The outer sect dormitories were built like cages — a hundred rooms stacked atop each other in plain stone walls. No formations, no warmth. Just shelter from the cold.
Wu Ye took the lowest room. No one else wanted it; it sat directly atop the sect's waste channels, where failed pills and dead beasts were dumped.
He didn't complain.
He didn't speak.
He simply entered, placed the crude wooden sword against the wall, and sat cross-legged on the stone floor. He didn't meditate. He didn't circulate Qi. He just... sat.
Like he was listening to something no one else could hear.
Three hours later, they came.
Four boys, robes marked with faded sect insignia. Outer disciples. Mid-tier cultivators.
The leader, lanky and wolfish, had a mocking smirk.
"Hey, beggar. Trials are over. Go back to whatever trashhole you crawled out of."
Wu Ye didn't move.
The leader stepped inside, kicking over the old sword.
"You deaf? This sect's for real cultivators, not soul-less rodents. This toy of yours—"He stepped on the blade.
Then paused.
His foot didn't press down.
It sank.
Like the wood was devouring him.
He screamed.
The others rushed to help, but the air in the room thickened — like grief had taken physical form.
Wu Ye stood. For the first time.
He picked up the sword. No stance. No technique. Just motion.
The lead disciple collapsed without a sound. His soul didn't shatter. It forgot how to hold itself together.
The others fled.
No reports were filed.
The sect didn't ask questions.
In Twin Serpent Sect, power determined truth.
And Wu Ye had just rewritten it.
That night, by candlelight, Wu Ye drew a symbol onto the blade with a piece of charred bone. The curve of it was ancient, the angle sharp enough to tear through thought.
It wasn't calligraphy.
It was a grave marker.
The air in the room turned still, almost reverent.
And far beneath the sect — beyond walls, beyond stone, beyond the roots of the Soul Tree — a corpse smiled in its tomb.
Far above, in the watchtower where senior disciples monitored sect activity, one girl whispered without looking up from her scroll:
"Another one touched."
The boy beside her frowned.
"Touched by what?"
She didn't answer.
But the candle beside her flickered, though there was no wind