Names did not spread like rumors.
Rumors were noisy, exaggerated, easily dismissed.
Names moved quietly.
Alaric felt the difference before he understood it.
The ruins were changing.
Not visibly—not yet—but the subtle hesitation in the air had deepened. Paths that once felt merely unused now carried faint resistance, as if the land itself were becoming cautious.
Observant.
He paused atop a fractured ridge and looked out over the valley.
The Broken Foundation lay far behind him now, its presence reduced to a distant pressure at the edge of perception. Ahead, the ruins thinned, giving way to broken roads and half-buried structures that hinted at once-established order.
This place had not always been abandoned.
It had been cleared.
Alaric exhaled slowly.
So the boundary was shifting.
He continued forward.
By the time the sun dipped low, he sensed it faint, disciplined movements threading through the land. Not scavengers. Not beasts.
Cultivators moving with purpose.
Careful not to leave traces.
A net was being laid.
Alaric stopped near a dried streambed and crouched, touching the cracked earth lightly. The ground still remembered energy flows, faint impressions of formations once embedded here.
He studied them.
Then altered his route.
Minutes later, three figures emerged where he would have been robes bearing a clear sigil this time, no longer faded or improvised.
A proper sect patrol.
They halted, scanning the area.
"He passed through here," one said quietly.
"Are you sure?" another asked.
"Yes. The disturbance aligns with the report."
The third cultivator frowned. "Still no clear cultivation level?"
"No," the first replied. "That's the problem."
Alaric listened from a distance, breath steady, presence folded inward. He did not suppress himself.
He misaligned.
The patrol moved on, unaware they had already lost him.
As silence returned, Alaric straightened.
So the scout had reported him.
Expected.
The question was not if attention would come but how it would come.
He continued traveling until the ruins gave way to the outskirts of a settlement small, unremarkable, nestled between fractured hills. Smoke rose from chimneys. Human voices drifted faintly on the wind.
Civilization.
Alaric did not enter immediately.
He circled wide, observing.
At the settlement's edge stood a notice pillar, worn smooth by time. Fresh markings had been added recently sigils denoting sect authority.
A claim.
One symbol stood out.
A simple mark of three intersecting lines.
Alaric recognized it.
Not from this life.
From memory.
"The Azure Boundary Sect," he murmured.
A mid-tier sect.
Not dominant.
But ambitious.
Known for methodical expansion and aggressive registration of talent.
So they had arrived already.
He turned away from the settlement, choosing a rocky outcrop overlooking the valley instead. From here, he could watch without being seen.
Night fell.
Torches flickered below as cultivators moved through the outskirts, quietly questioning villagers, inspecting energy traces, marking routes.
No arrests.
No announcements.
Just gathering information.
Professional.
Alaric sat cross-legged, conserving energy. The foundation responded slowly, but steadily. Each cycle of breath smoothed uneven flow just a fraction more.
Progress.
Slow.
But real.
Far below, a cultivator spoke in a low voice.
"…not violent. Not suppressive."
"Then what is he?"
A pause.
"…an irregularity."
Alaric opened his eyes.
Irregularity.
That was what Heaven had called him once.
Before erasing him.
He watched the sect members withdraw at last, retreating to temporary camps beyond the settlement.
They had not found him.
But they had not left either.
The net was tightening.
Alaric stood.
He could leave this region.
Disappear again.
But that would only delay the inevitable.
Attention, once drawn, did not fade it adapted.
He looked toward the settlement once more.
Resources existed there.
Information.
Paths outward.
And people who had never been touched by Heaven's notice.
The ruins had hidden him.
But the world would not.
"Very well," he said quietly.
"If names are going to circulate…"
He stepped down from the ridge and moved toward the settlement calm, unhurried, unregistered.
Behind him, unseen by mortal eyes, a faint line deep within the world's structure shifted.
A mark without classification.
A presence without permission.
The first name Heaven could not record had begun to circulate.