By ArkGodZ | DaoVerse Studio
The garden was wrong.
Jian Yu stood motionless, feeling it before he could even name it. The petals in the air had stopped falling. The usual soft hum of Qi weaving through the sect's stones had faded into a silence that pressed against the skin like wet cloth.
The petal in his hand—black on one side, white on the other—hovered above his palm, trembling.
He knew what would happen if he accepted it.
And yet, some part of him had already made the choice.
"Breathe," the Sutra whispered inside him. "Or break."
The petal touched his skin.
There was no explosion of light.No violent rush of power.
Only a single pulse, deep and low, like the world itself had taken a breath—and forgot to exhale.
A crimson lotus unfurled along his wrist, coiling up his forearm in delicate yet brutal lines, burning into his flesh without flame. Each heartbeat painted another petal along his veins.
Jian Yu gasped, stumbling back. The stone beneath his feet cracked outward in a spiderweb of black veins.
The garden groaned.The Moon Tree above them shuddered, its petals curling in fear.
The Sutra didn't roar to life.
It awoke like a tide returning to a forgotten shore, slow but unstoppable.
Jian Yu's spirit quivered under the weight of it. Not pain. Not rage.
Memory.
Old, raw, unfinished.
It flooded his body, not through his meridians—but through every memory he had ever suppressed.
The training yards where he had bled alone.The silent courtyards where elders passed him by without glance.The nights he dreamed of names he didn't yet know he had lost.
They returned in a flood, overwhelming, merciless.
"You forgot," the Sutra said. "Now you will remember."
A scream rose in his throat—but he didn't release it.
He clenched his fists instead, forcing breath into trembling lungs.
Around him, the sect convulsed.
Cultivators meditating in hidden gardens gasped, their Qi spiraling out of control. Protective arrays flickered, wards strained. Even the sacred flames that burned in the high towers guttered for a heartbeat.
Above him, the Moon Tree's flowers turned from pure white to ashen gray.
Jian Yu knelt, pressing his hand against the cracked stone.
The world pressed down.
The Sutra pulsed again, and with it, his spirit expanded outward—unshaped, wild, demanding.
"Not strength," Jian Yu thought. "Memory. It's forcing me to carry what I tried to bury."
He wasn't cultivating.
He was unraveling.
He exhaled once more, the crimson light around his wrist flaring brightly before settling into a dull, endless glow.
The spiral of Qi around him tightened, no longer wild.
It was waiting.
Watching.
The Sutra was no longer asleep.
And neither was he.
The Sutra pulsed again, and with it, his spirit expanded outward—unshaped, wild, demanding.
Somewhere, beneath layers of sealed memories and broken promises, something else stirred.
Not just within Jian Yu.
But across the sect.
Across bonds he no longer remembered forging.
Across a heart he had already lost once.
Far away, a silver thread tugged at another soul.
And Yuan woke gasping.
Yuan awoke with a start, her chest rising and falling like she had been drowning.
The world around her was too still. Too quiet.
The petals that always floated outside her window—carried by the eternal breath of the sect—were frozen in midair, suspended like shattered dreams.
"It's happening," Yuan thought, heart hammering against her ribs. "The dream wasn't a dream."
She rose on unsteady legs, her body heavy, as if something immense pressed against her from all sides.
The corridors outside her chambers stretched long and empty. No disciples, no elders, no sound. Only the cold, metallic taste of memory thick in the air.
Each step toward the Moon Tree was a battle.
Her limbs resisted, her spirit recoiled.Her heart called forward.
She remembered flashes now—more than the dream had shown.
A courtyard of blackened stone.A silver-haired boy kneeling beneath a burning tree.A promise whispered between cracked lips.
"Mei Lian.""I won't forget you again."
She pressed a hand against the wall, steadying herself.
"Why do I know that name?" Yuan thought. "Why does it make my soul ache?"
When she reached the garden, the sight stole the last of her breath.
The Moon Tree's branches twisted unnaturally, black veins snaking along their trunks. The ground beneath it was cracked, pulsing faintly with a crimson light that beat in time with Jian Yu's heart.
And there he stood.
Or what remained of him.
His back was to her, the crimson lotus wrapping his wrist and climbing up his arm in spiraling threads. His hair moved as if caught in a wind only he could feel, and the air around him shimmered—not with Qi, but with pressure.
He didn't turn.
But she knew he sensed her.
"Jian Yu," Yuan said, her voice smaller than she intended.
He turned slowly.
His eyes—no longer simply gold or crimson—seemed to carry layers of years she couldn't count. Ages of longing and pain and something else: recognition.
"You should leave," Jian Yu said. His voice was rough, almost broken.
"I won't," Yuan said immediately, stepping closer.
The air between them resisted her, like wading through the aftermath of a storm.
"I'm not who you remember," Jian Yu said, lowering his gaze.
Yuan shook her head. "Maybe not. But I'm not just who I think I am either."
She reached out—hesitant, trembling—and crossed the invisible threshold where the Sutra's presence distorted the air.
It wrapped around her, pulling at her emotions, amplifying her fears, her hopes, her love.
But she didn't stop.
A single tear slipped down her cheek.
Not from fear.
From recognition.
"I'm not afraid of what you're becoming," Yuan thought. "I'm afraid of forgetting why I came to you in the first place."
She stood in front of him, hand still reaching, even as the petals around them began to spiral into dark shapes.
In the shadows beyond the courtyard, unseen eyes watched.
Waiting.
Yuan lowered her hand slowly, standing still before Jian Yu. The weight of what was between them, what was awakening inside them both, could no longer be denied.
And far beyond the shattered courtyard, deep within the silent halls of the sect, an elder opened his eyes.
He had felt it.
The imbalance.
The corruption.
His orders were clear.
Stop it.
No matter the cost.
The weight of imbalance rolled through the sect like thunder beneath the earth.
Elder Rin opened his eyes from meditation, feeling the fracture deep in the veins of the sect's foundations. Protective arrays shuddered. Spirit pools dimmed.
"It has begun," Rin thought grimly.
Without waiting for formal orders, he rose, his robes whispering against the cold stone floor.
There was no time for debate.
Only action.
When he arrived at the broken courtyard, the sight that greeted him made even his seasoned spirit hesitate.
Jian Yu stood beneath the twisting branches of the Moon Tree, his body wrapped in tendrils of shifting red and black energy. The ground beneath his feet pulsed faintly, forming patterns that resembled petals, roots, and something older—something wrong.
And beside him, Yuan.
Still reaching for him. Still refusing to run.
Rin's jaw tightened.
He could not allow this corruption to spread.
He stepped into the courtyard, spiritual pressure gathering around him like a coiling serpent.
"You have brought rot into the heart of this sect," Rin said, voice sharp as frozen stone.
Jian Yu turned slowly.
The crimson lotus on his wrist pulsed once, and the petals underfoot trembled.
"I didn't choose this," Jian Yu said. His voice was rough but calm.
"Intent is meaningless," Rin said. "Infection does not need permission to spread."
He raised his hand, seals forming in the air, glowing silver and sharp.
"I will cleanse this rot before it consumes everything."
"You think you understand what's happening," Jian Yu said, his eyes dimly glowing beneath the strands of spiritual mist. "But you don't."
"You are a threat," Rin said simply. "Nothing more."
The first chains of Qi lashed out, wrapping the courtyard in shimmering lines of suppression.
Jian Yu didn't flinch.
The Sutra moved through him.
The ground cracked wider.
And from those cracks, the first black petals rose.
"You think these petals are weapons," Jian Yu said quietly, his voice echoing strangely. "But they are not."
The petals swirled upward, catching the moonlight in impossible shapes.
"They are memories," Jian Yu continued. "Yours. Mine. The ones you buried to keep your hands clean."
Rin hesitated for half a breath—too long.
The petals struck.
They didn't tear flesh.
They didn't rend armor.
They bloomed.
Tiny black lotus flowers burst along Rin's arms, his chest, even the air around him, feeding on the fear and suppression he tried to summon.
He roared, forming defensive arrays around his body—shields of Essence, hardened by decades of cultivation.
But the petals didn't break them.
They corrupted them.
Each shield turned brittle, blackened, and crumbled into dust.
"You can't fight what you refused to remember," Jian Yu said, stepping forward slowly.
The ground where he walked pulsed with emotional Qi, the stones themselves whispering forgotten names.
Rin tried one last desperate attack, summoning a spear of pure Qi.
It shattered midair.
And a heartbeat later, the flowers bloomed fully inside him.
Blood mixed with petals spilled from his mouth as he collapsed to one knee, gasping.
Jian Yu stood over him, the crimson lotus on his wrist burning softly, endlessly.
"I didn't want this," Jian Yu said, almost whispering.
"But you forced me to open the door."
The courtyard fell into a silence deeper than night.
The petals circled once, then dissolved into black ash.
And Jian Yu closed his hand, the burning mark pulsing once more against his skin.
The garden was dead.
Not by destruction.But by memory.
The petals had fallen.The Moon Tree's branches hung limp.The stones underfoot no longer hummed with the flow of Qi—they whispered only silence.
Jian Yu stood alone at the center, the crimson lotus burning faintly on his wrist, his breathing shallow.
The Sutra inside him pulsed slower now, not demanding, not roaring.
Waiting.
"Choose," it whispered again. "Before they choose for you."
The scent of scorched memories still lingered in the air.
He turned his gaze downward, where Elder Rin lay motionless at the broken threshold of the courtyard.
The elder's body was not bloodied by wounds of blade or fist. Instead, black petals were still rooted faintly along his veins—silent lotus blooms of guilt and fear crystallized into flesh.
He was breathing—barely.Each breath shuddered like a man drowning in regret.
The petals would fade in time. But the scars they left on his spirit would never truly heal.
Rin would live.
But he would never forget.
Nor would he dare face Jian Yu again without feeling the weight of the truth carved into his bones.
A soft gasp reached Jian Yu's ears.
He turned—and found Yuan still standing near the ruined Moon Tree.
She hadn't fled.
Not during the awakening.Not during the petals' bloom.Not even when Elder Rin fell to his knees.
She stood with her hand pressed over her heart, eyes wide—not in fear, but in a terrible, aching recognition.
"Jian Yu," Yuan whispered, her voice trembling.
He opened his mouth to answer—but the words caught in his throat.
There were no lies he could tell her.No walls he could rebuild between them now.
She stepped forward, only once, her body shaking against the invisible current of spiritual pressure that still clung to the air.
"You're not... the same," she said, voice cracking.
"No," Jian Yu said quietly. "Neither are you."
For a long moment, they simply stood there.
Two souls unraveling.Two memories bleeding into each other.
Bound by a promise neither fully remembered—and neither could abandon.
A shift in the air.
Jian Yu turned sharply, every muscle tense.
From the fractured shadows, the masked figure emerged once more.
But this time, he didn't wear the mask.
His face was weathered, the lines of age cut deep, but his eyes were sharp—too sharp for any mortal man. They burned with the weight of someone who had seen lifetimes rise and crumble.
"You survived," the man said simply.
"No thanks to you," Jian Yu said, voice rough.
The man smiled faintly. "I wasn't here to save you. I was here to see if you could save yourself."
Jian Yu's fist clenched at his side.
"You knew this would happen," Jian Yu said.
"I hoped it would," the man corrected. "There is a difference."
He stepped closer, the hem of his robe brushing against the ashes of the fallen petals.
"You carry something this world forgot," the man said. "Not a curse. Not a blessing. A memory. A Dao."
Jian Yu's heart hammered against his ribs.
"The Dao of Forbidden Desire," Jian Yu said quietly.
The man nodded.
"Once, it was the highest path," he said. "A Dao not of conquest or control—but of truth. The truth that what we long for shapes what we become. The heavens feared it."
"Why?" Jian Yu asked.
The man's eyes darkened.
"Because desire is stronger than discipline. Stronger than fear. Stronger than fate itself."
Jian Yu looked down at his burning wrist.
"And now?" he asked.
"Now," the man said, "the Sutra remembers what you tried to forget."
He knelt, pressing a hand against the broken stone.
A ripple spread outward—not of Qi, but of something deeper.
"The Sutra doesn't grant power," the man said. "It reveals it. It peels back the lies we wrapped around ourselves to survive."
He looked up, eyes piercing.
"And soon, others will come. Those who still wear the old chains. Those who fear what you are waking."
Jian Yu exhaled shakily.
"I didn't ask for this," he said.
The man smiled sadly.
"No," he said. "But you were born from it."
The Sutra pulsed again.
Not in demand.
In invitation.
"Open the door," it whispered.
"Remember the promise you made."
Jian Yu closed his eyes.
Images flashed behind his lids.
The burning tree.The silver-haired girl.The name on his lips.
"Mei Lian."
He opened his eyes, the crimson mark on his wrist flaring once.
"I won't run," Jian Yu said.
The man nodded.
"Then you won't be alone."
From the edges of the courtyard, faint shapes began to emerge.
Masked figures.
Silent.
Watching.
Waiting.
Not to kill him.
But to follow.
The first true Rememberers.
The ones who would walk the forgotten path once more.
End of Chapter
Next Chapter: Chapter 2 – The Garden Where Promises Burn
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