Darkness.
The taste of blood. The stench of smoke. Burnt flesh and machine oil.
Fang Yuan opened his eyes.
Not to sky—but metal. A dome of steel stretched above him, blinking red and blue like mechanical eyes. His body lay in a narrow alley choked with synthetic trash and cables leaking sparks.
Voices echoed nearby—shouting, laughing, boots stomping metal.
"Alive?"
No... not quite.
The voice wasn't his own—it rasped from an unfamiliar throat. Young. Fragile. His fingers trembled as he sat up. A dry cough escaped his lips. Blood.
The Qi in this body… was gone. Hollow. Dead.
Then memory struck.
Purple skies. The Demon's laughter. His blade, broken in his hands. Heaven itself crumbling. Death—total.
And now... this.
He pressed his fingers to his chest. A wound—a fresh, scorched puncture from a plasma weapon.
This body had just died.
"Reincarnated… into a corpse?"
Metal clanked.
From the alley's edge, a massive figure emerged—black armor gleaming, dragging a baton crackling with electricity. Mounted on its back: a cylinder containing a glowing red crystal—a Core.
"Unregistered subject detected. Execution authorized."
Fang Yuan met its glowing red eyes.
Then he smiled.
"If this is your new world," he whispered, "let's begin again."
Fang Yuan stayed low. The armor-clad enforcer advanced with the rhythmic weight of a machine: thump… hiss… thump… hiss…
But another sound drew his gaze.
Music.
From the far end of the alley, bright lights flared—shifting colors across metal walls. A crowd gathered in the adjoining plaza, laughing, shouting.
Fang Yuan moved silently toward the noise, slipping between oil-stained dumpsters and severed wires.
What he saw made him stop.
A parade.
Hovering just above the ground, a grav-truck glided forward. Kneeling atop it, bound in chains, was a white-haired boy no older than fifteen. His robes were torn, chest bare, and at the center of his sternum blinked a glowing red circle—an energy seal.
Beside him stood two soldiers in black exo-armor. On their backs: Core harvesters—cylindrical chambers pulsing with hungry red light.
The crowd roared.
"Level 21! Pure Core!"
"He's from the Inner Academies—gonna sell high!"
"Still conscious, too! Look at his eyes!"
Children laughed. Merchants held up paddles to bid. Some filmed with glass-lens visors. Vendors sold lollipops shaped like glowing Cores.
Fang Yuan's hands clenched.
One of the soldiers tapped a wrist control. A spike shot from the sealing ring—straight into the boy's chest.
He screamed.
A red-golden stream of light tore from his body, flowing into the containment tube. The Core throbbed, still warm.
The boy collapsed.
Silence.
Then: thunderous cheers.
"Three hundred thousand spirit yuan!"
"Four hundred! Uncracked! Pristine Core!"
"Experimental-grade! I'll pay five!"
Fang Yuan stared, unmoving.
He had once condemned such acts as the greatest heresy in the cultivation world—absorbing another's Core was a path to inner madness, soul rot.
But now… it was commerce.
A pillar of society.
He looked around at the smiling faces. The children. The drones recording every moment.
Not fear.
Celebration.
The blood on the pavement was still steaming.
And Fang Yuan whispered, not to anyone else—but to the faint golden light in his own chest:
"...This world is wrong."
The cheers from the plaza still rang in his ears when a cold voice returned behind him.
"Execution order remains active. Unregistered subject. Elimination resuming."
The black-armored enforcer from the alley had caught up—scanners blinking, baton raised, exo-suit hissing as it locked into combat stance.
Fang Yuan stood still.
Too weak to run. Too slow to fight. No Qi. No talismans. No body-tempering. Even the most basic of formations would collapse.
He braced for impact—
Fwhip—CHAK.
A flash of silver. Something pierced the enforcer's neck. Sparks exploded as a blade lodged into its circuits.
The machine staggered, jerking, then collapsed like a mountain of metal and meat.
Footsteps hit the ground behind it.
A girl landed lightly in the smoke—short black hair tousled, boots scuffed, and a crooked grin on her lips. She wore patchwork armor, a belt full of knives, and a single orange lens over one eye.
"You owe me a knife, you idiot."
Fang Yuan turned, silent.
She cocked her head. "You from the lower domes? Or just a dumb stray who wandered where he shouldn't?"
He didn't reply.
She took a few steps forward, squinting. "Weird face. No data tag. No heat trail. No digital signature. You're not even in the registry."
She reached slowly for her belt, half-curious, half-cautious. "Clone? Illegal vat-grown? Spirit junkie?"
"I'm older than this city," Fang Yuan said evenly.
She blinked. Then snorted.
"Right. And I'm the Empress of Sector 9."
She flicked a small chip in the air, motioned him to follow. "Come on. Patrol will sweep this whole sector in five minutes. I'm not sticking around for your second execution."
Fang Yuan moved behind her as she kicked open a panel behind a trash unit. A stairwell descended into darkness, lit only by flickering neon arrows painted on the walls.
"You got a name?" she asked, not turning back.
"Fang Yuan."
She laughed. "Of course. They always have names like that. Alright, Fang Yuan. Until I'm sure you're not a bounty, you sleep where I can see you. And if you touch any of my knives, I'll feed your Core to a rat."
He followed her into the dark.
"…Duly noted."
"Welcome to paradise," Nian'er muttered.
She kicked open a rusted door at the end of the stairwell, revealing a narrow half-circle chamber beneath the city's foundations. Faint lights buzzed overhead. Pipes hissed along the walls. The air stank of damp metal, grease, and mold.
But more striking than the stench was what filled the room.
Cores.
Dozens of them.
Stuffed into jars. Scattered across shelves. Some dim. Some still faintly pulsing. They flickered like dying embers—souls caught mid-breath.
Fang Yuan stepped inside slowly.
"Don't touch those," Nian'er said. "I don't know where half of them came from, and the other half try to scream when you pick them up."
She flopped onto a hammock strung between two steel beams and began rummaging through a plastic packet of dried synth-meat.
Fang Yuan sat cross-legged in the corner.
He closed his eyes.
And found... silence.
In his old life, he could feel the flow of heaven and earth by breathing deeply. The pulse of trees. The echo of stars. The rhythm of mountains.
Now?
Nothing.
No wind. No roots. No Qi.
Just static.
The world outside his body was a noise of machines, reactors, and invisible frequencies. Nature had been muted, suffocated beneath neon and circuitry.
He drew a slow breath.
"If there is no Dao in the world," he murmured, "then I must become the Dao within."
He lowered his pulse. Cleared his thoughts. Began to stir the ancient breathing technique:
First Path of Stillness: Light the Inner Flame.
No Qi answered.
But—
Something deep in his dantian stirred.
A spark. Tiny. Faint. But undeniably alive.
Golden-red.
He opened his inner vision—and saw it.
A single ember of his old Core. Not whole. Not even stable. But there.
Buried in this broken shell of a body.
Somehow… his Core had followed him through death.
From the hammock, Nian'er eyed him over a bite of synth-meat.
"You're meditating? Seriously?"
Fang Yuan didn't respond.
Sweat beaded on his forehead. His limbs trembled slightly as he willed his meridians to awaken. The body resisted. But the ember inside... pulsed.
Twice. Then thrice.
Alive.
"Amazing," he whispered. "You followed me, old friend."
Nian'er rolled her eyes and tossed something at him.
A slim black bracelet.
"Vital monitor. Strap it on. If you die meditating, I'm not cleaning up your mess."
Fang Yuan caught it, examining the device.
He smiled faintly.
"I won't die."
He lowered his gaze back inward, to the faint, flickering glow within.
His Core lived.
And that… was enough to begin.
The ember pulsed.
Like the heartbeat of a dying star, small but steady, buried in the core of his being.
Fang Yuan sat still, sweat clinging to his brow, his breathing long and measured. Slowly—achingly—he guided the warmth through his broken channels. The meridians in this body were faint, underdeveloped. Some were sealed shut, others bent in unnatural paths.
But he'd walked ruined paths before.
And lived.
He visualized the old patterns.
The Five Meridian Spiral. The Three Harmonies of Breath. The Inner Lake. His consciousness moved like a whisper through the darkness—searching for resonance.
The ember flickered. Flared. Dimmed.
Then surged.
For a heartbeat—just one—his body remembered what it meant to cultivate.
Qi moved.
Barely. Weak as candlelight in a storm—but real.
From across the room, Nian'er tilted her head, something shifting in her expression. She didn't understand the technique—likely couldn't even sense it fully—but she felt the change in the air.
The temperature dropped by a single degree.
The light bulbs above them dimmed as if something in the room had drawn power—not from the walls, but from a deeper place.
Fang Yuan opened his eyes.
The ember was still there, glowing faintly in his dantian.
A root.
A beginning.
He smiled.
"You're not empty after all," he whispered. "You're just forgotten."
Nian'er stood up, arms crossed.
"…What are you?"
Fang Yuan didn't answer right away. He looked around the dim shelter—at the tools, the flickering monitors, the jars of stolen Cores, and the girl with eyes too tired for her age.
Then he looked inward.
"I'm the memory this world buried."
He reached up and clipped the black bracelet to his wrist.
"But it's still breathing."