The ruins of Mourning Vale were exactly as the name promised: silent, cold, and steeped in the kind of grief that did not fade with time. Mist coiled through crumbled pillars, and fractured archways bore the marks of battles that had never been recorded. This place wasn’t mapped. It wasn’t whispered about. The Creed had made sure of that.

  Zhao Wei stood in the heart of the vale, the torn scroll clutched tightly in her hand. The ink had changed again—letters rearranging themselves with each breath she took. This was no ordinary ink. It was reacting to something deeper, older.

  She knelt, placing her hand against a stone slab. The symbols beneath her fingers pulsed once, like a heartbeat. A quiet tremor passed through the earth.

  Behind her, Ashen Fang growled low. “This place reeks of old power.”

  “Good,” Zhao Wei murmured. “We’re close.”

  She pressed the scroll against the stone.

  A ripple tore through the air—not like spirit energy, but like reality itself sighed. Wind exploded outward in a spiraling current, and with it, the stone fractured, splitting open to reveal… nothing.

  No vault. No chamber. Just mist, dense and unnaturally still.

  But then it moved.

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  From within the mist, footsteps.

  Zhao Wei reached for her blade, but froze.

  A figure stepped through.

  Not a memory.

  Not a ghost.

  A man. Real. Breathing. Wind curling around him like a loyal pet.

  His robes were old but unmarred, threaded with symbols of the air element—but none she recognized. His pale eyes caught hers with an unspoken challenge, and a flute hung loosely at his hip.

  He looked like he’d stepped out of an age long lost.

  “…You’re dead,” Zhao Wei said.

  The man smiled faintly. “That’s what they all said about you, General.”

  Ashen Fang moved in front of her, snarling. But Zhao Wei raised a hand.

  “Name,” she demanded.

  He bowed—an old, militaristic gesture she hadn’t seen in years.

  “Li Zephyr. Former wind-walker of the Western Spire. And your scout, before the Spire fell.”

  Her fingers tightened. “You died in the siege.”

  “No,” he said simply. “I was taken into the fracture. And now I’ve walked out of it.”

  Zhao Wei’s heart pounded. The fractures were ancient rifts—tears in the world itself, where memory, time, and essence coiled together like serpents.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  His gaze turned solemn.

  “To finish what we began.”

  He reached into his robe and pulled out a shard—one that matched the torn edge of the scroll she carried. When the pieces came close, they vibrated violently.

  “They tried to destroy it,” Li Zephyr murmured. “But prophecy is stubborn. Just like you.”

  Ashen Fang growled, “You expect us to believe you crawled out of time to help?”

  “No,” Zephyr said. “I expect her to remember.”

  Zhao Wei stared at the man—at the shard—at the way her spirit flared in response to something familiar.

  A face she hadn’t seen since her first life… one that stood beside her when everyone else ran. One she’d mourned, buried, and let go.

  But he was here.

  And now, everything was shifting again.