Chapter 1: The Village That Never Was
Mist choked the Dustbone Marshes, a pale shroud that clung to the earth like forgotten sorrow. The air hung thick with silence—not the silence of stillness, but a deeper one, as if the world itself had forgotten how to speak.
Yun Weishan stood barefoot at the edge of a stagnant pond, his clothes tattered and soaked in cold dew. Behind him… nothing. Where his village had stood only hours before, there was now only ash-gray fog and half-sunken stone foundations. Even those were fading, as though being swallowed by time itself.
He didn't scream. There was no one left to hear him.
The marsh was always treacherous, but this—this was different. It wasn't a beast raid, or a landslide. It was like the entire place had been erased by an invisible hand. No corpses. No fire. No blood.
No memory.
He reached into his robes and pulled out a shard of green jade, cracked and dim. It had once hung from his mother's neck. Now, it pulsed with a slow, irregular heartbeat—as though something inside it still remembered her.
A whisper brushed against his ear.
> "You are the last name... do not speak it aloud."
He turned sharply. Nothing. Only fog and reeds. But he knew that voice. It belonged to the old storyteller, the blind man who had once claimed to be a Dao Lord fallen from grace.
But he was gone, too.
---
That night, Yun Weishan found the tomb.
It had risen where the village shrine once stood: a black ziggurat of bone-white stone, half-buried in the swamp. The mist parted before it like a curtain before a stage. He felt no fear—only familiarity. Like stepping into a forgotten dream.
At its base, an inscription:
> "Here rests the Nameless General. Those who remember must forget. Those who forget may enter."
He touched the stone.
It turned to liquid.
---
🌑 Inside the Tomb
The world shifted.
He was no longer in the marsh. He stood beneath a sky of bleeding stars, on a plain of cracked obsidian. Spears jutted from the ground like tombstones. Wind howled with the voices of the dead.
Then came the trial.
From the shadows walked a giant of black iron armor, faceless and crowned with broken halos.
> "Name yourself, boy. Let the tomb know your truth."
But Yun Weishan understood, even without knowing how: if he spoke his name here, he would lose it forever.
Instead, he bowed.
> "I have no name. I walk the path of those who were forgotten."
The tomb groaned. The iron giant paused.
And then… it knelt.
> "Then rise, Tomb Walker. You are chosen."
The jade shard at his chest glowed like a second heart. His body ignited with pain—but also awakening. His senses sharpened. His breath came not from his lungs, but from the air itself. His blood flowed with faint light.
He had touched the Dao.
Not Qi, not sword, not technique—but Echo.
---
🌌 From Here...
Yun Weishan becomes a fugitive. Every sect hunts Tomb Walkers, fearing what they might uncover—truths that Heaven itself buried. With each tomb, he gains more power… but each step forward erodes his identity.
Will he become the greatest cultivator of the Nameless Dao?