Lin Ye did not wake up.
Not all at once.
Not like someone returning from a dream.
What came back first was the weight.
Not pain—that came later—but the sensation that something enormous was resting on his existence, pressing him toward a narrower place. Breathing didn't hurt, but it required intention. As if air no longer came for free.
During the first few days, no one was sure whether he was conscious.
His eyes remained closed, but sometimes his breathing changed when someone spoke a certain name. Or when Su Yanlin came too close too quickly. Or when, in the distance, the bells of the Upper District rang again.
"It's not a coma," Yan Mo said on the third day. "It's… readjustment."
Lin Ye lay on a platform different from the previous one. No longer gray jade, but a dull stone streaked with irregular white veins. It didn't heal. It isolated. It prevented the world from continuing to correct him while he couldn't resist.
"How long?" Su Yanlin asked, without taking her eyes off Lin Ye.
Her left arm was immobilized by a spiritual harness—not because of a physical injury, but because her qi had suffered a partial collapse during the rupture of the Inverse Pulse Prison. If she forced it, she would lose sensation for months.
Yan Mo slowly shook his head.
"It's not a matter of time," he said. "It's a matter of his body accepting that it can't return to what it was before."
During the first two weeks, Lin Ye had only fragments.
Not dreams.
Not visions.
Remnants.
Moments where the world felt incomplete: a wall without an edge, a word without an ending, a decision that never quite fell into place. Sometimes he felt as if he took a step… and the ground took an extra second to appear.
Other times, the pain arrived late.
Not when something happened, but afterward. As if his body had to consult the world before reacting.
In one of those moments, Lin Ye opened his eyes for the first time.
The ceiling didn't move.
That was a good sign.
"…stay still," said a voice, tired but firm.
Su Yanlin was sitting beside him, her hair tied up carelessly, dark circles beneath her eyes. She didn't smile when she saw him awake. She didn't cry either.
"How long…?" Lin Ye murmured.
"Twenty-two days," she replied. "And don't try to move."
"I wasn't planning…" he coughed, "…to do it fast."
He tried to feel inside himself.
The Threshold did not respond.
Not like before.
It was no longer a living boundary. It was a mark. A place where the world had passed through and left a scar. It didn't hurt… but it was always there, like a silent warning.
"I used it…" he whispered. "Too much."
Su Yanlin nodded.
"Ten seconds," she said. "No one forgets ten seconds like those."
Lin Ye closed his eyes.
"And them?"
"The elder is still alive," she answered. "He walks. He eats. He breathes. But his cultivation is fixed. It neither regresses nor advances. He's… finished."
Lin Ye didn't react.
"Shen Kuang," she continued, "was removed from several routes of influence. Not publicly. But now, every time he gives an order, someone confirms it twice."
That earned a slow exhale.
"Good."
Su Yanlin looked at him.
"You didn't win," she said. "You just avoided losing worse."
"That counts," he replied.
Yan Mo entered the room without announcing himself.
"The Empire registered the event," he said. "Not as an attack. As an incident of extraordinary compensation."
Lin Ye opened his eyes.
"That sounds… serious."
"It is," Yan Mo nodded. "It means that, officially, the balance was altered… and then restored."
"And me?"
Yan Mo held his gaze.
"You're the point where it happened."
In the days that followed, Lin Ye woke and fell back again several times. Each time he tried to mobilize spiritual energy, something closed inside him. Not violently. With refusal.
Until he understood.
It wasn't a lack of strength.
It was a lack of closure.
On the thirty-first day, he managed to sit up on his own.
The movement cost him cold sweat and a dry stab of pain in his back, but he didn't collapse.
"Progress," he muttered, without humor.
"Don't get excited," Su Yanlin said. "That just means the world stopped pushing you."
"So now it ignores me."
"For now."
That same day, in the Middle District, Xu Han smiled as he signed a minor document.
"Just an adjustment," he said. "Nothing personal."
The secondary route that discreetly supplied Yan Mo's refuge was "reorganized." Not cut. Redirected. The flow didn't stop… it became inefficient.
"First warning," Yan Mo murmured as he received the report. "Shen Kuang can't touch you yet. So he moves those who think they're untouchable."
On the forty-fifth day, Lin Ye managed to stand without assistance.
The world took half a second to accept it.
But it did.
"That…" Lin Ye said, breathing deeply. "That counts."
Yan Mo watched him closely.
"What did you feel?"
"That the ground… decided to hold me."
Yan Mo nodded.
"Then your cultivation is still alive," he said. "It just advances now when the world agrees."
Lin Ye smiled, tired.
"I always knew it didn't like me very much."
Somewhere in the Upper District, Ji Ren closed his eyes before an observation tablet.
Lin Ye's name was still there.
Active.
Unstable.
Not eliminated.
Ji Ren closed it.
"Not yet," he murmured. "It's not time yet."
And in Huo'an, as the second month drew to a close, someone weak but well positioned made the mistake of confusing tolerance with impunity.