---
The world didn't mourn him.
No silence, no screaming. Just absence.
Not a single tear spilled, not a single soul left to remember.
Once, there was a man who burned brighter than any star.
Now, there isn't even ash.
---
It began with stillness.
Not the kind that comes after death—
but something deeper.
The kind of stillness that exists before anything ever lived.
Before names. Before light. Before time.
He awoke there.
Not gently.
Not violently.
Just… woke.
Like a mistake the universe realized too late.
---
There was no sky.
No ground.
Only dust, and bones that didn't belong to him.
Bones older than stories.
When he opened his eyes, they burned—not with pain, but with a color that didn't belong to the world he remembered.
Crimson. Deep. Hollow.
Above him, a cracked moon hung low in a starless sky.
Its surface bled slow rivers of red light.
And in its quiet bleeding… it smiled.
---
A voice came—not from outside, but from inside the cracks in his mind.
"You shouldn't exist."
He didn't answer.
He couldn't.
His name—whatever it had been—was gone.
Scrubbed clean from his bones.
"And yet, you do. Strange, little fragment."
The voice was old, but not tired.
It felt like an echo of something that once ruled everything and then was left behind.
Not forgotten—buried.
---
He tried to move. His body responded like it had only just remembered it was supposed to be alive.
A breath.
Shallow.
A heartbeat.
Twice, then pause.
He sat up, and the dust recoiled from him, as if it knew something had returned that shouldn't have.
"Where… am I?" he whispered.
The voice didn't answer right away.
When it did, it was almost tender.
"Nowhere."
"You've been unmade. Not killed. Not broken. Just… erased."
"They tried to remove your story from the world entirely."
He blinked, trying to remember a face, a name, a feeling—anything.
But all that came to him was red.
The moon.
The dust.
The distant warmth of something buried in sorrow.
---
"I was Yun Che…"
He said it out loud, not to believe it—
but to fight the silence.
The voice laughed—not cruelly. Just... soft.
"You were. But not anymore."
"The name doesn't belong to you now."
"No one remembers it."
---
He stood, shakily, knees trembling like a newborn beast.
Above him, the cracked moon shifted—
not in orbit, but in expression.
Its grin widened.
And he felt it in his bones:
A pull.
Like something had been waiting.
For him.
For this moment.
"The Heavens have turned their back on you."
"Come then, little fragment. Let's return the favor."
---
He didn't know why, but he nodded.
And the red light that spilled from the sky
didn't fall on him…
It fell into him.
And he didn't burn.
He unraveled.
---
End of Chapter 1
---