The air burst from Shen Qiyao's lungs in a ragged, shuddering exhale, as if some invisible fist had driven it from his chest. His heart hammered against his ribs—wild, erratic, the frantic tattoo of a man who had raced across endless miles without ever leaving his chair.
And in that suspended instant, he knew.
Not a haunting, drifting like smoke through the cracks of his sanity. Not a curse, woven from the spite of forgotten gods.
No. It was reachingfor him. It was speaking to him. It was trying—desperately, achingly—to bridge the chasm.
A laugh clawed its way up his throat, brittle and unformed, but it shattered before it could escape. What rose in its place was a tangle of impossibilities: disbelief sharp as shattered jade, terror coiling like frost in his veins, awe that bloomed hot and fragile in his core, and something deeper, rawer—a vulnerability he could not name, stripping him bare. His body betrayed him then, trembling from crown to heel, every nerve singing with electric fire.
It's talking to me. It's trying to speak.
The realization thundered through his mind, a silent scream so potent he was certain the very walls of the inn room quivered in sympathy, leaning in to catch its echo.
Qiyao's palm slammed against the scarred wooden table, fingers splaying wide as if to claw purchase from the unyielding grain. The room tilted—or perhaps it was only his world, upended by the weight of revelation. Sweat gathered in a cold line along his spine, seeping through the thin silk of his robe like the first drops of an unforgiving rain. His thoughts spun in a maelstrom, battered by the sheer, unadorned truth of it all.
After nights devoured by silence, where riddles mocked him from the shadows and phantoms slipped through his grasping fingers—after he'd traced endless circles in a labyrinth of whispers, walls closing tighter with every fruitless turn—he had finally grasped the thread.
And that thread... it lived. It pulsed with intent, warm and insistent against the chill of his doubt.
The chamber seemed to hum now, a low vibration threading through the air like the aftershock of distant thunder. Or was it merely the roar of his own blood, pounding in his ears with such ferocity that the night's subtle symphony—the faint, rhythmic chirp of crickets beyond the shutters—faded to oblivion?
He could not move. Dared not. His hand remained pinned to the table's edge, a desperate anchor, for if he released it, the floor might give way, the stars might plummet, and the entire fragile scaffold of his existence would tumble into the void.
A language. The word ignited behind his breastbone, a ember flaring to white-hot life.
He nearly retched it out, a curse hurled at his own presumptuous mind for even daring to cradle such lunacy. Absurd. Deranged beyond measure. And yet... if this was the unraveling of reason, why did the jade talisman at his waist grow icier with every insistent throb of the notion? Why did the preserved petal—delicate as a sigh, cradled in its lacquered box—gleam with such pallid luminescence, as if it had unfurled its petals not in defiance of death, but in quiet affirmation of his whisper?
A quiver raced through his fingertips, unbidden and unrelenting. He curled them into a white-knuckled fist, pressing it hard against his lips to dam the tide of his breath, to force some semblance of order upon the chaos. But order was a fleeting dream. His chest heaved with the storm within—terror and wonder warring like thunderheads over jagged mountain spines, lightning forking between them in brilliant, destructive arcs.
His mind fled to the villagers of Zhuyin, those weathered souls who traced hasty wards in the air whenever the bamboo winds stirred, their faces etched with the lines of inherited dread. Their silences were not born of wisdom, but of fear—eyes averted, voices swallowed, steps quickened past the grove's shadowed fringe. They had never paused to listen. Never summoned the temerity to lean into the unknown.
And then there was Granny Xuemei... her riddles like barbs wrapped in silk, her eyes holding the weight of secrets too vast for a single lifetime. Had she glimpsed this truth long before he stumbled into it? Was that the shadow of pity in her gaze, a quiet elegy for the fool who would court the abyss?
The thought lodged in his throat like a splinter of bone, aching and unyielding.
The lantern on the table flickered then, its flame guttering in a draft that carried no chill—only shadows, twisting across the walls like specters roused from slumber. For a heartbeat, the room itself conspired with him, walls canting inward, air thickening with anticipation, as if the very timbers held their breath: What now, wanderer? What will you forge from this forbidden knowing?
But Qiyao offered no answer. No defiance, no surrender.
He remained there, a statue carved from tremor and resolve, his stare fixed upon the jade's unblinking green and the petal's ethereal pallor. The flute's phantom melody lingered in his skull, a brand seared into the folds of his mind—insistent, unquenchable.
The knowledge was too new, too viciously keen; it sliced at the edges of his composure, threatening to spill him open like overripe fruit. To give it voice now would be to invite the blade deeper, to let the revelation bleed him dry.
So he yielded to the silence instead, letting it wrap around him like a shroud—cool, encompassing, a momentary mercy.
And in that fragile truce, for the first time since his weary feet had crossed Zhuyin's threshold, Shen Qiyao felt the subtle shift: he was no longer the interloper, the stranger adrift in a tide of whispers and wary glances.
Something ancient stirred in the forest's heart—a voice long muted, now rousing to utterance.
And he, against all caution, had inclined his ear.
He had heard.
The night, ever the jealous lover, refused to relinquish its hold.
Even as the flute's last, evanescent note melted into the ether, Shen Qiyao found no solace in repose. Twice he lowered himself to the thin bedding, drawing the quilt up to his chin like a barrier against the encroaching dark—but each attempt crumbled swiftly. His muscles knotted with restless fire, his eyes snapping to the window's lattice as if the melody might slink back on the wings of the next stray breeze, sly and seductive.
He surrendered to motion instead, rising with the creak of floorboards that seemed to echo his unrest.
He paced the room's meager confines, a caged tiger in silk robes, each step a soft groan from the protesting wood. His hands—those traitorous sentinels—clenched behind his back in scholarly poise, then unfurled in futile appeal to the empty air, then plunged into the tangled spill of his hair, tugging as if to uproot the obsession lodged there. The lamp's flame leaped and bowed with his circuits, birthing shadows that stretched like accusing fingers across the walls, clawing toward the ceiling—and still, he prowled, a man ensnared by his own unraveling.
The music had taken root now, a parasite in the cage of his chest, replaying with the merciless precision of a well-rehearsed dirge. Phrase by haunting phrase, it prodded at him—fingers of sound ghosting over his ribs, insistent, impervious to banishment. Dismiss it, he commanded himself, voice a hollow echo in his skull. A mirage born of bone-deep fatigue, nothing more. But such pleas only sharpened the motifs, carving them into his very sinew with exquisite cruelty.
A language.
The word hovered, a specter uninvoked, yet it resonated in the room's stagnant hush—as though the rafters overhead, the scrolls gathering dust on their shelf, had all pricked up ears to his silent heresy, now poised on the precipice of his admission.
He would not summon it. Could not bear the weight of utterance.
Dawn crept in at last, a thief in gray veils, prying slivers of muted light through the shutters' grudging seams. Qiyao had not slept—had scarcely blinked. He slumped against the window's frame, his hair a wild cascade over slumped shoulders, eyes threaded with the crimson of vigil. One hand draped heavy across the jade at his belt, palm drinking in its subdued, wintry pulse—a rhythm that mocked his own faltering beat, as if the stone alone understood the vigil they now shared.
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