Lin Yan's first breath of the new day tasted of rust and frost.
The sun had not yet cleared the eastern peaks, but the horizon already bled—streaks of vermilion bruising indigo, as though Heaven itself had split its lip during the night. He stood at the centre of the frost-scorched crater, heel-deep in glassy shards that reflected a boy-shaped silhouette ringed by fireflies of darkness. The jade shard lay quiet against his breast-bone, but the black lotus beneath his skin beat like a second heart, slow, deliberate, out of rhythm with the world.
He closed his eyes. The memory of dying was still a jagged thing—no linear story, only splinters: a sword hilt slick with his own blood, a sky raining golden feathers, a gate taller than mountains slamming shut on his scream. The images cut, then vanished, leaving behind the metallic tang of inevitability.
A crow landed on the crater rim, tilted its head, cawed once—soundlessly. Sound had become negotiable. Lin Yan noticed the silence the way a man notices a missing tooth; every beat of absence ached. When he exhaled, frost plumed from his lips though summer still clung to the valleys. The lotus mark drank the cold and asked for more.
He left the crater, boots crunching frozen grass, and followed the ridge trail toward the cemetery. He meant to retrieve nothing—no mother's hairpin, no half-broken broom—yet his feet knew the way the way tongues know the shape of a childhood song. Morning mist clung to cypress spires like penitent ghosts. Each step deeper among the graves loosened the seam between what was and what might be.
The stone tortoise that once guarded the oldest tomb had cracked during the night's upheaval; its shell now cupped a pool of starlight that had no business existing in daylight. Lin Yan knelt, dipped a finger. The liquid was warm, scented with iron and lotus. Where it touched his skin a constellation of black characters flared, then sank beneath the dermis—words in a language that predated breath. He understood them anyway: Bridge of Unnamed Graves. A path, then. A test. A dare.
A whisper rose from the pool. "Step, Daoless."
He did.
The cemetery folded like paper. Cypress became pillars of petrified bone, graves became archways of teeth, the morning sky became a ceiling of mirrored obsidian reflecting a boy walking across an endless bridge suspended over nothing. Every plank was a headstone whose inscription had been chiseled away. With each footfall he felt a life—not his own—flutter against his pulse, then gutter out. The weight should have crushed him; instead it felt like还债, the settling of an ancient account.
Halfway across, the woman awaited—not flesh this time but silhouette, edges flickering as though cut from night. Black petals still drifted from her sleeves, but now they carried voices: a child laughing, a mother screaming, an emperor begging. She raised a hand; the bridge stopped moving.
"First toll," she said. "A memory you treasure."
Lin Yan's mind offered up Wan-Er's face the day she had given him the peach bun, flour on her nose, eyes bright with trust. He clenched the image, felt it wriggle, let it go. The petal that absorbed it turned white, then shattered into salt. The bridge solidified beneath his soles.
"Second toll," she intoned. "A memory that defines you."
He surrendered the moment his foster mother died—snow soaking through patched sleeves, her fingers loosening in his as warmth fled. Another petal blanched, burst. Each loss left a notch in his chest, yet the black lotus bloomed wider, petals curling like satisfied smiles.
"Final toll," the woman said, voice soft as grave dirt. "Your name."
Lin Yan hesitated. A name was more than sound; it was anchor, prison, promise. But the bridge was already fading, planks crumbling into star-dust. He inhaled the rust of dying suns, exhaled: "Lin Yan."
The syllables left his mouth as black fire, coalesced into a character that hovered between them—then cracked, each fissure leaking void. The woman caught a shard, pressed it to her breast where a heart should beat. For the first time she smiled—not gentle, not cruel, simply inevitable.
"Transaction complete. The Bridge remembers you, Nameless." She stepped aside.
The far end of the bridge was not an end but a wound—a rip in the fabric of the world through which another sky glimmered: violet clouds, twin moons, a city of jade suspended by chains of lightning. Lin Yan felt the pull, a string tied to his sternum, urging him toward that impossible horizon. Yet he paused.
"What are you?" he asked, voice raw from the theft of his own name.
"I am the echo of the gate you once guarded. I am the debt that must be paid when Heaven lies." Her form began to dissolve, petals becoming moths, moths becoming ash. "Walk, Daoless. Every step rewrites a law. Every law broken adds a scar to the sky."
The bridge lurched. She was gone. Lin Yan walked.
The moment he crossed the wound, sensation inverted: gravity became suggestion, color became flavor, time became a scent of crushed pine needles. He found himself standing on a hillside beneath foreign constellations, the cemetery, the village, the mortal world—gone. In their place stretched a valley of stone lotus petals the size of houses, each petal carved with names that were not names but vacancies—empty glyphs hungering for identity. Far above, the chained city revolved like a titanic dial, gears grinding out sparks that fell as silver rain.
His chest felt hollow, yet the black lotus thrived, roots twining around ribs, petals brushing the underside of his throat. He understood, then, that his body had become a seed-bed for something ancient, something Heaven had tried to sterilize. The realization should have terrified him; instead it felt like coming home to a house that had waited centuries to be occupied.
A figure approached across the petal field—neither man nor woman, skin etched with shifting star-maps, eyes two quiet eclipses. It carried a blade sheathed in absence itself. When it spoke, sound arrived as pressure behind the eyes:
"Key-bearer. Trial begins. Survive, or be rewritten."
The figure drew the blade. Where steel should have been, there was only a gap in the world, a line of perfect deletion. It swung. Lin Yan's instincts—raw, mortal, Daoless—screamed: move. He did, but not away. He stepped into the cut, trusting the lotus more than flesh.
Void kissed void. For an instant he was nowhere, nowhen, simply potential. Then the lotus bloomed in full, petals of black fire unfurling through the wound in reality, drinking the deletion, turning absence into seed. The star-mapped figure faltered, its eclipse eyes widening—an expression almost human.
Lin Yan grasped the hilt that was not there, felt it solidify beneath fingers that were no longer quite fingers. He drew a sword carved from the memory of dying, its edge singing: If Heaven denies me, I will deny Heaven. He swung.
The figure split—not in halves but in possibilities, crumbling into a thousand futures that scattered like startled birds. Each fleeing shard left behind a single drop of liquid night. The drops rose, orbiting him, then struck, burrowing into skin. New glyphs blossomed across his collar-bones: First Law Severed: Destiny.
Pain arrived late, exquisite, euphoric. He laughed—sound returning in a rush—and the valley laughed with him, stone petals trembling. Somewhere far off, the chained city groaned as one of its links developed a hairline crack.
He sank to one knee, panting, sword dissolving back into memory. The black lotus retracted, satisfied for now, curling into a bud that pulsed at the center of his chest like a second heart plotting mutiny.
A breeze carried scent of iron and lotus—familiar, impossible. He lifted his gaze. At the valley's far end rose a gate: twin pillars of bone-white jade, lintel carved from a single moon, threshold submerged in starlight. It stood open a finger's breadth, darkness beyond breathing in and out like lungs.
He knew its name the way a nightmare knows morning: Heaven Gate. Not the façade worshipped by sects, but the original wound through which the first immortals had crawled, and through which Heaven had later crawled back. The city chains fed into its pillars; the crack in the sky originated here. Every tale, every scripture, every prayer—footnotes to this hinge.
Lin Yan walked. Each footfall echoed twice—once on stone, once in void. When he reached the threshold he did not hesitate. He placed his palm against the jade. It was warm, alive, tasting of his own blood remembered across lifetimes. The gate shivered, recognizing the key.
A voice—not the woman's, not the star-mapped figure's, but something vast and patient and utterly without mercy—spoke directly into the marrow of his bones:
> "Enter, Nameless, and remake the world in your absence."
He stepped through. Darkness folded him like wings. Behind, the valley sighed, petals closing, chains tightening, the crack in the sky widening just enough to let a single black lotus petal drift through—falling, falling, falling toward a mortal realm that had not yet realized its sun would soon be eclipsed.
And far away, in the village of Qinghe, an empty Dao Crystal cracked along an invisible seam, bleeding light that had no color—only hunger.
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End of Chapter 2