, or who remembered too much. We listened to dreams. And we wove fate back into place."
He paused. The fire cracked.
"I wasn't satisfied."
He didn't say it with pride. Just regret.
"I didn't want to mend fate. I wanted to rewrite it. Tear it apart and stitch something better. I trained harder than anyone. Studied forbidden sutras, chased temporal echoes, healed things that shouldn't have healed. The elders said I was touched by Flow itself. That my thread whispered when others shouted."
Qiren stared. He couldn't imagine the man before him — worn, thin, quiet — as a titan.
But Mo Xuan wasn't done.
"I reached Mandate Awakening by seventeen," he said. "Felt my thread speak. Not in words. In visions. A river that bled into the sky. A reflection that didn't match. A name I'd never heard before… but that burned in my bones."
"Then?" Qiren asked, breath held.
"Then came Ascendant Vein. I could step outside myself. Cast afterimages into past hours. Walk through someone's memory like it was a garden. I stopped aging. I stopped sleeping. My qi didn't flow—it flooded."
Mo Xuan's eyes darkened.
"And finally, I touched Heaven-Bound. I saw my past lives. Hundreds. Some peaceful. Some monstrous. I had been a tyrant. A poet. A god. A ghost. I saw how time loops when fate is bent. How the Mandate tries to correct you when you stray."
He exhaled.
"And I knew… there had to be more."
Qiren sat frozen.
"There's always a ceiling," Mo Xuan said. "Even if you don't see it. And I was tired of ceilings."
That was when the rumors reached him.
A trial. Hidden in the black forests of Wuyin. A realm that opened only once every few lifetimes. A place where laws don't hold. Where the eighth thread—the one erased from history—was once touched.
No one returned from it.
Not even echoes.
So naturally, Mo Xuan went.
"I crossed into Wuyin alone," he said. "Carried nothing but a spirit lantern, a blade of memory, and a broken compass that didn't point north."
He gave a bitter smile.
"I should have known that was a warning."
The forest there didn't whisper. It listened. He walked days without casting a shadow. The trees grew in spirals. The water reflected people who weren't him. Sometimes he heard footsteps beside him — soft, slow, but never visible.
"I found the gateway," he said. "Buried beneath a temple of names carved into bone."
Qiren's mouth had gone dry. "You entered it?"
Mo Xuan nodded. "It wasn't a place. It was… a feeling. A trial stitched into the very laws of reality. There was no floor. No sky. Just tests."
"What kind of tests?"
Mo Xuan looked at him.
"The kind that know who you are. The kind that ask you to prove it."
He didn't describe them.
Only said they broke him.
That by the end, he stood on the edge of something the world had intentionally forgotten. A truth too heavy for Heaven to hold.
He reached for the eighth thread.
And the realm… closed.
"I woke up half-dead in a burned clearing," he said. "My power was still inside me. But it didn't answer. Like my body no longer spoke the same language."
He rolled up his sleeve again.
The black scar pulsed — not with heat or cold. But with silence. As if it refused to be real.
"I became a stranger to the world," he said. "To the heavens. Even to my own thread."
Qiren whispered, "But you survived."
Mo Xuan's eyes softened.
"I walked back. But something else walked with me."
That night, neither of them slept.
Because just before dawn… the assassins arrived.