They didn't walk out of the Rot Maw.
They were taken.
It happened in an instant.
One moment, Lu Tian stood at the crumbling edge of the scar dome, Yan Xue beside him, bloodied but alive. The Hollow Binding Sutra still hummed against his wrist, its invisible thread coiled like a sleeping curse.
Then the ground beneath them vanished.
Not crumbled. Not collapsed.
Vanished, like a trapdoor pulled by a forgotten command.
And they fell.
No sensation of air. No sense of time. Just light, white and endless, until it broke.
They landed in silence.
Grass cushioned their fall. Wind moved around them, cool and slow. The air didn't carry the rot of Qi-corrupted caverns or the stink of sect wards. It was clean. Alive.
They were in a forest.
But not just any forest.
The trees here rose like giants, trunks wider than houses, leaves so high they vanished into clouds. Roots wove like rivers through the ground. Each step on the soil released traces of untouched spiritual energy, raw and unrefined.
Yan Xue sat up first, coughing. "What the hell just happened?"
Lu Tian didn't answer.
He was already looking around, eyes scanning every shadow, every hill, every tree.
Then he said it.
Voice low. Hollow.
"I know this place."
She froze. "You've been here before?"
"No." His eyes didn't leave the horizon. "I've read about it."
He stood, brushing soil from his robe.
"This is the Southern Divide. One of the Fivefold World's sealed quadrants."
Yan Xue's eyes narrowed. "The what?"
Lu Tian finally turned to her.
"This world… it isn't a single land. It's split into five massive regions, each isolated by time, distance, or law. The Crimson Soul Sect lives in the Central Spine. The other four were locked away after the Collapse War."
Yan Xue's voice dropped. "And this one?"
"The Southern Divide." He looked up at the sky, where faint golden lines shimmered beyond the clouds. "Cut off from the Central Spine by a fifty-year temporal veil."
She blinked. "Fifty years?"
He nodded.
"If we tried to walk back, it wouldn't matter. We're five decades out of phase. The world we left behind won't even realize we're missing until we're already dust."
Silence fell.
Only the sound of wind moving through leaves.
Finally, Yan Xue broke it.
"So… what do we do now?"
Lu Tian looked around again. Not with panic.
With purpose.
"We get stronger."
"Strong enough to cross time?"
He smiled faintly. It didn't reach his eyes.
"Strong enough that when the veil thins, and the Crimson Soul Sect opens its eyes to the storm…"
"We're the thing standing in it."
---
They moved.
Carefully, deliberately.
The forest was too quiet to trust.
This wasn't untouched land.
This was sealed land, abandoned not because it was forgotten, but because it was too dangerous to remember.
They passed ruins draped in moss, shattered statues with melted eyes, bones half-buried in the roots of trees. Everything smelled ancient. Nothing felt dead.
They camped beneath a half-hollow tree that could've housed a village.
Night came quickly here.
And with it, whispers.
Not ghosts.
Not monsters.
The forest whispered.
Words half-formed. Memories not theirs.
Yan Xue slept fitfully.
Lu Tian didn't sleep at all.
He sat with the Sutra thread wrapped around his finger, watching it shift faintly in the starlight. He still hadn't used it.
But he knew he would.
Soon.
Because in this place, survival wouldn't be clean.
They had entered a forgotten land, separated from their enemies by time and distance.
But they weren't alone.
And power had a way of finding those who had nothing left to lose.
By morning, the forest had already changed.
The air was thicker. Not with fog or poison, but with something harder to name. A kind of pressure that slid beneath the skin and settled in the bones. Birds chirped in strange rhythms. The trees creaked even when there was no wind. It wasn't just a place to pass through. The Southern Divide was watching.
Lu Tian led the way, moving through the undergrowth like he had lived here for years. He hadn't, of course, but the novel had described pieces of this region. He remembered the landmarks. The warnings. The names of places that had swallowed entire sect scouting teams and never returned their bones. What he didn't remember was how many of those places were real and how many were stories.
Behind him, Yan Xue moved slower than usual. Her face was pale, sweat collecting along her collarbone. She had wrapped her ribs tightly in spirit gauze, but Lu Tian could see the cracks beneath her control. Her Qi was recovering, but not fast enough. The fight at the Sect, the Hollow Sutra activation, the collapse of the Rot Maw, it was catching up.
She didn't complain. Not even once.
Which is why Lu Tian stopped them first.
They reached a grove around noon. The trees here were massive, and the soil was darker than the rest of the forest, almost red. Lu Tian paused, eyes narrowing.
The bark on the trees was too smooth. The branches didn't sway with the wind. And the silence around them was complete. No insects. No animals. Not even the crackle of leaves underfoot.
Yan Xue noticed it too.
"This place is wrong."
Lu Tian didn't speak.
He turned to the nearest tree and knelt, touching the soil.
Warm.
He lifted his hand.
The dirt smelled like iron.
Then a whisper came, soft as breath.
"Tian…"
He froze.
The voice wasn't his. It wasn't Yan Xue's either.
It was his sister's.
He stood slowly. Looked around. The trees were whispering. Not in noise, but in memory. Mimicking voices from inside their minds. Echoing the things they thought they had forgotten.
Yan Xue stepped back.
"They're drinkers," she said. "Blood-root trees. They draw in your pain. Make it real. Feed on the reaction."
Lu Tian had heard of them. Semi-sentient forest creatures grown from the experiments of ancient alchemists. Left behind after the Fivefold War. They didn't move. They didn't roar. They just waited.
And then they fed.
One tree twitched.
Its bark peeled open like wet lips, revealing a hollow groove inside. Within that hollow was a face. His mother's. Her eyes were open. Her mouth hung slack. A loop of rope hung around her neck, swaying.
Lu Tian took a step back.
His Spiral flared with heat.
He could feel the pain rising again. The memory was real enough to bleed. If he let it grow, if he fed it, the trees would react.
They wouldn't just show pain.
They would attack through it.
Yan Xue gasped behind him.
He turned.
She was staring at a different tree.
Not her family. Not her past.
She was staring at herself.
Her body, hanging limp from a spirit pike. Her own voice echoing back, whispering how weak she had been. How she deserved it.
Lu Tian didn't think.
He reached out and activated the Hollow Binding Sutra.
The thread of memory unraveled from his chest, gliding through the air like black silk, and pierced Yan Xue's back.
She staggered once, then went still.
The memory froze.
The trees recoiled.
Something hissed. Leaves curled. Roots pulled back.
The vision shattered.
And in its place, a ring of blood dripped from the trees. Their hunger had been turned aside. Temporarily satisfied.
But the cost had been paid.
Yan Xue slumped to the ground, breathing hard. Her eyes wide.
"What did you…?"
Lu Tian sat beside her.
"I bound it to you," he said. "The memory. The pain. For now."
Her face twisted with something he couldn't read. Not anger. Not fear.
Just disbelief.
"You gave it to me?"
"You would've broken."
"I'm not a child."
"No," he said. "You're bleeding."
She didn't speak again for a long time.
The forest grew quiet once more.
And the Hollow Binding thread coiled slowly back into Lu Tian's wrist, glowing slightly brighter now. Stronger.
Because it had tasted blood.
And memory.
And for the first time, it had taken something that wasn't his.
Lu Tian didn't regret it.
But he didn't feel right either.
He looked at his hands.
And wondered how many more people he would have to scar in order to survive this world.