The twilight winds howled over the mountainous spires of the Fengrim Expanse, a barren and half-forgotten stretch of jagged peaks and scorched valleys that once marked the edges of human settlement before the Alliance reshaped the continental map. These lands had lain silent for years—until now.
Within the cold sanctum of the Shrine of Echoing Souls, the ancient spiritual chamber built atop a naturally resonant leyline fault, runes pulsed and flickered. A jagged fault of pale violet light cleaved through the central altar, shivering with unstable spirit energy. At the core of the disturbance stood Miren Vos, his crimson cloak trailing behind him like a bloodied banner, and his gauntleted hands moving in careful sigil rotations over the Spirit Basin.
"Third wave confirmed. Coordinates correlate with the Eastern Barrow Cliffs, near the ruins of Vale'drin," he said, voice grim.
Across the altar, Yue Mei materialized from a shimmer of light-illusion talismans. Her presence softened the space, though tension remained in her narrowed eyes. "Four separate provinces have registered identical soul-disruption pulses within a single cycle. This isn't residual trauma or haunted grounds. Something has triggered a feedback resonance."
Kai Chan appeared next, riding the edge of an echo-step, the sound of chimes accompanying his arrival. "It's coordinated. Some of these spirits have fragmented markers—etched traces, like branding seals."
Miren's face darkened. "Artificial bonds. Forced awakenings, maybe. And not from anything sanctioned by our Pavilion."
With their findings solidified, they launched an immediate expedition to the Barrow Cliffs. The trio flew swift, veiled by layered concealment talismans to avoid attention. Along the journey, the spirit pressure grew heavier, and the terrain more distorted. Ghostlight flickered unnaturally in daylight, and time itself felt fractured around them. Trees bled ash; stones whispered old names.
They reached the central disturbance.
There, nestled in a collapsed ritual basin—once a ceremonial altar of the Vale'drin Sect—lay rows of broken soul effigies, cracked stone mannequins carved in humanoid forms, and remnants of spiritual cages woven from blood-metal latticework. Hovering above the ruined altar was a boy no older than sixteen, suspended mid-air in a cocoon of shattered energy, eyes sealed, body twitching with violent spiritual spasms.
Kai Chan flinched. "His soul is screaming. It's splitting across timelines."
Yue Mei floated beside the boy, holding her fan upright. Her eyes glowed pale gold. "He was used. Not awakened... grafted. Someone forced a rogue bloodline into him and sealed the awakening mechanism using sacrificial souls. He's tethered to dozens of broken fragments."
Miren's expression hardened. "I'll begin the soul-calming rites. Kai, anchor the echoes. Yue Mei, we need to disrupt the brandings simultaneously."
They moved with precision. Miren's voice rose in solemn cadence, his hands tracing sigils made to soothe fractured spirits. Kai's sound pulses resonated with each spiritual scream, cancelling dissonance. Yue Mei's illusions pierced through the inner construct of pain that bound the boy's soul.
Still, it wasn't enough. His body began to convulse. A rift cracked open beneath them—a scar in space where the spiritual experiment had once reached into forbidden dimensions. Something ancient stirred from beneath.
And then the winds changed.
A crack of thunder—not from the skies, but from within the spirit realm itself.
A figure descended from the heavens, wrapped in silence: Su Mengtian.
He landed without motion, eyes glowing faintly beneath his calm facade. The sheer weight of his suppressed aura quieted the surrounding spirits in an instant. Yue Mei's fan stilled. Kai Chan fell silent. Even Miren bowed instinctively.
Mengtian moved to the boy, raising one hand.
Behind his palm, the faint outline of his concealed aura began to show—a surge of dragonic majesty, crackling with silent thunder and veil-bound lightning. The air bent around him. The boy's thrashing ceased.
"You walk between lives, child. You were not meant to carry another's legacy," Mengtian whispered. He placed his hand over the boy's heart.
A single pulse.
The boy's body flashed gold, then violet, then settled into a steady blue hum. The cocoon cracked like a shattered chrysalis, and the rogue bloodline seal writhed before vanishing with a final shriek.
The child fell.
Mengtian caught him.
The winds settled. The rift below closed with a sigh, as if some deeper hunger had been denied.
Miren straightened, awed. "You used your Thunder Guardian aura... not in attack, but resonance. You soothed the soul itself."
Yue Mei's voice was quiet. "That aura... it held elements beyond the known thunder arts. Was it celestial?"
Mengtian said nothing. He simply held the boy closer and walked toward the spirit basin, whispering into the air. "Name?"
The boy stirred, breath hitching. "Seryn. I... remember being called Seryn."
Kai Chan etched the name into a soul-scroll.
"Then Seryn you remain."
Mengtian turned toward the others. "Bring him back. He is proof not just of violation... but potential. We will need him prepared. The forces that created this would not have stopped at one."
They departed the site, leaving the grave-altar cold and silent once again. But something new echoed in the wind.
Not mourning.
A beginning.
The days following the rescue of Seryn passed in a hushed reverence. The Shrine of Echoing Souls, normally a place of quiet ceremony and observation, pulsed with heightened spiritual intensity. The disturbed graves had been silenced, their whispers quelled by the combined efforts of Miren Vos and Yue Mei, but one ripple remained.
Seryn.
The boy lay within the inner sanctum of the Shrine, surrounded by an octagonal matrix of soul-thread sigils maintained by Kai Chan and supervised directly by the Hall of Luminous Veil. Wards of harmony floated above his body, and an ocean-like hum filled the air—a constant echo of his unstable spirit and the shattered fragments of the rogue bloodline buried deep within.
Yue Mei stood in silence beside Su Mengtian.
"The soul is not simply damaged," she murmured, her fingers resting lightly on her fan. "It's fractured in both temporal and spatial layers. Time passed differently for him. Dreams interlaced with memory. It's a miracle he still clings to self-awareness."
Su Mengtian's gaze never left the boy's pale face. "Then we will give him what his creators never did. Choice."
Three days later, Seryn awoke.
He sat up slowly, eyes flickering with glimmers of celestial chaos—an inherited mark of the force-fusion. As his focus cleared, his breath caught in his throat upon seeing Su Mengtian standing nearby, arms folded, his presence steady as a mountain.
"You shouldn't be able to feel safe so quickly," Seryn whispered, voice still raw. "But I do."
"Good," Mengtian said. "You still have instincts."
A pause. Then, without ceremony:
"Do you know your name?"
"…Seryn. I think. They called me that when they needed a result."
"Then keep it. Let it mean something beyond their purpose."
Seryn blinked. "Why rescue me? You could have erased me. I'm unstable. Dangerous."
Su Mengtian moved forward, kneeling so their eyes met.
"You were not the weapon. You were the testing ground. We do not blame the soil when blood is spilled upon it."
---
Weeks passed. Seryn's spirit core was stabilized using the twin techniques of Kai Chan's harmonic echo-fields and Miren Vos' ancestral rites. It was Yue Mei, however, who first suggested his future.
"He has seen soul division, layered memory, and artificial emotion grafting," she said during a meeting in the State of Records. "There is no better candidate for spectral relay work."
Miren nodded. "And no soul more cautious of what tampering costs."
And so, Seryn was brought formally before the Eight Pillars.
He bowed stiffly, unsure of his place.
Su Mengtian addressed him from the central seat of the State of Records.
"You were created in silence. Forced into power you didn't ask for. Now I offer you a voice. The Hall of Echoes and the Hall of Luminous Veil both recommend your training be guided under them."
Kai Chan leaned forward. "You would begin as a spectral assistant—learning how to navigate spirit-traces, memory glyphs, and ghost-walk rituals. But in time, you could help guide lost souls to peace."
Yue Mei smiled faintly. "A guardian of echoes. One who hears what even the dead fear to speak."
Seryn swallowed, then bowed again.
"I… accept."
The decision was carved into the records that same day. A special codex—Clause of the Whispering Phoenix—was added to the Alliance's ethics framework, forbidding all experimental soul-fusion practices and binding any survivor of such to full rights of protection and rehabilitation.
For the first time in months, Seryn slept without voices in his dreams.
In the nights that followed, Su Mengtian stood atop the Shrine's high balcony. He looked toward the east, beyond the mountains, toward the shifting tensions of the continent.
Yueying approached, her hand finding his.
"You gave that boy a future they never meant him to have."
Mengtian nodded, quietly. "And in doing so, gave this continent one more witness to truth."
Thunder stirred on the horizon.
And elsewhere, distant forces began to listen.