The white light had not yet faded when Lin Qian opened her eyes.
The stone chamber of the Azure Sky Sect was gone.
The air here felt heavier, almost alive, thick with the scent of iron and rain, as if the world itself had just exhaled after a long silence.
She stood upon a flat silver-gray plain. The ground shimmered faintly, reflecting the swirling sky above, a sky that looked like a lake turned upside down, where clouds moved in slow spirals and mountains floated in the distance, untethered and silent.
Lin Qian turned slowly, her breath uneven.
"Where… am I?"
The wind answered her, soft, almost gentle, but there was rhythm in its whisper, like a hidden heartbeat.
She began to walk. Each step sent ripples across the shimmering ground, and faint sparks of silver light followed her feet. But when she looked down, she froze.
Her shadow was not moving.
It stayed still, unmoving, even when she took another cautious step.
Her voice trembled. "This isn't… reality."
"But it isn't a dream either,"
said a voice behind her, deep, resonant, too calm to belong to something human.
She turned sharply.
A figure stood within the mist, tall and shapeless, its outline flickering between smoke and form. Two pale eyes glowed faintly in the darkness, not with fire, but with a quiet kind of knowing.
"You…" she whispered. "You're the consciousness inside the stone."
"Consciousness," it said slowly,
"is a word mortals give to what they fear to understand."
The voice didn't echo in the air, it echoed in her mind. Every syllable made her pulse stutter, as though her body itself was listening.
"Why am I here?" she asked, her voice unsteady.
"Because you heard my call," it replied.
"Because you still carry something this world has forgotten, curiosity unchained by fear."
Lin Qian clenched her hands, the silver pendant at her neck glowing faintly. "What do you want from me?"
The fog stirred around the figure. Then the voice came again, quieter now, almost intimate.
"I want you to see what truly happened…
before the world rewrote its own memory."
The ground began to shake.
Mist flowed upward, turning into streams of liquid light that formed a vast, living vision before her eyes.
Lin Qian saw a world that no longer existed, ancient, radiant, divided by two skies: one of light, one of shadow. At its center stood a man whose face… almost mirrored Jian Wu's.
But older.
Wiser.
And burdened.
Around him, divine beings bowed their heads. Behind him, a swirling gate of black and white energy devoured mountains, stars, and sound.
"Who is he?" Lin Qian breathed.
"He was me," the voice said.
"Before the world learned to fear balance."
The image shifted.
The man raised his hand, and light split from his body, half white, half black, scattering across the heavens. The world cracked under the weight of it, time itself bending.
Then came a whisper, like a dying vow:
"If the world refuses to remember me…
then I shall live within its memory."
Lin Qian's throat tightened. "You sealed yourself… into the human world."
"I had no choice."
The mist shaped itself into a clearer form tall, cloaked, and shifting. Sometimes its face resembled Jian Wu's. Sometimes not. As if reality itself couldn't decide what he was supposed to be.
"The world tore me apart," it said softly.
"One fragment became light, called truth.
One became shadow, called sin.
And the last… became a man you now call Jian Wu."
Her lips parted. "Then Jian Wu… is part of you?"
"No, Lin Qian," the voice answered,
"He is me, trying to be human."
The wind trembled.
Lin Qian gripped her pendant, her heart pounding. Everything, Jian Wu's empty core, his strange dual aura, the way the world itself reacted to him, finally made sense.
"Now you see," the voice said, "why the heavens tremble when he breathes.
I was never dead."
She raised her head slowly. "Why show this to me?"
"Because your heart remains clear.
Only a heart unclouded can decide whether to wake the world's memory… or let it sleep forever."
The sky above them split into two seas, white against black, clashing in silence.
"If you open the truth," it warned,
"you may lose yourself.
But if you turn away… Jian Wu will fade alone."
Her voice wavered, but her gaze held firm. "Then I'll risk it. I won't let him disappear."
The air shivered. The world began to fracture like cracked glass, pieces of light falling around them.
"Strange creature," the voice murmured. "You cling to destruction as if it were love."
Lin Qian smiled faintly, though tears welled in her eyes. "If that's what it takes to save him… then yes."
The shadow stepped back. Its form blurred until only its eyes remained.
"Then prepare yourself…
to witness the end."
The light engulfed everything.
For an instant before the world vanished, Lin Qian heard one final whisper, soft, trembling, too human to belong to that being.
"Thank you… for remembering me."
When she opened her eyes again, the silver plains were gone.
She stood in the middle of a dark forest, rain falling gently through two moons, one white, one black.
Lin Qian's breath clouded the air.
She looked up and whispered, "I came back… but to which world?"