The smell hit Rin before the village came into view—an acrid blend of rot, mildew, and something unnaturally sweet, like overripe fruit left to ferment in the sun. He crested the ridge overlooking the valley, where sagging thatched roofs clung to crumbling homes and narrow dirt paths twisted like veins through the plague-wracked hamlet. Mist clung to the earth as if mourning it, and no birds sang overhead. The sun refused to shine here.
He descended slowly, wary of the stillness. Too still.
The village of Wei's Hollow had no guards, no dogs barking at the scent of an outsider. The wind scraped hollowly through broken wind chimes. Doors hung ajar. Rice paddies overflowed with blackened water and bloated stalks. And yet… he could feel the pulse of souls, a humming beneath reality, quiet and disjointed.
They were alive.
And yet they weren't.
He entered the square where a shrine once stood, now collapsed inward, its offering bowls filled with dry blood. Villagers shuffled about with vacant eyes and brittle smiles, movements too fluid to be natural. They greeted him with gestures of shallow hospitality—an old man offered tea that no longer steamed; a woman handed him a flower wilted beyond recognition, her face locked in a smile that didn't reach her eyes.
They were too calm.
They were already dead.
Rin's breath misted though the air was warm. His Death Sense writhed against something intangible. These villagers had died long ago—but their spirits remained tethered. This place pulsed with a death that hadn't finished dying. Something deeper than flesh. A loop, coiled around the soul.
And then night fell.
The transformation was slow, but it came like the turning of a page.
One moment the villagers sat around cooking pots, babbling to each other with dreamlike delight. The next, their flesh unraveled. Skin cracked. Eyes sank. Their movements became puppet-like, heads twitching at odd angles as bones creaked with every step.
Corpses.
Not zombies—no rage or hunger in their gazes.
Just sorrow.
Rin stood in the middle of it, unmoving, as the village became a theatre of the dead. He watched them reenact the same routines: a mother rocking a skeletal child; a merchant sweeping dust from a shattered stall. Over and over. A dream of life stitched over an unspoken rot.
He whispered, "Dream Deaths."
He had only ever read rumors in the forbidden fragments of jade slips salvaged from heretical archives: deaths that didn't end. Deaths suspended in stasis. Deaths turned into prisons by the hands of immortals, locking mortals into loops of placid ignorance.
A subclass of death. A cruel mercy.
He moved with purpose now, deeper into the village, seeking the source. The villagers did not attack, nor acknowledge his presence beyond polite gestures. He passed one who nodded and offered a bowl filled with maggots. Rin didn't flinch.
The air thickened toward the edge of the village, where the ground curved downward into a hollow field surrounded by dead trees whose bark peeled like scorched skin. At its center stood a house. Unremarkable. Cracked tiles. Wooden beams.
But it pulsed.
There was something inside. A thread too frail to sever from the outside.
A soul still dreaming.
Rin entered the home without knocking. Dust coated every surface in pale grey sheets, yet the hearth was warm. A child's laughter echoed faintly, dissonant with the dead air. He followed the sound upstairs, where a small bed sat beneath a paper lantern.
A child lay curled on the bed—hair tangled, face sunken, but still breathing in shallow pulses.
Eyes closed. Yet not peaceful.
He screamed silently in his sleep.
His soul was not at rest. Not reborn. Not gone. Caught in a fracture between life and death.
A spirit fragment.
Rin knelt beside the bed, placing his hand upon the boy's forehead. The flesh was cold. But the soul beneath it burned.
He inhaled deeply and closed his own eyes. Let his consciousness fall—not into meditation, but into descent. Down through the shell of the world, into the liminal space where dreams grew teeth.
Into the loop.
The world rippled.
Rin opened his eyes to the dream.
He stood in a replica of Wei's Hollow—but whole, beautiful. Laughter filled the streets. Children ran with ribbons trailing behind them. The villagers were young and hale, their faces bright with joy. The scent of bread wafted through the air.
But something was wrong.
The sky never changed.
The wind blew the same gust every three seconds. The same bird circled overhead, never landing. Time repeated in cycles, too perfect to be real.
The boy sat on a wooden stool outside the bakery, smiling as his mother handed him a steamed bun. He took a bite. Chewed. Swallowed.
Then, again.
And again.
Looped.
Unaware of the fracture.
Rin approached and knelt beside the child. "You're dreaming," he said softly.
The boy blinked. "No I'm not. You're dreaming."
He had no name here—only the illusion of one.
Rin frowned. "Do you remember dying?"
The child's eyes flickered. Just for a second. A twitch of awareness. Then gone.
The illusion repaired itself.
Rin placed his hand over the child's heart. "I'm sorry."
And he tore the loop.
The sky shattered like glass, falling in shards of starlight. Villagers screamed—not in terror, but in agony as their forms unraveled into threads of spirit and rot. The bakery collapsed into dust. Fire erupted from the earth as the dream dissolved into the truth of death.
The boy screamed as his eyes widened. "Mama—!"
There was no mother.
Only silence and ruin.
Rin held the boy's spirit close as the dream-world died around them. The weight of unspent death, of years unlived, of fear buried beneath false peace, surged into Rin's soul.
It burned like cold fire.
He refined it.
The Dream Death twisted, struggled, and was drawn inward—tamed, broken, and assimilated into his Death Core. The essence it yielded was like no death he had ever consumed: languid, quiet, potent in its stillness. It pulsed with the power of dormancy—the death that waits, that lingers just beneath consciousness.
Dormant Death Qi.
It settled into the threads of his being like embers buried under ash.
He opened his eyes.
He stood once more in the ruined house. The boy's body no longer breathed. The skin had grown translucent, the soul unshackled. Rin laid the corpse to rest, closing the boy's eyes with a gentle touch. The air was cleaner somehow—lighter. The loop was gone.
But the village…
It remained.
The others were still trapped in their dream-deaths. Still caught in loops not of their own making. To sever them all would take days—maybe weeks. Rin's hands twitched with the weight of the decision.
He stood in the town square. The sun was rising again. Or rather, the illusion of it. The villagers walked, talked, laughed. Puppets of mercy.
Created by cruelty.
He thought of the immortal who had once claimed this land. The scroll fragment he'd read long ago whispered of a failed Dao: Slumbering Mercy, a philosophy that death need not be painful if mortals never realized they had died. A failed experiment by an immortal whose name had been erased by the heavens.
Not for failure. But for defiance.
Mercy that sought to spare mortals pain by chaining them in dreams.
No enlightenment was ever born from stagnation.
Rin watched a man bow to a ghost that no longer responded. Watched a child chase a spinning top that would never fall.
"I could free them," he murmured.
He could enter each loop. Sever each dream. Absorb each death.
But he did not move.
He had refined enough—for now. The child was gone. The rest… would continue their sleep.
He turned away.
Was it cruelty? Or mercy?
The distinction no longer mattered to him.
He understood now. To save a soul or to consume it—it was a difference of intent, not action. Both led to refinement. Both led to growth.
Rin Xie walked out of the village with Dormant Death Qi coursing through his veins. It lingered beneath his skin, quiet and coiled, waiting for a technique that did not yet exist. A death that had never been awakened.
He would forge it.
Behind him, the village of Wei's Hollow continued to dream.
And corpses smiled beneath a false sun.
To be continued…