He should have died.
Again.
But he didn’t.
Aduin awoke—his spine twisted against a jagged obsidian shard, one arm numb, lips cracked. The crater above where the Rootling exploded was now nothing more than falling light. It fell like embers, but made no sound.
And in the darkness beneath it, the cavern pulsed.
Not from heat.
But from runes.
Midgardian. Sealed, fractured, and whispering.
He rose slowly, spitting blood and cradling his left ribs. His Qi flowed erratically—Moyao was silent inside him. Not gone. Simply… conserving.
The walls of the cavern were carved with layered scripts — each one older than the last. Some bore diagrams of spiritual circuits, others of organ transmutation, and some... showed beasts bound in chains, heads turned toward a falling red star.
“That… is not native to this world,” Aduin muttered.
At the center of the cavern sat an altar.
Flat. Smooth. Clean.
And atop it: a heart — not beating, not dead — suspended in a cube of water that didn’t flow.
He approached.
The heart was white, translucent, nearly made of jade, with thin threads of golden Qi slowly swirling around its frozen form.
“A cultivated heart... no veins. No blood. Just... energy.”
His hand hovered above the cube.
A vibration passed through his palm.
Then a voice. Feminine. Old. Stern.
“Only the one who breaks the law of time shall claim the marrow of silence.”
He froze.
The Qi in the cavern intensified. Runes lit like eyes.
Behind him, something stirred.
He turned.
It wasn’t a beast. Nor a ghost.
It was... himself.
Or rather, a corpse wearing his face — clothes tattered, eyes glassy, skin turned to living bark, pulsing with spiritual fungus.
It raised its hand.
And spoke in his voice:
“Don’t touch the heart, Aduin. You are not ready.”
The clone—or whatever it was—launched at him.
Faster than anything he’d fought before.
Aduin ducked, blood from his mouth spraying across a rune-inscribed boulder. The false body crashed into the wall, rebounded, then twisted midair with unnatural movement.
He threw a Stardust Ember Pellet, but it didn’t work.
The clone absorbed it.
“It knows my techniques,” Aduin hissed. “It’s... made from me.”
A flash of memory returned—the Moyao root had bled into the soil above. Some spores must’ve carried his Qi signature… and with the cavern’s strange aura, grown this reflection.
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A spiritual mimicry.
“Then I have to fight like someone else.”
He pulled a bitter blue pill from his belt — one he never tested.
Swallowed it.
His muscles screamed. His vision turned sideways. But his body moved faster, sharper.
He grabbed a broken root-chisel nearby, channeled Moyao’s energy through it, and lunged.
The blade struck the clone’s throat.
But the clone didn’t bleed.
Instead, it exhaled white spores — into Aduin’s face.
“Sh*t!”
The spores crawled into his nose. His ears. His mind.
Suddenly, he was falling—not in body, but in soul.
He awoke standing inside a glass forest, alone, his breath fogging the air. Before him stood all the versions of himself he had suppressed:
– Aduin of Midgard, weeping over a failed alchemy experiment
– Aduin of the Vermilion star, arms scarred from failed breakthroughs
– Aduin the coward, the killer, the lost boy, the arrogant scientist
They spoke in unison:
“You fight your nature. You experiment to forget. You bleed to remember. But you have yet to embrace your root.”
He sank to his knees.
But then, deep inside his soul, Moyao stirred.
“If you fall here, you’ll rot as mulch in a grave that never closes.”
With a scream, Aduin pulled himself free—forcing his will against the spores.
Inside his dantian, Moyao pulsed once, and expelled the foreign energy with a shockwave of anti-spore Qi.
He awoke.
Alone again.
The clone was gone. The heart cube was pulsing.
He stepped forward.
This time, he didn’t reach out.
Instead, he cut his palm, and let a drop of blood fall onto the altar beside the cube.
The cube responded.
The water evaporated instantly. The heart thudded once.
Just once.
Then a voice echoed—not female this time.
It was neutral. Mechanical. But ancient:
“Vessel recognized. Spiritual resonance 41%. Reconstructing technique archive.”
The altar cracked open.
Inside it was a scroll. Written in both Midgardian script and Vermilion brush.
The title read:
《Roots of the Forbidden Cycle》
An Alchemical Cultivation Method: Turn Decay Into Growth
It outlined a technique — sacrilegious by cultivation norms.
One that used dead herbs, rotting corpses, and abandoned Qi to forge a spiritual core through reverse blooming — a cycle where you regress in cultivation to stabilize and rebuild stronger.
“A forbidden art... but one that makes sense.”
He tucked the scroll away.
But before he left, he looked at the heart one last time.
It was still beating.
And this time, it said something else.
“When you bloom, we will meet again. And one of us will die.”
Aduin emerged from the cavern five days later.
Weaker.
But wiser.
He had lost a pill pouch. One rib had healed crooked. His cultivation had dropped half a stage.
But the new technique he practiced in silence — the Root Cycle Breathing Form — was already stabilizing his core beyond what he imagined.
He could now channel Qi through decayed matter, purify it inside Moyao, and convert it.
He called this path:
“The Withered Bloom Dao.”
Back in the forest, he returned to his herb field, where his earlier concoctions fermented inside stone pots.
Except now, he could use ingredients others would discard — burnt petals, wilted rootlets, spiritual waste left by dying beasts.
He crafted a new pill — thick, black, and ugly.
It tasted like ash.
But it tripled his cultivation rate during night meditation.
“This... is the beginning of my real cultivation path.”
On the tenth day, a shadow appeared in the sky.
Not a bird.
A lantern.
Floating. Enormous. Etched with the emblem of the Storm Lantern Pavilion, a nomadic order of Qi sorcerers and array engineers.
It descended like a predator.
Inside, a voice amplified by formation arts echoed across the mountainside:
“We sensed a forbidden resonance. Someone awakened a relic beneath the Hollow. By decree of the Pavilion, show yourself.”
Aduin didn’t move.
Then, three figures floated from the lantern.
The lead man — tall, robed in silver netted sleeves — scanned the forest and sniffed the air.
“He’s nearby. I smell rot. And alchemy.”
He raised his hand.
An array circle ignited the treetops — forming a dome over the region.
Aduin watched from beneath a camouflage of spores.
“If I fight now, I die. If I flee, I lose the Hollow.”
He gritted his teeth.
Then smiled.
He pulled from his pouch one of the unfinished Wither Bloom Pills — still unstable.
“Let’s test it.”
He whispered into the air:
“Moyao... time to wake up.”
The ground beneath him cracked.
Roots surged.
As the Storm Lantern Pavilion’s disciples searched the valley, one of them paused.
“Senior Han, the vines... they’re moving.”
The lead man turned.
Then froze.
A figure emerged from the trees — cloaked in spores, vines writhing like serpents behind him.
His face was pale, but his eyes burned with strange black Qi.
“Who are you?”
Aduin didn’t answer.
He crushed the pill in his hand.
And the world screamed.
The vines erupted, binding one of the disciples mid-air, draining him dry in seconds. The formation shattered. The lantern above flickered in confusion.
Aduin raised his hand.
“You came for a relic.”
He pointed to himself.
“You found a reaper.”
And then the Hollow lit up in war.
[TO BE CONTINUED…]