Fog hung thick between the jagged peaks of the Forsaken Range. No birds sang here. The air tasted of dust and forgotten names.

  Li Fan and Yue Xian stepped carefully through the warped landscape. With every step, the world shifted—paths changed, stones reversed direction, and the wind whispered in foreign tongues.

  But the scroll—the Map of Wounds—glowed in Li Fan’s hand. It didn’t chart places. It charted scars.

  Wounds where gods bled, where laws twisted, and where truth died.

  “This map isn’t showing where to walk,” Yue Xian whispered, eyes wide.

  “It’s showing where not to exist.”

  Midway through a narrow pass, the sky split like glass.

  Suddenly, Li Fan was seven years old again, standing in a burning orphanage. Smoke choked the air. Children screamed.

  He turned—and saw himself. The older him. Clad in black, with golden flame in his eyes.

  “You chose the Crownless Path,” the other Li Fan said.

  “Now choose again. Save them. Or keep walking.”

  Li Fan’s fists clenched. The moment was a memory—but it bled into reality. The children were real. The heat was real. The fear was real.

  He stepped forward.

  And then… he stepped back.

  “I can’t fix the past,” he said.

  “But I can burn a future no one else has to run from.”

  The memory shattered like glass, and he was back in the mountains. Yue Xian caught him as he staggered.

  “You saw it too?” she asked, shaken.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  He nodded.

  “The Gate tests who you were… before it lets you become what you must be.”

  They reached a cliff carved with tens of thousands of names. Some were worn. Some were fresh. Some bled faintly.

  “These are those who came before,” Yue Xian murmured.

  “The Gate doesn’t just bury souls. It remembers them.”

  A voice echoed on the wind.

  “Each name a wound. Each wound a warning.”

  They turned—and standing beneath a twisted tree was a man with no eyes. Just hollow sockets, from which light spilled upward like inverted tears.

  He wore tattered robes and carried no weapon—but the air bent around him like the fabric of the world feared his presence.

  “You walk the Crownless Path,” he said.

  “But only one who sacrifices name, flame, and fate… may pass the Gate.”

  Li Fan stepped forward.

  “And who are you?”

  “I am the Woundkeeper,” the man replied.

  “The one who failed. And now guards what he could never reach.”

  He raised a hand, and the mountain cracked open—revealing a descending staircase made of bone and starlight.

  “Beyond here lies the Deep Gate.

  If you pass, you leave behind everything that defined you.”

  Yue Xian looked to Li Fan. He didn’t hesitate.

  “Then I’ll burn the name. Shatter the fate. Walk through the Gate.”

  “And if I lose myself…”

  “Then I’ll walk beside you until we both remember,” Yue Xian said, smiling faintly.

  Together, they descended.

  Far beneath, sealed in a hollow that pulsed like a heartbeat, the Deep Gate stirred.

  It was not a door.

  It was a mouth.

  A wound in the world shaped like an eye, rimmed in broken sigils and locked in a circle of gods’ bones.

  The flames on Li Fan’s arm flared. The shard of the First Godslayer pulsed.

  The Gate opened—not with noise, but with silence so loud it broke thought.

  And on the other side… lay not another world, but a truth the gods had buried.