Chapter 5 — The Laughing Bones
The sky bled in strips of violet and rust, a bruised canvas stretched above the Bleeding Vale. The ravine slashed through the land like a wound no god had cared to stitch shut. Bones jutted from the cliffs—too smooth to be stone, too old to be named. They whispered in the wind, repeating the final words of fallen cultivators who had once challenged the heavens... and failed.
Lucien walked alone through the mists, and yet, he was not alone.
A voice cackled in his head.
"You've got a gift, boy. Not power. Not talent. Just that wretched thing that refuses to die. What's the word? Oh, yes—grudge."
Lucien grimaced. "You're dead."
"And still more entertaining than most living things," said the voice. "Name's Rathe. Once called the Fangless Demon. Now just a clever stain in your soul."
He had absorbed the thread of some forgotten Hollow-bound warrior during the last fight—and with it, bound something... extra. Rathe was a shade, a laugh too stubborn to vanish, tied to Lucien's Hollow Root like mold to damp bone.
Lucien could feel the parasitic presence writhing along his spine, occasionally forming a second shadow behind him when no light was cast.
"You know, most who walk this vale go mad," Rathe hummed. "But not you. You're already rotten from the inside."
Lucien stopped. "Why are you still here?"
"Maybe I want to see what kind of monster you'll become."
The Bleeding Vale was not just cursed. It was alive with echoes—spirit threads that lingered in the air like the final notes of songs no one remembered. They curled along the edges of cliffs, tangled through roots, hummed within the marrow of dead trees.
Lucien paused near a warped obelisk.
He felt it: a thread—not from a human, but something worse.
A low growl vibrated the stones.
From the mist crept a creature, limbs half-flesh, half-memory. A wolf-shaped thing with too many eyes and teeth shaped like broken blades. It moved in glitching steps, as though forgetting where its feet had once landed.
The Thread Maw.
It was not a beast, not truly. It was a devourer of dreams, a mimic of regret. Every soul it consumed, it wore like a cloak.
Lucien whispered, "So, you wear their strengths."
Rathe laughed. "Don't be jealous."
The Thread Maw lunged.
Lucien ducked left, feet barely scraping the dust, and reached inward. He called on the Thread of the Silent Duelist—a memory he had bound two nights ago. For a moment, he became the one who had died with honor but no name.
His hand moved like a blade. His body danced, not with speed, but with certainty.
The Maw shrieked, staggering as its flank split open.
Lucien rolled back, breathing hard. "The memory's decaying already…"
"They always do," Rathe said, smug. "You think the dead last forever? No. Only vengeance does."
The creature hissed and changed shape—its form now shifting, mimicking a flame cultivator Lucien once saw at the Academy. Blazing spirals of Qi formed in its mouth.
Lucien's eyes narrowed. "So it remembers the strong."
He turned, sprinting toward a battlefield of broken banners and shattered swords nearby. There, he could feel it—a lingering archer's regret, a thread bound in sorrow and precision.
Lucien gathered it, pain seizing his temples as the thread merged with his Hollow Root.
He turned, raised his arm as if drawing a bow, and whispered:
"I never missed. Except once. Let this be my correction."
A shard of spirit-light formed, shaped by regret and desperation. He released it—piercing the Maw through its false flame-core.
It howled, then melted into ash, its stolen threads snapping into the wind.
Lucien collapsed beside the beast's remains.
"You fight like a poet with rabies," Rathe chuckled.
Lucien spit blood. "And you talk like a dead man who thinks jokes can replace wisdom."
"They can," Rathe said. "Wisdom rots. Mockery survives."
Night fell, and Lucien sat alone, listening to the bones whisper in the wind.
"Why does the world remember the glorious deaths but forget the quiet lives?" he muttered. "Every hero is praised, every villain cursed. But the hollow... we are neither. We are the ones who carried the broken. Who buried them."
Rathe was silent for once.
Lucien continued, voice low. "They say fate is a thread pulled by divine hands. But what of those threads cut too soon? Frayed. Forgotten. Are they not fate, too?"
He stood.
"I will gather them all. The dreamers who failed. The cowards who ran. The monsters who repented. I will bind their endings to mine and become the tale they never could."
As dawn stretched its first light across the Bleeding Vale, Lucien found it—an ancient sigil array, buried beneath thorns and rot. Carved by a Hollow Lord from another age.
A design etched in madness and method.
Bind not one memory, but many.
Stitch not one path, but thousands.
Build the spiral. Let it bloom.
Lucien stared at it, eyes burning.
This was no mere Hollow technique. It was architecture. A library of regrets. A way to store and recall fragments like books in a vault.
"A Thread-Library," he whispered.
With this, his Hollow Root could evolve. No longer just a parasite...
But a monument to the discarded.
Lucien began copying the runes, etching them into his own skin with a dull blade, drawing lines in ink and blood.
"You know," Rathe muttered, "this is where most people start screaming."
Lucien smiled, bitter. "I screamed long ago. No one heard. Now I bleed so the world remembers."
By afternoon, Lucien reached the end of the vale, wind howling behind him like laughter or warning.
And there, waiting in the shadow of a crooked tree, was a girl.
Young, maybe fifteen. Robes torn. Her Fate Root was a Crystal Bloom, cracked and wilting. She clutched a broken flute in one hand and stared at him as if he'd grown from the soil like a weed.
"You're the Hollow one," she said. "The cursed root."
Lucien tilted his head. "And you are?"
She didn't answer.
"I came to die," she said instead.
Lucien paused.
"Then die," he said. "Or live and become something worse. I am not here to offer mercy."
She followed him anyway.
Rathe laughed in his mind. "You've got a fan."
Lucien said nothing.
But in his heart, a question stirred like ash:
Would this girl be another thread to bind, or something stranger?