Hex-Edge: Requiem of a Fractured Swordsman

The white flash dissolved into a silence so absolute it seemed to swallow the world.

Lin Wufeng's consciousness resurfaced in fractured layers. First came the taste—copper and ash, thick on his tongue. Then the scents—burning hair, wet stone, and beneath it all, the cloying sweetness of rotting plums. Finally, the pain arrived in a crashing wave, radiating from his blackened left hand up through meridians that felt scraped raw.

"Alive?" Yan Jiu's voice was the first to return, its usual sardonic edge dulled by disbelief.

"Barely." Jing Xin's mental sigh reverberated through their shared mindscape like a struck gong. "The Hollow King's awakening has damaged our qi pathways. We shouldn't even be conscious right now."

Lin Wufeng forced his eyes open. Above him, the fortress ceiling had split open like a cracked eggshell, revealing a twilight sky streaked with unnatural violet. The air hummed with residual energy, every breath carrying the acrid tang of ruptured spells.

His body lay half-buried under rubble, the once-fine blue robes now tattered and stained. When he tried to move, his left arm responded sluggishly, the fingers twitching like dying spiders. The skin from wrist to elbow had turned the color of a week-old bruise, veins standing out in stark black relief.

A wet cough echoed from across the ruined chamber.

Ying Sha slumped against a crumbling pillar, his signature daggers reduced to jagged shards in his trembling hands. Blood painted his lips and chin, but his dark eyes were startlingly clear—and fixed on Lin Wufeng with something dangerously close to pity.

"You remember now, don't you?" The assassin's voice was hoarse, yet every syllable carried the weight of years unsaid. "Not just the night they broke you. The reason why."

The words triggered an avalanche of fractured memories:

—A child's bare feet slapping against rain-slick courtyard stones

—The hiss of golden needles piercing his spine

—Twelve shadowed figures chanting as his screams turned to whimpers

—A scroll unfurling in the air before him, its characters bleeding ink like tears

Lin Wufeng's stomach convulsed. He rolled onto his side just in time to vomit a blackish bile that steamed where it struck the stones.

"Twelve Sects," Ying Sha continued, wiping his mouth with a torn sleeve. "Not just Netherworld. Celestial Strategy Pavilion. Cloud Soaring Manor. Even the Frost Moon Sect's so-called righteous elders." A bitter laugh tore from his throat. "They needed a vessel for the Tome's power—someone whose mind could be divided to contain its corruption. Turns out..." He coughed again, flecking his chin with red. "...breaking a soul is easier than controlling it."

A grotesque wet sound interrupted them.

Across the chamber, the Patriarch's bisected corpse was moving. The two halves squirmed toward each other through congealing blood, severed tissues stretching like taffy. The remaining eye rolled wildly in its socket, pupil dilating to swallow the iris whole.

"We need to burn it," Li Feng urged, his mental voice uncharacteristically strained. "Now. Before whatever that is finishes reforming."

"No."

The objection came from Xiao Qi—but altered, deepened by an undercurrent of something ancient.

"We need to remember. Properly this time."

The child personality's presence swelled unexpectedly, flooding their shared consciousness with a golden light that smelled inexplicably of pear blossoms. Lin Wufeng's vision wavered, the ruins dissolving into—