The blizzard thinned by dusk. What had been a suffocating white hell was now a ghostland of fading mist and bone-chill air. Ren Zhe, Meimei, and Jin had descended into the frostbitten plains of the Northern Deadbelt, where even snow refused to stay still. Winds carved runes into the drifts. Shadows flitted between the broken stelae of graves long abandoned.
"Where are we?" Meimei asked, voice muffled by her scarf.
Jin answered before Ren Zhe could. "The Graveyard of Sovereigns."
Ren Zhe turned, brow low. "How do you know that?"
Jin blinked slowly. "I remember."
The boy walked ahead, his feet tracing symbols into the snow without looking down. Each step aligned with some forgotten geometry—perfect, seamless, and terrifying.
"I've been here before," he whispered. "Not in body. But in dream."
They followed him.
The Graveyard wasn't marked on any map for a reason. It shifted—moved with the winds, vanished from memory, erased itself from charts. A burial ground not of flesh, but of names.
Great cultivators who reached realms no one dared speak of. Some said their souls became gods. Others claimed they transcended. But a few... they failed. Their ambitions collapsed into ruin, and their corpses were swallowed by this place, where the world itself refused to remember them.
Ren Zhe had once seen their tombs in dreams. Blank. Featureless. Carved in stone that rejected ink, blood, and thought alike.
One such stone now rose ahead.
No inscription. No sigil. No trace.
Just a monolith standing under the pale lightning sky.
Jin walked up to it and placed his hand on the stone.
The world shuddered.
Meimei stumbled. Ren Zhe drew his breath.
Symbols flared beneath Jin's palm—briefly, as if the stone remembered for only an instant. A ring of golden runes flashed, then receded, as though ashamed to be seen.
A low groan rose from beneath their feet.
"Back," Ren Zhe ordered. But it was too late.
The earth split.
And something climbed out.
It was not bone, nor flesh, nor soul. It was... regret, given form. A shadow of an ambition so grand it had shattered the mind that conceived it.
The entity stood nine feet tall, cloaked in the tattered fragments of what might once have been royal robes. Its face was a mirror—shattered and spinning. Its hands were quills made from the claws of ancient beasts. On its back, wings made of torn scrolls unfurled and crackled.
It had no voice. But its thoughts poured into the air like black ink.
You come to wake what should never dream.
Ren Zhe stepped in front of Jin. "You are dead. Stay buried."
I am Unwritten. I am what lies beyond the page. I am what happens when fate is abandoned and stories rot in silence.
Meimei backed up. "Ren—what do we do?"
Ren Zhe's response was simple.
He charged.
The fight was unlike any he had known.
The Unwritten did not bleed. It bled doubt. Every strike Ren Zhe landed made himself question his strength. Every parry whispered forgotten failures. Every clash pulled memories from his deepest shames.
He remembered the screams of his sect as they burned.
He remembered begging at the gates of the Star Pavilion.
He remembered the pit.
The darkness.
The silence.
And the shovel.
But something new surged beneath those memories.
A new voice. Not his. Not even the shard's.
Jin's.
"You buried yourself because you believed you'd rise again. You believed so hard, the earth listened."
Ren Zhe roared.
He let go of his thoughts.
He let the shard burn.
His aura surged into a vortex, sucking in the storm, the shadows, the whispers. He became a spear of crimson force. One movement—clean, sharp—he drove his palm through the mirror-face.
The Unwritten screamed.
Not aloud. But in everyone's minds.
The sound of every untold story, every broken promise, every path abandoned.
Then it was gone.
The tombstone cracked.
Jin collapsed.
Meimei rushed forward, but Ren Zhe caught the boy first. The glyphs on his skin were fading, melting into his veins.
"He's changing," Ren Zhe muttered. "Faster than I expected."
Meimei nodded. "Is it safe here?"
Ren Zhe didn't answer.
Because he could already feel the presence of another.
Watching.
From the edge of the graveyard, a figure stood. Wrapped in black, eyes glowing white.
The Observer.
Not of this world.
Not bound by it.
It turned—and vanished.
Ren Zhe whispered, "They know we're here."
And for the first time since leaving the pit, he felt fear.
Not for himself.
For what might wake next.