The path began where belief ended.
There was no gate. No stone. No inscription burned onto jade.
Only a tear in the world, suspended in the silence where gods forgot to look. A fissure veiled in gray, thin as regret, and deeper than memory.
Shen Wuqing stepped through.
No force welcomed him.
No energy rose to test his worth.
Instead, the world exhaled slowly, as if it had been holding its breath… not out of anticipation, but disdain.
And then the path revealed itself.
Not through sight, but through absence.
The Forsaken Path did not stretch forward. It did not wind or climb. It did not exist as something to be walked — only something to be endured.
With each step Wuqing took, something in him unraveled.
His left hand forgot its strength. His right foot dulled its nerves. His spine lost three memories, and his blood hesitated before flowing again.
This was not a road.
It was a refusal.
A ritual of denial, where every law of heaven had turned its face and said: you are not ours.
Wuqing kept walking.
His skin began to flake — not from damage, but from confusion. It no longer recognized the flesh beneath it. His heartbeat stumbled, not in pain, but in doubt.
The Forsaken Path was not meant for mortals.
Nor for cultivators.
Nor even monsters like him.
It was meant for those whose very existence had become a contradiction.
And so, step by step, the world tried to forget him.
His reflection in his own blood blurred.
His thoughts turned translucent.
The bones in his legs became unsure of their shape.
But he did not stop.
Because every step — no matter how much of him it stole — also whispered a truth more profound than any scripture he had ever read.
The Dao was not mercy.
The Dao was not justice.
The Dao was not balance.
The Dao was a lie spoken with the voice of the strong.
And Wuqing had no voice left.
Only hunger.
The path pulsed beneath him. Not as a road, but as a being — old, bitter, and resentful.
It had once been a path like all others: walked, worshipped, paved by cultivators seeking truths too vast for the sky.
Until it was judged unfit.
Until it was buried beneath layers of sacred lies.
Until even its name was stripped from the stars.
And now, only one walked it.
One who had no sect.
No heaven.
No witness.
The Forsaken Path coiled around him like smoke that did not burn, trying to bind, to erase, to drown him in forgetfulness.
He answered with silence.
His bones cracked.
Not from pressure.
But from reshaping.
He was not being wounded.
He was being… rewritten.
His spine elongated slightly. His eyes dimmed from grey to a deeper colorless depth. His fingernails became translucent, like forgotten glass.
Still, he walked.
Then came the first whisper.
It did not come from the path.
It came from him.
Not as a memory.
But as a splinter.
You should turn back.
The voice was soft.
Familiar.
It sounded like a younger Wuqing — before the hunger, before the blood, before the silence.
He ignored it.
The second whisper came sharper.
You are not supposed to exist.
That voice was older.
A sect master. One of the many who had cast him out before they knew his name would one day haunt their descendants.
He kept walking.
His lungs forgot how to breathe for three steps.
Then adapted.
The third whisper was kind.
Stop. Please. Let it end.
It was her voice.
The one who had once offered him a peach blossom on the night he was chased from his orphanage. The girl who believed monsters only existed in bedtime tales.
She was dead now.
Eaten, by something not quite him.
He kept walking.
The fourth whisper came from silence itself.
There is no end to this.
He agreed.
And still walked.
By now, his body no longer felt like his own.
His hands trembled with forgotten techniques.
His eyes held reflections of things he had never seen.
His name, once so sharp, had begun to fade from the memory of reality.
Not because he was dying.
But because he was leaving the system that allowed names to be remembered.
Then the path shifted.
No longer linear.
It spiraled.
Not upward.
But inward.
A descent not into hell, but into irrelevance.
The further he walked, the more the world above seemed like a dream told in another language.
He saw symbols crumble.
Laws collapse.
Concepts that once anchored physics — gravity, time, substance — they bled at the edges, unraveling into pure suggestion.
And amidst it all, he found the bones.
They were not human.
Nor beast.
Nor divine.
They were… attempts.
Skeletons of those who had tried to forge their own paths, only to be forgotten halfway through.
Some had three arms.
Some had no faces.
Some wept without mouths.
One still moved.
It reached toward him.
Its fingers were made of ideas — broken ones.
No words.
Only one feeling:
Why do you still walk?
He stepped over it.
Not with cruelty.
But with purpose.
Because he understood.
The Forsaken Path was not testing him.
It was offering him what he had always been denied:
The right to define himself without permission.
And that was more terrifying than any tribulation.
He was not just walking a path abandoned by heaven.
He was becoming its next author.
Further still.
The sky above — if it could be called that — began to scream.
Not with sound.
But with color.
Orange wept into black.
Purple bruised the edges of sight.
The stars flickered in and out, unable to decide whether they still had meaning.
He did not look up.
He looked down.
And saw himself.
Reflected in the cracks of the path.
But it was not him.
It was what he would become if he kept walking.
A shape that held hunger without mouth.
A body without shadow.
An echo with no source.
Was this death?
No.
Worse.
It was freedom.
He whispered, not aloud, but within:
I am not walking to ascend.
I am not walking to escape.
I am walking because even forgetting me won't save you.
The path smiled.
And broke.
Like an egg cracked by a serpent from the inside.
And in that rupture, Wuqing saw it.
The end.
Not a door.
Not a gate.
Just… a place where walking ceased to have meaning.
Where destination no longer existed.
He stood before it.
And asked himself, not with fear, but curiosity:
Who am I if no one remembers?
The void did not answer.
Because it could not.
So he answered for it.
I am the echo of paths no longer spoken.
And then, he stepped into the end.
The Forsaken Path did not resist.
It did not crumble.
It simply ceased to be.
Because its purpose had been fulfilled.
Someone had walked it without looking for salvation.
And that was the only truth it ever wanted.
Silence returned.
But it was no longer empty.
It was full.
Of him.
Shen Wuqing stood alone.
No longer man.
No longer monster.
Not yet god.
But something worse.
Something… unclaimed.