Pain had always been Jin Seong's companion, but this was something else entirely.
The moment the Heaven-Slaying Scripture entered him, the world fractured. Not in sight—but in truth. He saw the mountain differently. The stone under his fingers was no longer just cold—it screamed with the memory of every disciple who had bled on it. The rain carried whispers, and the wind dragged secrets.
The scroll fed on more than cultivation. It fed on reality.
Symbols burned into his skin, branding him not with a name—but with a curse. The first page of the scripture uncoiled in his mind, written not in ink but in will. There was no technique, no mantra, no step-by-step cultivation.
Only a command: "Slay the heavens that denied you."
His breathing steadied. Slowly. Raggedly. He sat cross-legged despite the hollow void where his dantian had been. He should have been crippled. But he wasn't.
He felt something else growing.
Where his core was shattered, a black lotus now bloomed—formed not from spiritual energy, but from defiance. A cultivation path born outside the laws of the heavens. Something the sects had forgotten. Something they had buried.
The Forbidden Path.
With each breath, the lotus pulsed. It didn't gather Qi. It consumed it. Every drop of ambient energy around him twisted inward, reshaped into something darker. Hungrier. It wasn't just cultivation—it was corrosion.
But it worked.
Hours passed. The rain stopped. Thunder retreated into the mountains like it feared what now sat at its peak. Jin Seong opened his eyes.
No longer broken. Not yet whole. But alive.
More than that—changed.
His limbs cracked as he stood. The pain remained, but it was distant now, dulled by something far greater. His senses expanded. He could feel the sect halls below, could hear whispers behind stone walls, sense the formation arrays surrounding the mountain. And in the distance, he felt Do Yun.
The blade of betrayal had a heartbeat.
He clenched his fists. The old Jin Seong would have rushed down, screaming for vengeance. But that boy was dead—crushed beneath the bell of silence, buried under the robes they stripped away.
He was something else now.
A rustle behind him.
He turned sharply.
An old man stood beneath the dead pine tree at the edge of the summit—hooded, hunched, robes plain and worn with age. But Seong saw past that. This wasn't a beggar.
Not with that presence.
The man's eyes gleamed gold beneath his hood.
"You took the scroll," the man said.
Seong didn't respond.
"You should be dead."
"I was," Seong replied.
A smirk played on the old man's lips. "Then perhaps you're worthy after all."
"Who are you?"
"Once, I was the only one to open that scroll and live. Now, I'm the only one who can help you survive it."
Seong narrowed his eyes. "Why would I need help?"
"Because page two awakens tonight. And if you're not ready… it will devour you whole."