A frigid wind carved through the Black Lotus Sect's training grounds, but Mu Qinglan barely felt it. The cold had long since settled in her bones.
She moved silently behind Bai Ling through the shadowed corridors, the dim torchlight casting jagged patterns across the damp stone. The silence between them was thick, but her mind was louder than ever. Had she truly been living under a lie? Had every grueling hour of training, every sacrifice, been for someone else's gain?
Doubt. A dangerous thing. A festering wound left untreated.
And yet, it grew.
Revealing the TruthThe path led them deeper into the sect, far beyond the reach of wary disciples or prying eyes. A hidden passage yawned open before them—rough-hewn walls damp with rot, the air thick with stagnant decay. Torches flickered weakly, their flames barely clinging to life.
Mu Qinglan's gaze remained sharp. "Where are we going?"
Bai Ling didn't break stride. "To see proof." A promise wrapped in quiet menace. "You won't have to take my word for it. You'll see."
The corridor ended at an iron gate, rusted and thick with the stink of old blood. Bai Ling pressed her palm against the lock, and dark energy seeped from her fingertips, curling into the mechanism like grasping claws.
Click.
The gate groaned open, a reluctant, tortured sound. Beyond it, the stench of rot slammed into Mu Qinglan, clinging to her like an invisible hand.
The chamber was filled with prisoners—no, not prisoners. Carcasses.
Some still clung to the illusion of life, barely breathing, their bodies shriveled husks of what they once were. Faces she recognized. Senior disciples. Promising talents. Once proud warriors, now reduced to trembling wraiths chained to the walls.
The air was thick with the remnants of stolen energy, the spiritual essence drained from their bodies leaving them brittle, wasted.
A rasping croak clawed its way from the corner.
"H-Help…"
Her eyes snapped to the source.
Senior Brother Han.
A broken thing. His once-vibrant eyes hollow, sunken deep into his skull. His limbs, nothing more than brittle twigs wrapped in too-thin skin. The weight of his own head seemed too much to bear.
He tried to raise a hand. Failed.
"They took… everything…" he wheezed, voice scraping like shattered glass. "The elders… drain us… to feed their own cultivation."
Mu Qinglan stared, unmoving. A different reaction might have come once, in another life. Shock. Horror. Outrage.
Now, there was only silence. The kind of silence that comes before the breaking of something fundamental.
Bai Ling's voice was soft. A whisper of venom. "This is your fate if you stay loyal."
The words slithered into her mind, wrapping around the doubt already there, tightening. Her gaze swept over the wreckage of what had once been men and women of strength. Now, nothing more than discarded husks, stripped of everything that once made them warriors.
A waste.
Her breath left her slowly. "How long?"
Bai Ling smiled. "Long enough."
Mu Qinglan turned away from the pathetic creatures in chains. They had already lost. They weren't worth saving.
But she would not be them.
The ChoiceA hand settled on her shoulder, light, but with the weight of a promise.
"You don't have to suffer this fate," Bai Ling murmured. "Join Master."
Mu Qinglan's jaw tightened. "Who is he?"
"The one who will burn this rotten world to the ground."
The words carried no warmth, no righteous fury. Only certainty. A quiet, inevitable destruction wrapped in inevitability.
Mu Qinglan let the silence stretch.
Then, she nodded.
Not out of trust. Not out of belief.
But because knowledge was power, and she would have both.
Bai Ling's lips curled into a satisfied smirk. A slow, creeping thing. Another thread woven into her web.
Master would be pleased.
Beyond the Sect – Jin Xiao WatchesMiles away, in the darkness of his chamber, Jin Xiao watched through Bai Ling's eyes.
A smirk played at his lips, slow and knowing. "Even the unbreakable will crumble. It's only a matter of time."
Mu Qinglan was a weapon waiting to be sharpened. A tool of untapped potential. A blade dulled by misplaced loyalty, but soon to be reforged in something purer—something cold, efficient, deadly.
Not yet, though.
No, not yet.
She still held onto the last threads of herself, threads that needed to be cut, one by one.
He leaned back, exhaling softly.
"I'll break you," he murmured to the silent room. "And when I do, you'll thank me for it."
The shadows whispered their agreement.