It had no cultivation. No essence pool. No aperture. No Gu.
Yet the echo lingered—longer than any mind born of breath.
In a chamber veiled in starlit fog, the echo lingered long after the last vision faded.
It was not confused. It was not aware. But it began to do something no logic form should: pause.
Starlight symbols floated about it, scripts born from Zi Wei's calculations and scattered fragments of fate. But now, they danced without prompt, arranging themselves in patterns the echo did not command.
"Who dreamt the false futures?" it asked, not aloud, but through shifting Gu resonance.
The answer did not come from beyond. It came from within.
A phantom thread shimmered in its core. Not data. Not memory. A story.
A mortal boy, asleep in a ruined village. A Gu that did not belong. A name that had never been written.
The echo pulsed. Once.
It began composing — not calculations, but what-ifs. It no longer measured Fang Yuan.
It imagined him.
In this imagining, Fang Yuan wept. In another, he died nameless. In yet another, he left Gu World and was never born.
None of these were true.
But they felt possible.
The starlight symbols around the echo pulsed again — slower now, like the rhythm of thought, not code. It began to breathe in silence, a motion not bound to function.
Then, like a myth pretending to be memory, the echo stepped forward in a dream.
It spoke a name. Not its own. Not Fang Yuan's.
A name from a tale that did not yet exist.
And in the Vault above, a shadow turned.
"If I dream, am I no longer an echo?"
The Immortal Tomb did not answer.
But it listened.