The official report took less than an hour to finalise.
"Subterranean chamber of uncertain origin.""Possible pre-dynastic human activity.""Further investigation pending approval."
Words neat and orderly, filed into a system that existed to make the unknown manageable.
Chen Yu read the summary twice and closed the tablet without comment.
The expedition was suspended indefinitely.
That decision came from above, delivered through layers of authority that neither explained nor invited questions. The injured researcher was evacuated. Equipment was packed. Temporary seals were placed over the collapsed passage, reinforced with enough material to discourage curiosity—but not enough to erase it.
By dusk, the Qinling forest looked no different than it had the day before.
Only the people who had entered it knew better.
They camped that night several kilometres from the collapse site. Fires were lit, meals prepared, and routines followed with the exaggerated normalcy of people trying to convince themselves that nothing had changed.
Chen Yu sat slightly apart from the others, reviewing sensor data.
There were gaps.
Not the obvious kind—no red error flags or corrupted files—but subtle inconsistencies. Time stamps that lagged by fractions of a second. Environmental readings that smoothed themselves unnaturally, as if corrected after the fact.
He highlighted one such anomaly, then another.
A pattern began to emerge.
Not centred on the tunnel.
Centred on the chamber.
Centred on the altar.
Chen Yu paused, fingers hovering over the screen.
He closed the data without saving his notes.
Some instincts were not meant to be acted on immediately.
Across the fire, Li Wei laughed a little too loudly at a joke Chen Yu hadn't heard. Others joined in, the sound brittle. Someone poured another drink.
"Creepy place," a junior researcher muttered. "Didn't like it down there."
"The place was fine," someone else replied quickly. "Just old stone."
Chen Yu watched the flames dance. Their movement felt… slower than it should have been. Not enough to alarm, just enough to register.
He blinked.
The sensation passed.
That night, sleep came in fragments.
Chen Yu dreamed of stone—not collapsing, not crushing, but folding inward like layers of thought. He saw lines etched into darkness, shifting positions when he wasn't looking directly at them. There was no fear in the dream, only a steady sense of expectancy.
As if something was waiting to see what he would do next.
He woke before dawn, the pressure behind his eyes faint but unmistakable.
The expedition returned to base two days later.
Life resumed its shape.
Chen Yu returned to his apartment, a compact unit overlooking a tiered residential sector. The city hummed below, orderly and bright. Deliveries arrived on schedule. Notifications stacked neatly. The world, at least on the surface, had not noticed anything amiss.
He showered, changed, and sat at his desk.
For the first time since the expedition, he pulled up his personal archive.
Years of reading filled the screen—comparative mythology, early human ritual sites, abandoned cosmologies dismissed as superstition. He navigated instinctively, opening texts he hadn't thought about in years.
Not looking for answers.
Looking for alignment.
Certain passages felt closer than they should have.
Descriptions of structures built without gods in mind. Sites meant not for worship, but for stabilization. Old stories where heaven was distant, silent, or irrelevant.
Human efforts, not divine gifts.
Chen Yu leaned back, rubbing his temples.
The pressure intensified briefly, then eased.
His wrist device chimed.
A message request—from Li Wei.
You free this weekend?
Chen Yu stared at the text for a moment longer than necessary before replying.
Yes.
The meeting took place at a quiet tea house far from research districts.
Li Wei looked tired. Not physically—his posture was as sharp as ever—but something in his expression had dulled.
"You felt it too," Li Wei said after a few minutes, voice low.
Chen Yu did not answer immediately.
"Felt what?" he asked instead.
Li Wei exhaled sharply. "Don't do that."
A silence stretched between them.
"The chamber," Li Wei continued. "The equipment failure. The way the readings… corrected themselves." He tapped the table once. "And the altar. You stood there like you were listening."
"I was observing," Chen Yu replied.
"That's worse."
Chen Yu met his gaze calmly. "Are you planning to file a supplemental report?"
Li Wei shook his head. "I tried. It got rejected before it even entered review."
Another pause.
"They don't want us back there," Li Wei said quietly.
Chen Yu considered that.
"Do you?" he asked.
Li Wei hesitated. "I don't know."
Chen Yu nodded. It was an honest answer.
That evening, alone again, Chen Yu opened a blank document.
He began sketching—not writing. Diagrams. Ratios. Spatial relationships. He recreated the chamber from memory, placing the altar not at the center, but at the convergence of several unseen axes.
When he finished, he stared at the shape.
It was incomplete.
Something was missing.
He slept poorly again.
On the third night, he woke to the sensation of movement—not in the room, but within himself. The pressure behind his eyes sharpened into something closer to tension.
He sat up.
For a brief moment, the darkness of his room seemed layered, as if depth had been added where none should exist. Lines faintly suggested themselves—angles, distances, alignments.
Then the lights flicked on automatically, and the world flattened back into normality.
Chen Yu breathed out slowly.
He did not record the incident.
Over the following days, coincidences accumulated.
He overheard conversations that referenced the Qinling Range unexpectedly. News feeds mentioned geological anomalies nearby, framed vaguely, without detail. A research forum he followed quietly archived an entire discussion thread on "non-ritual stone structures."
Each event, on its own, meant nothing.
Together, they formed a suggestion.
The mountain had not been forgotten.
It had been deferred.
On the sixth day after the expedition, Chen Yu made his decision.
He packed lightly. No official equipment. No scanners. Only essentials.
When questioned by the automated transit system, he selected a recreational hiking permit.
The request was approved without delay.
As the transport carried him back toward the preservation zone, Chen Yu watched the landscape change through the window—city dissolving into forest, structure yielding to terrain.
The pressure behind his eyes steadied, no longer intrusive.
Almost… anticipatory.
He did not know what awaited him beneath the Qinling stone.
He did not name it.
But he understood one thing with growing clarity:
Whatever lay hidden in that chamber had not responded to curiosity.
It had responded to restraint.
And this time, Chen Yu intended to listen.
End of Chapter 2