"Who are you?" Though An Jing was still lost in his memories, he quickly pulled himself back to the present. Instead of answering, he posed another question. "Why do you ask?"

"What doth thy heart desire?" The voice pressed on, ignoring An Jing's questions.

Closing his eyes, An Jing suddenly chuckled. "I see. So it's the ritual..."

He teased, "Oh great Yvelbane, is this the heavenly fiend you slaughtered? Why isn't it dead?"

"Hah! A defeated foe, nothing more than a remnant soul hiding in the shadows."

In a rare display of emotion, the sword soul sneered before quickly instructing An Jing, "Proceed with the ritual. I must focus entirely on locating my shard, so I can't help you for the time being."

"Understood."

An Jing sensed the deep-seated desires of the eight connected to him. He turned to Gu Yeqi, the girl who looked to him as an older brother. All that she wanted was to return to the northern frontier, to bring her father enough food, to reunite with her lost mother, and to finally share a hearty meal as a family. For reasons unknown, An Jing found his own face woven into her dreams of home.

There was also Qin Yunye, whose slight frame belied a fierce determination. She pushed her body to its limits, hoping to grow stronger and larger and gain enough strength to protect her kin and strike down her enemies instead of hiding beneath pine needles while bandits slaughtered her parents for food.

Then there was Cang Linzu, a boy who thrived on martial training. He sought nothing more than a quiet sanctuary to train and a steady stream of worthy opponents to test his mettle. Direlife Manor, with its daily rhythm of training, sparring, eating, and sleeping, was all he ever wanted. If it were up to him, it was a life he would gladly embrace forever. And given the chance, he wanted to fight An Jing. Cang Linzu harbored no illusions of victory, but simply craved An Jing's approval.

An Jing shook his head. He had accepted them as his friends long ago, but maintained a cold exterior to mask the full extent of his strength.

There were others, more familiar faces. After leading the group for three months, An Jing might not have known them inside and out, but he knew their pasts. Their desires, their longings, and their deep-seated hatred were now laid bare before him, as clear as ink on a page.

As the illusions took hold, dark tendrils of fiend qi snaked into their minds, pulling them deeper. This was the fiend qi contained within the fey flesh.

Without fiend qi, the heavenly fiend was powerless to bewitch them. For this reason, anyone susceptible to its influence had been weeded out from the very beginning. But it was far from wasteful. The fiend qi stimulated their lifearc, causing miraculous transformations that made them the perfect material for potent medicines.

But even those with constitutions resistant to fiend qi couldn't endure the steady accumulation of fiend qi from a prolonged diet of fey flesh. The excessive buildup left certain minds vulnerable to the heavenly fiend’s grasp. The result was death. Not even An Jing could save them; their fates were sealed. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

Fortunately, since uncovering the truth about the fey flesh, An Jing had been secretly guiding his group in cultivating stillness and deep meditation to overcome their inner demons. The group practiced diligently as it relieved them of additional training and gave them a few rare moments of rest. This kept the fiend qi from reaching dangerous levels. For now, they still stood a chance to live.

Bound together by the ritual, they became one another’s tether, capable of pulling their companions back from the brink or slowing a headlong fall into darkness. They were guides for one another through mental mazes too convoluted to face alone. This was the very definition of a teammate.

However, such support had its limits after all. Unless they possessed their own light, at least one teammate would eventually be swallowed whole by their inner demons as the ritual progressed. On the contrary, An Jing's own mind remained clear and immune to the ritual’s effects.

"What doth thy heart desire?" The voice repeated its question as a flood of images appeared in the darkness.

An Jing saw himself returning to the northern frontier, where there was no snow calamity or barbarian armies. There, he and his parents were successful merchants, living out their days in their hometown's quiet embrace.

A different illusion showed him departing his home as a martialist seeking to awaken his lifearc while his parents bid him a final farewell. In yet another illusion, An Jing mastered the Thirteen Classics and eight-legged essays[1], rising through the county and provincial levels to pass the final imperial examinations. And upon reaching the capital, he received his official appointment, was granted an audience with the emperor, and lived out a long life.

There were countless other versions of An Jing. Despite the differences in clothing, age, stature, and temperament, they shared certain similarities, like infinite derivatives from parallel universes, branching outward without end.

But An Jing remained unmoved, his gaze burning with clarity. He knew these paths were not his own. They were choices he would never make because he wasn't an ordinary boy from the northern frontier. He had the spark and knowledge from another world. Beyond that, he had the sword soul's recognition and the power to journey across worlds. His choices and the paths they carved were never meant to be ordinary.

"What dost thou loathe?" Sensing this, the voice posed a new question.

This time, specific faces and objects appeared—cauliflower, carrots, the tramp who had swindled him out of his candied hawthorns as a child, and the finicky horse that spat... These images were hazy and nothing more than fleeting memories.

An Jing's brow furrowed for a moment before his face broke into a smile. "So it seems both the horse and I hate cauliflower and carrots."

But as the figures and forms before him grew undeniably real, An Jing’s smile was replaced by a solemn expression.

He saw bandits torching the county and looting supplies, their knives dripping with blood. He saw the starving refugees trading and cooking human flesh and white bones that had been gnawed clean. He saw indifferent guards denying passage to kneeling masses, while the local gentry bribed the soldiers to drive away the refugees, their eyes filled with scorn and disgust.

And above all else, the children who perished, the vats in the rainy night, the dungeon, and the horrors in his dreams. Those that died in the dark, forgotten by the world, their faces frozen in bewilderment until the very last.

A blurred tapestry of people and objects, some hazy and abstract, others sharp and concrete, interspersed with a fleeting glance or a living presence. Screams and white bones, wailing and bloody flesh, swords and corpses, a glance before being forgotten.

Nothing was more devastating than the sight of those barred city gates, not human violence nor the fury of nature itself. Nothing was worse than being forgotten, not slaughter and carnage or the threat of death.

An Jing could no longer smile. Fate held no power over him. He didn't believe in some imaginary future; he only trusted the ground under his feet. He was unmoved by temptation as he wanted more than anything the darkness offered.

Yet when confronted by the very things he despised, the arrogant stares, the crushing realities that fueled his rage and sorrow, leaving him powerless yet unable to look away. He couldn't turn a blind eye, couldn't be indifferent, and couldn't move on.

1. The Thirteen Classics refer to important Confucian texts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Classics) while eight-legged essays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay) are a type of essay used for Chinese imperial examinations. ☜