Bai Zixian opened his eyes to crushing pain, his vision blurred. A ringing filled his skull, sharp, insistent. He tried to move his limbs but they refused commands.
Slowly, the pain receded. The ringing faded. His sight cleared.
Jagged cliffs surrounded him, frozen trees clung to their faces, branches heavy with ice that gleamed in light from nowhere he could identify. To the north, mist filled a valley that disappeared into grey nothing.
Bai Zixian pushed himself upright, hands pressing against stone so cold it burned. Fragments of memory surfaced—the reception hall. He'd been there when it happened. A tear in space.
Reality splitting open, exposing something his eyes couldn't properly perceive. He'd gotten close, activating his Memory concept to understand what he was seeing.
His head had throbbed. Then thunder. Then nothing.
Or not quite nothing—his body had moved without his direction, limbs flailing as if someone had severed the connection between thought and motion.
Bai Zixian lay back down on the frozen ground and closed his eyes.
He'd tried this before—using Memory on places rather than objects. Dangerous. Places held too much history. The older the location, the worse the pain.
This place felt ancient.
He activated his concept and directed his intent outward, trying to read the memory of the stone beneath him.
Pain crashed through his skull.
Worse than expected. This place was saturated with memory so dense that even recent events were inaccessible. His concept recoiled, unable to find purchase in the overwhelming flood.
He gasped and released the technique.
For the next several minutes, he tried again—stone, ice, branch. Pain. Nothing.
Finally, he collapsed back onto the ground, his concept exhausted.
Useless. He needed rest, shelter, water. He sat up and listened.
There—faint but present—the sound of water. Waves against stone, somewhere to the east.
He looked around, the environmental conditions were harsh. No visible life beyond the frozen trees. Temperature cold enough that his breath misted despite his divine existence physiology.
But that harshness meant safety. Nothing lived here because nothing could thrive here.
He pushed all other thoughts aside. First priority: shelter.
The cliffs extended in both directions, their faces sheer. The frozen trees clustered in certain areas while leaving others bare. To the north, the mist valley waited—close to the water source he could hear, it was a risk but also an opportunity.
He walked north, moving carefully over ground uneven and treacherous with ice. As he approached the valley's edge, he stopped, mist covered everything beyond, reducing visibility to nothing.
He wouldn't enter it, but staying near gave him access to water while maintaining visibility, the trees would also provide material for shelter.
He approached the nearest frozen tree and drove his fist into its trunk. The wood bent backward easily, brittle from cold. A smile worked into the corners of his mouth—at least Resonance stage had granted enough physical enhancement to make this manageable.
He worked until his hands went numb. Walls of lashed trunks. A roof of woven branches. Barely large enough to lie down in. It wasn't much. But it was something.
As he worked, his mind circled back to information. He couldn't read the memory of this place. Couldn't extract knowledge from objects saturated with history beyond his comprehension.
But what if he didn't need external sources?
"What if his memories worked on himself too? If they could work on objects—and people—surely they'd work on him, could he view his own past?".
He ducked inside his shelter and sat down, activated Memory and directed it inward, toward himself. The shift was immediate and disorienting.
He was viewing himself from outside himself, watching his own body from a third-person vantage as if observing a stranger. His chest tightened—not from the memory, but from his real body's reaction to what he was seeing.
And there was no pain. No throbbing. No overwhelming flood. Just clarity.
Perfect clarity.
This was the first time he'd activated Memory without any pain whatsoever.
But even as relief flooded through him, exhaustion crashed down. The concept itself was draining, even without pain. His mind had reached its limit.
His consciousness flickered, and he collapsed inside his shelter, unconscious before his head hit the ground.