The Forsaken Disciple: Rise of the Immortal Emperor

Chapter 2: The Broken Jade Pendant (Part III)

There was no amusement in his voice. Only weariness. Only the bitter emptiness of someone who had been pushed too far, too many times, and no longer knew how to explain himself even to his own heart.

“Protecting a broken pendant...” he murmured.

His gaze lifted to the empty forest, where Zhao Feng and the others had vanished. “...when I cannot even protect myself.”

His voice faded into the stillness. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the jade grew warm.

Chen froze.

The heat spread slowly through his palm, not sharp enough to burn and not wild enough to frighten. It was gentle. Deep. Almost intimate, as though some ancient presence had reached out and touched him with careful recognition.

His heartbeat began to pound. The largest fragment rose from his hand. Chen’s breath caught. Then a second fragment lifted into the air. Then a third.

Within moments, every shattered piece had begun to float. He stumbled backward, staring. “What is—”

He never finished.

Golden threads spilled out from the fragments, fine as silk and bright as dawnlight, weaving themselves through the air in dazzling arcs.

The broken pieces began to revolve around him in widening circles. Slowly at first, then faster and faster.

The surrounding spiritual qi trembled as if the mountain itself had inhaled sharply. Fallen leaves rose from the ground despite the absence of wind.

The ancient trees shivered, their trunks creaking in protest. Behind Chen, the broken statue began to hum with a low, resonant vibration that he felt in his bones more than he heard with his ears.

Then the pressure came.

It descended without warning, vast and invisible, smothering the mountain beneath a presence so old and immense that Chen’s knees nearly buckled beneath it.

He lifted his head. The sky above had darkened. Clouds gathered from every direction, dense and heavy, swallowing the light of dawn.

And yet somewhere in the distance, beyond the ancestral mountain, the Azure Heaven Sect remained quiet and undisturbed. No alarm was raised. No elder came running. No disciple looked up in shock.

It was as if the mountain had sealed itself away from the rest of the world, as if this place no longer belonged to the same heaven and earth.

The circling fragments flashed brighter. At last, the golden threads converged, but not to repair the pendant. Instead, they plunged into the stone beneath Chen’s feet.

A vast formation erupted outward in a blaze of molten gold.

Symbols ignited one after another across the cracked ground, flowing beneath him like rivers of living fire. They spread in intricate patterns too profound to be mortal script, too ancient to belong to the present age, and too beautiful to be mistaken for anything made by human hands.

Chen stared down at them, his mind reeling. “What... is this?”

A voice answered him. It did not come from the trees. It did not come from the clouds above. It rose from inside him.

From somewhere deeper than his heartbeat, deeper than bone, deeper than soul.

The voice was ancient beyond comprehension, majestic beyond measure, and so lonely that hearing it felt like standing beneath the ruins of a dead world. “After ten thousand years...”

The mountain fell utterly still. The wind stopped. The trees stopped swaying. Even the drifting leaves seemed to hang motionless in the air.

For a single impossible instant, it felt as though time itself had halted. Then the voice spoke again. “...a descendant has finally come.”

Chen’s pupils shrank. Every hair on his body stood on end. “W-Who are you?”

No answer came. What came instead was far worse. Memories crashed into him, not his own. He saw an ocean split from horizon to horizon beneath the fall of a single sword. He saw mountain ranges rise into the heavens as though the earth itself had been commanded to kneel.

He saw immortals prostrating themselves before a figure wreathed in golden radiance, a figure whose face remained hidden because no mortal eye could bear to look upon it.

He saw stars raining from the sky. He saw worlds burning. He saw an endless battlefield at the edge of existence, where gods and monsters had fallen in numbers too vast to count.

And at the center of it all, he saw a colossal gate, Ancient Sealed Watching. Then everything vanished. Darkness swallowed the vision whole.

Chen screamed.

Pain exploded through his head with such violence that it felt as though countless blades were being driven into every corner of his consciousness. He clutched his skull and dropped to his knees, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

The golden formation beneath him blazed even brighter.

Cracks tore through the surrounding stone. Behind him, the ruined statue trembled. Then, with agonizing slowness, it bowed.

The movement was slight, so slight that anyone else might have mistaken it for settling rubble, but Chen saw it.

The ancient ruin had lowered itself toward him, not in collapse but in acknowledgment. At that same moment, the shattered jade fragments began to dissolve.

They did not turn to dust. They became light. Countless motes of golden radiance drifted free and then surged toward Chen’s chest.

One after another, relentless, inevitable, like rivers rushing home to the sea.

“No—” Chen reached for them on instinct, but his hand passed through empty air. The light ignored his resistance. It entered his body effortlessly.

The warmth spread through him at once, through every vein, every bone, every breath. It flooded into places inside him he had never known were empty.

Then the final fragment vanished. The pendant was gone. Completely, nothing remained in his hand. The pressure disappeared.

The clouds overhead thinned. The golden formation dimmed and then faded from the earth as though it had never existed. The wind returned. The birds began to sing again.

The mountain resumed its ordinary face with terrifying ease, as if all the impossible things that had just occurred had been hidden beneath the surface of the world all along.

Only Chen remained kneeling on the cracked stone, shaking, breathless, barely able to keep his eyes open.

His vision blurred. The forest tilted sideways. “What...”

His voice was a broken whisper now. “...is happening to me...?”

His heartbeat slowed, not with peace, but with exhaustion.

But this exhaustion did not come from bruised flesh or battered limbs. It rose from someplace far deeper, someplace he had no words for, his consciousness, his spirit and His soul.

Darkness crept inward from the edges of his sight.

Just before it consumed him entirely, one final whisper sounded in the deepest part of his mind. “Find the Primordial Immortal Scripture...”

The voice paused.

This time, the silence that followed was colder than fear. “...before they find you.”

A final spark of alarm flashed through Chen’s fading awareness. “They...?”

No answer came. His body collapsed forward onto the cold stone, and then he knew nothing.

High above the forgotten mountain, beyond the curtain of clouds and hidden from every eye in the Azure Heaven Sect, a pair of ancient golden eyes slowly opened.

Those eyes gazed downward, piercing stone, forest, distance, and fate itself, until they found the lone, unmoving figure beside the ruined statue.

They watched him in silence. Then, for the first time in ten thousand years, they smiled.