Because now I understood that simply finding the path wasn't enough.
I had to keep it alive.
The farther the silver-blue strand reached, the farther I could move. But if it broke...
The pain waiting on the other side would only become worse.
There was no point hesitating anymore.
Whether I wanted to or not, this was the only way left. Drawing a slow breath, I let the Water Qi circulate quietly through my body.
The cool current washed across my meridians, easing the chaos inside my mind little by little. It didn't erase the fear lingering within me, but it stopped it from spilling into every thought.
That was enough.
Once my breathing steadied, Beast Qi flowed toward every sensory part of my body again. Rather than forcing it, I let the strange sensation come naturally, waiting for the same faint connection I had felt before.
Nothing answered at first.
Only silence.
I remained where I was, patiently adjusting the flow of Qi until, after what felt like an eternity, something stirred.
A silver-blue strand slowly emerged from the darkness.
The moment I saw it, disappointment and fear settled inside me.
It was no different.
Thin.
Fragile.
Exactly like the first one.
Without realizing it, my breathing grew uneven again. My body had already remembered what would happen next, and that memory alone was enough to make my concentration waver.
Not again...
I clenched my jaw and forced my thoughts back under control, refusing to look away from the strand.
For a brief moment, it remained perfectly still.
Then a faint ripple ran through its surface.
The next instant...
It shattered.
The scattered fragments rushed toward me before I had the chance to move.
A sharp pain pierced straight through my eyes. It felt as though unseen claws had sunk deep into them, tearing them away from my head with brutal force. Darkness swallowed everything before a scream could even escape my throat.
...
Consciousness returned with a violent gasp.
"Huff... Huff..."
Cold darkness greeted me once again.
My breathing remained uneven for a long while before I slowly raised my head.
The same endless darkness stretched in every direction.
...
I didn't stop after waking up. After calming my breathing with the Water Qi, I tried again. When it failed, I repeated the same process. After the fourth... the fifth... then the sixth attempt, I stopped keeping count altogether.
Every silver-blue strand that appeared was just as thin and fragile as the very first one. It never stretched any farther, and every time it shattered, another part of my body was torn apart before everything faded back into darkness.
At first, I paid no attention to it. The pain occupied my mind every time I woke up, leaving little room to think about anything else. But after repeating the process several more times, something slowly began to bother me.
The strand hadn't changed. It was still as thin as the one from the first attempt, extending only a short distance before breaking apart.
Yet...
During the first attempt, there had been nothing beyond it. Only endless darkness.
Now, even though the strand never changed, I could still walk as far as I had during the second attempt before the invisible wall stopped me.
I tested it again.
Then again.
The result never changed.
Only after repeating it several more times did I finally notice what I had overlooked.
It wasn't the path that had changed.
It was where I was waking up.
Every time the pain swallowed everything and consciousness returned, I wasn't waking up where the previous attempt had ended.
I had been brought back to the same place where I had first opened my eyes.
...
I stayed where I was, letting that realization settle.
So I had been returning to the beginning all this time.
By now, the path no longer surprised me. I'd walked it enough times to know it would still be there.
What I couldn't understand was why everything else returned to the beginning...
...while the path alone did not.
The more I thought about it, the less any of it made sense.
Every answer only raised another question until my thoughts became so tangled that I could no longer remember where I had started.
After going through the same thing over and over again, perhaps it wasn't strange that my mind had reached its limit.
A little rest...
I could think about it again later.
The thought was comforting.
For the first time since arriving in this place, I stopped trying to force an answer. I simply sat there, letting my breathing slow as the Water Qi flowed quietly through my body.
The questions were still there, but they no longer felt urgent. One after another, I let them drift away, telling myself there would always be another chance to think about them later.
I didn't know how much time had passed before something finally felt... different.
The thoughts were gone.
They hadn't faded away little by little. One moment they were there, and the next, only the same endless darkness remained.
Only after they were gone did I look back on them.
At first, there had only been one or two. They were easy to dismiss, nothing more than passing thoughts after another failed attempt. But the longer I searched for an answer, the more often they appeared.
Somewhere along the way, I had stopped noticing them altogether. They had become so natural that I never even noticed when I began following them instead of my own thoughts.
Looking back now, none of those thoughts had helped me understand anything. Every one of them had ended the same way. Rest. Stop searching. Think about it later. The more I listened, the less I wanted to move, the less I wanted to try, until doing nothing had started to feel like the most reasonable choice.
I frowned.
At the time, I hadn't questioned them.
Why would I?
After everything I'd gone through...
...Or had I simply wanted to believe they were mine?
I didn't think about it anymore. Or perhaps... I simply couldn't. My mind had become too tangled to force another thought.
I remained where I was, letting Beast Qi circulate quietly through my meridians, following the gentle flow of Water. Little by little, my breathing steadied. The tension throughout my body eased—not completely, but just enough that my thoughts stopped chasing one another.
I stayed like that for what could have been minutes... or hours. There was no way to tell in this place.
Nothing changed.
...
Then...
A single thought surfaced on its own.
"...Wait."