They stood together, suspended in a place that defied time, space, and quite frankly, logic.

  An echo of his sister, framed in the eerie stillness, surrounded by the very worms that had plagued his nightmares for years. And yet, they didn’t move. They simply watched, frozen, as if waiting for some command.

  Tunde inhaled shakily, unable to look away.

  “What does that mean?” he asked, voice hoarse, each word dragged from something deeper than his lungs.

  Something inside him stirred.

  She raised one delicate finger toward him, not accusing, not angry. Merely...pointing. As if to say you already know.

  “You felt it, didn’t you?” she asked, her voice lilting with ancient weight.

  “The void... humming in your bones. Your Dao. Do you understand what that means?”

  “I don’t,” he replied, sharper than he meant.

  Too raw, too wounded, grief at the sight of his sister’s image taken by something strange.

  She tsked softly, almost like a disappointed teacher.

  “Nothing is right with this world of yours,” she said, gesturing vaguely around them.

  “Tainted lifeforce, stagnant and twisted cultivations, no Qi, no true Dao. And your body...”

  She looked him over, eyes dark with something like disdain.

  “A borrowed frame. Held together by authority and sheer stubbornness.”

  “Who are you?” he snapped again, fury igniting in his chest as the faint humming within him dulled and vanished.

  “No, no, no,” she said with a sigh, like a parent watching a child forget their lessons.

  “You’ve lost it again. Idiot heir.”

  She stepped forward.

  “Emptiness, boy. Be empty.”

  A blade appeared in her hand, ornate, elegant, silent, like it had always existed, simply waiting to be acknowledged. It radiated nothingness in the most suffocating sense.

  No pressure. No light. Just absence.

  Tunde instinctively stepped back. He reached inward for his concept, his authority—void, ice, force—but all of it shimmered and dispersed like smoke in the wind.

  “The first law,” she said slowly, carefully, like each word was a shard of glass.

  “Requires emptiness. You weeping, ragged child of void and fire.”

  The worms, the cave, even her borrowed face, all of it began to unravel, threads of falsehood pulled away to reveal a vast expanse behind her.

  A black canvas.

  A void untouched.

  Only stars—cold and watching—remained, scattered like specks of judgment.

  “The emptiness of the void,” she continued, her features now simply a rough outline of a starry void, and her voice lower now, almost reverent.

  “Is not despair. It is the beginning. A single law of the Dao of Void. And you, so close to death... you’re finally ready to understand.”

  Tunde’s throat tightened. “You're saying Emptiness is... an aspect of the Void?” he asked.

  Then why hadn’t he touched it before? He wielded space. Ice. Force. Was this another facet of his growing Dao? Or something far deeper?

  The being who was not his sister any longer inhaled sharply, as though trying to contain a storm inside her lungs.

  “Observe.”

  She raised her blade.

  He didn’t scream, though he wanted to. When she swung, the world itself yielded. Darkness—true, primordial darkness—peeled over what was already dark.

  It painted over nothingness itself, swallowing the stars like candle flames snuffed out in a single breath.

  Tunde fell.

  And kept falling.

  He passed through layers of memory like shattered glass, jagged, beautiful, unbearable.

  His parents’ deaths.

  The iron chains of the Mistwalkers.

  The voyage across the Boundless Sea, with corpses rotting under unfeeling suns.

  The fire-wracked wastelands.

  The siege of Jade Peak.

  Joran’s body torn in half.

  Ashen Flame sect’s betrayal.

  Miria’s hollow eyes.

  Ifa’s smile, moments before death.

  The crucible never ended. Not once had the heavens granted him peace. Only war. Only loss.

  Now, he fell through it all again, helpless, silent, burning with the truth he had refused to name.

  He had never been full.

  He had been empty from the start. And now, finally, he was beginning to grasp and understand what that meant.

  And what the Void had always waited for.

  “Why?” he croaked.

  His voice was hoarse, barely more than a breath dragged over broken glass.

  “Why show me all of this?”

  His limbs trembled, not from fear alone, though it was there, but from exhaustion. From pain that reached into places far deeper than flesh or bone, right into his spirit.

  The woman tilted her head, voice like a whisper caught between silence and wind.

  “Because to grasp even the faintest shimmer of the Law of Emptiness… to touch even a sliver of the Dao of the Void… you must face what you’ve been. Accept that all those memories, all those battles, all that suffering—are simply that.”

  She leaned in, the whisper curling through the echoing void:

  “What you have been.”

  Tunde collapsed to his knees. The torrent of memories kept replaying. Over and over. An unending cycle of loss, of survival, of wrath. It was not just pain. It was weight. And it crushed him.

  “Besides,” she said idly, as though commenting on the weather,

  “That thing… that wretched fusion you call Borus... It’s helped, in its own way.”

  She gestured, and the dark sky above them fractured to reveal the battlefield once more, regents failing, paragons tired and broken, saints screaming as the abomination ripped through them and their techniques like paper. Tunde watched it all in stillness, the image hovering like a cruel truth.

  It was a massacre.

  “And those who call themselves saints,” she muttered with a derisive snort, “how pitiful.”

  She folded her arms.

  “Trapped in wrong bodies, clinging to wrong truths. Trying to cultivate Dao seeds while polluted by the poison you call Ethra. A comedy of errors, really.”

  Tunde’s hands dug into the formless ground beneath him.

  “Please,” he rasped,

  “I don’t understand. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “You don’t need to,” she said, almost gently this time.

  “Understanding isn’t always the point. Survival is. And for now, that is my task, getting you to survive long enough to matter.”

  She turned toward the black horizon, the stars pulsing faintly around them.

  “That abomination,” she said, voice laced with ancient contempt,

  “Has changed things. It’s shaken the balance. So perhaps… perhaps I can give you an edge. Just a sliver. Before the Great Realignment begins.”

  “Realignment?” Tunde echoed, but she ignored the question, laughing lightly, like the notion of the entire world collapsing was a passing joke.

  She raised her hand.

  Colourless energy gathered in her palm. Not dark. Not light. Just absence. Even the space around it seemed to expand, giving it space.

  Tunde felt it instantly—his body, the true body far away in the broken skies of Adamath, siphoning the energy. Drawing it in.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  It burned.

  Not like fire. Like reality disagreed with what was happening.

  He gasped.

  “This feels… wrong.”

  “Of course it does,” she said with a sniff.

  “Your body’s attuned to filth.”

  “What is that?” he asked.

  She tilted one amused eye at him, gaze cold but not unkind.

  “Qi,” she said simply.

  The word rang through him like a bell struck at the bottom of a void.

  “Qi,” she repeated, drawing the syllable out like a blade.

  “The true breath of the universe. The original essence. The base lifeforce before Ethra, before your world corrupted everything with imbalance and shortcuts.”

  She curled her fingers, and the energy shrank, dense beyond reason.

  “Blame your ancestor,” she added, voice mocking now. “

  The great Alana sealed your plane and let you all drown in forgetfulness. If not for her, you'd all know the truth. But instead, you all chase ghosts with broken legs.”

  Tunde clenched his jaw, rage and confusion dancing in his eyes. But he didn’t look away.

  Because despite it all, she was giving him something.

  And he wasn’t going to die before he used it.

  Tunde frowned. The word echoed in his mind like a hammer striking hollow stone. Qi.

  He had been told, taught, and drilled to believe Qi was just another name for Ethra, that the two were one and the same.

  Different dialects. Different schools. Nothing more. But here, in this void wrapped in stars and shadow, that illusion fell apart like rotted silk.

  “What do you mean Ethra is tainted?” he asked, his voice low, hoarse.

  She didn’t respond with words—at least, not right away.

  Instead, she pointed a finger toward the constellation of memories hanging in the air, moments of loss, agony, war, and sacrifice. His mind reeled just looking at them.

  “You’re thinking too small,” she said softly.

  “Those are not your problem. Not yet.”

  Her eyes glinted, stars caught in obsidian.

  “The first law,” she continued, voice tightening with strange authority,

  “Is for you to understand. No, not just to understand, to embody. That is what it takes to truly surpass the rubble you call Saints.”

  Tunde clenched his jaw. Something in her words struck true, painfully so. His mind wanted to resist, but his spirit trembled with recognition.

  She studied him for a heartbeat longer.

  “Your bloodline is strong,” she said slowly, the words dragged as though pulled from some distant place.

  “For a distant branch family member, from the middle of nowhere, you have—”

  She stopped.

  Abruptly.

  Like an unseen blade had been placed at her throat.

  Her lips pressed together. She sighed, the weight of countless lifetimes in the sound.

  “Nevermind,” she muttered and turned away.

  Tunde narrowed his eyes. But before he could question further, she held out the swirling orb of Qi once again.

  “Emptiness,” she intoned,

  “Is the absence of all thought. Of energy. Of matter. The first door in the Dao of the Void is not knowledge. It is release. To grasp it, you must become it. And to do that...”

  She stepped closer.

  “You must purge everything you have been. Your pain. Your goals. Your ties. Your vengeance. Even your hopes.”

  She said it as if asking him to unclench a fist, casually. But her gaze pierced him like a spear through the soul.

  “Can you do that?” she asked.

  “Can you choose to let it all go?”

  Tunde didn’t answer.

  She turned her palm, revealing the swirling sphere of Qi again—pale, colourless, radiant.

  But he didn’t look at it.

  His gaze drifted upward. And she knew.

  With a wave of her hand, an image took shape in the sky above them, his own body, lying broken and unmoving, skin pallid, lips darkening.

  Cultivators gathered around him, force-feeding him elixirs and pills. None of it worked. Each one fizzled into useless vapor the moment it touched his skin.

  His body was shutting down, caving in on itself like crumpled paper. No, he was dying.

  Tunde stared at himself. At the futility. At the end of a road paved in blood and fury, and the hope that maybe there was something better waiting on the other side.

  He took a breath.

  Then another.

  And spoke, more to the image than to her:

  “Be empty,” he whispered, the words barely audible in the quiet.

  He crossed his legs and sat, eyes still fixed on the broken version of himself. Facing it. Facing everything.

  Around him, the void listened.

  One by one, it showed him everything—every scar, every loss, every shard of a life spent clawing toward the light only to be dragged back into shadow.

  His sister’s death.

  Could he forgive himself for that?

  Tunde shuddered as the memory unfurled in perfect clarity—the terror in her eyes, the blood, the sound.

  A broken sob escaped his throat as he dropped to his knees. The tears came hot and heavy, no restraint, no pride left to hold them back.

  He had been so weak, a scared brittle boy with no power, no courage, no strength.

  He bowed his head before the image.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, voice trembling. “I’m sorry I let you die.”

  He begged her forgiveness, but he knew he would never truly be free of that weight. Even so, he burned her face into memory now that he could finally see it clearly.

  And with hands clenched in anguish, he prayed, Please rest well. Please… be somewhere better than this.

  Then came his parents.

  Their deaths at the hands of the Mistwalkers.

  Could he have stopped it?

  “No,” he said quietly, shaking his head, grief anchoring his voice.

  “Not then.”

  The truth came bitter but clear. He had been a child, helpless, caged in a world where power dictated fate. But that world had been torn apart now.

  The Mistwalkers were gone, reduced to dust and whispers in the wake of all that had come since. Their blood had been answered for, though it didn’t undo the loss.

  He hoped they, too, had found peace.

  Then the wastelands.

  The desolation. The madness. The months of hunger and frost and teeth always snapping behind him.

  Had he overcome that?

  “Yes,” he said aloud.

  “I did.”

  He stood a little taller.

  And Jade Peak?

  The rise. The fall. The betrayal. The slaughter.

  He clenched his fists and then unclenched them.

  “I survived it. I surpassed it.”

  His voice was steadier now. A statement of fact, not hope.

  Then—Joran.

  The bond that had shaped him more than he ever admitted aloud. The old tiger’s final roar still echoed in his chest. Could he live past it?

  He wanted to say no. He almost did.

  But then he remembered the parting. The farewell they’d been granted against all odds.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “I saw him again. I said goodbye. He’s at peace.”

  And on and on it went.

  Every loss.

  Every pain.

  Every bloody chapter of a life that had been more battlefield than journey. Some memories brought sobs.

  Others drew quiet nods. Some struck with fresh grief, while others passed like a gentle wind over old scars.

  But through it all, something changed.

  Tunde saw what the emptiness wanted him to see, that the universe was far too vast, too indifferent, to mourn a single speck like him. It didn’t care about what had been done to him.

  So if the world wouldn’t remember him...

  He would force it to.

  Not by holding on to his pain.

  But by becoming something it couldn’t ignore.

  To do that, he had to let everything go.

  Ifa’s hopes? They didn’t matter anymore, not because they weren’t real, but because clinging to them would only break him further.

  Vengeance? It was hollow now. The regents were crumbling beneath their own sins, paying in fire and blood. Let them.

  Perhaps from their ashes, something new could rise. But he would not be a part of that burden unless he chose to be.

  First, he had to be free.

  For years, he had unknowingly invoked the Void’s emptiness to still his heart in battle, to remain centered when the world demanded fury.

  He had walked the path of emptiness without knowing its name.

  Now, as one memory closed after another, sealed not in denial, but in acceptance, his heart grew lighter.

  The void... no, the Dao of the Void, as the Emptiness had called it, began to hum in him like a distant thunder.

  It was faint at first.

  A soft pulse behind the curtain of his consciousness.

  But the closer he drew to stillness, the more it began to rise—first a whisper, then a call.

  Then a song.

  And finally, resonance.

  He didn’t force it.

  He simply let go.

  And the Dao answered.

  He had been in that place for what felt like eons, suspended in a space where time had neither meaning nor mercy.

  There were no stars, no sounds, no passage of hours to mark his stillness.

  Only the weight of transformation, and the slow, steady hum of what he assumed now to be the Dao of the Void resonating deeper and deeper into his being.

  Then it seized him.

  Not from the outside. From within. A pressure, a crucible, born from the very marrow of his spiritual self. It clutched at him with silent inevitability, a trial that felt more like a rebirth than a test.

  Emptiness moved.

  He hadn’t seen her take a single step. One moment she was there, at a distance, and the next she was in front of him, close enough to feel the void radiating from her skin.

  “This body will become your true body,” she said, voice colder than the vacuum between stars.

  “That husk you’re clinging to out there? It’s about to become nothing more than dead weight, an anchor for your entire being if you will.”

  And without waiting for a response, she slammed the gathered Qi into his chest.

  Tunde arched back violently, his spine bowing like a drawn bowstring as raw Qi surged through him—no, tore through him.

  It wasn’t Ethra. It was alien, older, and terrifying in its purity. It knew no compromise. It recognized no limits.

  It surged through every inch of him like a tide washing away the last vestiges of who he had been.

  His eyes flew open.

  He saw the law of Emptiness. Not in words, not even in comprehension—but in feeling.

  It wasn’t the absence of thought, or love, or pain. It was the acceptance of all things. Of grief. Of wrath. Of futility. Of what was and what will never be again.

  It wasn’t peace.

  It was surrender—not to weakness, but to truth.

  And in that clarity, something ignited.

  The Dao of the Void pulsed in rhythm with the Law of Emptiness. It bound with his authority, it enveloped his essence flame, and it made room for something impossible.

  He had taken his first true step into understanding the Dao.

  And it was enough.

  Enough to elevate him beyond the line he had crawled toward his whole life.

  Enough to push him through the veil.

  Tunde was becoming a Saint.

  Not one of the void itself, that was unattainable currently, a distant dream in the far-flung future.

  No, he was becoming something lesser yet more powerful than anything he had ever been.

  A Saint of Emptiness.

  The power poured through him, overflowing with both violence and serenity, until even the weird place he had found himself began to fracture. Around him, the black realm shattered like porcelain.

  Emptiness smiled that strange, eternal smile.

  “Until we meet again, useless heir,” she whispered.

  He frowned, something nagging at the edge of his thoughts—but it vanished like mist as the world collapsed around him.

  When he opened his eyes again, he was back in his soulspace, and chaos still reigned.

  The taint of the abomination was still there, a malignant cancer gnawing at his spirit, devouring what little was left of him.

  Tunde flexed his fingers.

  His spiritual form burned—burned—with Qi.

  It was strange. Foreign. Almost wrong. And yet, it was growing more familiar by the second. Like a second skin he hadn’t realized was his all along.

  He clenched his fist, and a sharp reverberation of authority rang out through the chamber like a temple gong.

  He was in the air a second later, floating above the ruin of his soulspace.

  The insight of the law hummed beneath his skin, and though he barely understood it, he knew it.

  There were patterns, tiny pinpricks across his spiritual form, channels that seemed to pull the Qi through him with startling ease.

  Meridians, his mind supplied.

  The term echoed like a memory from someone else’s mouth. Everything was alien.

  But one thing was familiar: the need to fight. His arm drew back instinctively, a memory rising with it.

  The first technique Joran had taught him.

  This time, it wasn’t just a form; it was power. Pure, refined, terrifying power shaped through the Dao of Emptiness.

  He hadn’t named the technique before.

  But now?

  The name came to him as naturally as breath.

  Void Devouring Palm.

  He struck.

  The palm hit the taint like a divine hammer, Qi and authority crashing together into a surge of annihilating light. The darkness screamed, if it had a voice, but it was silenced just as quickly.

  Gone.

  Turned to nothing.

  Erased from existence by the law of emptiness.

  His essence flame flared, the sputtering spark now bursting back into brilliance, flooding the soulspace with violet-gold fire once more.

  He turned.

  And saw the creature.

  The serpentine thing that had once terrified him, made from coiled Qi and silent menace. Now, it bowed its head to him—no, it roared in triumph as he lowered himself before it in return.

  This wasn’t a symbol of his ego, it was a truth, it was his Dao given form.

  The Void Dragon.

  How did he know?

  He just did, it didn’t matter where it came from. Or even where he came from. This was real, this was who he was.

  He turned his attention outward, to his physical body, which teetered on the brink of collapse. His heart was barely beating. His core was cracked. Elixirs did nothing. Pills only dissolved.

  But now, with Qi burning inside his soul, he traced the flow. Studied its movement. Saw where it fed into his dying body—and where it didn’t.

  He began to reconstruct it, bit by bit—a Saint, remaking himself from ashes.

  First, the core—shattered and tainted. It had to be purged. He willed the Qi to consume it, piece by piece, swallowing the broken remains and replacing it with something new.

  It would take time, too much time, but he had already started.

  He crossed his legs mid-air, facing the ancient law stone, and began to cultivate. Truly. For the first time, not just out of desperation, but because he had the choice.

  The Law of Emptiness throbbed beneath his skin.

  And the Saint of Emptiness was born anew.

  Let the regents die. Let the sky fall. Let the heavens scream.

  Tunde would rise.

  And he would bring something to Adamath it had never seen before.