BENEATH HEAVENS GAZE

Chapter 7 – The Immortal Who Left No Name

The village of Shui’an sat cradled between rivers, its fields once golden with spirit grain. But now, rot clung to the roots, and the water no longer sang. Children coughed. The elders sat in silence. No beast approached.

The sky above the village had grown dark, even during the day.

It began two weeks ago—when a crack opened in the old temple ruins. Something unseen had poured from it. Not a beast. Not a ghost. But a scent, like burnt bones and rusted Qi.

They prayed to wandering cultivators, begged sect disciples traveling the roads.

But none came.

And now, the children had begun vanishing.

---

Chen Fi stood beneath a broken shrine tree at the village’s edge. His robes were plain. His hair tied loosely. He said nothing to the villagers. They didn’t see him arrive.

He stood there at dusk as the last light faded. He listened to the earth breathe beneath the rot. And then, quietly, he stepped toward the center of the miasma.

No one stopped him.

No one could.

---

Beneath the ruined temple, hidden deep underground, a nest had formed.

The Rot-Will Larva, a parasitic wraith born from failed demonic cultivators, had rooted itself in the earth, drawing pain and Qi from the living above. Its form pulsed like a heart made of ash and screaming mouths.

As Chen Fi entered, the Larva screamed in twenty tongues at once.

He lifted his hand.

Did not speak.

Did not summon fire.

He merely closed his fingers slowly.

The wraith’s cries were swallowed. The nest twisted violently—and then collapsed in on itself, crumbling into grains of salt and smoke.

A breeze passed through the temple. Warm. Pure.

Above, the clouds broke.

The villagers emerged from their homes, blinking at the stars for the first time in weeks.

The children returned—each one waking from nightmares with no memory of pain.

And no one saw who had come.

No footprint remained.

No aura lingered.

Only an old man who had arrived in the morning to sell herbs claimed anything unusual.

“I saw a man,” he said. “Face like still water. He walked into the darkness. Then the wind changed.”

---

Back in the forest clearing, Liun waited beside the fire pit, keeping the tea warm just as he liked it.

Chen Fi returned just before dawn, robes unstained, eyes distant.

“You were gone a long time,” she said.

“Was I?”

She watched him carefully. “Something happened.”

He nodded. “A shadow was removed.”

“Just like that?”

Chen Fi sat beneath the pine and drank in silence.

Then, far off, across three provinces and a hundred stories—a rumor began to spread.

Of a man with no name.

Who walked through evil as if it were mist.

Who needed no sword, and left no trace.

Some said he was a god. Others, a forgotten ancestor spirit.

But all agreed on one thing:

He never spoke his name.

---

Meanwhile, in the inner halls of the Black Flare Sect, the Shadow Crows returned with strange reports.

“A village in Shui’an healed overnight.”

“No spiritual residue.”

“No signs of sect work.”

“Just wind.”

Sect Master Weng Zu frowned. “A cultivator?”

“We cannot say. The Dao in that region now bends unnaturally. Even time… wavers.”

Another elder murmured, “The Ghost of Voidcrest…”

But Weng Zu looked beyond the map—toward the place where no name was written.

And said, “No ghost. Something worse.”