Night pressed its cool face against the world. Moonlight spilled like silver paint over the fields; an autumn tree on the ridge bowed its brittle limbs to a wind that only ever knew how to come from the north. Mountains kept their silence as though they were old gods that had stopped answering petitions long ago. In a low, thatched hut the air had gone thin and cold — the timbers, once warm with breath and light, now sighed with the slow, patient fatigue of neglect. Clouds drifted across the sky like pale ships on a black sea.
Zhung lay upon a pallet of compressed straw and rags, the hay prickling at the back of his neck. His left arm hung heavy against his side in a crude sling; the skin at his jaw was bruised, and a purple lace of pain had mapped across his temple. The room smelled of old smoke and dried sweat and the faint sweetness of spilled tea. Outside, a dog barked once and then fell silent. Inside, the silence unfurled, deeper than sleep.
When he shut his eyes the world did not simply go dark. Instead memory and dream braided together until they were indistinguishable: a replay of lives he had lived like a man watching his own funeral procession from the rafters. He watched himself — a man he recognized as the one who had been mercifully naïve, who had believed in warmth and ordinary kindness. That man smiled easily, gave his trust, and in return had been made into a spectacle.
He watched from a distance and judged. The older Zhung's eyes were cold; the new Zhung's gaze contained something harder than sorrow, a patience honed like a blade. The version of himself that occupied the dream was gullible and bright-eyed — the kind of person who believes the world will hold him gently. Fate, if it had hands, had used that man as its jester. Every laugh, every genuine warmth, became a lure; the heavens toyed and took.
The memory did not ease. It tightened into a series of images so concise and elemental they felt like blows.
"Did life see me as a mistake?"
"Did life ask fate to erase the mistake?"
"Did life ask death to take me away?"
The words were spoken into a sky that offered no reply. They fell from his lips in the memory like pebbles tossed into a black well, sending no ripples back. He watched the man in the memory turn his head to the moon and smile a hollow smile, the kind a person keeps to scare away pity. Zhung — the one who watched — felt something in him stiffen until it was bone.
That life had tasted of ordinary things at first: small mornings made of bread and tea and a steady job, hands that knew the language of honest labor. There had been a woman with a laugh like a bell and an easy way of cradling hope, strands of planning their future tied like neat knots. Zhung could remember the lanterns being strung across a bustling street, the way morning light struck through paper panes, the texture of the ring he had imagined on his own finger. There was a warmth in those images that made his chest ache now.
And then the image skewed. Vows he had written in the privacy of his heart were stolen; another man's chest rose and fell beneath the woman he had chosen. The memory of their kiss warped into a stranger's embrace, and Zhung felt the ground under him tilt as if rituals had been pulled from beneath his feet.
"How could I get blind like this, how really foolish I was back then."
He had muttered those words aloud, and the memory clung to them like fog. The betrayal had not come as a single dagger but as a thousand small distortions: evidence turned, words reshaped, friends who had once been allies folding their hands over convenient ignorance. The company where he had worked — once a place of paper and polite laughter — became a court where rumors were paid to speak louder than truth. Documents that had proven his integrity turned into forged proof of his guilt. Witnesses with thin consciences had perfected the art of looking away. He stood with proofs in trembling hands while the crowd demanded a scapegoat. The easiest face to pin blame upon was his.
His descent was not a single fall but a series of humiliations. From polished office chairs to a guard's post on a midnight shift to an alley with a leaking gutter; each step was a grinding of dignity into grit. Even when he tried to speak, the language of defense was imperfect. Evidence was refiled as accusation. He argued; the world found him entertaining, then pathetic, then dispensable.
At home the rot spread. Parents who had once been pillars took on the practiced cool of merchants — kindness measured and rationed, an affection that could be accounted for in ledgers. His little brother, a bright thing with a laugh that had once made Zhung feel less alone, began to shrink under the pressure. The boy's shoulders bent beneath a weight no child should shoulder; he learned to hide his hurt with a smile that did not reach his eyes. The day the boy chose silence over breath, the house showed the truth: the price of comfort was never pain.
Zhung bought a coffin with the last of his money and dug a grave with hands that shook. He remembered the soil dry and flinty between his fingers, the service conducted without certain mourners, and the way he had pressed his own palm to the small cold face of a brother who would never joke again. He cried then in his shabby room, every day like a small bleeding, and no one came to hold him in that grief. The people who should have saved him had chosen to save themselves.
Anger followed grief like a shadow that could not be outrun. Zhung, who had once been generous with hope, found an appetite for truth that could not be appeased by silence. The family firm's embezzlement was not a secret; it was a suite of crimes wrapped in polite hospitality and clever accounting. He exposed them — not because he loved chaotic justice, but because every silence had taught him that the worst cruelty was not the theft itself but the bargain that let it stand.
For that, he paid. He was cornered in an alley and taught what men do when they decide to quiet a voice: knuckles on ribs, wooden clubs on back. Blood and rain mixed on his face; laughing, he spoke into the rain the sentence that would etch into the marrow of who he would become.
"You two monsters sending this thugs to beat you're own son!"
The cry rang out raw and ugly, and the rain swallowed it without a trace. Zhung laughed — a thin sound that was less victory than the sound of a man testing whether his heart still had a soft place. He tasted salt and iron and thought he could weep himself one last honest flood. He staggered, palms slick with rainwater and blood, and the city kept its indifferent pace. He walked to the street with a kind of fragile, crooked resolve and watched a truck coming — not with a precise plan, but with a quiet resignation that the wheels might finally prove kinder than people.
At last darkness, he thought. The truck took him and the world folded, as if a book had been closed on one of his many personas.
Even if that life — the modern life he had inhabited — had been a particular thread inside a tapestry of rebirths, it had still left marks. Pain leaves a map; the soul reads it in the same way hands read scars. That life, with all its ordinary little cruelties and betrayals, had taught him to distrust softness. It had taught him that love could be a parasite that, in its demand, would eat the giver alive. These were not mere impressions but the bedrock of his new shape.
The dream shifted. The straw of the hut blurred into banners and the scent of incense. The world returned, but altered. A new life rose like a jagged mountain: the Chi World — a place of cultivated power where will and bone were married to energy and law. Here, betrayals were not whispered in offices but shouted on battlefields. Here, a man could rise to be a grandmaster and still fall in an instant under the blade of envy and politics.
He saw himself — another self — climbing with a desperate hunger, losing limbs of trust while gaining the sharpness of survival. The faces of elders and disciples became landscapes of loyalty and perfidy. Masters died, not from time but from sudden betrayal; disciples he had trained to bloom into sharp knives turned out to be petals hiding poison. Each wound in memory rekindled the flint in his soul.
Among those faces a name surfaced like a bell toll: "Master... Shin Luo." Zhung's voice in the memory trembled and softened. The man had been mentor and grandfather, a figure of warmth in a world that could freeze a body with a glance. Even in the frost of his mind there was a place of light when he remembered Shin Luo. For a moment, nostalgia softened the hard lines of his face.
But sentiment was a fragile thing in these memories. The battlefield came: the sky went the color of ash, and the heavenly demon loomed like an absence given flesh. His naïve self stood on a ridge and addressed a woman whose face he had loved, and the moment unfolded like a tragedy that had rehearsed itself a thousand times.
"Xain Xe why..."
Words once full of pleading now hollowed into a dusty whisper. The reply came like a cold stone.
"I need the Heavenly Pearl to cultivate it into the Demonic Pearl."
The confession was clinical; her voice carried the certainty of someone trading a life as if it were currency. He demanded, not from pride but from the rawness of betrayal: "Did you ever loved me Xain Xe?"
Her answer was a precision-sliced remnant of humanity and the nihilism of someone who had learned to use love as an instrument.
"Yes once as the substitute of my real husband I must awake him using the Demonic Pearl."
There was no apology. There was explanation, and it was worse in its logic than any cruelty. In the memory they held one another's gaze for a beat that seemed eternal and then short as a spark. When emotion had been a tide, it ebbed. She looked at him with the same features he had once adored — but the eyes were without mercy.
"It seems that's you're choice you've made."
The line hung in the air, brittle and final.
"Indeed."
She calmly said.
"Then let's spar, for the one last time, the reason how we first meet but, this time life and death is on the line."
The two smiled, as the air hung.
The combat that followed was not beautiful; it was catastrophic. Zhung's past life, old with a body matured by a hundred strains of cultivation but fierce still in will, poured the sum of a thousand years of life force into a single blitz — a thousand lifeforces given as a debt. The earth itself seemed to scream as Chi swords flashed and a dragon of condensed force roared into existence. Xain Xe summoned a demonic palm that cleaved the sky and pushed back like the turning of the sea. For a throb of time, the two were engaged in a vision of annihilation and yearning, each strike a testament to what had once been and what hatred had become.
Fate is cruel and merciless, but also gives the small things with happiness for a short time.
He watched himself die old and bold, saw how he had been used as a key to unlock another's slumber, saw the Heavenly Sect elders fall and the betrayal cut like a blade through centre of the world. He watched his disciples scattered into the wind like chaff. He watched the life he had built with patience and strictness collapse.
Even through the blaze of that memory a laugh escaped: not joyful, but irrevocable, a flint against steel. His laugh became a vow — something that did not so much warm him as brand him.
"An eye for a eye, a tooth for a tooth but heaven and fate only taken my humanity."
The oath tasted like metal. It was not an unformed promise; it was a plan given in blood. The man who had been wronged would not be content with petty retribution. He mapped an ambition that would not stop at vengeance: if the cosmos had a ledger, he would learn to write in the margins.
The vow soaked into him as if it were an oil that made his resolve slippery and sure. He felt the hum of future weight — the idea of changing the rules themselves, not simply playing in the pattern laid before him. He promised to reshape the mechanisms that had spat him out. If heaven and fate had taken his warmth, he would become a force that would make the theft impossible to repeat.
Then the last vision collapsed into the present. Zhung opened his eyes to foam-stiffened hay at the ceiling of the hut. His shoulder burned; his heart was a drum in a chest that had learned to hold back a thousand storms. The broken arm ached with a precise, honest pain; the mind was a well of cold lucidity.
He sat up, feeling every broken contour of himself. He was neither saint nor demon; he stood on a splintered path he'd stripped for himself, a path with neither name nor comfortable promise — the Broken Path. It did not offer absolution. It offered only progression, a forward grind that would not stop no matter the cost.
He laughed then, a small, dangerous sound that could have been mistaken for madness. Around him the hut remained unmoved — the moon continued its slow watch, the wind tugged at the eaves, indifferent as always.
"If you two take my only warmth in this life my mother then I'll climb then change the rules according to my will."
The vow was a flare in the night. He spoke not only to the empty rafters, but to the absent faces who had put a price on affection. The sentence made no attempt at elegance. It did not need to. Its rawness made it more terrible.
He strapped his arm with old strips torn from a shirt and pulled a threadbare cloak over his shoulder. The wood beneath his feet was creaky with long winters; the humidity of midnight clung to him like a second skin. He thought of the ways one could climb: through cultivation, theft, learning, cruelty, patience. None of it seemed pure; every route would require a kind of violence either to others or to the self. He felt, for a moment, the cold luxury of choice: to turn back, to seek comfort, to die quietly. Then the image of his brother's closed eyes overcame him, and the luxury was gone.
He rose. The hut door creaked as if complaining to be disturbed. Outside, the world spread like a map of small betrayals and tender cruelty. Lanterns burned here and there, lights in other people's cocooned worlds. The wind smelled of distant rain and the iron-sweetness of the city. He took one last breath of the world as it had been and then stepped forward.
His steps were slow but determined. The Broken Path did not glitter; it was a road of cold stones and sharp turns. He did not know how he would change the rules, or what he would become to do it. He knew only that he would not be made into a clown for fate's amusement again. He had been a fool and lost everything, but he had found, in the loss, a shape that was harder to bend.
He walked away under a sky that had always looked down with the same indifferent expression. Above him the moon watched as if recording the slow revolution of a man who would dare to rewrite his fate. The journey ahead was long and uncertain. Somewhere between the pain and the vow, Zhung moved as if a new name might be stitched into his path — not soft and human, but something carved, iron-forged, and unstoppable.
"Even if I Enlightened my Soul, it is still broken. Beyond from repair, it will still be a frozen soul unmoved by everything."
As heaven and fate will start the chaos of this world the amusement the world of unfairness and fairness.
**End of Chapter 7**