The column of aurora‑green light tore into the heavens like a spear cast by a forgotten god. The qi‑glass trees shuddered violently, their crystalline trunks chiming like an orchestra of breaking ice. Leaves shimmered, turned brittle, and then disintegrated into drifting flecks of silver.
Yanmei's boots skidded across the illuminated ground as they lunged toward Lauri, but the shockwave that radiated from him was not the kind mortals — or even cultivators — could cross easily. It was thick, elastic, almost alive. Every step Yanmei took bent the air around them, bending light itself, as if rejecting their presence.
"Lauri!" Yanmei shouted. Their voice vanished into the storm of qi, swallowed before it reached him.
He floated several meters above the ground, limbs hanging limp, head tilted slightly back. His eyes glowed with that unnatural jade-green light — cold, unblinking, ancient. Auroral strands wrapped around him like serpents made of light, weaving patterns across his skin.
A sigil burned on his chest.
Not a mark he had been given.
A mark that had remembered him.
The grove responded in kind.
Cracks zigzagged across the ground, emanating from his suspended form. The qi‑glass roots beneath the soil vibrated like strings struck by an unseen musician. Some shattered from resonance. Others pulsed as though waking from a long, cold sleep.
Yanmei steadied their stance, pressing a palm against the nearest tree to keep upright.
This is no simple resonance, they thought grimly.
This was something older. Wilder.
Something the world itself remembered with fear.
The tear in the sky — the vast wound that had begun ripping its way through reality — widened. A dark rim formed around its edges, as though shadows themselves had condensed into something tangible.
Yanmei's breath caught.
A colossal silhouette shifted behind the tear.
Not fully visible.
Not fully formed.
But unmistakably aware.
Its eyes — if the two distant, faintly glowing points could be called eyes — drifted downward, scanning the world below with the slow, heavy intelligence of a being that had outlived eras.
A wind howled across the grove, bending the crystal branches, and Yanmei's heart hardened.
"A rift-beast…" they murmured. "But larger than any recorded…"
Yanmei gripped their sword, frost racing along the blade. But even as they lifted it, they knew the truth:
They could not kill what was climbing through that tear.
Not alone.
Not at all.
The world shook.
Lauri's suspended body convulsed, fingers twitching as if some invisible force pulled strings beneath his skin. A faint sound escaped him — not a cry, not a breath, but a whisper of pain carried on the current of qi.
Inside the storm of light, he was not unconscious.
He was not asleep.
He was trapped.
And he saw it.
Not the grove.
Not Yanmei.
Not the tear.
He saw a twisting corridor of aurora and shadow fissuring before him — a place that felt like the inside of a memory he had never lived. Voices echoed through the rift-thread around him, overlapping, layered like centuries speaking at once.
"Temper…"
"Remember…"
"Return…"
"Break…"
Each voice carried a tone — pleading, commanding, threatening — but no face accompanied them.
Then, suddenly, the voices fell silent.
A pair of eyes opened in the darkness before him.
He had seen those eyes once before — in the sauna stones, reflecting the jade-green light before the world split open.
Cold.
Knowing.
Patient.
A voice whispered, neither male nor female, deep as a glacier shifting:
"Northern Candidate… You have crossed the threshold before your fate has ripened."
He could not speak, but something inside him formed the question anyway:
What… do you want?
The voice rumbled, amused.
"It is not what I want. It is what the heavens have forgotten they owe."
The darkness behind the voice quaked, rippling like an ocean beneath a storm.
Outside, Yanmei struggled forward, forcing each step through the pressure wall. Ice bloomed beneath their boots as they anchored themselves with qi.
"LAURI!" Yanmei called again.
His name barely reached him.
Barely.
The voice in the darkness thickened.
"A thread ties you to a realm that denies its own debts. A thread you did not choose."
Mei's face flickered through his mind.
Clear.
Bright.
Whole.
He tried to reach for that memory — for her — but the darkness blocked it like a curtain falling.
"You reach for the wrong destiny."
His chest ached.
He fought to speak.
To breathe.
To not believe.
No… she found me. Her voice reached me.
The light flared around him, a violent jolt of emotion bleeding into the aurora whorls.
The ancient voice paused, then sighed.
"It is always the same with mortals. Always reaching for threads too fragile to bind the truth."
The rift-shadow's silhouette behind the tear in the sky shifted — something colossal lowering itself as if listening for Lauri's answer.
The ground cracked again.
Yanmei hurled themselves against the pressure one final time — sword first — and broke through a fraction of the barrier, staggering toward him.
But the ancient voice eclipsed everything.
"You were not summoned to love, Northern Soul."
A cold pulse struck through him.
"You were summoned to remember."
The aurora light flared violently, throwing Yanmei backwards as the grove screamed under the weight of the awakening.
The colossal creature's shadow leaned closer to the widening tear, sensing its anchor.
And the chapter drove toward its midpoint cliff:
Lauri's eyes snapped open — not jade-green.
But white.
A white so bright and pure Yanmei felt their heartbeat falter.
A white that did not belong to any mortal realm.
A white that remembered things the heavens had long tried to bury.
The white in Lauri's eyes was not light.
It was memory.
Not his memory — but something older, colder, vaster. Yanmei staggered backward at the sight, gripping their sword with both hands. Frost crawled along the blade as their qi surged defensively.
"Lauri…" Yanmei whispered, voice brittle.
The aurora storm twisted into a spiraling cage around him, threads of jade and white battling for dominance. Lightning flickered between the strands — quiet, soft, but carrying a force that made the qi‑glass trees bow as if in reverence.
Above them, the colossal shape behind the sky‑tear shifted again, feeling the change in him.
It lowered its head.
Two massive eyes — each the size of a sauna window — focused on Lauri, unblinking.
The valley seemed to forget how to breathe.
Yanmei forced breath into their lungs. "Lauri! Listen to me! Whatever is inside you — fight it!"
But the voice in the darkness spoke louder than any mortal.
"He does not belong to you."
A shockwave burst outward from Lauri's chest, flattening the grass, shaking the crystalline canopy overhead. Yanmei crossed their arms, grounding themselves with qi to avoid being thrown.
The voice continued — resonant, patient, inevitable.
"He belongs to a debt older than your sect. Older than your heavens."
The grove darkened.
Clouds coiled unnaturally above the tear, spiraling inward like a great, unseen hand closing its fist.
Yanmei spat blood but kept their stance. "If you intend to take him, you will face me."
The ancient voice chuckled.
Not with humor.
With remembrance.
"Tiny frost-blade. You cannot even comprehend what you defend."
A tendril of darkness slid from the tear, long as a river, thin as a shadow. It drifted toward Lauri, tasting the air. Yanmei leapt forward, sword flashing in a crescent arc.
Frost exploded along the ground as the blade met the tendril.
For a fraction of a moment — impossibly — the tendril recoiled.
Yanmei staggered back, breath ragged.
The shadow paused.
Then it twisted, amused.
"Interesting."
More tendrils uncoiled behind the tear, each one writhing like the limbs of a creature half-born into reality.
Yanmei lifted their sword again. "Lauri! If you can hear me — if any part of you remains — anchor yourself! Remember something! Anything!"
Inside the storm, Lauri was drowning.
He stood — no, floated — inside a vast, white expanse. No horizon. No ground. No sky. Just an endless plain of frozen light stretching in all directions.
He felt… nothing.
No pain.
No fear.
No warmth.
Just a hollow coldness that seeped into him, smoothing away the edges of who he was.
His thoughts slowed.
Fragmented.
Disappeared.
He reached for himself and found —
Ice.
White ice.
Pure.
Empty.
Perfect.
Then—
A flicker.
Tiny.
Warm.
Weak.
"…Lauri…"
A voice — trembling, distant — broke through the frost.
His breath hitched.
Mei.
The white plain rippled.
A droplet of color — jade green — fell into it like ink hitting snow.
"—don't fade—"
Mei's voice cracked on the last word, as if she were fighting something far stronger than distance.
Lauri reached for that voice with both hands, with all the shards of himself that remained.
The whiteness resisted.
Fought.
Cracked.
He screamed inwardly, forcing warmth back into his frozen memory. Faces flickered. Moments. The sauna's heat. Finland's northern silence. The aurora dancing above his cabin.
Mei's smile.
His hand closed around the memory like it was the last ember in a dying fire.
And the white world shattered.
The aurora coil around his body exploded outward, ripping apart the storm of qi. Yanmei shielded their face as shards of light tore across the grove.
The colossal shadow behind the tear reared back, startled.
Lauri fell.
Not far — just enough to hit the ground on his knees, gasping.
His eyes — once white — now flared with a swirl of jade and faint aurora blue. His pupils returned, dilated, human.
Alive.
Yanmei rushed to his side. "Lauri—!"
But the ancient voice snarled, the sound shaking reality.
"YOU DEFY THE THREAD."
The tear in the sky convulsed. The colossal shape pressed its limbs through the widening wound. The qi‑glass forest groaned as if each tree felt the pressure of its emergence.
Tendrils lashed downward, aiming for Lauri.
Yanmei shoved him aside and intercepted the first strike. Their sword clanged against a tendril thicker than a ship mast. Frost detonated along the blade's edge — but the shadow didn't stop this time.
It slammed Yanmei backward.
They hit a tree so hard the trunk cracked like crystal struck by a hammer.
"Yanmei!" Lauri struggled to stand, but his legs trembled violently.
Another tendril plunged toward him.
The world slowed.
He could see the shadow's trajectory.
Could feel the cold intention behind it.
But he couldn't move fast enough.
Then—
A sound.
High. Piercing. Clear.
Like a tuning fork struck by a mountain.
The sigil beneath the grove — the one awakened by Lauri — flashed.
A circle of pale green runes spun outward, forming a barrier around him just before the tendril hit. The shadow collided with the protective shell and recoiled, shrieking.
Yanmei coughed blood and stared in shock.
"Your… resonance… it's protecting you."
Lauri felt warmth flood his chest again — not the white coldness, but the softer pulse that always accompanied Mei's voice.
Inside him, the thread trembled — fiercely, stubbornly, refusing the ancient call.
The creature's roar vibrated through the grove.
"YOU CANNOT ESCAPE WHAT YOU ARE OWED!"
The tear split wider, revealing for the first time a portion of the creature's massive form — obsidian scales that absorbed light, ridges shaped like broken halos, a maw lined with jagged teeth that bent inward like a collapsing star.
Lauri stared upward, heart hammering.
"…What am I owed?"
The answer came like thunder:
"YOUR DESTINY."
The tear surged downward — the creature lunging, forcing more of its body through reality.
Yanmei shouted: "LAURI, RUN!"
But Lauri couldn't.
Because in that moment —
in the roar, in the trembling thread, in the collapsing grove —
he felt something impossible:
Mei's voice, trembling through the mark on his chest.
"Don't… let them take you."
The creature lunged.
The forest cracked.
Light swallowed everything.
And Chapter 6 ends as Lauri is caught between two destinies — one ancient, one fragile — while the sky‑tear descends toward him like the mouth of a devouring god.