The Fading Echo Sect was built on a foundation of memory. Power, in their world, was not merely the circulation of Qi, but the art of “Sculpting.” Cultivators would meditate upon Echo Jade—precious stones that held the psychic residue of past events, creatures, or even geological eras—and from these memories, they would sculpt tangible forms. A disciple might relive the memory of a Sky-Dragon’s flight to manifest wings of wind. An Elder might channel the memory of a volcanic eruption to sculpt a spear of molten rock. The strength of one’s soul, and their connection to a rich personal and ancestral past, determined the clarity and power of their creations. In this grand gallery of remembered glory, Jian Yi was a blank wall.
Found as a boy at the sect’s gates with no name and no memory, he was a void. While others had a “Soul-Trove” of personal and ancestral memories to draw upon, his was empty. They called him Jian Yi, “The First Reflection,” a name steeped in irony, for he reflected nothing. He was the “Blank Slate,” a soul without a past, and therefore, without a future. His cultivation was a joke. When he touched an Echo Jade, he felt nothing. The heroic last stand of General Ping, the serene enlightenment of the First Matriarch, the savage roar of a Primordial Tiger—to him, they were just cold, silent stones.
His home was the Dusting Pavilion, a cavernous library where used Echo Jades were stored. These were jades whose memories had been mostly depleted, leaving behind faint, fractured echoes. His job was to clean their surfaces, to tend to the husks of greatness. He was surrounded by the ghosts of power, a curator of fading legends. Each day, he watched the other disciples practice in the courtyard. Fen Zhao, the Head Disciple, would touch a jade containing the memory of the “Iron-Blood General” and his entire body would be covered in a suit of shimmering, crimson memory-armor, complete with a sculpted Qi-saber. Jian Yi, meanwhile, would feel a phantom ache of emptiness in his chest, a hollow where his own history was supposed to be.
“Still polishing stones, Blank Slate?” Fen Zhao’s voice cut through his thoughts. The Head Disciple stood before him, radiating an aura of condescending power. “Perhaps if you rub hard enough, a memory of a decent cultivator will rub off on you.”
Jian Yi bowed his head. “Senior Brother is wise,” he murmured, his voice flat. Arguing was pointless. He was a flaw in their perfect system, a living refutation of their philosophy.
That night, a new shipment of depleted jades arrived from the “Rift of Sorrows,” a dangerous place where fragments of other, dead worlds sometimes appeared. It was Jian Yi’s job to sort them. Most were dark and inert. But one piece caught his attention. It was a small, ugly shard, veined with black and sharp to the touch. It had been discarded as useless because it held no discernible memory—no creature, no event, no person. When the sect’s Elders had probed it, they found only a chaotic, meaningless energy.
But as Jian Yi held it, he felt something. It was not a memory in the form of a story. It was a feeling. A raw, pure, and overwhelming intent. He felt the crushing gravity of a star a billion times the size of their sun. He felt the thermonuclear rage in its core. He felt its aeons-long life of silent, burning purpose. And then, he felt the final, cataclysmic moment of its collapse—the incalculable agony and the final, defiant, impossible will to burn even as it was being extinguished. It was not a memory of a thing; it was the memory of a thing’s fundamental nature.
A jolt, white-hot and silent, shot up his arm and into his soul. For the first time, the empty room of his “Loom of the Soul” was not empty. It was filled with the blinding light of a dying star. The other cultivators, with their rich Soul-Troves, had no room for such a raw, abstract concept. They looked for stories, for heroes, for forms to copy. Jian Yi’s emptiness, his greatest weakness, had become the perfect vessel for this formless, narrative-less power. His blank canvas could finally hold a color others couldn’t even perceive. He didn’t need to borrow a hero’s memory. He had found a memory of pure, unyielding existence. And in the silent darkness of the pavilion, a tiny spark ignited within the Blank Slate.