Ren Kairo woke up coughing blood.
Again.
It was beginning to become a hobby.
The jagged transition from the Dream Domain back into reality hit like a spiritual hammer. His bones buzzed with phantom pressure, his meridians ached like molten glass, and his thoughts were still fragmented—future memories slipping through his fingers like sand.
[Dream Throne Assimilated.]
[Memory Bleed: 8%]
[Current Symptoms: Spatial Echoes. Hallucinations. Chrono Drift. Recommended: Mental Anchor.]
"Noted," Kairo muttered, spitting out more blood. "I'll anchor myself with disappointment. That always works."
The cavern was dim. Faintly lit by glowing moss along the ceiling. He was back in the Trial Caverns beneath the Ashen Range—buried beneath a collapsed sect ruin where the Voidheart Codex had first pulsed.
It was supposed to be a sealed training ground.
Now it was a grave.
Half a dozen dead cultivators lay crumpled around the broken formation ring. Their robes bore the mark of the Crimson Pavilion Sect—a local power that had claimed this ruin as "sacred ground."
Kairo had claimed it as "his."
Only one of them still breathed.
Barely.
The girl. Thin, bleeding, unconscious—but not unfamiliar.
"Yi Feixue," Kairo said aloud, recognizing her in the flickering mosslight.
The spirit scholar from the inner territories. The only one who had ever dared to question the clan histories aloud. She'd tried to decode forbidden texts about lost cultivation eras during a lecture at the Imperial Institute.
She'd been publicly caned for it.
Kairo had watched from a rooftop, quietly amused.
Now, years before that moment could happen again, she was lying at his feet, pulse flickering.
[Codex Fragment Detected: Embedded in subject's spiritual sea.]
[Warning: Fragment is corrupt. Contact will trigger resonance.]
Kairo frowned.
The Codex didn't give "warnings" like that for nothing.
Still, he knelt beside her and reached out. Her spiritual sea was fraying. Overloaded from the backlash of activating a forbidden array, no doubt. Probably trying to protect herself from the Dream Throne's awakening pulse when he'd claimed it. Even the echo of that breakthrough could have shattered someone unprepared.
Kairo hesitated then drew a single line of spiritual energy across her brow—an old cleansing technique. Primitive. Effective.
Her body jerked.
Eyes opened—wild and golden.
She screamed.
Not in pain.
In knowing.
"The stars are broken," she gasped, clawing at the floor. "The throne calls from the pit. The false realm... it cracked when he blinked..."
Kairo grabbed her shoulders. "Hey. Focus."
Her gaze found his. And stilled.
"You," she whispered, voice ragged. "You're the fracture."
Kairo blinked once. "...Okay, that's new."
Yi Feixue shook violently, then coughed until blood stained her chin.
[Codex Synchronization: 17%]
[Status: Dormant Fragment Stabilized.]
[Skill Gained: Mind Anchor – Passive. Link to known individual to stabilize Dream-related effects.]
She passed out cold.
Kairo sat back, wiping a hand over his face.
He was used to strange but this was stranger.
"She had a Codex fragment in her all along," he muttered. "Hidden. Dormant. Probably attached to a lost text. And the moment I awakened the Dream Throne, it echoed…"
He glanced down at her again.
"Or maybe... she was always part of the Codex cycle."
He stood.
The air in the chamber shimmered slightly as spatial echoes rippled outward—evidence of his unstable presence in the timestream. The Curse of the Dream Throne was real. He was starting to hear voices that hadn't spoken yet. See visions of events that hadn't happened.
But the Codex gave him a single lifeline:
[Anchor Set: Yi Feixue]
[Temporal Drift stabilized within 5-meter radius.]
"Great," Kairo said dryly. "My emotional crutch is a delusional archivist with memory damage. What could go wrong?"
A sound echoed above.
Footsteps.
Then voices.
"-still unstable. The pulse came from the caverns below—check the blood seal! If the Dream Throne awakened, we can't let it escape!"
Kairo's expression sharpened instantly.
He recognized that voice.
Sect Master Ruo Feng of the Crimson Pavilion.
The man who had spent thirty years collecting dream-based techniques under the table, claiming to be a righteous cultivator while secretly experimenting on orphans to see which ones could survive mental fragment implantation.
The man who'd burned down the Fei Clan in the future, looking for lost records.
"Right," Kairo whispered, crouching low. "Time to test the silence."
Ten minutes later, the cavern filled with echoing screams but not Kairo's.
[Dream Skill: Silence Field – Activated]
[Effect: Nullifies sound, suppresses technique activation within 20 meters.]
[Drawback: User cannot speak during activation.]
Kairo moved like a ghost. The Crimson Pavilion disciples couldn't see him coming. Couldn't hear him. Couldn't channel their spiritual arts. Their mouths opened, but no sound came out.
And then they died.
One by one.
A crushed throat.
A blade to the lung.
A punch that ruptured dantian and spine at once.
Kairo didn't waste motion.
Didn't waste thought.
This was the new rule of cultivation: No witnesses. No survivors. Only the truth and the thrones.
When the last body fell, Kairo released the Silence Field.
The air snapped back like an elastic band.
Yi Feixue groaned faintly, beginning to stir again. She blinked slowly, looking around at the massacre. Her eyes found Kairo, coated in blood but eerily calm.
"What... what happened?"
"You screamed about thrones and broke space," Kairo said simply. "Then I killed your sect."
She blinked again.
"Oh."
Kairo helped her sit up.
"I need answers," he said. "You've read things no one else has. Tell me everything you know about the Void Thrones. And the Architect of the False Heavens."
She hesitated. Then, with a trembling hand, reached into her sleeve—and pulled out a sealed jade scroll etched with weeping runes.
"Then you'll want to see this," she whispered.
"The truth starts here."