The room was quiet when he died.
No crying loved ones.
No final regret.
No last words whispered to the fading light.
Lián Wúyǐ, known in his previous life simply as "the man who believed in nothing," took his final breath as calmly as one exhaling after a long meditation. Death, to him, was not an ending. It was a correction. A natural stillness returning to a world obsessed with purpose.
Life had been noisy.
Meaning had been a lie.
And he had long stopped playing along.
As his heartbeat slowed, he felt relief, not fear.
At last… everything returns to the void.
But the void did not welcome him.
A blinding orchid-white radiance tore open the darkness. A cosmic pulse, ancient and commanding, crashed against his drifting soul like a tide against a shore.
A voice, floral and cold, whispered.
"Child of Nihility… why do you not bow before the Dao?"
He did not answer.
He did not care.
The light trembled.
"Why do you not seek heaven, glory, power, or life?"
Still, no response.
And then
A crack appeared in the radiance.
A fissure that spread like a wound in the sky.
From within it seeped something darker than any void he had imagined
A stillness so absolute the heavens recoiled from it.
His soul drifted into that crack, unresisted, unclaimed.
The world of his past life crumbled behind him.
He awakened to warm sunlight and the faint perfume of orchids.
A palace ceiling stretched above him, painted with constellations shaped like blooming petals. Around him, servants whispered in panic. A young woman cried softly, clutching his limp hand.
"Your Highness Wúyǐ… please wake up… don't leave us…"
Prince?
Highness?
He blinked, exhaled, and felt the weight of a new body weak, small, and trembling. A fragile vessel unfit for even basic cultivation.
Someone spoke from outside the curtains:
"Third Prince Lián Wúyǐ's spirit root test is conclusive.
He… is defective."
The room fell silent.
Pity.
Disappointment.
Shame.
The emotions thickened the air like smoke.
Wúyǐ listened with the same numb calm he had taken to the grave.
Defective?
Worthless?
Fated to be nothing?
Good.
Meaning had followed him into death.
He had no intention of letting it chain him in life.
As he gazed out the window at the distant peaks of the Verdant Lotus Mountains, a faint, unnatural ripple brushed his consciousness
a whisper of stillness, the same stillness that had cracked the heavens.
Nothingness… follows me still.
And so began the life of a prince fated to be insignificant
and destined to become the one man Heaven itself could not understand.