The Nether Realm was not a place for the living.

  It pulsed with the whispers of the forgotten, where time was measured not in hours or days but in suffering, in the slow unraveling of souls with nowhere left to go. There was no sky here, no horizon. Only endless shadow, thick as ink, stretching into eternity. The air writhed with lost spirits, their forms twisting like vapors caught in unseen currents, drifting aimlessly through the abyss.

  Yet, amid this swirling void, something stirred.

  Not a lost soul, not one of the nameless wraiths that wandered without direction.

  Something older. Something with purpose.

  A presence that had once been human—immortal, even—before it was torn from the world above. Stripped of its body, its power shattered, its existence reduced to nothing but a fragment of hate lingering in the dark.

  But even broken things could be reforged.

  And he had been waiting.

  The ground beneath him was not truly earth, not in any sense mortals would recognize. It was grey, lifeless stone, fractured and uneven, cracked as if the very foundation of this place had been shattered by unspeakable ruin. Sharp ridges jutted from the landscape at grotesque angles, like jagged fangs of a beast that had long since died but refused to decay.

  No wind moved here.

  The air hung stagnant, thick with the weight of despair, as if something unseen pressed against the skin, whispering cold, invisible hands against the nape of the neck. And yet, despite the stillness, the shadows themselves twisted and writhed, curling through the crevices of the land, coiling like living things in search of something to consume.

  The waters of Yīn Jiān were no salvation.

  They seeped through the rock in sluggish currents, dark and murky, the color of tainted ink. They did not flow; they slithered, oily and thick, dragging with them remnants of the lost: fragments of robes, brittle bones, the faint, flickering remnants of human souls too weak to escape the current.

  And the souls—ah, the souls.

  They drifted along the banks of these dead rivers, some half-formed, whispering with no lips to speak, reaching with no hands to grasp. Others were little more than hollowed-out husks, their shapes dissolving into mist, torn apart by the very realm they had been cast into.

  They did not wail.

  Not anymore.

  Their suffering had stretched too long, erasing even the will to mourn.

  But in the distance, from the depths of the Black Chasm, a sound did rise.

  Laughter.

  Not the laughter of the mad, nor the laughter of the triumphant.

  But the laughter of a man who had waited, plotted, and endured.

  A man who had been abandoned, left to wither. Had not perished.

  The jagged stone, the suffocating air, the rivers of blackened ink—they were nothing to him now.

  Because this was his domain.

  And soon, it would no longer be his prison.

  He did not remember how long it had been.

  At first, there had been nothing but agony. His body, his true form, had been torn from him in the final moments of the battle, cut down by a hand he had once trusted. His soul, fractured and bleeding, should have scattered into the void, dissipating like smoke in a storm. He should have ceased to exist.

  But he hadn’t.

  Somewhere in the endless dark, he had clung to the one thing that could not be taken from him: hatred. The memory of betrayal burned brighter than the pain, a searing wound that refused to heal. He had been cast into Yīn Jiān, the Shadowed Realm, like the countless other lost souls who wandered its desolate plains. But he was not like them. He did not wail in regret or beg for absolution. He had never sought mercy from the gods, not in life, and certainly not in death.

  Instead, he had waited.

  It had taken lifetimes to pull himself back together, to claw through the suffocating void, to gather the shattered remnants of his immortal soul piece by piece. The process had been slow, agonizing, each fragment of his being a jagged shard that cut deeper than any blade. But pain meant nothing compared to what he had lost.

  Now, he could feel it again, his strength, once stripped from him, slowly returning. The darkness that had once threatened to consume him had become his cloak, his domain. The shadows bent to his will, twisting and writhing like living things as he reshaped them into tools of his vengeance.

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  And now, after all this time, he could finally feel it—the shift, the disturbance in the world above.

  Mo Chen had returned.

  Once, long ago, they had stood side by side.

  Brothers.

  They had trained together beneath the same master, kneeling in the same frostbitten courtyard at dawn, reciting the same sacred incantations until their voices were hoarse. They had honed their blades beneath the same sky, sparring until their arms trembled, until they could read each other’s movements as instinctively as breathing.

  At night, beneath the watchful gaze of the mountain stars, they had spoken of the future. Their path to immortality. The glories that awaited them. They had whispered of a time when they would stand as legends, their names etched into the fabric of time itself, beyond the reach of mortality’s decay.

  But when the rebellion began when the old ways had to die so that something greater could take their place…

  Mo Chen had chosen the sect over him.

  Their master, once a pillar of wisdom, once the hand that had guided them through the tribulations of youth, had been the first to fall. He had fought with unyielding grace, even as his robes were stained crimson, even as the halls he once called sacred were burned to cinders around him.

  Qi Tian had begged Mo Chen to stand with him.

  To turn away from the weak-willed teachings of an era that had outlived its purpose.

  To rebuild something stronger, something unbreakable, something that would never again kneel before the indifference of the heavens.

  But Mo Chen had not listened.

  Mo Chen, his sworn brother, the one who had once pledged loyalty beneath the ancient peach tree at the heart of their sect, had been the first to cast him down.

  The memory still burned, seared into the core of what remained of him.

  Mo Chen had left him to rot.

  Left him to wither away in the abyss, discarded like an old sword left to rust in the dirt.

  He had known pain beyond comprehension—the agony of torn flesh, the slow decay of wounds that refused to heal, the unrelenting hunger that gnawed at him in the darkness. But none of it compared to the cold, silent truth that haunted him more than the pain ever could.

  Mo Chen had deemed him unworthy.

  Had they not bled together? Had they not dreamed together? Had they not defied the heavens side by side?

  Yet Mo Chen had stood beneath the open sky, untouched by the ruin he had inflicted, while Qi Tian had been left to sink into the abyss, swallowed by the festering darkness that the heavens had turned away from.

  The injustice burned.

  It blistered, hollowed him out, twisted him into something else… something greater.

  Now, he was no longer the boy who had once chased immortality beside Mo Chen.

  No longer the disciple who had once believed in the path laid out before them.

  Now, he was something more.

  And Mo Chen would learn that some ghosts never fade, and some grudges never die.

  But he was still here. And now, Mo Chen would learn what it meant to destroy something and think it would never return.

  His eyes, no longer bound by mortal flesh, were twin voids—shadows so deep they swallowed even the dim glow of the Nether Realm. They did not shimmer, did not reflect, but consumed light as if devouring the very essence of existence. Hollow yet seething, they gazed into the endless abyss, past the wailing phantoms and drifting remnants of shattered souls. In their depths lay not just hatred, but something worse, a hunger that had no end, no bottom, no mercy.

  And then there was her.

  At first, he had not believed it. It had seemed impossible. The threads of fate were fickle, tangled things, and even the gods themselves could not always predict their course.

  But the girl, Xu Lian, was undeniable.

  She wore a new face, bore a new name, but he had seen past the veil of time. Beneath the fragile shell of her mortal flesh, he recognized her soul.

  She had belonged to Mo Chen once.

  And that, more than anything, made her his to take now.

  She was the key, not just to Mo Chen’s suffering, but to his own return.

  Through her, he would shatter Mo Chen piece by piece.

  Through her, he would remake himself.

  And when the time was right, when the heavens once again looked away, he would step from the shadows, no longer a fragment of what was lost, but something greater.

  Something even Mo Chen could not destroy.

  A god reborn in vengeance.

  King Yama 阎王 (Yán Wáng) did not concern himself with the cries of the dead.

  He did not listen to their wails, did not heed their regret, did not pause in his judgment. To rule over Yīn Jiān was not to rule at all—it was simply to oversee what had already been set in motion.

  For the Shadowed Realm was a place that required no master, no guiding hand. It functioned as it always had, as it always would.

  The flow of souls was endless, a river that never ceased. They arrived, were judged, and passed through, each soul sent to its rightful fate, whether it be reincarnation, punishment, or erasure.

  King Yama did not interfere. He did not intervene in the natural order, because there was no need. The machinery of the underworld turned with precision, relentless, unyielding.

  The judges beneath him recorded the sins of the dead, the scribes inscribed their fates in books that stretched beyond mortal comprehension, the guards of the ten courts carried out their duties with silent efficiency.

  What need was there for the King to act, when the weight of eternity was already set in motion?

  Even the wraiths, the wandering remnants of those who had refused to accept their judgment, were nothing more than specks of dust lost in the endless churning cycle of death and rebirth.

  King Yama watched them with neither pity nor cruelty, only detachment.

  For what were they to him?

  The dead were not special. They were not unique. They were simply part of the process.

  The heavens could weep for their fallen children. The living could mourn their dead.

  But in Yīn Jiān, there was no mourning.

  Only continuance.

  Only what must be.

  And if a soul, long thought shattered, chose to resist the cycle, clawing its way back from oblivion, gathering strength from hatred rather than fate?

  That was not Yama’s concern.

  The system would correct itself in time.

  It always did.

  ?? Current Work: "When the Heavens Turned Away" (天道无归 – Tiān Dào Wú Guī)

  ?? Themes I Write: Xianxia | Wuxia | Cultivation | Poetic Tragedy | Immortality & Fate

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