The Sunken Moon inkstone was delivered, Hao Jie’s parting sneer a fresh, if minor, wound. Elder Fei, apparently, had been mollified. Wen Xuan had received no further summons, no reprimand filtering down through the outer sect hierarchy, which was perhaps the best outcome he could have hoped for. He returned to the Repository, the heavy door groaning shut behind him, sealing him once more within the realm of dust and echoes.

  The vast hall felt different now. The silence wasn't merely an absence of sound; it hummed with a latent potential, a thousand thousand unspoken stories pressed into the objects lining the shelves. The air itself seemed thicker, laden not just with dust, but with the residue of time. Wen Xuan moved through the aisles, his steps softer, his gaze lingering longer on seemingly insignificant items – a tarnished silver locket lying sprung open, a child’s worn wooden toy horse missing a leg, a single, petrified scale shed by some long-dead beast. Before, they were just inventory. Now, they felt like locked diaries.

  His assigned task for the afternoon was less about discovery and more about preservation – or rather, preventing further collapse. Steward Liu, in a rare moment of acknowledging the Repository’s existence beyond its function as a source for obscure errands, had noted the precarious state of a shelving unit in the damp-prone northern section. It held mostly geological samples and petrified flora – items deemed low priority, heavy, and generally uninteresting – but the warped wooden shelves were visibly sagging, threatening to dump their stony contents onto the floor. Wen Xuan’s job was simply to reinforce it, using whatever materials he could find within the Repository itself.

  He located the ailing unit near a wall slick with damp, where the air was perpetually cool and smelled strongly of wet stone and encroaching mould. The wooden shelves, once sturdy hardwood, were dark with moisture, softened and warped into unhappy curves. They groaned audibly under the weight of geodes split open to reveal dull crystals, chunks of unidentifiable ore, and several large, heavy pieces of fossilized wood. One particularly large shelf was supported at a dangerously tilted angle by just such a piece – a thick, pillar-like section of fossilized tree trunk, wedged underneath it like a crude, desperate prop.

  Wen Xuan surveyed the situation with a sigh. Proper repair would require new lumber, skilled carpentry, and likely reinforcing the damp wall itself – resources the Falling Star Sect seemed unwilling or unable to spare for its forgotten archive. His task was essentially to apply a patch, likely involving finding more sturdy debris to shove under the sagging shelf alongside the fossilized wood pillar.

  The pillar itself drew his eye. It was massive, easily reaching his waist in height and thick around as his thigh. Its surface was a dull, stony grey, the texture rough, showing the faint, mineralized grain of the ancient wood it once was. It was coated in centuries of grime and patches of pale green mould flourished in its crevices. It looked immensely heavy, utterly inert, a piece of the deep past repurposed for the mundane task of holding up rocks. It radiated a profound sense of stillness, of time slowed to a geological crawl. There was no discernible Qi signature, no hint of anything beyond its stony, ancient nature. Just a big, old, fossilized log.

  He needed to clean the area first, to see where additional support could be placed. He knelt beside the fossilized pillar, his worn cloth in hand. Dust lay thick around its base, mixed with fallen bits of crystal, splinters from the decaying shelf above, and sticky patches of mould. As he carefully swept the debris away, his shoulder brushed against the pillar’s rough surface. It was cold, damp, unyielding as rock. He continued cleaning, working his way around the base, trying to get a clear view of the floor beneath the sagging shelf.

  The shelf above groaned again, a distinct cracking sound echoing in the quiet hall. Dust and a few small pebbles rained down. Wen Xuan looked up, alarmed. The shelf seemed to be slipping further, its angle increasing. If it gave way entirely, the heavy geological samples could crash down, potentially damaging other artifacts or even injuring him. He needed to stabilize it now, before adding any more props.

  Instinctively, he pressed his shoulder firmly against the fossilized wood pillar, trying to counteract the tilt, while simultaneously reaching with his other hand to wedge a smaller, flat stone he’d spotted nearby under the sagging edge of the wooden shelf. It was an awkward position. He had to put significant weight against the pillar for leverage, his cheek pressed close to its cold, damp surface, his hand straining to manoeuvre the flat stone into the narrow gap.

  His focus narrowed entirely on the task: the resistance of the stone he was trying to wedge, the ominous creaking from the shelf above, the precarious balance. The fossilized wood pillar was just a point of leverage, a tool. He gripped its rough surface tightly with his free hand near the base, needing a better anchor as he pushed the flat stone with all his limited strength.

  The contact wasn't brief. Seconds stretched, marked only by the creak of the straining shelf and his own grunting effort. His palm and shoulder remained pressed hard against the ancient, fossilized wood. He wasn't thinking about the pillar itself, only about preventing the shelf's collapse. He held the position – straining, pressing, gripping the cold, rough surface – for a slow count of ten heartbeats, maybe more, as he finally managed to slide the supporting stone into place.

  It happened not as a sudden jolt, but as a slow, inexorable sinking.

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  The sounds of the Repository – the distant drip of water, the scuttling of unseen insects, the creak of the shelf – didn't just fade; they ceased to have meaning. The feeling wasn't of impact, like the dummy core, but of immense, slow, crushing pressure. It felt as though millennia were collapsing in on him, the weight of mountains pressing down, the profound, unutterable stillness of being buried deep within the earth.

  He wasn't seeing images, but feeling the essence of the wood's transformation. The slow, molecule-by-molecule replacement of organic fibre with mineral. The leaching away of life, replaced by the cold permanence of stone. The crushing weight of sediment accumulating above, layer by patient layer, over epochs. The damp darkness. The utter lack of change or event, a stillness so profound it bordered on non-existence.

  Then, superimposed on that geological timescale, came the fainter, more recent impressions. The jarring upheaval of being unearthed, brought into light and air after aeons of darkness. The rough handling. The ignominy of being wedged under a sagging shelf in a dusty, decaying building. And then, the long, slow centuries of simply being there, an unthinking, unfeeling support. He felt the constant, downward pressure of the shelf above, the weight of the rocks and crystals it held, an unchanging burden borne with the infinite patience of stone. He felt the damp seeping into its stony pores, the dust settling, the faint vibrations of footsteps passing nearby – countless footsteps over generations, none paying it any mind. He felt the slow decay of the Repository around it, a process happening at lightning speed compared to its own transformation, yet still achingly slow from a human perspective.

  His own consciousness felt… compressed, slowed down, overwhelmed by the sheer inertia, the passive endurance of the fossilized wood. It was a 'lapse' not of violence, but of utter, crushing stillness. Time lost its meaning. His sense of self blurred, submerged in the cold, heavy presence of stone that was once wood.

  The thud of the shelf settling firmly onto the flat stone he’d wedged underneath broke the spell. The physical jolt, the completion of his action, severed the involuntary connection.

  Wen Xuan gasped, stumbling away from the pillar, his limbs heavy, unresponsive. The Repository rushed back in, the sounds and smells overwhelming after the profound sensory deprivation of the experience. Nausea churned in his stomach, a dizzying vertigo seizing him as his perception of time snapped back to its normal pace. He felt an immense, bone-deep weariness, as if he himself had borne the weight of that shelf for centuries. His hand, the one that had gripped the pillar’s base, felt numb and cold, the rough texture seemingly imprinted on his palm.

  He leaned against the opposite shelf, breathing heavily, trying to steady himself. His heart pounded with a dull, heavy beat, unlike the frantic fluttering after the dummy core incident. This felt deeper, more pervasive.

  It happened again.

  The realization struck him with the force of a physical blow. This wasn't a one-off hallucination. This wasn't fatigue. Touching that ancient, seemingly mundane piece of fossilized wood, holding it with focused pressure for a prolonged period, had triggered another immersive, involuntary archival experience. Different sensations, different timescale, but undeniably the same phenomenon.

  Fear, cold and sharp, pierced through the lingering disorientation. What was this? A curse? A mutation of his soul? Was he losing his mind? The sect elders spoke of cultivation deviations, of Qi poisoning leading to hallucinations, of demonic influences preying on weak minds. Could this be one of those? The intensity, the sheer reality of the experiences, felt far beyond simple imagination.

  He looked back at the fossilized pillar. It stood impassively, exactly as before, supporting the now slightly more stable shelf. Just a piece of petrified wood. Yet, he knew. He had felt its history, its transformation, its long, silent endurance. He had, for a moment, been the unthinking stone.

  The implications were terrifying. If mundane objects held such echoes, what secrets lay dormant in the truly significant artifacts – the scrolls penned by sect founders, the weapons wielded by legendary cultivators, the strange relics whose origins were completely unknown? The potential for knowledge was staggering, dwarfing anything he could ever hope to achieve through his meagre cultivation. But the danger… the sensory overload, the mental strain, the risk of losing himself in those echoes… seemed equally immense.

  And secrecy was now more critical than ever. Instructor Rui’s well-meaning but dismissive words came back to him. If anyone discovered this… what would they think? Best case, they’d dismiss him as delusional. Worst case… they might see him as possessed, a danger, or perhaps even something to be studied, dissected. His low status, his lack of backing, made him vulnerable. This ability, whatever it was, felt like both a potential key and a death sentence.

  He forced himself to stand upright, pushing away from the shelf. His legs still felt heavy, his mind clouded by the echoes of geological time. He needed to finish his task, to appear normal. He found a few more sturdy-looking pieces of debris – a thick slate slab, another chunk of dense, non-fossilized hardwood – and carefully wedged them under the sagging shelf, reinforcing the support provided by the fossilized pillar. He worked mechanically, his thoughts elsewhere, replaying the crushing stillness, the immense weight of ages.

  As he gathered his cleaning cloth and prepared to move on, his gaze fell again on the faint wear pattern on the floor near Shelf Seven-Theta, the one hidden by the unrelated inkstone. He remembered the faint scent of clean steel near the ancient weapon rack. Isolated incidents? Or pieces of a larger, hidden puzzle within the decaying sect? Now, layered on top of those external observations, was the internal mystery of his own strange connection to the past embedded in objects.

  The Repository no longer felt merely neglected; it felt layered, secretive, almost watchful. Wen Xuan felt a profound sense of unease, but beneath it, inextricably, undeniably, grew the sharp, compelling hook of curiosity. His life as a struggling outer disciple, defined by slow cultivation and empty stomachs, had just become infinitely more complicated, and perhaps, infinitely more dangerous. He took one last look at the fossilized wood pillar, now just a dull grey support in the dim light, and wondered how many other objects in this hall held such deep, silent histories, waiting for an accidental, prolonged touch.