The world dissolved in a sigh of shifting light. One moment, Lin Chen stood upon the placid surface of the Sea of Essence. The next, the waters turned to dust, and he stood ankle-deep in a desert of crystalline sand, each grain holding the faint, cold luminescence of a dying star.
Before him, the Sunken Palace had fully risen, a spectral city of fossilized coral and tarnished gold, its spires spearing a sky that was now a terrifying duality—one half the familiar blue, the other a perfect, shimmering mirror, both marred by the ever-present, bleeding cracks in the Veil.
A gateway of pearl and obsidian swung open, revealing not a hall, but an avenue of mirrors. Thousands of them, each reflecting a version of Lin Chen that was a lie. One with eyes of consuming darkness. One with a chest horrifically empty where the ember should be. One wreathed in flames not of power, but of self-immolation.
He took a single step forward.
The mirrors exploded. Not into shards, but into a storm of light-winged butterflies that swirled around him in a silent, beautiful tempest. Their collective whisper was a chill wind in his soul:
"WELCOME, FIRST FLAME.
THE DREAM PALACE REMEMBERS WHAT YOU COULD BE.
ENTER… AND SEE YOURSELF TRULY."
---
She awaited him in a throne room that had no walls, only the infinite reflection of the desert sky. Empress Shao Yulan, a being at the very peak of the Soul Core Realm, was a vision of captured stillness. Nine perfect reflections orbited her, a silent court of possibilities. Her true form was one of impossible perfection: skin of flawless porcelain, hair a cascade of liquid night, and eyes that were not eyes, but pools of quicksilver, showing him a hundred different versions of himself with every blink.
Her smile was a delicate, dangerous curve. "You tempered the Leviathan's flow into your flame. A remarkable feat. Now, you must temper your own soul in the fires of what you are not."
Lin Chen halted, his form a stark, unwavering line against the shifting reflections. "I do not perform tricks for anyone's amusement."
The Empress's laughter was the sound of a thousand chandeliers falling. "Then let the Palace show you that the greatest conflagration… is the one that consumes the self."
---
The world dissolved into pure consciousness. The palace unfolded not in space, but in the landscape of his soul. He was pulled apart, his consciousness fractured into nine streams, each flowing into a different mirror of fate.
Reflection 1: The Child That Never Was
He was a boy of six again,the white eye blind, his body frail. The Qi storm screamed, and he reached for a salvation that was not there. The ember had chosen another. He died cold, small, and forgotten in the dust. The Reflection of Powerlessness shattered.
Reflection 2: The Slave That Endured
The Ironbone Monastery.The weight of the chains was absolute. The boulder did not move. The monks' mockery was a physical blow. He lived and died a broken slave. The Reflection of Failure shattered.
Reflection 3: The Disciple That Submitted
The River Pulse Hall.His meridians remained sealed, a prison of his own flesh. He begged for the Healer's knife. He felt his own heart, still beating, being cut from his chest. The Reflection of Surrender shattered.
Reflection 4: The Pirate That Brokered
On the deck of Hei Mo's ship,he knelt. He traded the ember for his life, becoming just another hollow-eyed predator on a sea of shadows. The Reflection of Compromise shattered.
Reflection 5: The Coward That Fled
The Spiral Sea churned.As the Leviathan rose, he turned his back. The abyss took him not in battle, but in ignominious flight. The Reflection of Fear shattered.
Reflection 6: The Betrayer That Served
Before the Mirrorheart Empress,he saw a path of ease. He bowed, offering the Leviathan's Heart Pearl, becoming a favored hound in a gilded cage. The Reflection of Servitude shattered.
Reflection 7: The Monster That Consumed
The Veil tore open.He stepped through, not as a liberator, but as a new kind of tyrant. He drank the light of the Nine Realms until only a cold, silent husk remained. The Reflection of Corruption shattered.
Reflection 8: The Martyr That Sacrificed
At the Bound Sky Plateau,he gave everything. His flame ignited a pyre that saved existence, but at the cost of his own song, his own name, his very essence. A hero for a dead world. The Reflection of Self-Annihilation shattered.
Reflection 9: The First Flame
He stood in a void of pure,origin-fire. The ember was a nascent sun. Behind him stretched the tapestry of his journey. Before him, the Veil hung, cracked and weeping light. A voice, the truest echo of his own will, spoke:
"THE CHOICE IS NOT BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL.
IT IS BETWEEN SELF AND NOT-SELF.
BURN THE WORLD TO BE YOURSELF.
OR BURN YOURSELF TO SAVE THE WORLD."
Lin Chen looked at the binary prison of the choice and smiled, a flash of absolute, defiant freedom.
"The choice is a lie.I will burn my own path."
He did not embrace the reflection. He did not deny it. He struck it, his fist shattering the illusion of the question itself.
---
The nine shattered realities did not vanish. They rushed back into him, not as failures, but as fuel. The immense pressure of these discarded fates collapsed his Molten Spirit Sea, compressing its vast energy inward, downward, into a single, infinitesimal point.
It liquefied, then crystallized.
In the very center of his being, a new sun was born. A Primordial Ember Soul Core, golden and fist-sized, its surface eternally etched with the dancing forms of nine distinct flames. He had not chosen one path; he had consumed all possibilities to forge his own singular truth.
Soul Core Realm — Achieved.
The Dream Palace trembled, its foundations shaken by a will it could not contain.
---
Shao Yulan rose, her serene mask crumbling. Her nine orbiting reflections screamed as they were dragged back into her, their energy fueling not her power, but her dissolution. Her porcelain skin cracked, spider-webbing across her form, revealing not bone or blood, but a core of cold, reflective glass. A golem, a prison of a soul bound for eternity to capture the light of others.
"YOU!" she shrieked, her voice the sound of a world breaking. "YOU WERE TO BE MY TENTH REFLECTION! THE ONE THAT MADE ME WHOLE!"
Lin Chen simply raised his hand. The Leviathan's Heart Pearl floated before his palm, pulsing with the rhythm of the deep.
Azure Flame Flow: First Form — Mirror Tide
He did not attack her. He offered a fusion. A wave of flame-wrought glass, molten and alive, surged forward. It did not destroy the Empress; it embraced her. Her mirror-body melted, not into slag, but into a stream of pure, reflective essence that flowed around his left forearm, cooling into a bracer of flawless, dark glass—the Mirrorheart Aegis. Her bloodline, her power to reflect and refract, was now his.
---
With the Empress gone, her throne of illusions dissolved, revealing a staircase of solid light leading down into the heart of the palace. At its end, a small, stark chamber held a single object: a coffin of pure, untarnished gold.
An inscription was carved into its lid:
"HERE RESTS THE DREAMER.
THE FIRST SOUL TO HEAR HEAVEN'S SILENCE AND WEEP.
OPEN… AND AWAKEN THE FIRST SORROW."
Lin Chen laid a hand upon it. The lid slid back without a sound.
Inside lay a woman, not dead, but locked in an ageless slumber. Her face was one he had seen in a memory of steel—Huo Lian, the Ashen Valkyrie. And in her chest, a second, smaller ember flickered, a dying echo of his own.
A note was clasped in her hands. He took it, and the words burned into his mind:
"If you read this, the True Flame lives. I tried to ascend where the Veil was thinnest. I failed. Heaven did not strike me down; it captured me, using my body as an anchor to split my soul and reinforce its cage. My fragments became the Nine Mortal Realms. Find the other eight. Reunite us. Or Heaven will use you as it used me."
As he finished, his own ember roared in resonance. The woman's silver eyes opened. They held eons of loneliness and a spark of impossible hope.
"Brother…" she whispered, a single, breathless word.
Then, her form dissolved into a stream of silver light that flowed into his chest, merging with his Soul Core. The core grew denser, brighter, now housing two intertwined flames where there had been one.
---
The palace sank back into the sands, its purpose fulfilled. Lin Chen stood once more in the endless Soul Mirror Desert. Among the shimmering mirages, one did not waver: a verdant, impossibly lush oasis.
At its center, in a pool of clear water, floated a corpse. It was an Immortal, its body radiating a faint, divine light, its wings of light tattered, its golden halo shattered. Its face was a smooth, featureless expanse, as if its identity had been scoured away.
Lin Chen approached. The water did not ripple.
The corpse spoke, its voice hollow, echoing from a vast, empty distance:
"TOUCH ME…
AND KNOW THE PEACE OF FORGETFULNESS."
He reached out and touched its chest.
An avalanche of memory, not his own, slammed into him. A vision of the Immortal Realm, not as a paradise, but as a battlefield. Fallen Gods. A cataclysm that shattered the very firmament. Then, a searing pain as his own memories were ripped away—the Fleshlands, the Dustborn, his name—all turning to smoke.
The ember in his core screamed in protest.
First Flame Mantra: Soul Anchor
He burned the foreign touch from his soul, a purifying inferno that scoured the mental invasion. His memories rushed back, solid and real. But one fragment of the Immortal's memory remained, a final, damning truth:
"THE VEIL WAS NOT A PUNISHMENT. IT WAS A QUARANTINE. A SEAL TO CONTAIN A WAR THAT WOULD CONSUME ALL CREATION. YOU SEEK TO OPEN IT… AND YOU WILL UNLEASH THE END OF EVERYTHING."
---
It came with the rising of the mirror-moon, a creature born of the desert's hunger. The Silver Jackal, a Soul Core beast whose howl could crystallize a soul. It was the size of a warhorse, its pelt shifting mercury, its eyes voids of need.
It lunged, a streak of lethal silver.
Lin Chen stood his ground. The Mirrorheart Aegis on his arm flashed. The Jackal's soul-shattering howl hit the dark glass and reversed, amplified, striking the beast itself. Its own Soul Core fractured under the backlash.
In that moment of stunned agony, Lin Chen moved. The horn-spear found its eye. The Jackal dissolved into a pool of liquid metal that coalesced into a single, cruelly curved Silver Fang dagger.
---
But the desert was not yet done. The entire expanse stirred. Every single grain of crystalline sand rose into the air, each one becoming a perfect, floating mirror. And in every mirror, a different Lin Chen burned—the child, the slave, the monster, the martyr—all screaming in unison, a chorus of his forsaken fates.
A voice that was the weight of the sky itself, the consciousness of the Veil, thundered through his very being:
"NINE FLAMES TO IGNITE THE FORGE.
NINE REALMS TO BE ITS FUEL.
NINE DEATHS TO TEMPER THE BLADE.
THE UNIFIED PLAINS WILL BE YOUR ANVIL.
THERE, YOU WILL BE FORGED INTO THE WEAPON THAT SAVES ALL…
OR SHATTERED INTO THE DUST THAT BURIES IT."
The mirrors exploded. The desert fell away. The sand beneath his feet became lush, endless grass, swaying in a warm, gentle wind.
The Unified Plains awaited.
---