In the distance, households began to wake to a low murmur, lamplight blooming in windows as voices drifted from the chief's courtyard.
Wuji soon reached the village center. After a glance at the backs of the curious crowd, he melted into the gathering throng.
There, his eyes took in the strange scene: first, the massive, wounded corpse of a buffalo beast lying behind several disciples, its hulking form still radiating a faint, oppressive weight.
Then, his gaze shifted to the battered, blue-robed disciples tending their wounds, before finally settling on the body that held everyone's attention.
The young man's corpse was strangely, suspiciously, intact, with no visible wound beyond tattered robes. But as a coffin maker and burial man, Wuji was not concerned with causes. He was a man of endings.
Parting the crowd, he stepped forward until he stood before the young woman keeping vigil at the corpse's side.
"My condolen—" he began, but before he could finish she whirled on him, eyes red-rimmed and wild.
"He is not!" she cried, her voice fraying into the sobs of a young maiden. "Senior Brother Ling is not dead! His… his…"
Stammering, she opened her trembling palm to reveal a small jade pendant pulsing with a faint, steady glow. "His soul jade still shines."
Wuji froze, his questioning gaze snapping toward the other disciples. His eyes settled on the man who stood slightly apart; the one whose bearing marked him as their captain.
"Old man, proceed with your work. This is not unheard of," the captain said, his tone detached and calm, his gaze adding silently: ask, and you will learn.
"If you say so," Wuji replied flatly, his fist clenching as he turned back to the grieving young woman.
For a moment, her raw, desperate sorrow scraped against something long buried within him. He was no longer in the village square, but adrift in the silent memory–void of his past, drowning again in the fresh, suffocating grief of his wife's death, a world where her warmth had vanished, and every breath felt like a betrayal.
It had taken him months to learn how to breathe without guilt. Now, seeing her drown in a grief that mirrored his own, he did not speak. He merely waited, silent, for her lament to end.
Thud!
The sound of the coffin striking the ground made everyone turn. For the young woman, the sight of that plain, unadorned box made the truth she had been denying feel irrevocably, crushingly real.
A raw, wrenching sob tore from her throat, so intense it seemed for a moment to swallow the whole village before its echo vanished into the darkness.
In the flickering torchlight, some villagers' faces showed a flicker of helpless pity. Others were simply blank, hardened by the grim routine of such nights.
After several long minutes, Wuji raised his right hand. Wang Da responded at once, lifting the coffin lid and retrieving a thick stack of folded spirit paper, its edges gilded with silver. He came to stand above the young woman and offered it to her with a bowed head.
She slapped it away without looking, and the papers scattered into the air and across the ground.
Wuji did not react. He simply gestured again to Wang Da, and together, they moved to transfer the corpse.
"NO!" she screamed, lunging forward and throwing herself over the body. "His soul jade still glows! You're burying him alive! I'll report you! I swear by the heavens, the sect will hunt you."
Her words were daggers in the silence, making the crowd and even some of the disciples flinch.
But Wuji didn't flinch. Or rather, he couldn't, not with the captain's gaze burning into his back. Before any sect could reach him, this man might act, and the cut on Wuji's own cheek was a clear testament to how serious they were.
With grim, practiced efficiency, they lifted the body as two disciples held the young woman back. Wuji and Wang Da arranged the lifeless limbs, hefted the lid from the ground, and closed the coffin.
To her, the soft click of the lid settling into place was the sound of the world ending.
With the reluctant help of the other disciples, they carried the coffin beyond the village toward the forest's edge, where the cemetery lay. Cold air, thick with the smell of damp soil and a watchful, creeping silence, greeted them.
Wuji descended into the ready-open grave first. From above, Wang Da and the others lowered the coffin down to him, settling it into the earth.
He extended a hand, and Wang Da passed him the ritual hammer and a pouch of silver nails. One by one, Wuji began to seal the coffin shut.
Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!
The silver nails were a ward, a supposition passed down from cultivators to mortal coffin makers. They were told these pins could restrain wandering spirits, prevent possession, corruption, even the slow transformation of the dead into something else. In eighty years, Wuji had never seen proof.
As his hammer fell in steady rhythm, his brow furrowed. Beneath the percussion, he was certain he heard something else: a faint, irregular scrabbling. A muffled thump answered each blow from inside the coffin. Pausing, he felt the coffin tremble.
His knuckles whitened around the hammer's haft. He glanced up at the disciples looking down into the grave, their faces illuminated by torchlight.
They showed no concern, no doubt, only detached, expectant stillness.
The suspicion solidified in his gut: he was sealing a living man inside. A wild urge to stop seized him. "This is madness, a cruelty I never imagined." Yet his arm, as if controlled by another will, did not falter.
To stop now would invite questions he could not answer, entangle him in schemes he could not afford, incur a wrath he would not survive. He was just an old man. He did not wish to accompany this unlucky soul tonight.
Besides, each silver nail represented a month's worth of food. To remove one was wasteful; to obtain more would mean a week-long journey to town. And as a coffin maker, he knew the ritual, once begun, must not be broken, lest something far worse take root. "Or perhaps," a cold voice whispered inside him, "I'm just a coward."
The disciples' silence from above seemed to grow heavier, a pressure settling on the back of his neck and raising the hair on his arms.
The hammer rose and fell, each strike sealing the young man's fate, until the last nail sat flush with the wood, silencing the weak, final scratches from within.
Wuji laid the hammer upon the sealed lid and took the decorative glass beads and straw from Wang Da. He began the ritual mantra to send the soul to the underworld, and this mantra was a feeble hope that it might allow for a safe transition to the underworld and a better life in the next reincarnation.
When he finally spoke, his voice was a dry rustle in the pit of the grave.
"Earth receives the flesh," he began, scattering the straw around the coffin. "Wood receives the bones." He placed a glass bead upon the lid.
"Breath returns to the wind." Another bead. "Blood returns to the soil. What was borrowed, I return. What was owed, I do not keep." He placed the remaining beads, one after another, thirteen in all.
"Walk the dark road without fear. Do not linger. Do not look back. Heaven counts the living. The dead are beyond its gaze."
After the final words of the mantra faded, Wuji pulled himself from the grave with Wang Da's help. He took up a shovel and began the slow work of filling it, stroke after heavy stroke, until the soil lay flat and the gravestone was set.
Only then did his strength abandon him. He slumped to the ground, his breath shallow, limbs trembling with a deep, bone-aching exhaustion.
Seeing their sect brother finally interred, the disciples turned back toward the village without a word to him.
Wuji stood slowly, his robe caked with dirt, and leaned lightly on Wang Da's offered arm. Concern was written plainly on the younger man's face. For a moment, he wanted to repeat his old advice, that this work was too much for an old man, that he should retire while he still could.
But he knew better than to speak. Wuji, as always, would not have listened.
To Wuji, this grim work was his inheritance, passed from his great-grandfather, to his grandfather, to his father, and then to his own hands. It was woven with too many memories to be a simple legacy to abandon.
In a strange way, it also granted him a kind of peace. Being near death made his own fear of it fainter, though the fear itself never truly left. He had died once before—a dagger piercing his heart in a previous life.
The visceral agony of that moment had never faded from his memory, and so he hoped not to die again. But given how things were going, death felt increasingly inevitable.
As the village lights drew near, he pushed those wandering thoughts aside. Straightening his back with an effort of will, he stepped away from Wang Da's support and approached the leader of the disciples: the captain.
"The burial is complete," he stated, extending his dirt-stained hand for payment.
The captain removed a fist-sized pouch from his waistband. He counted out twenty gold coins, their surfaces glowing faintly in the torchlight, and placed them into Wuji's waiting palm.
Wuji counted them again, his touch deliberate, and bit down on one to test its purity. "Ten remain."
"You'll get them later," the captain said dismissively, as if shooing a fly. "We travel light on these missions. I didn't carry more."
"How long?"
"A week. Perhaps two," he replied, already half-turned away.
"I cannot wait that long," Wuji said, his voice low and firm. "Silver nails aren't cheap. Do you have anything else of value? Silver, if not gold. Copper will do."
"Of value?" The captain gave a short, derisive laugh. "I don't peddle trinkets." He paused, a flicker of cold amusement crossing his features. "Wait. I do have something."
He retrieved a thin, worn manual from his pouch and tossed it toward Wuji's feet. "A basic breathing method. You look half in the grave already. It might lend a corpse some vigor. Consider it a courtesy to an elder."
Wuji did not look down. The booklet landed in the dirt between them with a soft, insulting thud.
"Young man," he said, his voice as cold and flat as a tombstone. "Do you presume I know nothing of the Way?"
The captain arched an eyebrow in mock surprise. "Of course not, Senior. You are, after all, the esteemed father of the Twin Sword Elders of the outer courtyard."
"You know that," Wuji stated, his words hanging in the air like a condemnation. "And yet you offer me a child's primer? A technique my own sons outgrew before their first decade in the sect?"
The captain's smile thinned to a razor's edge. "Let's not pretend, Senior. Everyone in the outer courtyard—no, everyone in the entire sect—knows your sons severed their mortal ties for the ruthless sword path. Do you truly believe they would risk a flaw in their Dao hearts for a dying coffin maker?"
His words were not a blow, but a dissection, laying bare the last fragile sanctuary of hope Wuji had nurtured these past few years: the dream of healing, of reconciliation. Inside him, something quietly broke.
"You—how dare you—!" Wang Da spat, rushing forward.
"Enough!" Wuji's voice cracked like a whip as he turned on the younger man with a startling, pure ferocity. "Are you determined to die a fool's death? You dare raise your voice to a disciple of the sect?" His jaw was clenched so tightly his teeth ached.
Wang Da flinched as if struck, his face a storm of hurt and impotent rage. "Master, I only meant to—"
"I said ENOUGH!"
Wuji understood the boy's loyalty. But now, with his imagined refuge stripped away, he could not afford a spark of hostility, not a word, not a single misplaced glance.
Slowly, stiffly, he bent and picked up the breathing technique manual from the dirt. He did not look at the captain again. Without a word, he turned and began the slow, dark walk back to his workshop, the worn pages a bitter weight in his hand.
Wang Da followed, fists clenched tightly at his sides.
The captain watched their retreating figures, a cold, mirthless smile touching his lips. "Good. The seed is sown," he thought. "Let's see how steadfast the Twin Elders remain on their ruthless path once they learn their father withers in the mortal dust. Would they rush back, unable to bear it… or would they persevere?"
His smile vanished as a sudden, frantic cry cut through the night behind him.
"NO! NO!"
The young woman's wail pierced the air. In her trembling fingers, the soul jade pendant, which had clung to its fragile light, flickered, dimmed, and went utterly dark
Wuji and Wang Da halted mid-step and turned at the sound.
Before Wuji could process it, a cool, foreign sensation washed through his body, then vanished as if it were merely the night's chill.
Yet something had changed. He felt a pull, a connection he couldn't name. His body felt the same, yet fundamentally altered. All at once, his eyes widened as a knowledge that was not his own surfaced in the depths of his mind.
[Lifespan obtained: Three years.]
Before he could grasp the meaning of the strange thought, a more violent disruption erupted.
Flashes of stolen memory, alien and vivid assaulted him. They were the sights, sounds, and emotions of the buried young disciple, lancing through his consciousness. He felt a first kiss stolen behind the training halls, the crushing weight of a senior's disdain, the desperate, soaring ambition to prove himself worthy to his Master.
They did not feel like memories recalled, but experiences injected, a brutal, chaotic torrent threatening to drown his own identity.
He collapsed to his knees, his body convulsing as if struck by invisible blows. His fingers clawed into his skull while a savage headache tore through him, the world around him dissolving into a storm of another man's life.
It felt as though iron nails were being driven into his brain, twisted and hammered without mercy. A raw scream ripped from his throat—hoarse, animalistic, unrestrained—drowning out the wailing of the woman behind him.
Veins bulged across his forehead, the whites of his eyes flooding red as his vision blurred and his hearing dulled. The world faded into a distant, ringing haze.
Through it all, one sound barely reached him: Wang Da's frantic, broken voice calling his name. Every head in the village turned, shock spreading across their faces, tinged with fear and unease. Wang Da looked as if his own heart were being torn from his chest.
Only one man reacted differently. The captain watched in silence, his expression hardening not with concern, but with cold disappointment.
"Too weak-willed," he thought. "He broke far too quickly."
With a casual motion, he pulled a small array plate from his pouch and instilled his Qi into it. The engraved inscriptionsflared to life, shimmering faintly in the air.
"At least this will be useful," he mused, a thin smile on his lips. "The sight of their father screaming like a dog… that should carve itself nicely into their so-called ruthless Dao hearts."
Satisfaction crept into his gaze as he imagined the reward waiting for him, already counting the merits before the echoes of Wuji's scream had fully faded.