The path grew strange after the canyon.
The road was lined with shattered spirit stones, as if someone had once tried to pave it with wealth—and failed. The trees thinned, and the sky turned dull gray, even though the sun had not yet set.
Yan Ruo slowed her steps.
"We're close," she said.
"To what?" Lin Yan asked.
She pointed ahead.
"A city that doesn't exist on any map."
---
They arrived by dusk.
Ruined walls rose from the ground like bones, half-swallowed by time. Beyond them sprawled a city of crooked towers and sunken roads, overrun by silence. No birds. No beasts. Just wind, and something else…
**Memory.**
"This place was once called Yemu," Yan Ruo whispered. "A city built by rogue cultivators, all of them discarded, exiled, or hunted."
"Furnaces?" Lin Yan asked.
"Many. But also broken geniuses, crippled heirs, failed alchemists. It was meant to be a sanctuary."
He frowned. "What happened?"
She looked up at the shattered archway over the gate.
"They trusted someone they shouldn't."
---
As they passed into the city, Lin Yan felt it immediately—**residual pain** in the spiritual energy. Like the entire city was haunted by its last breath.
And in the center of the city stood a single structure untouched by rot.
A **temple** carved into a giant black stone, its door sealed with nine burning talismans.
Yan Ruo's voice dropped.
"That's where the truth is hidden."
Lin Yan approached it, his heart pounding.
The talismans glowed faint red. Not hostile. Not sealing something in… but protecting something inside.
He touched the door.
And the flame within him pulsed in recognition.
---
A deep voice echoed in his mind.
> **"You who were branded furnace, cast aside and drained… do you still burn?"**
Lin Yan did not answer.
He simply opened his palm, summoned his flame, and let it roar.
The talismans vanished.
The door opened.
---
Inside the temple was a circular chamber.
On the walls: etched names—hundreds, maybe thousands—of those who had once called this place home.
And at the center… a crystal obelisk.
Floating above it, a single glowing book.
> **"Codex of the Forgotten Vessels."**
Yan Ruo stared at it in silence.
Lin Yan reached toward it—but the moment his fingers brushed the cover, images flooded his mind.
Flashes of other furnaces—boys and girls torn from their families, broken in spirit, some who died, some who escaped.
Some… who changed everything.
He gasped.
And then he saw **her**.
A woman with crimson eyes and silver hair, standing atop a mountain of corpses. Around her neck: a necklace made from the seals of all seven great sects.
Yan Ruo paled.
"You saw her too?" she whispered.
Lin Yan nodded.
"Who is she?"
Yan Ruo's voice was barely audible.
> "They called her the Furnace Queen."
> "And she started a war."