With the Abbot's permission, Lin Mu was granted access to the Scroll Vault—a place even the monks rarely entered anymore. The heavy ironwood doors creaked open slowly, revealing a vast chamber carved into the very rocks themselves. Dust blanketed most of the scroll shelves like a second skin, and the faint scent of old ink and yellowing parchnt hung in the air like incense.
A monk guided him in, lighting the sun lamps along the ceiling before giving a respectful bow and retreating. "This place hasn't been entered in decades," he said before leaving. "Most of us have not had the ti to read, let alone explore."
Lin Mu stood alone among thousands of scrolls, each one a voice of the past.
He began his search imdiately.
The days blurred into each other, marked only by the flickering of the lamps and the tolling of the monks in the inner chamber. Lin Mu barely left the vault, stopping only to rest or eat. The gravity of the place was ever-present, like a quiet companion pressing down on his shoulders.
For an entire week, he scoured the archives. Scroll after scroll, book after book—he read of sacred chants, ditation thods, body-refinent techniques, and the monastery's rites. But despite all the ink and paper, the truth about the Heart of Gravity remained elusive. It was as if even the monks didn't fully understand what they had built their monastery upon.
Still, he learned fragnts.
The Great Burden Monastery had once been a branch sect of the far more ancient and powerful Immovable Vajra Temple, a bastion of Buddhist cultivation that stood firm even among the chaos of the immortal worlds of ancient tis. Their practices were renowned for combining extre ntal discipline with equally extre physical tempering.
The calamity that befell the Vimana Realm, however, shattered that legacy.
What exactly had happened was not recorded in detail. So scrolls referred to it as "The Shattering Dawn," others as "The Heaven-Cracking Sin." Lin Mu could only infer that it had been apocalyptic. The records said little about the enemy or force that caused it—only that the Immovable Vajra Temple had tried to resist and failed.
A final ergency protocol had been activated: an imnse teleportation array, flinging the surviving monks and disciples across the myriad realms.
The Great Burden Monastery's current residents were rely one of those scattered fragnts.
"We lost too many," one record read in the hand of a forr abbot. "I do not know if the Grand Abbot survived. We do not know where our brothers and sisters landed. The Sutras are incomplete. Our purpose now is survival."
As Lin Mu read those lines, a familiar sensation stirred in his chest—an echo from his own path. A sense of incompletion, of walking a road whose end had been lost to ti.
It was during his final day in the vault that Lin Mu stumbled across an aged bamboo tube tucked in the back of a collapsed shelf. It was bound in golden silk and sealed with an iron bead that bore the sigil of a half-closed eye.
He opened it carefully.
The contents were fragntary, part of a manual written in a mixed language of ancient Buddhist script and Dao Script runes. But Lin Mu's extensive formation training, along with his cultivation insights, allowed him to parse it slowly.
And what he saw… left him breathless.
The scroll described an incomplete body cultivation art called the Golden Dominator Sutra—a counterpart to the Great Burden Sutra. The two were known as the Twin Pillars of the Immovable Vajra Temple.
"Where one endures the weight of all creation, the other walks as a golden sovereign above it," the scroll said.
The Golden Dominator Sutra was a refinent art that involved transmuting the body into a True Gold Vessel, forging the bones, flesh, and even the marrow through a mysterious golden essence that required a catalyst of high Dao affinity.
"True Gold… is not of this world," it read. "Only with the Dominator's Breath can the mortal body rise to challenge the heavens."
And then Lin Mu saw it.
A side note, written hastily by an unknown monk:
"One of the young monks had begun to practice this before we fled. We only had fragnts… he nad it the True Gold Body Forging Art. I pray he survived."
Lin Mu's eyes widened.
He had discovered the technique back in the Xiaofan world, practicing it without knowing its true origin. It had been powerful, a mystery… and now he understood why.
It was a remnant of a shattered lineage. A broken heirloom of a fallen temple.
He closed the scroll slowly, his hands trembling slightly—not from fatigue, but from the weight of inheritance.
The technique he had walked for years was never his by design—but fate had brought it to him nonetheless.
And now… he was standing in the ruins of the temple it ca from.
Outside the vault, the gravity still pressed down with silent vigilance. The monks ditated, sweat beading on their brows. The abbot waited with patience forged by centuries of discipline.
Lin Mu erged from the vault, scroll in hand, and t the old man's gaze.
"I found sothing," he said quietly.
The abbot raised a brow. "Oh?"
Lin Mu held up the scroll. "The Golden Dominator Sutra. Or rather… what's left of it."
Recognition flared in the old monk's eyes. "So that survived…"
"Only just. But more importantly… I've been practicing it, unknowingly. A fragnt of it ca to years ago. It's called the True Gold Body Forging Art."
At this, the abbot inhaled slowly, his composure shaken for the first ti.
"Then… it has returned to us," he said, awe in his voice. "And perhaps… so have you."
Lin Mu tilted his head. "What do you an?"
The abbot stepped forward, placing a weathered hand on his shoulder.
"Perhaps the Sutra found its bearer through fate. Or perhaps… you were always ant to carry the weight of a legacy lost to ti."
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