Chapter Forty-Three: Threads the Venerables Cannot Cut

In the starlit chamber of the Fate Observatory, a mirror cracked.

Fairy Zi Wei's remnant will pulsed through silver dust, flickering as a thought-path phantom. She had long died—but thoughts leave trails.

And tonight, something had disturbed every trail at once.

Time-path currents twisted unnaturally. Logic-path records blurred. The Starlight Fate Mirror reflected not futures, but forgotten names.

"Yellow Heaven has changed," the phantom whispered. "A clone walks backward. And the Final Thread does not obey the one who wove it."

Elsewhere, in the fiery core of the Sea of Blood, Giant Sun's blood-echo roared.

His altar of flesh pulsed. His descendants wept in their sleep.

"A rival Sovereign grows," the blood murmured. "One with no thread to grasp."

He saw it not as a myth—but a contagion.

Even Spectral Soul's remnant, buried deep within a Dreamsoil bloom, twitched.

"A name that resists dream and memory both?" it rasped. "Unacceptable. Unknowable. Unworthy."

And Fang Yuan—

He sat still in the center of his vast immortal aperture.

The winds of his internal world howled. Storm Gu shimmered. Rivers trembled.

He had seen the Yellow Heaven ritual. He had felt the echo. He knew.

"A clone has walked free," he said quietly.

"He walks backward. He forgets me."

"He intends to become what I refuse to be."

A single thought-path Gu bloomed in his hand. He could crush it—trace the clone by force, pierce backward logic, collapse the echo.

But he didn't.

"Let him walk," Fang Yuan murmured.

"There are threads even I cannot cut yet."

He placed the Gu into a sealed jar of myth-born amber.

And turned to the storm gathering in his sky.