The burial ground was not marked on any map.
Not even the Heavenly Sects dared record it.
It lay beneath a forgotten ridge in the Hollow Province, where the moon always looked cracked and the wind never made a sound. The path to it was overgrown with black thorns and bones that refused to decay.
Yi Mochen walked it like one who had returned home.
The twelve graves waited in silence.
Their markers were broken, not by time, but by intent.
Each tomb bore no name, only deep scars—slashes that could not have come from mortal blades. Some still bled ash when the cold night grew too quiet. Faint whispers curled in the air like smoke, voices of those who had been erased from history.
"We remember," one of them sighed, "even if the world does not."
Yi Mochen paused before the largest grave, where the earth sagged and pulsed like something buried alive.
The scent of iron and regret clung to the soil.
There was no inscription. Only a single symbol, carved so deep into the stone it looked burned into the marrow of the rock — the inverted sigil of the Heavenly Reversal, a mark forbidden since the ancient era.
He knelt.
And the wind stopped breathing.
His fingers brushed the cracked soil.
Beneath it, something stirred.
Visions struck him — a thousand eyes opening in the dark, a woman screaming as her soul was sealed, a child made to drink moonfire until his veins turned black.
The past clawed its way forward.
Yi Mochen did not flinch.
He whispered an incantation from a language older than sin,
and the ground opened like a mouth.
---
Far across the realm, Sect Masters and prophets woke in terror.
> "The twelfth seal has weakened," muttered the Seer of Withered Stars.
"He's walking the path again."
The sky over Hollow Province began to bleed a soft crimson.
And at the burial ground, where history had been buried by force,
history began to rise.
---