The ancient floor tile beneath Lìngxiāo's foot vanished as if exhaled into nothing.
He stepped lightly to the next, his body a study in fluid tension. His robe whispered around him, and the crimson veil that had never left his hair since the temple claimed him stirred in a wind that did not touch the dust. It clung like a vow.
Then, the guqin began to play itself.
The melody was slow, haunting, carved from memory and loss. It did not simply sound — it spoke. A song mourning its own forgotten meaning. Lìngxiāo's ever-present smile turned thoughtful, his head tilting as he listened deeper, trying to catch the ghost in the notes.
The temple floor became a living trap. Tiles yawned open and snapped shut in a random, hungry rhythm. From slots in the walls, blades and axe-heads shot forth — not illusions, but cold, honest steel. It was a gauntlet of lethal intent.
Lìngxiāo did not fight it. He followed it.
He began to move with the music, skipping from one safe tile to the next. His steps were not frantic escapes, but measured, elegant placements — a dance. His hands traced arcs in the air, his body weaving through the deadly symphony with an eerie, purposeful grace. He was not avoiding a trap; he was learning its steps.
From his perch around Lìngxiāo's neck, Mò Qīn's beady eyes darted. He saw it — a flash of red fabric behind a tattered curtain, mirroring their movements. "What new game is this?" the snake grumbled, his dry voice a stark contrast to the melodic peril. "A ghost that speaks through floor puzzles? It seems to be enjoying itself far too much. Can't we do something more dignified than hopscotch with death?"
Lìngxiāo chuckled, the sound almost lost under a sweeping blade he arched his back to avoid. His smile widened, a crescent of genuine intrigue in the gloom. "He isn't just playing, Mò. He's talking with his mouth shut. Watch the tiles I land on. Connect them."
Mò Qīn blinked and focused. As Lìngxiāo's dance accelerated, transforming from a graceful waltz into the frantic, beautiful steps of a desperate cry — a cry the ghost was forcing through his feet — words began to form. Carved into the tiles that did not vanish, glowing with a faint, sorrowful light.
HELP ME
KILL HIM
HE KILLED HIM
KILLED US
KILLED OUR SON
HE MADE ME LIVE IN THIS HELL
IF YOU DON'T I WILL KILL YOU HERE
LIKE THE BRAINLESS ONES
WHERE IS HE?
FIND HIM
YOU WORK FOR ME
NOT THEM
DO AS I SAY
Mò Qīn read the jagged plea aloud, his voice flattening with each horrific line. He looked at Lìngxiāo. "He's fractured. Begging and commanding in the same breath. Who is 'him'? Who is 'he' telling you to kill?"
"That is why this case is a knot, not a blade," Lìngxiāo breathed, spinning under a horizontal axe. He could feel it now — a presence, not cold, but burning with a desperate warmth, hovering just behind his right shoulder. Guiding, pushing, pleading. "We cannot cut it with qi. This… this is the raw heart of him. We must follow its beat."
"And if the heart leads us into a stomach?" Mò Qīn hissed, tension coiling his small body. The lines between right and wrong, between victim and threat, were blurring into a terrifying grey. "What if this is the trap?"
Lìngxiāo's smile softened into something painfully gentle. "All I have ever wanted is for someone to believe in me."
It was his quiet creed. He was the exorcist who danced with monsters, who listened to the unspoken, who tried to heal the wound before severing the specter. He made horror into poetry, not to beautify it, but to understand it.
He made no move to capture the ghost, though it was close enough to touch. He needed its story more than its surrender.
"I do believe in you, Dàozǔ," Mò Qīn insisted, worry sharpening his tone. "But this ghost… it is not wholly evil, nor wholly innocent. Such spirits are the most dangerous. They can change faces faster than you can change your mind."
"I don't need belief that sounds like disbelief," Lìngxiāo answered, his tone final yet not unkind. His path was chosen. He would follow, but not blindly. He would dance, but to his own rhythm within theirs.
Mò Qīn sighed, a tiny, defeated sound. "As you wish."
"Save that tone for when I'm at the edge of death," Lìngxiāo said, the words devoid of emotion, yet heavy with a loneliness he never showed. "At least then it will feel like I truly had a friend."
"Stop speaking like that!" Mò Qīn snapped, fear lending his voice force. "You promised to return in three hours!"
"Only one remains," Lìngxiāo observed, never breaking his fluid motion. "Time is tight. But the story… is fascinating."
The next attack was a scything axe aimed for his throat. It came faster than the others.
"Dàozǔ,LOOK OUT!"
Lìngxiāo dropped, but the evasion was too extreme. He landed sprawled on the treacherous floor — one foot on a stable tile, one hand on another, his head resting on a third. The triangle of safety left his torso suspended over a fourth tile, which had vanished entirely, revealing a square of pure, swallowing darkness beneath him. Unlike the others, this void did not close.
"What an elegant position he's left us in," Mò Qīn whispered, staring up at the crisscrossing axes still carving the air above them.
Then, Lìngxiāo saw it. The six-headed key, hidden within his robes, pulsed with a soft, inner light. And in the same rhythm, something deep within the darkness below answered with a single, corresponding gleam.
A slow, dangerous smile — the kind that held no joy, only ruthless resolve — spread across Lìngxiāo's lips.
"Hold tight, Mò," he whispered.
"Why?"
"Because I'm going to let the temple swallow us."
Mò Qīn's eyes went wide. "You cannot be serious."
But Lìngxiāo was already moving. In one fluid, powerful motion, he pushed off the tiles and dove headfirst into the waiting maw of darkness.
The tile snapped shut above him with a sound like a final sigh. The guqin music ceased. The temple fell into a silence so absolute it was louder than any scream.
*
The slide was not a fall, but a descent — smooth, steep, and endless. Lìngxiāo rode it on the soles of his feet, a dark surf on a stone wave. His small spirit lantern, a captive wisp of light, zipped to his side, casting frantic shadows on the smooth walls rushing past.
His hair streamed behind him like a banner, but the red veil remained, anchored to his crown as if grafted there by grief. The space widened, becoming a vast, subterranean throat.
"This path feels like it has no end," Mò Qīn commented, his voice echoing in the hollow dark.
"Everything has an end," Lìngxiāo replied, his voice calm in the whirl. "Some are simply… deeper than others."
Suddenly, the smooth channel terminated, dropping away into a vertical shaft. Lìngxiāo braced himself against the walls, grinding to a halt at the precipice. He peered down.
His lantern floated obediently over the chasm, illuminating a sight below. Not treasure. Not an exit.
Bones. Piles of them. Some animal, many unmistakably human, tangled with rags of fine, rotting silk.
"A charnel house," Lìngxiāo murmured. "A secret ossuary."
He stepped onto his hovering lantern, and it bore his weight, descending slowly into the pit like a leaf on a still pond. The full horror came into view.
"These were cultivators," he whispered, kneeling beside a skeletal hand still clutching the hilt of a shattered spiritual sword. "Powerful ones, by the remnants of their robes." He touched the frayed silk, its embroidered clan sigil faded but recognizable. A memory, sharp and invasive, pressed against his closed eyelids.
FLASHBACK :
A man in guard's uniform, breathless with panic, kneeling in a grand hall. "Dàozǔ, the town's curses grow stronger by the day! We must act against the lantern-maker clan! They are the source!"
The clan leader on the throne, face etched with weary wisdom, shook his head. "The source is a poison, not a people. The Dàozǔ of the Gùqīn Bāi Chén clan was my friend. His heart was as bright as the lanterns he crafted. Someone is painting a target on his back."
"But the evidence—"
"I have spoken." The leader's hand cut the air, a gesture of finality that was also a dismissal. "Do not let fear make villains of the innocent."
The guard rose, frustration in the set of his shoulders, and left.
GLITCH.
The scene shattered, reforming in this very pit. Fresh corpses in fine robes, eyes wide in final surprise. The same guard from the vision stood at the edge, looking down at his handiwork. Another figure, shrouded in shadow, spoke from the darkness, voice cold as buried iron: "No one who stands in my way will survive. Dispose of them."
The unseen man kicked the closest body into the pit.
END.
Lìngxiāo's eyes flew open. The vision was a fragment, a single bloody piece of a much larger mosaic. But it was clear: a calculated, personal vendetta had been waged against the Gùqīn Bāi Chén clan — the Lantern-Weavers, known as much for their exquisite guqin purification melodies as for the whispered horrors that later consumed them. That vendetta had festered, poisoning the town's very soul, birthing the curse that now wore a red robe.
His thoughts were a storm. Was the ghost the victim? The avenger? Both?
A presence shifted.
Lìngxiāo looked up. A figure in pristine white robes stood at the far end of the bone-strewn chamber, its back to him. It had not been there a moment before.
The six-headed key at his chest flared, hot and urgent against his skin.
Slowly, Lìngxiāo stood. He offered the figure the same ghostly, polite smile he reserved for the dead — a mirror's reflection of emptiness. "Hello? May I ask who you are?"
He took a careful step forward.
The figure twitched, then turned — not fully, just a quarter profile, enough to suggest a jawline, the slope of a shoulder. It was a gesture of unbearable sorrow.
Then, from somewhere deeper in the dark, a child's cry echoed — sharp, terrified, real.
The white-robed figure flinched as if struck, then broke into a sprint, vanishing into a fissure in the wall from whence the cry came.
"Wait!" Lìngxiāo gave chase, his lantern bobbing ahead.
He plunged into the narrow tunnel, the sound of the child's sobs pulling him forward, around a bend, through a curtain of hanging roots—
And into blinding daylight.
He stumbled, not into another chamber, but onto the packed earth outside the temple's western wall. He was back in , standing directly before the compound of Chóng Féng. The transition was so abrupt it stole his breath.
A crowd had gathered. A cheer began to rise.
"Lìngxiāo Kùmsūn!He made it!"
"He's alive!"
The cheer died, strangled in a dozen throats. Excitement curdled into sheer, unadulterated terror on every face.
Chóng Féng, who had watched with dismissive expectation, now looked as if he'd seen his own ghost. His face was bloodless.
It was Chóng Fēi who found his voice first, his words stumbling over disbelief. "That… that robe. Where did you get it? You were not wearing that."
What robe?
Lìngxiāo looked down at himself.
The humble travel-worn clothes he had entered with were gone. He was clad in a robe of rare, luminous white silk — a style said to have vanished in the "Bù Wàng" Era. The one from his vision. But this robe was not pristine. It was painted in blood. Old, dark blood that had soaked the fabric and dried into a grotesque, glittering embroidery, catching the sun like a million tiny crimson crystals. His red veil remained, a violent accent against the ghastly white.
A weight dragged in his hand. He looked down, slowly uncurling his fingers.
Cradled in his palm was a human head. Desiccated, skin like old parchment stretched over bone, partially blackened by fire. It was light as a dried gourd, yet its presence was an anchor of pure horror.
Lìngxiāo's ever-present smile finally froze. His eyes, wide and uncomprehending, lifted from the head to the bloodied silk, then to the petrified crowd.
"What…?" he breathed, the word barely a sound.
"What?!" Mò Qīn echoed faintly from his neck, his small voice shrill with shared shock.
They had followed the ghost's desperate dance, plunged into its secret grave, and emerged wearing its skin and carrying its grief.
But why?
And for whom?
The answers hung in the air, as silent and heavy as the head in his hand.