Chapter 35: The Forgotten Ruins
The broken stone steps groaned beneath Ashen's boots as he descended deeper into the ruin. With each step he took, the air grew heavier and colder, as if it carried the breath of something long buried. Dust floated lazily in the faint light that seeped down from cracks far above, creating drifting beams that cut through the darkness like thin silver threads.
The deeper he went, the more the sound from above faded. The voices of the approaching cultivators became muffled, then vanished entirely. The upper hall felt distant now — as though it belonged to another world.
Here, the silence was different.
It wasn't the emptiness of abandonment.
It was the silence of something waiting.
Ashen slowed as the staircase ended, opening into a vast underground chamber. The ceiling curved high overhead, lined with dark stone ribs that resembled the framework of a giant's skeleton. Columns rose from the floor, most broken, some tilting, others shattered into jagged stumps.
The chamber felt like a grave.
Not of a person.
Of a legacy.
Ashen walked further inside, the faint glow from the upper cracks barely reaching the middle of the hall. As his eyes adjusted, he noticed the first mural.
It stretched across the left wall, cracked and weathered. Ashen approached it, brushing the dust aside with a slow sweep of his hand.
Lines appeared beneath his touch.
Old.
Precise.
Intentional.
Depicting a lone figure standing atop a mountain ridge — robes billowing, one hand lifted toward the sky. Around the figure, dozens of cultivators knelt. The mural carved them smaller, lesser, kneeling in reverence.
Even after centuries of erosion, the composition was clear.
A supreme being.
Perhaps the strongest of his era.
Ashen leaned closer. The figure had no face — only a smoothed stone oval. It had been carved away deliberately. Not eroded. Erased.
He moved his fingers across the scars in the rock.
"Someone removed your identity," he muttered softly. "Not time… someone."
His voice echoed faintly, swallowed almost instantly by the heavy air.
A forgotten name.
A forgotten story.
A forgotten legacy.
He stepped back to take in the mural fully.
Circles formed behind the headless figure — five of them, each perfectly carved, overlapping like stages of cultivation ascending toward something greater.
Ashen recognized nothing of the system.
But the pressure left in the lines told him enough:
This person once walked the threshold of Absolute Supremacy.
The kind of power that only legends dared whisper about.
The kind of power that could warp land, twist fate, and fracture a valley into the chaotic landscape it was now.
Ashen's breath slowed.
"So this was your domain…"
He moved to the next mural, carved into the adjacent wall.
This one was larger — stretching across almost the entire stone surface. It depicted the same faceless figure standing before an array of jagged symbols that resembled broken reality. Mountains were cut in half. The sky was drawn with warped spirals. The ground was cracking apart.
Not from battle.
From the sheer pressure of the man's existence.
Ashen paused, eyes narrowing.
"…Your power did this to the valley."
The deeper parts of the mural showed mountains bending like soft clay, rivers turning completely upward, and forests dissolving into white emptiness. The valley wasn't naturally chaotic.
It was broken, long ago.
This ruin didn't simply show a powerful cultivator.
It showed a being whose existence alone distorted the world.
Ashen touched the mural where a mountain twisted like a spiral.
"This looks like the distortions of the reflection pools…"
Memory flashed — reflections that moved out of sync, showing impossible versions of himself.
The remnants he fought.
The predator beast shaped by spiritual hunger.
The shifting cliff that revealed the staircase.
The valley wasn't alive.
It was fractured.
And the fractures responded to him.
Ashen lowered his hand.
Something about the broken patterns felt familiar — not from this life, but like an echo felt through instinct rather than memory.
Almost like he'd seen this kind of power somewhere, long ago, or deep within himself.
He turned to the final mural.
The largest.
It was carved into the farthest wall, partially hidden behind fallen rubble. Ashen approached it slowly, stepping over broken stones and thin roots that had worked their way in over centuries.
Dust coated the mural thickly, so he wiped a large arc with his sleeve.
The image beneath killed his breath.
This mural was different.
This one was unfinished — or destroyed.
The top half was shattered, as though someone had broken it deliberately.
But the lower half remained, and the scene it depicted was more unsettling than the others.
The faceless cultivator still stood at the center — towering, unshaken, aura carved in lines that spiraled outward like a storm.
But something else was behind him.
Something enormous.
A dark shape.
A looming presence.
A silhouette carved not with soft lines, but deep gouges.
A shadow.
It had no face.
No form.
No features.
Just a long, slender humanoid outline, stretching unnaturally tall, its edges flickering as if carved to represent motion or instability.
The shadow's arms were extended, reaching toward the Supreme figure — but not attacking.
No.
It was mirroring him.
Ashen's breath tightened.
"This is…"
The silhouette wasn't a being.
It was a reflection.
A counterpart.
A split.
A shadow born from the Supreme cultivator's own existence — the same way the valley birthed remnants and manifested beasts.
A second self.
A darker self.
A self created when power grew too immense for the world to contain.
Ashen stepped back slowly, studying every line of the shadow. The artist had carved the silhouette deeper than the rest of the mural — almost angrily — as if trying to trap the shape inside the stone.
Ashen felt something cold stir in his chest.
The same sensation he felt when the mirror entity mimicked him.
The same feeling when the valley reacted to his presence.
The same pressure that lingered after battles.
He knew this silhouette.
Not from memory.
From instinct.
"This shadow…" he whispered, "…is still here."
Dust drifted down from the ceiling as if the ruin exhaled at his words.
A faint tremor rolled through the floor, subtle but deliberate — like something reacting to his understanding.
The mural seemed to darken for a heartbeat.
Ashen's fingers curled.
Something ancient stirred beneath the ruins.
Something that once mirrored a Supreme.
Something that the valley had tried — and failed — to bury.
The shadow in the mural was not dead.
And Ashen was no longer alone in the dark.