She coughed and soon her lips were stained with blood.
"Guess… I should've… listened when you said the ravine felt wrong."
"Stop," he choked. "Please stop."
Her fingers trembled as they brushed his cheek.
"You have to live," she said softly. "You promised… to get strong."
Tears stread down his face.
"I promised to go with you."
She displayed a sad and peaceful smile.
"Then… go further… for both of us."
Her hand slipped.
The light left her eyes.
---
Afterwards, the beasts were slain.
Barely.
Only three escorts survived.
The convoy was lost.
The ravine drank the rest.
Bai Feng knelt in the blood-soaked dirt, holding her body long after the danger passed.
No one spoke.
No one dared.
---
Back at the clan.
The elders' verdict was swift.
"Unforeseen variables."
"A tragic accident."
"No one is to speak of this further."
Lan Rui was posthumously blad for breaking formation.
Bai Feng didn't argue.
He didn't scream.
He didn't cry.
Not anymore.
Sothing inside him had gone cold.
That night, Bai Feng stood alone before her morial tablet.
"I'll rember," he whispered.
"I'll rember what you died for."
"And one day… I'll make sure no one ever calls this kind of death acceptable again."
---
Age 17
Training beca obsession.
Blood soaked his palms.
Qi roared through his ridians.
He fought beasts alone.
Fought cultivators stronger than him.
Lost.
Won.
Bled.
Rose.
At eighteen, Bai Feng stood at the clan gates.
Raosheng clapped his shoulder. "You're leaving."
"Yes."
"Good."
Lan Rui's mory lingered behind his eyes.
"I'm going to see the world," Bai Feng said. "And beco strong enough that no one ever decides another's fate again."
He stepped forward and the mory shattered.
Victor staggered slightly as his consciousness returned.
Gojo's wings beat steadily beneath him. The storm clouds were thinning now causimv distant sunlight to pierce through cracks in the sky.
Victor exhaled slowly.
"…So that's how it started," he murmured.
Bai Feng wasn't delusional.
He had been human.
Flawed. Kind. Ambitious.
And burdened by loss.
Victor stared ahead with heavy thoughts.
If this is only fragnt one…
How much deeper did this truth go?
Above them, the horizon slowly began to change.
And within Victor, a past not his own had begun to take root.
The first fragnt refused to leave Victor's mind.
Even as Gojo cut through the thinning storms and the endless white slowly gave way to rough borders of stone and shadow, Victor's thoughts remained tangled in the mories that were not his—yet felt uncomfortably close.
Ascendant Realms.
A real place.
Not code. Not scripted behaviors. Not artificially generated NPCs running on lines of dialogue and probability trees.
People.
Living, breathing, suffering people.
Victor clenched his fist slowly.
"If that world is real…" he muttered with a low voice nearly swallowed by the rushing wind, "then how the hell are we able to get in?"
The question echoed back at him with no answer.
He had spent years believing Ascendant Realms was one of the greatest technological achievent humanity had ever created... A full-dive experience so imrsive that it blurred the line between reality and fiction. Cultivation systems refined by algorithms. Worlds generated by impossibly complex engines. NPCs designed to feel human.
But Bai Feng's mories had shattered that foundation.
And then there was the bigger contradiction... the one that made Victor's head throb if he thought about it too hard.
"How did the developers do it?" he whispered. "How did they make a gateway to a real world… and call it a ga?"
Players didn't just observe Ascendant Realms. They entered it. Cultivated there. Bled there. Died there.
And Bai Feng who should never have existed in Earth's reality, had appeared here, dinsionally displaced in ti, knowing Victor under his ga alias.
Fang Chen.
And if Bai Feng t an older version of …
Then what do I beco in the future?
The thoughts spiraled endlessly.
Was Ascendant Realms a parallel world? A sealed realm discovered and exploited? Or sothing worse... sothing humanity had never been ant to touch?
A faint vibration interrupted his thoughts.
> [mory Fragnt 2/10]
Status: Locked
Requirent: Ti Synchronization Pending
Victor sighed quietly. "Figures."
Whatever chanism governed the transfer wasn't sothing he could brute-force. The system—the sa system he could now see in the real world—was deliberately pacing him.
Or preparing him.
He leaned back slightly against Gojo's scales and exhaled.
"At least I'm not crazy," he muttered. "That's sothing."
Below them, the icefields were ending.
The endless white cracked apart into fractured terrain and frozen cliffs giving way to rough landforms that looked less natural and more… wrong. The boundary of the icy region wasn't marked by walls or signs or changes in mana density like Victor expected.
It was marked by absence.
The mont Gojo crossed the invisible threshold—
The world changed.
The light dimd as if the sky itself had recoiled.
Above them, the sun was still there but its light no longer reached the land. Thick, sluggish clouds stretched endlessly across the sky, layered upon each other like rotting flesh.
They didn't move naturally. They expanded and contorted slowly. Faint veins of dull crimson and sickly purple glowed within them like a dying heartbeat.
The air darkened, turning heavy and oppressive.
Shadows deepened unnaturally, stretching far beyond their sources. Even Gojo's massive form cast a silhouette that twisted and warped along the ground below, as though the land itself rejected his presence.
The mont they were out of the icy region, Gojo slowed.
His powerful wings beat more sluggishly as mana rippled uneasily beneath his scales. A low rumble escaped his throay.
"…What the hell is this place?" Victor murmured.
Below them stretched a vast, desolate expanse.
The ground was no longer ice-white but a dull, ashen gray, cracked like dried blood vessels. Spiky black stone jutted upward at odd angles, as if thrust violently from beneath the earth. No snow fell here. No wind stirred naturally.
Instead, the air carried a faint whispering sound... sothing closer to distant breathing.
Slow.
Labored.
Wrong.
Victor's instincts told him a lot was off about this place but since he got displaced by the ti space continuum, every where had typically been unsafe so this wasn't exactly a surprising scenario.
Eirene who was seated quietly beside him, tilted her head slightly.
Through the soul bond, Victor felt her unease.
"This place…" she said softly. "It feels… thin."
Victor frowned. "Thin?"
She nodded slowly, fixing her gaze on the land ahead. "Like sothing peeled away a layer of the world and never put it back."
That explanation sent a chill crawling up Victor's spine.
Gojo let out another low rumble and slowed further, wings angling downward as he descended cautiously. His movents were no longer confident sweeps through open sky, but deliberate adjustnts, as if every ter forward required permission from the land itself.
Victor leaned forward and patted the massive beast's scaled neck.
"It's okay, boy," he said calmly. "I'm here."
Gojo's breathing steadied slightly, though his pupils remained dilated, constantly scanning the terrain below.
Sothing subtle pressing against his consciousness, like an invisible hand resting on the back of his skull. His Void Emperor Bloodline reacted instinctively as space around him tightened, stabilizing and reinforcing itself without his conscious command.
"…Yeah," Victor eyes narrowed as be muttered. "Sothing's definitely wrong."
He patted Gojo's back again. "Easy. Just keep moving."
Gojo released a soft snort, acknowledging the command, and continued forward but his speed was still reduced.
Victor's thoughts raced.
He had planned to phase into Ascendant Realms during the journey and use the relative safety of travel ti to cultivate, investigate, maybe even return to Bluefla City to confirm so things.
But he couldn't just do that without making sure things out here wasn't safe.
Eirene glanced at him. "You're thinking of leaving," she said quietly.
"For a mont, I'll still be here..." Victor replied honestly. "But not here."
She nodded once, as if she already understood.
They flew in silence for several minutes.
The eerie land stretched endlessly ahead, broken only by distant, crooked silhouettes that might have been mountains—or might have been sothing else entirely. No birds. No beasts. No signs of life.
Yet Victor felt watched.
His grip tightened unconsciously.
The longer they flew, the clearer it beca that sothing was wrong.
Victor didn't need numbers or notifications to tell him that Gojo was slowing down. He could feel it through the soul bond... a gradual loss of montum, a subtle strain creeping into every beat of the frost raptor's massive wings.
What had once been a blur of speed cutting through the sky was now a heavy, labored advance.
Gojo wasn't even flying at half his forr pace.
"Hey…" Victor brows knitted as he leaned forward slightly with one hand resting against the beast's icy scales. "What's going on?"
"Gojo," he said softly while patting the beast again, "are you alright?"
The frost raptor released a low, resonant growl and through the bond, Victor felt it clearly.
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