In the stillness of the void, Lu Chen drifted like a leaf caught in a current he could not see.
There was no time. No ground. No direction. Only the echo of his own heartbeat—steady, fading, like the memory of a life that was no longer his.
At first, there was nothing.
Then, light flickered—dim and scattered, like lanterns swaying in a fog. It shimmered across the blackness like reflections on deep water, revealing not space, but memory.
A child's laughter, high and bright, echoed faintly.
He saw himself—young, wide-eyed, barefoot—running through the corridors of an old courtyard house. Ink stains on his fingers, the hem of his robes trailing in the wind.
His small hands reached out, clumsily but earnestly, to hold the gnarled fingers of his grandfather. That weathered grip, always warm, always steady.
A cluttered study unfolded around them. Scrolls stacked high like crooked towers. Chalk-dusted blackboards filled with strange, looping equations beside ancient runes. The air smelled of sandalwood and machine oil.
And then that voice—rough with age, gentle with wisdom.
"The Dao is not to be found, Lu'er. It finds you, when you are ready."
It was more than teaching. It was a lullaby. A tether. A truth.
But the warmth soon gave way to grey.
Rain, unrelenting and cold. Black umbrellas huddled like crows around a pair of wooden caskets. He stood small and alone, the umbrella too big for his young hands, trembling as water slid down his cheeks—tears or rain, he no longer knew.
The memory twisted. His grandfather's cough—dry, rasping, lingering like a bad omen—grew louder. Nights filled with the scent of herbs and old books. Then silence.
An apartment, barren and too quiet. Bowls of instant noodles stacked on the floor. Faint outlines of a whiteboard glowing in the dark. He filled it with formulas. Then erased them. Then filled it again. Days blurred into each other. Time passed, but not life.
Adulthood came not with freedom, but with hunger.
A hunger to understand, to bridge the old and the new. To decode fate. To quantify the unquantifiable. He merged his grandfather's faith with the cold logic of machines, chasing the impossible dream of syncing human thought with higher laws.
Quantum threads. Neural links. Artificial spirit cores.
The idea of a System had obsessed him. A divine program encoded into the soul of the universe. Not just something to believe in—but something to build.
He gave up friends, time, health. All for the chase.
All… except Xiao Li.
Among the blur of days and years, Xiao Li was the one constant. A shadow always nearby, a voice that always answered. The boy with the bamboo sword and wild ideas. The teen who stayed up all night reading forbidden scrolls and teaching Lu Chen to fight with a staff made from broom handles.
His first sparring partner. His only real friend.
Xiao Li, who once took the blame for a broken array so Lu Chen wouldn't be expelled. Who stood beside him through grief, through isolation, through every failure and glimmer of discovery.
His only true bond in a world that never quite welcomed them.
Lu Chen tried to call out—but his throat held no sound.
Still, he felt Xiao Li's absence. Like a phantom limb. Like a promise left unfinished.
Why wasn't he here?
Why couldn't he remember how they parted?
The lights in the void flickered violently now, like an overloaded circuit. Memories collapsed into static. The air trembled.
A low mechanical tone pulsed through the dark.
Then—
"Initializing compatibility scan..."
The voice struck him like cold water. Genderless. Distant. Calm. Neither human nor machine—something between.
"Host consciousness detected."
The void rippled. A pale light pulsed faintly near his chest—right where the jade pendant once rested. The one Xiao Li had given him.
He looked down. There it was. Cracked. Faintly glowing. A simple, familiar memento.
But now, something inside it stirred.
The voice returned.
"Fragment identified. Authority incomplete. Beginning interface construction."
"What... are you?" Lu Chen whispered.
"Who's there?"
There was no reply, only a humming in the air around him. The void began to tremble. Lines of light spiraled from the pendant, forming faint patterns in the air—like circuitry overlaid on the skin of reality.
It wasn't a system he recognized. It wasn't Daoist. Nor was it scientific.
It was something else.
Something older.
Something waiting.
Lu Chen stepped forward, trying to steady his breathing. "Are you... part of the signal?"
The lights pulsed in response.
"Connection... unstable. Searching for compatible consciousness. You are... 87.4% aligned."
"Aligned with what?"
"The Path."
Then silence. The patterns froze midair.
A pause.
As if even the voice wasn't sure what came next.
Lu Chen stared at the glowing lines, heart pounding. Xiao Li was still missing. The world had shattered. He was alone in this endless dark.
And yet—something had found him.
Not a god. Not a ghost.
But a fragment.
A fragment... of what?
And why him?
He didn't know. But deep within, something stirred. A resonance.
Perhaps this was the beginning. Or maybe... the continuation of something much older than he could understand.
To Lu Chen, The Path was never just religion. Never just logic. It was everything between.
His grandfather used to speak of it as if it were a living river—shaped by heaven, but flowing through man. Daoist scrolls described it as Wu Wei, the effortless action, the natural unfolding of all things. In quantum physics, Lu saw its reflection in probabilities collapsing into reality. And in artificial intelligence, he had once dared to replicate it—coding equations that could mimic choice, simulate divinity.
But none of it was complete.
The Path... is not a road laid before you, his grandfather had said once, It is a current. You don't walk it. You align with it.
And now, inside this endless void, Lu began to understand something deeper.
The Path wasn't a moral compass or a singular truth. It was compatibility—with the world, with fate, with whatever force had guided that broken fragment to him.
The 87.4% wasn't a test score.
It was a resonance.
A sign that he had lived, chosen, failed, and endured in ways that made him suitable—not just to wield power, but to continue the evolution of something ancient and forgotten.
In that moment, Lu Chen stopped thinking like a scientist.
He stopped reaching like a disciple.
He started listening—truly listening—to the silence behind the voice, the logic beneath the code, the will hidden inside the fragment.
A ripple.
Then a flicker.
Before him, suspended in the blackness, a familiar shape began to coalesce—smooth edges, faint blue glow. A console. Not unlike the one from the lab, but this one... felt alive. Ancient, yet unexplainably advanced.
A line of text pulsed onto the translucent interface.
"Do you accept FATE?"
There was no cursor. No keyboard. And yet, Lu felt the weight of the question settle in his mind—as though the console wasn't asking with words, but with will.
He paused. Somewhere, a memory of Xiao Li's laughter echoed. Somewhere, his grandfather's voice whispered through the void.
He nodded.
The console flashed.
[FATE ACCEPTED]
The interface shifted.
New panels emerged, hovering like pages unfolding in air:
— Name: Lu Chen
— Compatibility: 87.4%
— System Construct: Initialising...
— Accessing Inherited Path: [Restricted Tier]
— Core Traits:
— Heaven-Thread Insight
— Cognitive Resonance
— Fragmental Bond (Unidentified Origin)
Beneath the last line, a new message began to type itself slowly, each word like a nail into his old world:
"Physical body has been deemed irrecoverable."
"Reconstruction protocol engaged."
"New vessel will be formed. Prepare for rebirth."
Lu's breath caught—not that he needed breath in this place.
But it was happening.
His form, long absent, began to break apart into filaments of light, dissolving into the void like dust caught in starlight. And yet, he felt no pain. Only release.
Then came the final line:
"Do you wish to modify your FATE?"