Path Beyond Fate
**Synopsis: Veil of the Unseen Path**
Eron has spent eighteen years perfecting the art of being forgotten.
To teachers he is average. To classmates he is harmless. To bullies he is easy. He answers questions softly, scores just high enough to pass unnoticed, and lets the world label him a pushover—because revealing the mind that quietly devours differential equations, quantum paradoxes, and every hidden pattern in existence would only paint a target on his back. He chooses invisibility. Logic demands it.
His family is the only place the mask softens: his gentle mother who believes in quiet effort, and his father—a man of sealed lips and long absences—who works for something he will never name.
One moonlit night, that father slips into Eron’s room like a shadow. No words. Only a silent ritual: something cold and metallic pressed to his son’s chest, a bloom of unnatural warmth, then gone. In the morning, Harlan has vanished again. Eron says nothing. He never does.
Days later his body begins to change—muscles carving themselves from frailty, senses sharpening to a predator’s edge. The world notices. He still hesitates at every raised voice.
Then the sky remembers it is not supposed to be kind.
A low, grinding earthquake. Crimson days that refuse to end. Scarlet rain that falls like judgment, burning through flesh and bone. In hospital beds the dying rise screaming with power—flames at their command, wind in their breath, impossible strength in trembling hands.
Before every surviving face a screen appears: eternal, unblinking. *Cultivation Level*. Quests. Rewards. A ladder to godhood for anyone willing to climb.
Eron sees only empty air.
His home stands silent. His family is gone. Only an old silver pendant remains—its runes faintly warm, as though it remembers something he does not.
Then the world itself dies and is reborn.
Technology perishes in a single apocalyptic roar. Concrete twists into ancient timber and tiled roofs. The modern city becomes something older, crueler—a lawless realm where strength is law and the weak are currency.
In the heart of his transformed room lies a single book that was not there before: *The Eternal Path of the Martial Artist*.
When he traces its first form, something wild and pure surges through him—for one blinding heartbeat—then vanishes.
No screen guides him. No quests promise him power. No one knows what he carries in his blood, what his father did that night, or why the pendant pulses when no one else is watching.
To a newborn murim world already crowning its new gods, Eron is nothing.
A forgotten boy. A blank space. A mistake.
And that is the most dangerous thing of all.
Because some paths were never meant to be assigned.
Some flames were never meant to be lit by anyone else.
And some veils, once torn, cannot be mended.
Eron steps forward into the crimson-shadowed wilds.
Unbound. Unseen. Unstoppable.
The true story begins where every system ends.
