The Moon in the Mirror, the Flower in the Water

Outside Qingyun Town stood a dry well, and in the well was a moon.

When Su Chen was seven, someone pushed him into it. He didn’t die from the fall. Instead, he met a boy in white who had been imprisoned there for three thousand years.

The boy said his name was Jingyue, and that he was the first mirror created when Heaven and Earth began.

He also said Su Chen was a flower, one that should have bloomed in the middle of the water.

The mirror reflects all things; the flower gives rise to myriad forms.

Then the Heavenly Dao was born, and it would not tolerate anything different.

The mirror was sealed in the dry well, while the flower was shattered into countless fragments and scattered across the Myriad Worlds.

Su Chen believed Jingyue.

He fought his way from Qingyun Town to the ancient road among the stars, swept aside the prodigies of his generation, and shattered the supreme rulers of forbidden zones with his fists.

He thought he was walking the path of a strong cultivator defying Heaven and changing his fate.

He thought the man who taught him to cultivate and drew him into the game was his master, his comrade-in-arms.

Not until he stood before the Monument of Mortal Life Through the Ages did he see the most important moment of his life:

The well, when he was seven.

There was no Jingyue.

Only a white flower.

It turned out that everyone he had ever trusted had been lying to him from the very beginning.

It turned out that he himself was that flower.

And the one who promised to break the Heavenly Dao alongside him…

Had never intended to let him live to see the end.

The moon in the mirror was false, and the flower in the water was false too.

Yet it was these falsehoods that ensnared the truest person in the world.

To cultivate the Dao, one must first cultivate the heart.

After a lifetime of cultivation, all he had cultivated in the end was one question:

Who am I?