Jin Mu did not close the door for a long time after she left.
He stood in the threshold, listening to the wind hissing through the rafters. For an instant, he imagined he could still feel her presence—cold as the first snowfall.
His heartbeat was loud in his ears. A ragged, hollow rhythm.
When he finally turned back into the room, he felt lighter. No relief—just a brittle clarity that had followed him since he awoke in this second chance.
He had saved her. But nothing in that small triumph would absolve what came next.
By the hour of the Rat, the refectory had emptied, and the lanterns guttered in their brass sconces. Jin Mu unrolled the lacquered scroll he had hidden beneath his sleeping mat.
It was old, the parchment brittle as autumn leaves. A single crimson seal marked the header: The Seventeen Convergences of the Black Emperor.
He traced the characters with one fingertip.
This was no common manual. Not the cleaned and diluted instructions the Concord distributed to new disciples. This was the unredacted text—an artifact from the first exiles who had shaped the Path in defiance of every orthodoxy.
He had found it once before. In another life.
And he had watched it burn when the inquisitors came.
If they discover this, he thought, I will not survive the accusation.
He could feel the old fear rising in his chest, bitter as bile.
But he unrolled it further.
Because no power worth having ever came without risk.
The first diagrams were simple—spirals intersecting a network of nodes. But as he read, the symbols grew stranger, the geometry more alien.
He stopped at the seventh page.
A single line of cramped script had been inked in the margin, as if the last scribe had hesitated before erasing it:
When the Sign of Thirteen is seen, the False Heir will awaken.
Jin's breath stilled.
He knew that phrase. He had heard it whispered by dying men in the smoldering ruins of the Ash Pass.
The False Heir.
So it begins again, he thought, a shiver running the length of his spine.
If the omens were true, then everything he had done to change the future might prove nothing.
He set the scroll aside and pressed the heel of his hand against his brow.
The fear came then—sharp, insistent.
The dread that he was no more than an insect trapped under glass, that the world itself was conspiring to return him to the same futile ruin.
He had no time for panic.
With slow deliberation, he took up the iron-etched talisman he had prepared. He drew the chalk lines in the center of the floor, careful to align them to the four cardinal points.
The air grew heavy as he worked—thick with the scent of scorched salt and something more elusive, like old parchment left to rot.
When the circle was complete, he knelt at its heart.
He closed his eyes and began the incantation.
"Black Emperor who abides in the fracture of every covenant…"
The words scraped his throat raw.
"…grant me vision unmarred by hope."
With each phrase, the sigils pulsed a dim red. The shadows lengthened, flowing in unnatural directions.
He felt his mind strain under the pressure—like a pane of glass bowed near breaking.
But he did not relent.
As the ritual deepened, the world dissolved around him.
He felt the memories unspool—unbidden, unwanted.
The night Shen Yan had driven a blade through his heart.
The moment he realized no one would mourn him.
The countless hours he had wasted believing redemption could be earned.
The images came faster, bleeding into each other: Yiran's contemptuous gaze; the ruin of the pass; the tower where he had died, alone.
He clenched his jaw until it hurt.
This is the price.
The sigils burned brighter. A low, droning vibration filled the air, felt rather than heard.
"I accept the fracture," he whispered.
And in that moment, he saw something he had never glimpsed before:
A single eye, vast as the sky, opening in the darkness beyond all thought.
Its gaze found him.
And he knew with cold certainty that no act of will would ever fully sever the past.
When the vision receded, he was slumped against the floorboards, trembling.
Sweat soaked his robe. The taste of iron flooded his mouth.
His pulse rattled in his throat, too fast, too shallow.
He forced himself upright, one hand braced on the wall.
In the faint gleam of the dying sigils, he saw his reflection in the polished steel of his dagger.
He looked hollow.
A revenant, animating a body that no longer believed in its own worth.
What am I becoming?
The question lingered as he scrubbed the blood from his upper lip.
When he could stand, he began the exercises.
Not the approved forms, but the ones the elders forbade—movements that blurred the boundary between channeling and distortion.
First Convergence: draw the breath of living aether, but refuse its intention.
Second: invert the currents. Let rejection become acceptance.
Third: hollow the vessel.
Each progression was an act of war against the self.
As his pulse slowed, he felt something shift inside—like a door unbarred.
A slow, cold tide of power rose in his veins.
Not exultation.
Not triumph.
Only the sensation that he was treading the edge of a blade.
This will be the death of me, he thought. But so will inaction.
When the exercises ended, he sank back to the floor.
He did not bother to clean away the chalk or the scorched residue.
Instead, he stared up at the beams and spoke aloud to no one.
"If I am damned, let it be for something more than survival."
His voice was steady.
But inside, the fear still waited—implacable as the tide.
And somewhere beyond the horizon, he knew the False Heir was stirring.