Chapter 1 – The First Death

"Immortality was a lie. It did not begin with ascension. It began with screaming."

The blood came last.

First, there was pain—raw, white-hot, lancing up through his shattered core like molten iron poured into glass.Then came the silence. Then came the dark.

Aren Yu's mouth filled with dirt and blood as he lay broken at the foot of the altar, unmoving.

The ritual had failed.

He could taste the bitter iron of it on his tongue. His veins, once trembling with hope, were now empty of light. His spirit root had cracked during the channeling phase. His meridians tore under pressure, like dried riverbeds suddenly flooded. He was never meant for this.

He had tried anyway.

The elders had warned him. He'd been a failed disciple from the start, no spirit affinity, no qi sense, no inheritance. Just a mudblood orphan the sect took in for menial labor after the last war. He was given scraps of cultivation theory to keep him quiet, used as a sparring dummy by inner disciples, and left to rot in the outer courts while others soared to the clouds.

But even ghosts dream. Even ants can pray.

And Aren had found a name—scribbled in the corner of a burned manual.The Vermilion Tomb.The Scarlet Vow.A second path.

He crawled into myth like a dying dog.

The tomb had been real. A cavern carved into the roots of an ancient mountain. Forgotten by every sect and kingdom, sealed under talismans so old they crumbled at his touch. No guardian. No spirits. Just a stillness so old it felt like the world itself had stopped breathing inside.

There had been no treasure.

Just a stone altar. Covered in flaking red symbols he could barely translate. A sword driven through the center like an offering.

And the words carved above it:

"TO BLEED IS TO BEGIN."

He bled. Of course he bled.

The ritual had required it. A cut along the heartline. A recitation of the vow in one's mother tongue. A sacrifice of qi—except he had none. So he offered flesh.

He remembered falling. Screaming. Feeling something ancient press against his mind. Something that watched. Something that fed.Then—

Nothing.

He opened his eyes.

The tomb was cold.

His body ached. His throat was dry. His ribs felt cracked. The blood around him had dried into a crust of black.

He blinked. Once. Twice.

He was alive.

"No," he croaked. "No, I…"

He should have died.

Aren pushed himself up with trembling arms. Every nerve screamed. His fingers left skin behind on the stone as he moved. His bones felt like they'd been boiled and reshaped into wrong angles. His chest was stitched with black scars, like veins burnt into the skin.

He crawled. Not toward the altar—but away from it.

He felt no power. No warmth. No glow of awakened qi. Just pain. Agonizing, constant, alive pain.

He pressed a hand to his chest.

His heart beat. Barely.

He tried to summon qi. Nothing.

He focused. Meditated. Pushed inward.

There was no dantian. No core.Just a hollow void where it had once been.

He was not a cultivator.He was not dead.He was something else.

The tomb took him three days to crawl out of.

His body did not heal.

He ate lichen, drank rust-colored water, vomited twice. His vision swam. He slept. Woke. Slept again. The light of the surface came too slowly.

When he finally stumbled into daylight, the sun felt like knives in his skull. The wind tasted of ash. Far in the distance, the faint smoke of a battlefield curled toward the clouds.

The war had reached this land too.

He wandered. Starving. Disoriented.

No qi beast came for him. No wandering cultivator lifted him from the dirt. The road ignored him. The world forgot him.

He reached a ruined village. Burned out homes. Dead animals. He found bread in a half-collapsed cupboard and devoured it in silence.

Then the bandits came.

They didn't ask questions. He was ragged, weak, alone.

The first arrow hit him in the side.

The second lodged in his thigh.

He screamed.

They laughed.

They dragged him to the village square, tied him to a charred post, beat him with sticks until the wood snapped. When he passed out, they pissed on him. When he woke, they gouged his eye with a red-hot coin.

"Think he's dead?"

"Nah. Not yet. Let's test."

The blade slid under his ribs like paper.

Pain blossomed again.

Again.

He died.

He woke.

Same square. Same post.His eye was still gone.The wound still there.

But his heart beat.

He screamed.

Louder this time. Not from pain—but from terror.He screamed until his throat shredded.He screamed until crows took flight from the trees.

He was alive.

Again.

That was the beginning.

It took him weeks to understand the rules.

He could not heal. Not by medicine, not by time, not by cultivation.

His wounds stayed. He carried each scar. Each cut. Each broken bone.

But he did not die.

Not truly.

Each time he crossed that threshold—whether by blade, starvation, drowning, disease—he would wake again, wherever his body had fallen. Rotting but alive. He would see flashes of something during the liminal space between death and awakening:

A red sky.An impossible staircase.Eyes watching from behind stone.Chains stretched across the stars.

And then he'd return.

His mind intact. His memories sharper.His soul… heavier.

Years passed.Then decades.

He tried to end it, once. Walked into the sea. Chained a stone to his feet. Let the waves pull him under.

He drowned.Woke on the seabed.His lungs screaming.Unable to die.Unable to rise.

He clawed his way to shore a week later, half-mad, his skin peeling from salt and sun and rot.

He never tried again.

Aren Yu, the man, vanished.

In his place, a ghost walked the empires.

Nameless. Scarred. Hollow-eyed.

Whispers followed him. Cultivators spoke of a cursed immortal. A wandering corpse who could not be slain. An omen of ruin.

He avoided sects. Avoided towns. But always, they found him.

Those who sought immortality tried to dissect him.

Those who feared blasphemy tried to exorcise him.

And the heavens… remained silent.

But something watched.Every time he died.He felt it.

A presence.

It did not judge.It did not save.It only waited.

Then, one night, under a sky split by red lightning, Aren died again.

A cultivator of the Nine Lantern Sect found him near a ruined shrine and mistook him for a demon. Their blade was a crescent of moonlight. His torso was split in half.

And in the moment between life and death—

He saw.

Not a dream.

Not a hallucination.

But a reality too vast to understand.

Pillars of bone stretching into infinity.A prison carved in the shape of a lotus.A voice not made of sound, whispering directly into his soul:

"YOU TOOK THE VOW."

He screamed.

He awoke beneath the shrine.

His body stitched itself into place, not by healing—but by force.

He was whole again. And something had changed.

There was a mark on his chest now. A brand. A circle of black thorns.He felt no qi. No strength.

But his eyes saw deeper.

The cultivator who had slain him returned two days later, seeking to finish the job.

Aren looked at him—

—and saw chains wrapped around the man's soul. Invisible bindings tethered to the heavens. He could see the cycle. The karma. The weight.

And he understood:They were all prisoners.

Scarlet Vow.

That was its name.

A forgotten path. A forbidden one.

It did not promise power.

It promised truth.

Through death.Through memory.Through recursion.

Every time Aren died, he came closer to understanding the Dao.Not cultivating it. Not ascending it.But unmasking it.

And maybe…

Maybe the heavens weren't a blessing at all.

Maybe they were the final cage.