Returnee from Earth: Lord of Immortality

The ink of peace, like all inks, eventually fades.

Years passed. The Blooming Path had become a myth to some, a memory to others, and a mystery to most. The world no longer shook with literary warfare, nor did quills glimmer with elemental rage. But while many believed the tale of Lin Feng had ended—closed like a well-thumbed tome left to dust—those who listened closely knew better. For the story whispered still.

It whispered beneath the bark of old ink-trees. It whispered in scrolls with no beginning. It whispered in silences so deep they formed punctuation for the world.

And from within that silence emerged Lin Feng again.

He had changed.

Not aged—time rarely dared claim those who wielded narrative energy with his grace—but deepened. There was a gravity in his gaze now, like a library remembering a thousand lost titles.

He no longer walked among cities. Instead, he traversed what scholars had come to call the White Margins: the uninked lands that bordered known realms, the places where no story had yet found its voice. These were not voids of emptiness, but possibilities—entire regions whose history had yet to be written.

Many feared these margins. Others worshipped them. But only Lin Feng entered them with the intent not to conquer or to claim, but to listen.

And one day, deep within a canyon where sound could not echo, he found the Quill Beyond Silence.

It was not a tool.

It was a being.

Slender and shimmering with ink that dripped upward, the Quill was a sentient echo of the first sentence ever spoken. It pulsed with ideas not yet formed. When Lin Feng touched it, he heard every word he had never dared write. Regrets. Dreams. Versions of himself he had discarded in drafts.

"You are not the first," it told him, its voice a chorus of prefaces.

"But I will be the last," Lin Feng replied.

The Quill did not challenge this. Instead, it asked, "Then write the one story no one else has."

And Lin Feng began.

Not with words.

But with memory.

He wrote of his life on Earth.

Of subway trains and lonely coffees. Of books half-finished and parents he never got to know. Of a love that had once sat beside him on a rain-soaked curb and whispered, "You'll write something great someday."

He wrote of his first death. And his first breath in the Immortal World. Of awe. Of confusion. Of fear masked as courage.

He wrote of power, and how it consumed less like fire and more like applause—sweet, addicting, hollow when gone.

He wrote until the canyons glowed with imagined lights, each syllable forming constellations that never existed in the sky but did in his soul.

And when the final sentence trembled in his hand, the Quill Beyond Silence took it from him.

"This is not your story alone," it said.

Then it vanished.

The White Margins began to ink themselves.

Villages rose from forgotten metaphors. Rivers carved from similes once discarded now flowed with vibrant clarity. People who had never been written into existence now walked, spoke, sang.

Lin Feng did not return to the Blooming Path.

He became it.

Every traveler who wandered too far found an old man beneath a tree, always with a quill and a scrap of parchment. He would not speak. But if you sat beside him long enough, your thoughts would start to write themselves.

Some say it was illusion. Others say it was legacy.

But all agree: the Scribe who once refused to end did, in a way none expected—by giving others the power to begin.

In the farthest stretch of the new realm, etched into the side of a mountain shaped like a closed book, were five words in living ink:

Here stories pause, never end.

To be continued in Chapter Forty-Three – "The Echo of Unwritten Names"