Lin Ye left the secondary imperial city without an escort and without announcements. The gray plaque hung hidden beneath his robe—not as visible protection, but as tacit acceptance: the Empire knew he was moving, and had decided, for the moment, not to intervene. That absence of explicit control was more unsettling than any open surveillance.
The road he took led him east, following minor trade routes that connected satellite cities with peripheral domains. He had not chosen that direction for convenience or chance, but because the fragmented clock reacted almost imperceptibly every time he looked that way. It was not a clear summons, but a constant dissonance, like background noise that only he could hear.
As he moved farther from the imperial centers, the stability of the environment changed. Not dramatically, but subtly. Maintenance formations were less dense, seals older, and administrative control diluted into the hands of local clans. It was there that the Empire usually detected anomalies first—not because they were born in such places, but because no one had enough power to conceal them.
Lin Ye passed through villages where water clocks marked different hours depending on who observed them. Through markets where merchants argued because a transaction had occurred "before" it was agreed upon. Small faults. Insignificant details to most, but to Lin Ye they were clear signs of a system under strain.
In one of those villages, he stopped longer than expected.
There were no walls or watchtowers, only houses of wood and stone arranged around an irregular square. The atmosphere was calm, almost dull, but the fragmented clock vibrated with gentle insistence, as if something there were out of place—though not in a violent way.
Lin Ye sat at an outdoor table of a tea house and ordered hot water. While he waited, he observed the people. He was not looking for powerful cultivators or strange artifacts. He was looking for mismatches.
He found them in a child.
She could not have been more than ten years old. She was sitting at the edge of the square, drawing shapes in the dirt with a stick. What was strange was not that, but that every time she looked up, the drawing changed slightly, as if it had been altered by someone else. No one seemed to notice.
Lin Ye frowned.
When the girl looked back at her drawing, one of the lines disappeared completely. She tilted her head, confused, and traced it again in the same place… only for a different one to vanish.
The fragmented clock answered with a clear pulse.
It was not a dead instant.
It was an echo.
Lin Ye stood and walked toward the girl with caution. He did not want to provoke anything. He did not want the world to react before he understood what was happening.
"What are you drawing?" he asked softly.
The girl looked up. Her eyes were normal—too normal. There was no gleam of lineage, no trace of spiritual energy.
"My house," she replied. "But it never stays the same."
Lin Ye crouched beside her and looked at the ground. The lines were not random. They formed a coherent but unstable structure, as if they represented different versions of the same place.
"Does it always happen?" he asked.
"For a few days now," the girl said. "Mama says it's the wind."
Lin Ye shook his head slightly.
"It's not the wind."
He focused carefully, without activating anything. He did not steal time. He did not force perception. He only observed. The space around the girl had a faint overlap, as if two spatial trajectories shared the same point without fully merging.
A childish spatial echo.
Rare.
Dangerous.
"Does it hurt when it happens?" he asked.
The girl shook her head.
"I just get dizzy. And sometimes…" she hesitated, "I feel like I've already been here before I arrive."
Lin Ye closed his eyes for a moment.
She was not a conscious bearer.
She was an early fissure.
If the Empire detected her, she would be isolated, studied… or eliminated, depending on how useful she seemed. If a local clan discovered her, it would try to exploit her without understanding the consequences.
"Listen to me," Lin Ye said. "When you feel dizzy, stop drawing. Go to your mother and rest. Don't try to remember things you don't understand."
The girl looked at him with unexpected seriousness.
"Do you get dizzy too?" she asked.
Lin Ye held her gaze.
"All the time."
She nodded, as if that were explanation enough.
Lin Ye stood and left a few coins on the tea house table without touching the hot water. As he walked away, the fragmented clock vibrated with a strange mixture of approval and warning.
He had intervened.
Not actively.
But he had chosen not to report.
That, he understood, was also a political choice.
That night, he stayed at a modest inn on the edge of the village. As he rested, he felt something new: a distant pressure, far away, but clearly directed toward his position. It was not the Empire. It was something less organized, but no less dangerous.
Hunters.
Not the same ones from Khaelor.
Others.
The fragmented clock did not react with alarm, but the central gear turned a fraction faster.
The world had begun to respond to his presence.
Not with direct attacks.
With interest.
Lin Ye opened his eyes in the darkness of the room and looked at the wooden ceiling.
"So this is the real battlefield," he murmured. "Not fronts. Not armies.
"But small decisions.
"Silent.
"Irreversible."
Hundreds of kilometers away, in a tower that appeared on no imperial map, a hooded figure closed a freshly written scroll.
"Confirmed," it said. "The anomaly is moving freely."
Another voice answered from the shadows:
"Do we intervene?"
"Not yet," replied the first. "Let us observe what it breaks… and what it decides not to break."
The board was no longer limited to Empire versus anomaly.
It had entered a new phase.
And Lin Ye, walking alone beneath an apparently stable sky, found himself exactly at its center.