Chapter Forty-Four: The Step That Was Never Taken

The sky inside Fang Yuan's immortal aperture turned black.

Not night—something older. A pre-dawn ink, spreading from the edges of memory itself.

Fang Yuan's clone—code-named Hidden Hand—activated a perimeter of starlight Gu. The constellations flickered erratically, showing no futures, only void.

"This is not dream-path," Hidden Hand muttered. "Not fate-path either."

Within the darkness, a single footprint appeared.

It pointed backward.

Far below, inside a memory-glade orchard, an old figure pruned trees that remembered.

Bo Qing.

He looked up. For a moment, his sword Gu trembled.

"The pathless cultivator has moved."

He bowed toward the sky.

"May no one walk that step twice."

In another region, a girl with no face carved sigils into her flesh.

She bore no Gu. Only scars.

The name on her chest read: Zhao Lian Yun.

Her hands bled.

But she smiled.

"The one who forgets has remembered me."

"Now I will return."

Back within the ink-sky, the footprint pulsed once, then split.

Two paths emerged:

One toward the depths of myth.

One toward a place Fang Yuan never visited.

Hidden Hand hesitated. He was a clone—but also a thread-bound eye of the Sovereign.

He touched the edge of the second path.

And saw a world without Gu.

"Impossible," he whispered.

The path blinked shut.

And the footprint was gone.

Somewhere, in a place even Yellow Heaven could not reach, the nameless clone stood at a crossroads made of silence.

He took a step.

And the world bent to make it true.