The stars had not moved.
And yet, the world felt older.
Shen Wuqing stood atop a desolate ridge, where moonlight dared not shine, and the sky above seemed to peer down like an ancient god with no name—observing, never judging, always remembering. Beneath him sprawled a graveyard of sounds, where not even echoes dared wander.
He had walked far since leaving the pagoda.
And yet, he felt no distance had been crossed—only depths, immeasurable and unseen.
Each step he took now was accompanied by silence not of absence, but of reverence. It was the hush before a storm not of wind, but of fate.
The Shihun Jing.
Realm of Soul-Eating.
He had reached it.
But no lightning tore the sky. No thunder of tribulation roared. No manifestation of the heavens descended to crush or judge him.
Instead, there was a stillness that suffocated.
An overwhelming pause in existence itself.
Then came the cold.
Not wind.
Not frost.
But a pressure that slid beneath his skin, into his marrow, and whispered, "Do you remember who you were?"
He did not answer.
He never did.
---
Around him, the ground began to fracture—not upward, but inward.
Cracks formed in the fabric of the earth, not splitting stone but memory. Images bled through the breaks: fleeting glimpses of children laughing, a mother's hands, a father's silhouette blurred by time.
None of them belonged to him.
They were not his.
And yet, they poured into him.
Thousands of memories, stripped from forgotten souls, from nameless corpses buried without rites, from dying thoughts that never reached a listener.
Each fragment found root in his soul.
Not to heal.
But to dissolve what remained of his own.
His fingers trembled.
His knees buckled.
And he fell—not physically, but inwardly, into a spiral where identity unraveled like old scripture burned in reverse.
He saw himself—Shen Wuqing—standing in a mirror that did not reflect.
He saw other faces in his place.
Men. Women. Children. Beasts.
Their screams were silent. Their pleas soundless. Their memories burned bright for a moment—then vanished, leaving behind a hole slightly wider than before.
The baptism had begun.
Not by fire.
Not by lightning.
But by devouring.
---
Somewhere in the marrow of the world, something ancient stirred.
It did not welcome him.
Nor did it resist.
It merely opened a space—like the void parting for a falling star.
Wuqing stood amidst a sea of shadowed thoughts, each echoing lives unlived and deaths incomplete. They drifted around him like ash, clinging to the scent of silence that now permeated his soul.
And then, a voice.
Not external.
Not internal.
But absolute.
"You consume what cannot be mourned. You inherit what cannot be remembered. Do you still claim to exist?"
His eyes opened in the dream.
He stood in a garden that should not exist.
Petals made of silence floated in the air, refusing to land. Trees bore fruit that dissolved before ripening. Statues of unknown gods wept dry blood from their hollow sockets.
At the center: a throne made of bones.
Empty.
Waiting.
And in his chest, a pull.
Not desire.
Not ambition.
But inevitability.
The soul-eating baptism did not ask for will.
It required surrender.
Or destruction.
Shen Wuqing stepped forward.
The throne of bone remained still. The silence did not break—it only grew deeper, heavier, denser, as if reality itself held its breath.
Each footfall was an act of blasphemy.
The garden warped.
Leaves shriveled to dust.
Statues crumbled into forgotten names.
Sky melted into a blank parchment, as if the heavens no longer knew what to write.
The moment his fingers brushed the throne—he did not sit, he bled.
A line split down the middle of his chest, not physically, but conceptually.
His soul was being opened.
Not by force.
But by the echo of every soul he had ever brushed, devoured, touched, stolen from.
The silence screamed.
And in that scream, Wuqing saw it—
Not a future.
Not a past.
But a thousand versions of himself.
Some kneeling.
Some burning.
Some laughing in madness.
Some falling into endless night.
"You do not belong to one self," the voice whispered again, no longer a question but a decree.
"You are legion clothed in one name."
A flood surged into him.
Faces. Deaths. Despair. Love. Rage.
Foreign lives.
They did not possess him.
He possessed them.
And as they became his... his own self eroded, thread by thread.
This was the price of power.
---
Then, a memory struck him like a blade:
A child kneeling in a ruined village.
Bodies around him—slain cultivators, family, friends.
A voice behind him whispering: "Live, no matter the cost."
The boy had no name.
But the pain was real.
Wuqing stumbled.
He felt the child's sorrow embed itself in his spine.
Felt it devour a sliver of who he was.
That was not a memory he had lived.
Yet now, he could not remember if it wasn't.
The boundary between self and other was dissolving.
His soul had begun the baptism.
---
He woke.
Not suddenly.
Not with clarity.
But with a dull ache that stretched across his bones and memory.
The garden was gone. The throne no longer existed.
But the silence remained.
Except... it was no longer silent.
He heard whispers now. In the wind. Beneath the soil. Behind the stars.
Not words.
But names.
Names of the devoured.
They had become part of him.
They followed him now.
Not as ghosts.
But as shadows.
They had no voice, but their hunger echoed in his steps.
And when Wuqing opened his eyes beneath the darkened ridge once more, the world flinched.
A single black petal drifted past his face.
It turned to ash before it touched the ground.
His eyes, now deeper, darker, reflected not flame—but absence.
Not wrath—but inevitability.
He had entered Shihun Jing.
But he had not passed through it.
He had absorbed it.
And something old had watched.
Not approving.
Not condemning.
Just… waiting.
---
At the edge of the forest, a deer looked up.
Its ears twitched.
Then it ran.
Not from sound.
Not from scent.
But from recognition.
It remembered the name the world was trying to forget.
Shen Wuqing.