Snow covered everything in winter.The cliff rose sheer and impossibly high, its upper reaches lost in a churn of cloud and mist, its sides jutting outward like something that had been carved rather than grown. A single vast bridge connected it to the rest of the range — the only way in, the only way out.This was Skypillar Mountain, the burial ground of the Sky Burial Sect, where the dead of the order were laid to rest."Three days now." Beneath the eaves of a rough-thatched hut, sprawled in a weathered old chair, lay a young man dressed in plain white — the look of a scholar who'd wandered somewhere he didn't belong.Silas Marrow turned an old bell over in his hands, muttering to himself out of sheer boredom.He wasn't from this world. He'd arrived in it only three days before.The body he now wore had belonged to a scholar's son from a respectable family in the Ashland, a kingdom that answered to the Sky Burial Sect. That boy had studied at Wren Academy — until his family was hande

The next morning, he woke from meditation with the ghost of a smile already on his face.The improvement wasn't subtle. He could feel his cultivation climbing almost visibly now, hour by hour.He straightened his robes and stepped outside.Someone's coming.A large, broad-shouldered man was walking toward the hut, dressed in an outer disciple's white robe, a hard edge to his expression that suggested he wasn't someone to cross carelessly."You're Silas Marrow?" Bram Hollis stopped in front of him, face cold."That's right." Silas offered a small bow, expression carefully harmless. "Have you brought a body, brother?""I'm staying," Bram said, biting down visibly on something ruder, though his tone stayed clipped and formal despite himself."Go on, then." Before Silas could ask anything further, Bram tossed him a bell. "Corpse Bell. Yours is worn out — take this one, keep it somewhere visible, or tie it to your belt. When it rings, there's a body waiting."Silas turned the bell over in

Five uneventful days passed. Silas spent them cultivating, inching steadily toward the fourth stage of Qi training.He was in no rush to actually build the spirit-gathering array the Formation Peak disciples had left in his hands he had neither the spirit stones nor the raw materials to construct it properly, and figured it made more sense to break into the mid-stage of cultivation first and worry about formations later.Bram, for his part, spent those five days sulking — though not over Silas. He had bigger concerns.The Outer Sect Grand Tournament was coming.Nothing on Sky Burial Mountain drew a crowd quite like it. Beyond simply crowning the strongest outer disciple, the tournament offered something far more valuable: its top three finishers were promoted directly into the inner sect.Ordinarily, earning a place among the inner disciples meant grinding all the way to the seventh stage of Qi training — a benchmark that sounded modest and was anything but. Most disciples with real t

The next day, Silas found Bram's body not far from where the phoenix crown had been laid to rest.He wasn't surprised. If anything, he'd half expected it.Bram, in his final hours, had likely believed himself blessed convinced that a true disciple baring his soul to two strangers meant something like friendship.Silas understood it differently. Evander hadn't wanted friends. He'd wanted someone, anyone, to unload thirty years of grief onto before it crushed him from the inside.Had Bram been of equal standing, none of this would have mattered. But he wasn't, and he'd made the fatal mistake of believing a story like that came free of consequence.Evander was a true disciple heir to the sect itself. Secrets belonging to men like that weren't meant for outer disciples to carry.If Silas had lingered as long as Bram had, there would have been two bodies waiting for him this morning instead of one. That was precisely why he'd excused himself the moment the story began and, notably, why he'

Three nights later, once he'd squared things with Gus, Silas set out for Sky Burial Mountain proper.His conversion to the Green Lotus Method had gone smoothly over the past few days, and his spiritual reserves had more than doubled as a result.Even with that boost, his low-grade root still capped his overall pace steady progress, but slower than he'd like.Which left him with one option: brave the market and buy what he needed, both to finally set up a proper spirit-gathering array and to begin experimenting with alchemy.The Market sat on a broad shelf of flat ground partway up Sky Burial Mountain the only trading hub in the entire sect. Outer disciple or true disciple, everyone came here eventually, and everyone found what they needed.Silas arrived disguised black robe, a green fox mask and found the street already lit and crowded despite the hour.Cultivators didn't keep conventional schedules; day and night blurred together for most of them, which meant the market never really