The Name That Never Meant Anything

It was a name that passed like mist through the mind.

Aeskar.

The sound stuck in Lin Feng's throat, halfway between a breath and a wound. He'd never heard it before—he was sure of that. And yet, the name tugged at something in him like a buried blade.

Ruoxi leaned over the cracked edge of the Obsidian Archive, staring at the burning rune etched into the black wall.

"Aeskar," she repeated. "Do we… know that name?"

Yue Lian frowned. "It doesn't sound familiar."

But none of them looked away.

Because deep in their hearts, something mourned.

That night, Lin Feng dreamed.

He stood in a city without name, on streets that felt familiar but held no memory. Children laughed nearby. A bell tolled overhead. The sky was green, and no one noticed.

A young man stood on the rooftop, looking down at him.

He wore no face.

No aura.

No voice.

But Lin Feng knew.

Aeskar.

The faceless man raised one hand.

Then vanished.

And the dream shattered.

Back in Lion's Crown City, Lin Feng visits a hidden library within the Crimson Scroll Sect—a place famed for recording unrecordable things.

He asks for the name.

The scribes go silent.

One finally speaks. "That name… has no record. But we remember erasing it."

"Why?"

"Because it erased others. Every time it was spoken, three more names vanished."

Lin Feng stared. "It's not a person."

"No," the scribe said. "It's a concept. A truth that rejects other truths. A story that kills lesser stories."

As word spreads that the name has returned, ancient monuments around the continent begin to crack open:

The Shrine of Eternal Oaks splits, revealing runes in a dead language

The Sapphire Tomb bleeds shadow through its stonework

In the desert of the Singing Bones, sand forms a single word every night: Aeskar

Yue Lian analyzes it with an ancient lens and gasps.

"These places were built… to contain the name."

"But now the seals are breaking," Ruoxi said.

Lin Feng nodded. "Because I said it."

A historian named Master Huoyan, half-mad and wrapped in veils, reveals a chilling fact:

"Aeskar was once a cultivator. But he achieved a state beyond ascension. Not godhood. Not void. Something else."

"What?" Lin Feng asked.

"Oblivion. He became the idea of what should not have existed. A being whose presence undid time. The world forgot him. But the void remembered."

That night, Lin Feng and his group are attacked by creatures made of blank space—entities with no aura, no form, no soul.

They speak only one phrase:

"Where is the name?"

Lin Feng fights them off, but every strike feels like hitting memory instead of matter.

Ruoxi is wounded.

Yue Lian's eyes go pale from near-erasure.

Lin Feng uses the Void Law: Trace of the True Self, anchoring them in their identity.

The enemies vanish—but leave behind a single white coin.

On it: the name Aeskar.

Lin Feng stands at a cliff's edge, overlooking the ruins of the once-forgotten shrine.

He realizes something.

"Aeskar isn't just returning," he says. "He's calling us."

"To what?" Ruoxi asks.

"To finish the story we never knew we started."

Behind them, the stars dim again.

One constellation rearranges.

Into a single word.

Aeskar.

To be continue...