Even the heavens turned away when he fell —
Not for emperors, not for gods,
But for him.
Beneath a sky of blood-red clouds, where thunder rolled like the dying breath of forgotten gods, the Abyssal Crucible stood untouched by time.
It was not a prison of iron or stone, but of divine judgment, forged from the essence of the Nine Heavens themselves. No ordinary soul could be sealed within — only one who had shaken the pillars of immortality.
And within that prison, he had slept for tens of thousands of years.
Bound in Heaven-Sundering chains, his soul fused with the Primordial Shadow — the first chaos.
He had once been Chen Wuyan, the Heaven-Sundering Sage, a being whose name was whispered in awe across the Nine Heavens. He had walked paths no mortal should tread, shattered the laws of cultivation, and reached heights that even immortals feared.
And for that, he was betrayed.
By his own disciples.
By his closest brothers.
By the heavens themselves.
They called it justice.
They called it balance.
But it was nothing more than fear — and the silence that follows when the world forgets a name.
The world that forgot
Tens of thousands of years passed.
In that time, sects rose and fell, empires crumbled and entire cultivation lineages were erased from history. What once was legend became myth. What once was myth became nothing at all.
The Nine Heavens, in their judgment, did not merely exile him — they rewrote the world to ensure he was never remembered.
His name was erased from records.
His disciples were scattered or killed.
His sect was wiped from existence.
Even the stars that once bore witness to his ascent were made to forget.
Only the Primordial Shadow Entity remained — fused with his soul, whispering in the void, the only thing that remembered who he had been.
And then, a girl found him.
Ling Mei — the one who shouldn't have been there
Ling Mei was no prodigy. A low-level disciple of the Azure Sky Sect, she wandered into the Ruins of the Forgotten Peaks chasing rumors — of lost artifacts, hidden pill formulas, and ancient treasures buried beneath centuries of dust.
She found none of that.
Instead, she found him.
Half-buried in the earth, his body — or what remained of it — wrapped in chains of fading light. His face was obscured, but his breath, though shallow, still clung to existence.
She reached out.
The moment her fingers brushed the rusted links of the seal, the world shuddered.
The air thickened, like dusk made solid.
The sky held its breath.
And then — darkness pulsed.
A single heartbeat of shadow, ancient and infinite.
And from the ruins, he rose.
Not as Chen Wuyan, the sage who had once stood among the heavens.
But as Yan Mo, the forgotten.
The seal was already cracking
The Abyssal Crucible had not been broken by her touch alone.
It had been failing for centuries.
The Heavenly Edict that sealed him had been written with hubris, not foresight. It assumed that time and silence would be enough to erase him — but memory is never truly gone.
The Primordial Shadow Entity, fused with his soul, had been whispering through the cracks in reality. It had been testing, reaching, waiting.
Waiting for a soul that could remember.
And when Ling Mei found him, the seal did not break — it responded.
Not because of her power.
But because of what she carried — a single, flickering echo of the world that once was.
A memory shard.
And it was enough.
The awakening within the seal
Yan Mo did not awaken because she touched him.
He awoke because he remembered.
A single memory — a girl's voice, long ago —
"Even if the world forgets you… I won't."
That memory was not hers.
It was his.
And it was enough to stir the Primordial Shadow, to split the chains of oblivion, and to pull him back from the void.
The seal did not shatter with violence — it dissolved, as if it had been waiting for this moment.
The Primordial Shadow stirred, and spoke:
"She remembers…
Then the world must remember too."