Kaelen was drowning in voices.Not metaphorically. Actually drowning. His consciousness submerged in a sea of corrupted memories. Each one belonging to a person or cultivator absorbed by Hollows. They crashed over him in waves.A mother trying to shield her child. Both consumed.A cultivator watching his entire sect fall.A teenager in the wrong place at the wrong time.A Council Elder who thought herself untouchable. Proven fatally wrong.Each memory came with emotions. Terror. Despair. Rage. Resignation. And underneath them all, threading through like a toxin, was the seductive whisper of Hollow Sickness.Let go. Stop fighting. It hurts less if you just... stop.Kaelen's sense of self was fragmenting. He couldn't remember his name. Couldn't remember why he was fighting. Couldn't remember what he was supposed to protect.But then.A hand. Small. Warm. Pressing against his cheek. And a voice cutting through the chaos."KAELEN!"~~~In the physical world, Lira had reached him.She was

They didn't take Kaelen to a torture chamber. Nothing so crude.Instead, they led him to a room that was somehow worse. Sterile. White. Filled with devices that hummed with barely restrained power. It reminded Kaelen of the university's medical wing. But everything here was designed not to heal. But to analyze.The three Elders arranged themselves in a triangle around him. Kaelen was strapped to a chair in the center. Not with chains. But with bands of solidified air that conformed to his body. Impossible to break.Elder Cassius circled him like a predator assessing prey. Up close, their beauty was unsettling. Too perfect. Like a sculpture rather than a person. "Do you know what we are, Kaelen?""The people who murdered my mother."The jovial grandmother, Elder Yumei, laughed. It was a warm, grandmotherly sound that made Kaelen's skin crawl. "Oh, he has spirit! I like this one, Cassius. Can we keep him?""The Voidborn is not a pet, Yumei." The tall, masked Elder, Arcturus, spoke with

The moment the suppression field dropped, the Void Keep transformed from prison to battlefield.Prisoners who hadn't moved in years suddenly exploded into action.Darius Korr in cell 47-B blasted through his transparent walls with a technique that turned his fists into living lightning. Each punch left scorch marks in reality itself.Professor Yuna Seo didn't attack. She creates, summoning barriers of crystallized knowledge around groups of weaker prisoners. Protecting them from the chaos while they oriented themselves.Marcus Chen, the former Enforcer, moved with military precision. Disarming guards and redistributing their weapons to other escapees. Turning rabble into an organized force in seconds.The Enforcers tried to respond. But they were overwhelmed. These weren't random criminals. These were some of the most powerful cultivators the Council ever captured. Held at the edge of death for decades. And now suddenly free.It was a massacre.And it was beautiful.~~~Kaelen absorbe

Darkness.Not the oppressive darkness of the prison's suppression field. Not the cold darkness of Hollow Sickness. This was different. Vast. Peaceful. Infinite. Like floating in the space between stars, where light hasn't yet been born and won't die.He was dead. He knew that instinctively. His heart stopped. His body failed. He pushed too far.But he was also not gone. Somehow, impossibly, his consciousness persisted.Where was he?"Welcome to the Threshold." A voice said. Not the Hollow King. Not the Faceless Sage. But something else. Older. Deeper. "The place between life and death. Matter and void. Existence and absence."A figure coalesced from the darkness. Humanoid but indistinct. Made of starlight and shadow in equal measure. It radiated presence without having definable features."I am the First Voidborn." The figure said."Or rather, I am what remains of her consciousness. Encoded in the Silent Veins themselves. Passed down through every generation. Waiting for one strong en

The Enforcers didn't wait for a response. Morrigan gave a hand signal. The helicopters opened fire.Not with bullets. With cultivation-enhanced weapon. Streams of concentrated elemental energy. Fire,Lightning,Ice. All color-coded by type. Pouring down from the sky like the wrath of gods.The ruins exploded. Warehouses that stood for decades disintegrated in seconds. Concrete and steel turned to molten slag. To frozen shards. To charred ash.The freed prisoners scattered. Some froze in panic. Others moved with combat-trained efficiency. Professor Seo threw up barriers of crystallized knowledge. Translucent walls that absorbed the first wave of attacks but cracked under sustained fire.Kaelen didn't think. He moved.His transformed body responded differently now. Faster. More fluid. Like he wasn't quite bound by normal physics. He blurred across the battlefield. Blood-armor fully manifested. And reached the teenage girl with the tracker wound.She was frozen in shock. Bleeding. About t