In the dim moonlight of the deep forest, the cool night wind whispered through the tall trees. Several figures in shadow-blue robes emerged from the darkness.
They moved like phantoms between the massive trunks, their swords silent in their sheaths, their steps leaving no trace on the soft earth, their hands resting lightly on their hilts.
The deeper they ventured into the untamed heart of the forest—where countless beasts roamed—the calmer they became, their eyes sweeping the shadows for any sign of ambush.
Meanwhile, deep within the woods, a massive blood-striped buffalo lay sprawled before the entrance of a large cave. Its three-meter-long body was marred by faintly glowing scars that throbbed like dying embers in the damp gloom as they slowly knit themselves together.
From within the cave's darkness came the soft, restless bleating of its calves as they circled a frail, faintly glowing purple orchid, its weak light glazing the damp stone floor.
At the same time, to the south, a village of three hundred thatched roofs huddled under a cloudless, moonlit sky. The houses were pale and dark, swallowed by the chilly night, except for a single, flickering point of candlelight.
The dim yellow glow came from the center of three houses clinging to the northern edge of the village. There, the deep silence of the night was repeatedly torn by the raw, hacking cough of an old man until, finally, it stopped.
Inside the middle house, Ye Wuji forced his frail body to sit upright. Each movement was a slow negotiation with pain, his weak muscles and brittle bones resisting his will.
He reached for the clay pot beside his bed, spat a thick mouthful of dark blood into it, and let the pot fall.
It struck the packed-earth floor with a muffled thud. For a moment so brief it might have been imagined, the blood inside glimmered faintly, catching a light that wasn't there.
Then the glow vanished, and the blood returned to its dull, lifeless black, as if something vital had been taken from it.
Oblivious to the flicker, he sank back onto the surprisingly soft mattress, an obscenity in the narrow, decaying room. Under the wavering candlelight and the cold wind seeping through the wall cracks, its softness felt like a mockery.
Minutes passed, marked only by the persistent taste of blood on his tongue, a flavor as familiar as breathing had been for the past two years.
His eyes stayed open, fixed on the smoke-stained ceiling. They were heavy with a weariness unrelated to sleep; it was the exhaustion of a man who had long made peace with his end, yet remained condemned to wait for its slow arrival.
After lying still, sleep eluded him. He pushed himself up again, settled a heavy black woolen robe, smelling of dampness over his thin shoulders, lit a simple horn lantern, and stepped outside.
The cold night air struck him at once, sharp and biting. He pulled the robe tighter and surveyed the quiet darkness. It was a silence he knew would not last. Not tonight, either.
He turned left. Beside his room stood the workshop. Wooden coffins were stacked against its outer wall, from right to left, their long, dark shapes patient in the gloom, as if waiting for the dead to arrive.
He stopped before one, raised a hand, and ran his fingers over the wood. The surface felt like memory under his calloused fingertips. For a moment, the scents of pine, resin, and sawdust were displaced by another, the faint, painful sweetness of her perfume. He missed his wife dearly, having lost her ten years ago.
The lantern's glow illuminated his stern, wrinkled face, softening the lines around his eyes with a profound, peaceful melancholy.
"Wait for me a little longer," he mumbled to the silence, the taste of blood fresh on his tongue. "It seems my time is nearing."
He trudged to the workshop door, pushed it open, and stepped inside. The hinges groaned, and the air within was cold and musty, thick with the scent of damp wood and old resin.
He lifted his lantern and lit the candles on the wall near the door and on the shelf to his right, one by one. A small, fragile warmth pushed back the darkness and the chill clinging to the room's corners.
Almost by habit, his gaze settled on the coffin at the back of the workshop.
It was three meters long, crafted from a wood unlike any he had seen in eighty-two years of working timber. He couldn't scratch its surface, couldn't pry open its tightly sealed lid, and couldn't so much as shift its impossible weight—which was the strangest part, since he clearly remembered the merchant's workers carrying it inside.
He'd watched them, just as he studied the coffin now, day after day. It was too heavy, too imposing for a village like this. Yet for all its strangeness, it still looked like a normal coffin.
He had found it two years ago among a traveling merchant's wares. As merchants often do, the man spun a wild tale—that it had been used to bury giants, perhaps even the mythical Titans. Wuji listened to the pitch for a dozen minutes with one ear and let it slip out the other.
In the end, he was swayed, despite his skepticism. He hoped it might turn his fate for the better, it wasn't as if he hadn't tried other things that might have become his "golden finger."
He paid an exorbitant twenty gold coins, feeling like the cunning protagonist of a story who turns hidden treasure to his advantage.
Now, no matter how dim the candlelight, the name carved into its side seemed to catch the glow: Heaven Burial Coffin.
It was an absurd name, too grand and blasphemous for a world that bowed its head to the heavens and feared their judgment like gods. Not that he doubted the existence of gods in a cultivation world, he just didn't know any of their names.
They were gods all the same, though Wuji had stopped believing in them long ago, after his failed attempts to gain their attention through strange rituals, hoping to attract some unnatural force. Just remembering those actions made him flush with embarrassment.
For the first two weeks after acquiring it, he tried everything he knew or had read in novels to open it.
No amount of strength, leverage, or persistence worked. When force failed, he turned to the only other method he could think of that might work: blood refinement.
He smeared the surface of the coffin again and again for days, for nights, until dizziness overtook him and liters of his blood soaked into the workshop floor.
The coffin did not react. But he persevered, thinking perhaps it was sentient, or that some ancient immortal's soul might be awakened impressed by his perseverance. Even this yielded nothing.
By the fifth month, he left it where it lay, his body's blood drained, his lifespan shortened without his knowing, believing the coffin would gather dust like every other lie ever sold by a wandering merchant, every failed attempt to turn his fate around.
Sighing, he turned away, no longer giving the strange coffin a second thought. A familiar tightness seized his chest, and he coughed, spitting blood onto the floor. The amount of blood I cough up grows by the day, he thought.
Without his noticing, the coffin glowed faintly, briefly, before sinking back into darkness.
He simply wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, shrugged off his outer robe, and folded it carefully over a stool. Reaching for his tools, he felt the mallet, the chisel, and the saw. Its dull teeth gleamed softly in the candlelight.
Without hesitation, he selected fresh planks of heart pine and laid them out with practiced ease. Then, with a solemn and familiar rhythm, he began shaping the wood into a coffin identical to the one he had made for his late wife.
Yet as he worked, a familiar unease took root. Uninvited memories of his two sons surfaced. Fifteen years had passed since they had last parted, and by the time they returned, if they returned at all—they would find only a name carved in stone.
In a soft, internal voice, he tried to soothe himself. "Don't trouble yourself. Worry will only shorten the little life you have left. The sect forbids contact anyway. What difference would a few letters make, whether you're sick or not?"
Yet beneath the practical excuses lay a deeper, rawer truth. He yearned to feel his family's warmth one last time, to speak without pretense, to bridge the silence of fifteen years.
He even imagined the shameful plea he might make: to beg for a cure, a longevity pill, anything to borrow a few more years. A brief extension might grant him the chance he had surrendered long ago, the path of cultivation now forever closed to him.
But above all, stronger than the pain in his chest, was the longing to know: Had his sons found success on the immortality path that had rejected him? Had their sacrifice, and his, been worth the gravestone that would soon bear his name?
The mallet struck the chisel, driving it deep into the heart pine. Each blow echoed an unanswered question. Memory dragged him back to his childhood, to the day of the spirit root test, and to the moment his world, and his hopeful future quietly collapsed.
He could still hear the dispassionate voice of the sect disciple as if it were yesterday: flying swords and distant magnificent horizons were not meant for people like him, with waste spirit roots.
Exploration, immortality, the heavens themselves… They belonged only to the blessed. For seventy years, the bitterness of that day had never truly faded.
For a long while, he carved in silence. The blade sounded like a whisper in the dim light, each stroke measured and deliberate. Outside, insects chirped, indifferent witnesses to an old man shaping his own coffin.
BOOM!
A loud explosion rolled from the depths of the forest, loud enough even here to make him pause mid-stroke. He listened as sleeping birds erupted from the canopy and small animals scattered through the underbrush around his house.
After several quiet minutes with no further disturbance, he returned to his work, the mallet moving over the wood with a slower, more deliberate rhythm.
"It's been days since the sect's disciples entered the forest," he mumbled to the empty workshop. "I wonder when they'll return." His gaze drifted to the sealed envelope resting on a shelf to his right, placed carefully beside a single flickering candle.
Time passed, marked only by the gentle, rhythmic scrape of blade against wood, until the sound was shattered by hurried, stumbling footsteps on the path outside.
Wuji's hands stilled. He turned toward the door just as the latch rattled violently.
Bump!
The door burst open. Three young men in blue, dirt-stained robes stood in the doorway, the village chief behind them. The candlelight and the torch they carried cast uneven shadows across their faces, each wearing a different expression.
"Old Ye," the village chief said, stepping forward with forced familiarity. "You still have that bad habit of making coffins in the middle of the night."
"Old Lin," Wuji replied evenly, "it seems the time for your family to buy you one is drawing near."
The village chief's expression darkened at the ill-omened remark, but he swallowed his anger, keenly aware of who stood beside him. "Surely you jest. You are the one—"
"We don't have all night." One of the disciples interrupted, his voice sharp with impatience. Without waiting for a response, he turned away. "Come. Let's bury our fellow disciple."
The other two followed at once, but before they had taken three steps, Wuji's voice rang out again, firmer this time. "Wait! The price for the rites—"
Whoosh!!
A flicker of silver in the torchlight was his only warning. The hidden dagger flew toward him, and before he could flinch, the blade sliced his left cheek.
Blood welled, then spilled in a dark line down his wrinkled face, pattering onto the ground. Several drops struck the lid of the Heaven Burial Coffin, where they gleamed for an instant before the faint light was swallowed by the wood.
Wuji, his hand pressed to the stinging cut, did not see it.
The village chief froze at the attack, his eyes darting from Wuji's bloody face to the backs of the departing disciples. For a moment, conflict raged in his gaze. Then he plastered on a conciliatory smile and scurried after them.
Wuji watched until the last flicker of their torch dimmed. Only when absolute darkness fell did he remove the black robe from his shoulders and press the coarse wool against his cheek.
Once the bleeding had clotted, he changed into his white burial robes and crossed to the house on the right. He rapped sharply on the door.
A startled shuffle sounded from within. Wang Da, the mountain of a man who served as Wuji's laborer, emerged, his eyes blurred by sleep.
"Hurry," Wuji said, bypassing all greetings. "We have a customer."
"This hour?" Wang Da yawned, rubbing his face. "Can't it wait until dawn? It's not like the corpse will run away."
"It's a sect disciple," Wuji replied. "One of those sent to clear the forest."
Understanding dawned instantly. "Then we must move quickly," Wang Da said, sleep gone from his voice. "Before some wandering spirit fancies his body."
"Bring a coffin and the ritual materials," Wuji said, already turning back toward the center of the village.