The forest settled into silence again, but it didn't feel peaceful. It felt like breath held in the dark, waiting for something to move.
Lu Tian sat against a gnarled tree root, hand still wrapped around the fading thread of the Hollow Binding Sutra. He had felt it draw out the memory. Had felt the backlash. But what came next, he didn't expect.
Yan Xue sat cross-legged across from him, face pale, chest rising and falling fast. Her body trembled, not from fear, but from something deeper. Qi swirled around her like smoke caught in a windless room. Thin golden veins spread beneath her skin, flickering under the surface.
Then it happened.
A burst of force exploded outward from her spine, followed by a ringing crack through the ground. The air pulled tight, and a sound like glass fracturing rippled through the grove.
Lu Tian blinked.
He knew that sound.
A breakthrough.
Yan Xue opened her eyes. They burned brighter now, not just from Qi, but from clarity. Her breath was sharp. Her posture firm. The fatigue in her face was gone.
"What just happened?" she asked, voice lower than before, almost cautious.
Lu Tian was already watching the flow of energy around her.
"You advanced."
She frowned. "That's not possible. I wasn't even close."
"You are now," he said.
He stood and helped her up.
Her presence had changed.
Qi Condensation Nine was gone. Now, she stood firm at Foundation Establishment Stage Three. He didn't need to probe. He could feel it from the way the ground resisted her steps. From the way the blood-root trees kept their distance.
The Sutra hadn't just transferred pain.
It had reconstructed the memory inside her, fed it to her cultivation path like fuel, and forced her to face it.
She had survived.
And grown.
For the first time since entering this cursed forest, Lu Tian felt something shift.
They weren't just running anymore.
They were becoming dangerous.
Yan Xue stretched her arms slowly, testing her balance.
"This… wasn't supposed to happen."
"No," Lu Tian said, "but it's good that it did."
She looked at him, eyes narrow.
"You bound a part of yourself to me. You gave me pain, and now this?"
He didn't answer.
Not out of shame.
Out of understanding.
The Abyss had always been about trade.
But this time, the Hollow Binding Sutra had turned into something else.
Not just a tool to survive.
A method to uplift, at a price.
She didn't say thank you.
But she didn't pull away either.
"We move," she said. "Now."
Lu Tian nodded, and they pressed forward, past the grove and into the deeper trees. Every step carried further than the last. Yan Xue's speed had improved. Her perception sharper. Where once she had followed, now she walked beside him.
Together, they reached a clearing just as dusk settled.
A stone shrine stood in the center, worn down by time. Moss covered most of it, but faint lines could still be seen etched into the bark of the trees that surrounded it. Names. Hundreds of them. Some barely visible, some recently scorched.
Lu Tian stepped forward.
His heart slowed.
One name at the base of the central stone caught his eye.
Lu Tian
He knelt.
Ran his hand over the carving.
The year next to it read:
Died: 60 Years Ago
Yan Xue stepped beside him, silent.
Her hand rested near her blade, eyes scanning the trees.
"No other name is repeated," she said. "Only yours."
Lu Tian stared at it.
The forest whispered again.
And for the first time, the whispers didn't sound like warnings.
They sounded like recognition.
Lu Tian stood motionless in front of the stone.
The name was there. Clean. Etched with purpose.
Lu Tian
Died: 60 years ago
No title. No cause. No lineage. Just a final statement carved into bark and left to rot under the sunless canopy of this forgotten forest.
He traced the letters with his fingers.
The stone was real.
The name was his.
But it wasn't possible.
Not like this.
Not in this place.
In the novel, Lu Tian had died. Yes. His death was quiet, unceremonious, a footnote in a flashback, used only to add weight to the protagonist's rise. A background character. A disposable name. The kind of death that didn't deserve a burial, let alone a monument. But that was before.
Before he took this body.
Before he became Lu Tian.
The name was supposed to belong to him now.
He had rewritten that part.
Hadn't he?
So why was it still here?
A cold thought slid through the cracks of his mind.
Is this a butterfly effect?
Had everything he done so far, surviving the corpse pit, taking the Abyss Root, mastering the Hollow Binding Sutra, defying the Sect, somehow echoed outward? Were the threads of the world shifting in response to his choices? Was this the cost of deviation?
Or was it something else entirely?
Another possibility stirred in the shadows of his thoughts.
Distortion.
The Southern Divide wasn't just sealed by space. It was cut off by time. This was a realm buried beneath a fifty-year temporal veil. Here, time might bend sideways. The past might bleed forward. The future might forget where it starts.
Could this grave be a relic of what was supposed to happen?
Or what already had?
Or worse...
What would happen again?
Lu Tian swallowed.
He remembered now, a line from the novel that never meant anything to him until this moment.
"In the Southern Divide, even the trees remember things that haven't happened yet."
He had read that sentence and moved on.
Now he stood in front of his own grave.
And nothing moved.
Not the air. Not the trees. Not the Spiral spinning inside his chest.
For the first time since entering this world, he felt displaced.
Not lost.
Wrong.
Not that he didn't belong here, but that the world itself wasn't sure he did.
He stared at the grave for a long time.
His thoughts felt too loud in the quiet.
He couldn't tell Yan Xue.
Not now.
Not ever.
She still saw him as a guide. A survivor. The one with the map in his head.
What would happen if he admitted that even he was starting to lose the trail?
He stood slowly, brushing moss from his hands.
The Spiral pulsed once. Not in warning, but in response. It had felt it too. The tear in the narrative. The crack in the script.
This wasn't just the death of a name.
It was the death of certainty.
The forest had shown him a truth no one else could understand.
Somewhere, somehow, the world remembered a version of him that had already failed.
And if he wasn't careful...
It might try to bring that version back.