The doppelgänger's grip burned like molten iron, phoenix fire searing through Chen Mo's wrist. He choked on the stench of his own charring flesh, the system's warnings screaming silently behind his eyes.
[Heavenly Dao Anomaly Intensity: 99%]
[Recommended Action: Immediate Retreat]
Xia Ling's muffled cries cut through the chamber. She hung suspended above the altar, veins bulging as the invisible force crushed her throat. Her dagger lay useless on the floor, its edge reflecting the doppelgänger's manic grin.
"You think this is new?" The double leaned closer, its breath reeking of scorched parchment. "You've stood here nine hundred and ninety-eight times. Begged. Bargained. Once, you even slit her throat yourself to buy another cycle."
Chen Mo's vision fractured. Ghostly memories surged—Xia Ling's corpse in a snowdrift, her lotus scars blackened by frost. Another where she stabbed him through the heart, screaming about stolen lives.
"Lies," he hissed.
The double laughed, flames dancing in its hollow eyes. "The Phoenix Manual isn't a cultivation guide. It's a ledger. Every soul you've burned for power, every timeline you've unraveled—it's all here." It tapped Chen Mo's temple. "You're the matchstick, not the flame."
[SYSTEM OVERRIDE]
[New Quest: Ashes to Ashes]
[Objective: Destroy the Altar of Forgotten Names]
[Reward: Phoenix Manual's True Form]
[Penalty for Failure: Eternal Recurrence]
Chen Mo's remaining hand twitched toward the Voidsteel dagger at his belt—a crude weapon forged from sublevel debris. The doppelgänger's smile widened.
"Ah, the dagger. Always the dagger. How many times must we—"
Chen Mo moved.
Time fractured.
[Temporal Fracture Activated: 5 Seconds]
The world slowed to syrup. Chen Mo's dagger arced upward, its shadowy blade drinking the chamber's light. The doppelgänger's flames froze mid-flicker, its taunt stretched into a distorted groan.
*Three seconds.*
He pivoted, severed wrist spraying blackened blood across the altar. The dagger plunged into the stone, cracks spiderwebbing through names older than the sect itself.
*Two seconds.*
Xia Ling fell in suspended motion, hair fanning like ink in water. Chen Mo caught her mid-collapse, her weightless form colder than winter's heart.
*One second.*
The dagger shattered. Shards of Voidsteel embedded themselves in the walls, their shadows writhing like trapped eels.
Time snapped back.
The altar exploded.
---
Chen Mo awoke to Xia Ling slapping him.
"—wake up, you suicidal bastard!" Her palm cracked against his cheek again. "We need to move!"
The chamber lay in ruins. Where the altar had stood, a gaping pit yawned into darkness, its edges glowing with residual phoenix fire. The names on the walls wept fresh blood, their whispers coalescing into a single word: *Cycle*.
[Quest Complete: Ashes to Ashes]
[Reward Claimed: Phoenix Manual's True Form (Sealed)]
[Soul Degradation: 3%]
A jade slip materialized in Chen Mo's remaining hand, its surface etched with a phoenix mid-immolation. He tried to speak, but his voice emerged hollow, as if echoing from a vast distance.
"Your arm," Xia Ling said, staring at his cauterized wrist. "Why?"
Chen Mo flexed phantom fingers. The pain was abstract, muted—a side effect of the system's override. "The dagger required payment. A soul's fragment."
"And you just *knew* that?"
"I remembered."
The lie tasted bitter. In truth, the system had whispered it—a fragmented warning from cycles past.
Xia Ling opened her mouth, but a tremor cut her short. The ceiling groaned, cracks racing across bone pillars. Somewhere above, voices shouted—Lu Tao's nasal sneer rising above the chaos.
"Elder Guo! The blasphemers are below!"
Chen Mo staggered upright. The chamber tilted, his remaining hand brushing a blood-slick wall. The names shifted under his touch, their letters rearranging into a chillingly familiar phrase:
*Xia Ling - Cycle 602 - Sacrificed to Quell Frostveil's Rage*
"We need to go." He gripped her shoulder, ignoring her flinch. "Now."
She shook him off. "Not until you explain how you slowed time. Or why your shadow…" Her voice trailed off as she stared at the floor.
Chen Mo followed her gaze. His shadow stretched unnaturally long, its edges blurred. Where it touched the pooling blood, faint screams echoed.
[Soul Degradation: 3%]
[Manifestation: Shadow Aberration]
"Later," he said. "Unless you want to explain this to Elder Guo."
Another tremor. Dust rained down as the first bone pillar collapsed. Xia Ling cursed, snatching up her dagger.
"This way! There's a hidden exit behind—"
The floor gave out.
---
They fell through centuries.
Chen Mo's stomach lurched as temporal energies whipped past—glimpses of Frost Cloud Sect's past. A younger Elder Guo sealing the sublevels. Lu Tao's ancestor flaying a disciple for stealing bread. Xia Ling, in another life, kneeling before Patriarch Frostveil's icy throne.
[Warning: Temporal Instability Detected]
They landed in a snowdrift, the impact driving the breath from Chen Mo's lungs. Xia Ling rolled to her feet, dagger raised against the blizzard's howl.
"Where are we?"
Chen Mo stood slowly. The blizzard parted, revealing a familiar mountain peak—the Frost Cloud Sect's training grounds, but older. The Hall of Whispers stood pristine, its obsidian doors unchained.
"The past," he said. "Cycle… 302, maybe."
Xia Ling stared at him. "You've done this before."
"Not me. Another me."
A horn blared. Through the snow marched a contingent of disciples in archaic robes, their formation encircling a prisoner—a woman with lotus scars.
Xia Ling gasped. The prisoner was her mirror image, right down to the dagger strapped to her thigh.
"Cycle 302's Xia Ling," Chen Mo murmured. "Caught stealing the Patriarch's wedding gifts."
"How do you—"
"The manual remembers."
They watched as the past Xia Ling spat in her captor's face. The lieutenant backhanded her, a ring of frostbite blooming on her cheek.
"We have to help her," present Xia Ling whispered.
Chen Mo gripped her arm. "We can't. This memory is fixed."
"But she's me!"
"No." His hollow voice silenced her. "She's what you could've been. What nine hundred others were."
The executioner's blade fell. Past Xia Ling's head rolled into the snow, eyes wide with defiance. Present Xia Ling retched.
[Soul Degradation: 4%]
[Penalty: Memory Leakage Detected]
Chen Mo's vision doubled. For a heartbeat, he saw two Xia Lings—one trembling in the snow, the other bleeding out in a forgotten tomb.
"Chen Mo?" Her voice came from far away. "Your eyes…"
He blinked. The temporal vision faded, leaving only the blizzard's bite. "We need to anchor ourselves. Find something unchanged across cycles."
Xia Ling touched her throat where the doppelgänger's force had crushed it. "The manual. You said it's constant."
Chen Mo unclenched his remaining hand. The jade slip glowed faintly, its phoenix emblem pulsing in time with his erratic heartbeat.
[Phoenix Manual's True Form (Sealed)]
[Unsealing Requirement: ???]
"It's useless," he said.
"Then we find what sealed it." Xia Ling stared at the execution grounds, where disciples shoveled snow over her predecessor's corpse. "The Patriarch's vault. Every cycle, Frostveil hoards artifacts to control the reset."
Chen Mo's shadow twitched. "You've tried this before."
"Not me. Her." She nodded to the bloodstained snow. "But I remember… echoes. A vault behind the Hall of Whispers, guarded by things not human."
The ground trembled. Reality itself seemed to recoil as a distant avalanche roared—one that shouldn't exist in this memory.
[Heavenly Dao Anomaly Intensity: 127%]
[New Quest: Shattered Hourglass]
[Objective: Locate Patriarch Frostveil's Temporal Anchor]
[Reward: Unseal Phoenix Manual (Partial)]
[Penalty: Soul Dissolution]
Xia Ling didn't flinch at the system's chime. She'd learned, as Chen Mo had, to ignore the invisible dagger at their throats.
"We'll need allies," she said.
"No one here is real."
"Not here." She pressed her dagger to his chest, its point drawing a bead of black blood. "Take us deeper. To the fracture point between cycles."
Chen Mo hesitated. The system screamed.
[WARNING: Temporal Fracture Limits Exceeded]
He grasped the dagger's hilt. "This will hurt."
"Everything does."
He drove the blade into his shadow.
The dagger's hilt vibrated in Chen Mo's grip as shadow and steel pierced his own silhouette. The world inverted.
Snow became ash. Cold became fire. Time became a shattered mirror.
They fell through shards of fractured cycles—a temporal labyrinth where moments bled into one another like watercolors left in the rain. Xia Ling's scream echoed across eras, blending with the cries of a hundred other selves.
[WARNING: Temporal Cohesion Critical]
[Soul Degradation: 7%]
Chen Mo's shadow unraveled thread by thread, its frayed edges dissolving into the chaos. He glimpsed reflections of past lives: a Xia Ling in scholar's robes incinerating herself to seal a demonic rift, another leading a peasant revolt against the sect, a third cradling his corpse in a blood-soaked field.
"Focus!" present Xia Ling shouted, her voice warping. She gripped his arm—the severed one, now a spectral stump flickering between existence and void. "Find an anchor!"
The Phoenix Manual burned in Chen Mo's remaining hand, its jade surface cracking to reveal pulsating crimson script.
[Phoenix Manual's True Form (Sealed)]
[Unsealing Progress: 12%]
A memory not his own surged forth—Cycle 422's Chen Mo standing in this same labyrinth, pleading with a spectral Xia Ling to remember him. She'd driven a blade between his ribs, whispering, *"You're not my Chen Mo."*
"There!" Xia Lung pointed.
A lone figure trudged through the temporal storm, his armor fused with frost and blood. The man carried a banner bearing the Frost Cloud Sect's sigil—but inverted, the snowflake dipped in crimson.
"Kael," Chen Mo breathed, the name surfacing from the manual's depths. "Cycle 155's rebellion leader."
"You know him?"
"He knows *us*."
The warrior turned, his face a patchwork of scars and ice burns. Twin lotus marks adorned his throat—Xia Ling's dagger work from a lifetime long erased.
"Late again, Phoenix," Kael rasped. Behind him, phantasmal soldiers materialized, their forms flickering like candle flames. "The Patriarch's vault is guarded by Frost Wraiths now. Nasty bastards."
Xia Ling stepped forward. "How many are we?"
Kael's laugh echoed with the voices of dead cycles. "All that remain."
The storm parted. Dozens of figures emerged from the temporal haze—rebels from forgotten eras, their bodies half-real. A woman with Xia Ling's eyes but a scholar's stoop. A boy barely twelve, his hands blackened from forge fires. A blind swordsman humming a dirge Chen Mo last heard in Cycle 77.
[Soul Degradation: 9%]
[Penalty: Temporal Echoes Intensifying]
Chen Mo's spectral arm flickered. The rebels recoiled.
"He's fracturing," the scholar-Xia warned.
"We all fracture," Kael said. He tossed Chen Mo a flask of liquid shadow. "Drink. It'll stabilize you… for now."
The fluid tasted of burnt hair and despair. Chen Mo's shadow knit itself back together—a marionette's tangled strings.
[Temp. Soul Cohesion: 58%]
"The vault's defenses adapt," Kael said, drawing a sword forged from glacial iron. "Last cycle, it was poison gas. Before that, living runes. This time…" He nodded to the storm.
The blizzard coalesced into towering figures—Frost Wraiths with eyes like frozen supernovas. Their howls shattered nearby time-shards, erasing fragments of a marketplace massacre and a wedding turned bloodbath.
Xia Lung hefted her dagger. "Same as the sublevels?"
"Worse," Kael said. "They remember."
---
The battle was a symphony of dying timelines.
Chen Mo fought beside his spectral selves—a version from Cycle 600 who wielded dual sabers, another from Cycle 899 who spat acid venom. Xia Ling dueled a wraith wearing her own face, its movements mirroring hers strike for strike.
[Temporal Fracture Activated: 3 Seconds]
Chen Mo slipped between heartbeats, Voidsteel dagger carving runes into a wraith's core. The creature exploded, its death cry erasing a nearby shard of Cycle 205 where he'd died of plague.
"Left flank!" Kael roared.
A wraith's claw raked Chen Mo's back. Pain blossomed in delayed bursts—first the physical tear, then the memory of a wolf's jaws closing on his throat in Cycle 12, finally the phantom ache of Xia Ling's blade in his gut from Cycle 422.
[Soul Degradation: 14%]
[Penalty: Cross-Cycle Pain Feedback]
Xia Lung dragged him behind a time-shard depicting their own graves. "We can't win this!"
"Don't need to win." Chen Mo pressed the Phoenix Manual to his bleeding side. The jade drank his blood, cracks spreading. "Just need to reach the vault."
[Unsealing Progress: 34%]
Kael's forces fell one by one, their deaths erasing more of the labyrinth. The scholar-Xia dissolved mid-incantation. The blind swordsman faded with his dirge unfinished.
"Go!" Kael slammed his banner into the ground, ice spreading to trap the remaining wraiths. "We'll hold them!"
"You'll die," Chen Mo said.
The warrior grinned, teeth filed to points like the doppelgänger's. "We've *been* dead."
The rebels charged, buying seconds with their dissolving lives. Chen Mo ran, Xia Lung at his side. The vault loomed ahead—a structure of impossible geometry, its walls shifting between stone, ice, and screaming flesh.
[Soul Degradation: 17%]
[Warning: Cognitive Integrity Failing]
Chen Mo's remaining hand phased through the vault door. Xia Lung caught him, her touch the only anchor in the storm.
"Stay with me," she ordered. "Whatever happens next, you don't get to fade."
The door opened.
---
Patriarch Frostveil's vault was a cathedral of frozen time. Ice encased moments like insects in amber—a disciple's first kiss, an elder's secret treason, Chen Mo's own arrival in this world repeated endlessly. At the center floated a pulsing orb of crimson ice, its surface reflecting the faces of everyone who'd ever died for the cycle.
[Temporal Anchor Detected]
[Objective Updated: Shatter the Anchor]
Xia Ling approached the orb, dagger raised. "This ends now."
"Wait." Chen Mo's shadow stretched toward the ice, drawn like iron to a lodestone. "It's a trap."
"Of course it's a trap." She didn't lower her blade. "When have we ever had choices?"
The manual burned in Chen Mo's hand, now 78% unsealed. The Phoenix's true form whispered promises—*Burn the anchor. Burn the cycles. Burn her if you must.*
A tremor shook the vault. Frostveil's laughter rumbled through the ice, dislodging frozen moments that shattered like glass.
[Heavenly Dao Anomaly Intensity: 199%]
[Patriarch Frostveil's Awakening: Imminent]
Xia Lung pressed her dagger to the orb. "Together?"
Chen Mo's spectral arm flickered. Somewhere, Kael screamed his last.
"Together," he lied.
As the dagger struck, Chen Mo pivoted—not toward the anchor, but toward a frozen shard of Cycle 1. The *original* cycle. The truth.
The orb exploded. The vault collapsed. And in the heart of the storm, Patriarch Frostveil opened his eyes.