Lu Tian sat beneath the statue of himself and didn't speak for a long time.
The walls were filled with carvings, layered spirals etched into stone and root, over and over, like someone had tried to rewrite the same sentence until the ink bled. Each line was jagged, rushed, obsessive. The diagrams spiraled not inward, but outward, losing shape the further they spread, like a mind unraveling as it tried to hold onto its own clarity.
He had seen Spiral Paths before. His own. Mo Yao's fragmented Root. The Drowned Saint's preserved structure, still humming beneath the Sect's sealed grounds. But this was different.
This was a path that refused to end.
It didn't ascend. It didn't condense. It just… continued. Every scar fed another. Every ring fed the next. The cultivator who made this hadn't sought breakthrough or power.
They had tried to outrun their own collapse.
Yan Xue kept her distance, eyes scanning the broken carvings, but her fingers stayed near the hilt of her blade. Even she could feel it.
This temple had been made by something brilliant.
And broken.
Lu Tian touched one of the carvings. It was a scar-mantra, incomplete. A phrase meant to be whispered into the Spiral during memory compression. But the phrasing was wrong. Twisted.
He read it anyway.
"I bind the echo not to truth, but to denial."
The moment he finished, his Spiral pulsed.
A second later, pain shot down his spine.
He staggered.
Yan Xue turned, but he raised a hand.
"I'm fine."
It wasn't true.
His Spiral had reacted. One of the outer rings had twisted slightly, as if adjusting itself. He could feel it in his ribs, in the way the Hollow Binding Sutra tightened around his wrist.
Something inside him had listened.
He stood slowly and moved deeper into the ruin. More carvings. Some in blood. Some in bone. One diagram showed two scar-skills being force-bound together, like iron forged under pressure it was never meant to survive.
Scar Fusion.
An advanced method even Abyss masters avoided.
Because scar-skills weren't techniques, they were pain, shaped and condensed. To fuse two was to weld one trauma to another, risking the mind, the Spiral, and the soul.
Lu Tian traced the fusion glyph.
The symbols were precise.
Whoever carved them knew what they were doing.
And more than that…
His Spiral understood it.
The resonance was undeniable now.
Something in this temple was trying to align with him. Not pull him in. Not manipulate. But synchronize.
He stared at the statue again.
At the words.
"I made it farther this time."
What did it mean?
Was this a place he had built in another loop? A memory echo? Or had the forest remembered a version of him that failed here, and left the record behind?
He felt the Spiral shift again.
Not violently.
But like it was testing the boundaries of itself.
One more scar.
One more push.
And maybe he could step past where this version of him had failed.
Or maybe that's what it wanted.
Not growth.
Repetition.
He stepped back from the carvings.
Yan Xue was watching him carefully now. Not suspicious. Just wary.
"Are you going to try and follow it?"
Lu Tian shook his head.
"No."
But deep inside, he wasn't sure.
Because the longer he stayed here, the clearer it became.
This version of him had reached farther than any Abyss cultivator ever recorded.
And died trying to finish what he started.
What if Lu Tian could finish it?
What if the Spiral didn't just need more scars,
What if it needed to be completed?
And what if that meant becoming someone who never walked out of this forest at all?
Night returned to the forest, though down in the root-temple, the light never changed. The black stone walls glowed faintly with the quiet pressure of memories sealed too long. Yan Xue rested near the broken archway at the edge of the chamber, sharpening her blade with slow, steady strokes. She said nothing, but Lu Tian could feel her attention. She knew he was doing something dangerous. She just didn't ask him to stop.
Lu Tian sat cross-legged in front of the Spiral carvings. His hand rested on one of the etched scar-mantras, the one that had reacted to his Spiral. The words still echoed in his memory, sharp and wrong.
I bind the echo not to truth, but to denial.
He said it again, slowly, this time in his mind.
The Spiral inside his chest pulsed.
At first, there was no pain. Just a flicker of heat beneath the surface of his skin. Then a deeper sensation, like a thread being pulled taut behind his heart. He felt the Hollow Binding Sutra contract against his wrist, reacting to the new pressure.
He focused his breath. Slowed it. Let the Spiral spin on its own.
A strange thing happened.
Instead of rotating in its usual rhythm, the outer ring began to vibrate.
Not a full movement. Not enough to break.
Just enough to shake something loose.
Then it appeared.
A thin layer beneath the Spiral. Not another ring. A shadow of a ring. A phantom spiral that only became visible when he focused through the mantra's meaning.
He had never seen anything like it.
The Spiral was meant to store pain, refine it, and weaponize it. Its strength came from structure. Its danger came from overloading. But this layer… it didn't hold anything.
It mirrored his scars but reflected them backward, like looking at himself through a memory that had been denied too long.
The longer he watched it, the more he understood what it was.
It was a rootless ring.
A space for scars that were too buried to surface.
The Spiral hadn't just responded to the mantra. It had accepted it. Built a hidden chamber to contain its logic.
Lu Tian opened his eyes. The statue still watched him with its dead smile. Yan Xue was still at the edge of the room, unmoving.
He stood.
The new phantom ring pulsed once, then went still. He could not access it like the others. It required something different.
Not pain.
Not memory.
Something he had not tried to use before.
He whispered the mantra again.
This time with intention.
The Spiral shivered. Then something cold slid through his spine, and a vision bloomed behind his eyes.
He stood in a room that did not exist.
The floor was black marble. The walls were mirrors, all broken. In each shard, he saw himself. Not as he was. But as he could be. Some versions smiled. Some bled. One wept with black liquid running from his eyes.
One held Yan Xue's body in his arms.
One sat atop the ruined Sect, alone.
One had no eyes.
He turned in the vision and saw the forest burning behind him.
And then it ended.
He fell forward to his knees, coughing blood. The Spiral recoiled and locked down the phantom ring. It had allowed him a glimpse. Nothing more.
Yan Xue was already moving toward him.
She knelt, grabbed his wrist, checked his pulse.
"What did you do?"
Lu Tian shook his head.
"Nothing I understand yet."
She stared at him, frustrated.
"You keep saying that. But every time we move forward, this place remembers more of you."
Lu Tian wiped blood from his mouth and looked up at the statue.
Maybe it was not remembering him.
Maybe it was rebuilding him.
Piece by piece.
With each scar.
Each mantra.
Each echo.
The Spiral was supposed to be a path downward, toward clarity through sacrifice. But what if it could turn outward instead? What if the Spiral could become something else?
Not a core.
Not a soul.
Not a weapon.
A story.
One that had already been told.
And was now telling itself again.