Lin Ye didn't quicken his pace as he moved deeper into the warehouse district. That would have signaled intent. He walked like someone who knew the area just well enough not to seem lost, but not well enough to seem local. That balance mattered. In cities like this, predators didn't hunt the ones who ran—they hunted the ones who believed they'd escaped.
The warehouses spread out like a lattice of stone blocks and reinforced timber, separated by narrow alleys and inner courtyards where crates, barrels, and remnants of forgotten goods were piled up. There were no visible formations, but Lin Ye could feel them: old, incomplete seals, maintained over generations by merchants more concerned with ordinary theft than with anomalies in the world. To a powerful cultivator, it was an insignificant place. To someone like him, it was terrain full of edges.
The fragmented clock did not vibrate with urgency. That was good. It meant the danger wasn't immediate—only inevitable.
Lin Ye turned a corner and stopped before a half-open wooden door. Inside, the air was colder. Not in temperature, but in the absence of passage. A little-used space always accumulated echoes, and echoes were… useful.
He went in.
The interior of the warehouse was almost empty. A few broken crates, dust built up, a fallen beam at the back. Light slipped through high slats, forming pale columns that didn't quite match the sun's position. Lin Ye walked to the center and stopped.
He closed his eyes.
He did not activate the clock.
He listened.
Not with his ears, but with that strange perception he had acquired after Khaelor. Space remembered many things there: men hauling goods, hurried footsteps, nighttime arguments, minor escapes. It also remembered something more recent—the mark he carried, an artificial fixation trying to anchor his position to the common flow.
"Clumsy…" he murmured.
The House of Ashes wasn't using a divine artifact or a forbidden technique. It was something far more pragmatic: a tracking seal based on spatial consensus. As long as Lin Ye moved along common routes, the mark "knew" where he ought to be. They weren't tracking him—they were tracking the world's expectation of his movement.
That could be broken.
But not with force.
Lin Ye opened his eyes and walked into one of the light columns. He extended his hand—not to touch it, but to measure its edge. There, right where the light blurred, was a minute irregularity. A place where space wasn't sure how to illuminate.
An edge.
Lin Ye drew a deep breath and sat on the floor, his back against a broken crate. If someone came in now, they would see a tired traveler who had decided to rest in the worst possible place.
The fragmented clock surfaced in his awareness.
It did not turn.
It waited.
Lin Ye remembered Kael-Ur's words: don't force—negotiate. He remembered the Still Fire, the resistance to collapse. He remembered the Silent Thunder, the interruption whenever something tried to impose coherence on him. And he remembered spatial memory, that web of past trajectories the world had not yet forgotten.
I'm not going to vanish, he thought. I'm just going to stop matching.
He didn't steal an instant.
He didn't create a new one.
He did something subtler: he shifted expectation.
He allowed space's memory to remember him along two nearly identical trajectories for a brief span. He didn't split. He didn't create a double. He simply let the world hesitate, for one heartbeat, over which of the two versions was correct.
The tracking seal reacted.
Not with alarm— with confusion.
The mark on his chest cooled, then warmed, then lost definition. To any external observer, Lin Ye was still there. But to the tracking mechanism, his position was no longer singular.
Footsteps rang outside.
"In here," a voice said. "He stopped."
The warehouse door flew open. Three figures rushed in, weapons ready, eyes sharp. They were the same hunters, but now their coordination was tighter, more tense. The leader advanced one step and frowned.
"Where…?" he muttered.
Lin Ye was still sitting right in front of them.
But the seal didn't confirm him.
One of the hunters raised a small device—an irregular compass spinning without pointing anywhere.
"He's here," he said. "But also… not."
The Silent Thunder tightened slightly, responding to a binding intent beginning to form.
"Careful," the leader ordered. "Don't strike yet."
Lin Ye lifted his gaze.
"Hello," he said calmly. "Still looking?"
The three flinched—not in fear, but in frustration. The leader forced a tight smile.
"You're cooperative," he said. "That saves us time."
"No," Lin Ye replied. "I'm just tired of running."
The leader took another step forward.
"Come with us. You don't have to suffer. The House of Ashes takes good care of what it captures."
Lin Ye tilted his head a fraction.
"That's what worries me."
The hunter on the left moved first. He extended a hand and activated a gentle sealing technique designed to immobilize without harm. The instant the technique tried to fix Lin Ye as a "target," the Silent Thunder intervened.
It didn't cut the technique.
It cut the intention.
The energy scattered before it could consolidate, as if it had lost its reason to exist. The hunter froze, staring at his own hand.
"What did you do?" he snapped.
"Nothing," Lin Ye said. "You did."
The leader's brow creased.
"Enough," he said. "Use the anchor."
The third hunter produced an object wrapped in dark cloth. When he unwrapped it, he revealed a shard of opaque crystal etched with runes Lin Ye didn't recognize— but the fragmented clock did.
The central gear vibrated violently.
Danger.
That crystal wasn't a weapon. It was a resonator, built to force spatial coherence over a small area—eliminating ambiguity. Exactly the opposite of what Lin Ye needed.
"Don't do that," Lin Ye said honestly.
"Too late," the leader replied.
The resonator was activated.
The air inside the warehouse hardened. Shadows pinned themselves in place. Light stopped wavering. The world, for an instant, decided that only one version of Lin Ye could exist.
The fragmented clock reacted violently.
A minor dead instant formed, screaming to be taken.
Lin Ye clenched his teeth.
If he took it, he would escape.
And he would pay a price.
If he didn't take it, the resonator would pin him— and capture would be immediate.
The Still Fire burned silently within him, damping the collapse. The Silent Thunder vibrated, searching for an intention to cut. Spatial memory tightened, revealing routes that were no longer valid.
Lin Ye made a different choice.
He didn't steal the instant.
He returned it.
He pushed the dead instant into the resonator—not as energy, but as contradiction. The artifact tried to stabilize an area that contained something reality had already discarded.
The crystal cracked.
It didn't explode.
It simply lost coherence. The runes went dark one by one, and the resonator fell to the floor, reduced to a useless object.
Silence.
The hunters stood motionless, unbelieving.
"What… are you?" one of them whispered.
Lin Ye rose.
"Someone you can't keep in a box."
The leader reacted quickly, pulling an emergency talisman.
"Withdraw!" he ordered. "Now!"
But Lin Ye took a step forward.
Not to attack.
To speak.
"Tell the House of Ashes something for me," Lin Ye said, voice steady. "If you mark me again, I won't break the seal."
The leader's eyes narrowed.
"Then what?"
"I'll break the road you use to follow me."
The Silent Thunder crackled softly—not as a threat, but as a statement.
The hunters didn't argue. They triggered the talisman and vanished in a minor distortion, leaving the warehouse silent and a faint smell of burnt energy… without fire.
Lin Ye was alone.
The fragmented clock vibrated once—long, deep.
Pain.
Not immediate, but present. He had pushed a limit. He hadn't stolen time, but he had interacted with something designed to impose order. The price wouldn't be physical.
It would be attention.
Lin Ye breathed in and leaned against the wall. He didn't smile. He didn't feel victorious. He had gained space, not safety.
He left the warehouse through a back door and crossed into the open fields beyond the city. He didn't look back.
Kilometers away, in a chamber coated with black ash, a hooded figure listened to the report in silence.
"The resonator failed," the messenger said. "Not by force. By incompatibility."
The figure tapped the table with a soot-darkened finger.
"Interesting," it murmured. "So he isn't a weapon."
"What do we do?" the messenger asked. "Reinforcements? Another attempt?"
The figure shook its head slowly.
"No," it said. "Not now."
It leaned forward.
"If he keeps breaking roads instead of people… he'll draw things larger than us."
It lifted its gaze, where a gray flame burned without consuming anything.
"Observe," it concluded. "And prepare."
The board had shifted again.
And Lin Ye, walking alone beneath a sky that pretended to be stable, had just proven something neither the Empire nor the hidden houses had anticipated:
He was not easy to capture.
Because the world, little by little, was starting to doubt how to do it.