Chapter 136 – A Brother’s Ghost
The sky above the Shaded Marsh was no sky at all—merely a curtain of ash and miasma stretching over stagnant waters that reflected nothing. No birds cried. No insects buzzed. Only the rippleless stillness of black, oil-thick swamplands that devoured breath and thought alike.
Rin Xie stood at the edge of a drowned shrine, ankle-deep in decaying lotus petals. His robes had long since darkened from blood and death, his skin etched with soul-calligraphy that pulsed faintly. His eyes, once clear, now carried the cold weight of a man who had outlived his own innocence.
In his palm, a fragment of bone writhed.
"Li Jian," he said.
The name hung in the air like a broken prayer.
From the heart of the sunken shrine, a figure emerged—not walking, not floating, but unfurling. Like a drowned man learning how to move again. White burial robes clung to a translucent frame. The face was blurred at the edges, as if the world itself struggled to recall it.
But Rin remembered.
He would always remember.
"Rin," said the figure. The voice trembled with distortion—like echoes pulled from a cracked soul bell. "You came... even after what I did."
"I came to see what remained," Rin said. "I didn't expect it to be you."
Li Jian, his sworn brother from the Azure Echo Sect. The boy who once laughed through storms, who had stood beside him when they were still disciples. Who died—or so Rin believed—on the night the Sect was burned, its core disciples butchered, its inheritance scattered.