The journey to Shuxian took three days. Three nights of quiet tension and ghost-haunted silence.

  By the time the trio stood before the ruined gates, the sky had turned the color of old bruises, gray, heavy with storms not born from clouds. Bai stopped short, scrolls hugged to his chest like talismans, while Feng Ren’s usual sarcasm had dissolved into wary silence.

  Zhao Wei stood before the crumbled archway, her hand resting lightly on the hilt of her blade. The ruins before them looked like they had been carved out of time itself. Giant stone lions lay toppled and broken, ivy strangling their once-majestic forms. Pillars leaned like drunks, and every surface was etched with script too old to be spoken aloud.

  "Looks abandoned," Bai offered, voice cracking. “Definitely cursed.”

  Feng Ren chuckled dryly. “Your genius never ceases.”

  Zhao Wei stepped forward.

  And the gates groaned open without a touch.

  The stone didn’t crack or crumble, it shifted, as though recognizing her. Dust spiraled upward in lazy, serpentine swirls. Bai made a whimpering noise and scurried behind Feng Ren.

  “You did say this place was sacred once, right?” she asked without turning.

  Feng Ren nodded. “A spirit-temple from before the War of Sundering. People say it was built to hold… something. But no one agrees on what.”

  Zhao Wei crossed the threshold. “We’ll ask the walls.”

  Inside, the air changed.

  It was not just colder, it was older. Every breath felt like it belonged to someone else. Echoes chased footsteps, and light refused to settle. The grand hall was choked in rubble and roots, but even decay couldn’t hide its former grandeur. A shattered altar stood at the center, covered in symbols that twisted when looked at too long.

  Bai moved carefully, taking rubbings and notes. “This place wasn’t just for worship,” he whispered. “It was a seal. I can see it in the layering. These glyphs weren’t made to honor the spirits. They were made to contain one.”

  Zhao Wei ran her fingers over one of the deeper carvings. A jagged spiral, familiar. Wrong.

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  She knew this symbol.

  It had been carved onto her cell wall in the moments before her execution.

  Her pulse quickened.

  “Someone’s been here before,” she muttered.

  Feng Ren tilted his head. “You think it was the Creed?”

  “No,” she said. “It was me. Or... Wei Ning.”

  The realization hit like thunder: She had sealed something here, long ago. Or helped to. And her return had triggered its stirrings.

  Then came the whisper.

  Not spoken aloud, but breathed into the bones.

  “You are not whole, child.

  The shard remembers you.”

  Zhao Wei turned too fast, blade half-drawn but saw nothing. Still, the mark at her wrist burned black.

  The glyphs on the altar pulsed dimly. One by one, they cracked.

  Bai cried out, falling back as light shot from the fissures. “That’s not supposed to happen!”

  Stone split like skin beneath a knife.

  A shadow surged forth not massive, not monstrous but shaped like a robed figure with no face. Its edges bled like smoke. It hovered before the altar, silent.

  Zhao Wei stepped forward.

  It bowed.

  Not to Bai. Not to Feng Ren.

  But to her.

  “Name yourself,” Zhao Wei demanded, voice level.

  “I am the Keeper of the Shard,” the shadow intoned, its voice layered in echoes. “I watched as you betrayed the pact. I watched as you died for it.

  And now… you wear the wound.”

  Zhao Wei narrowed her eyes. “The Void mark.”

  “No. The price. The wound is older than the mark. Older than you. But it has chosen you again.”

  The ground shook. More stone collapsed in the distance.

  Feng Ren drew his dagger. “Zhao Wei, what the hell is it talking about?”

  Zhao Wei’s memories spun images of war rooms, lost cities, a blade she once plunged into someone who screamed like the world was ending. A pact made to stop something far worse.

  She spoke slowly, the words tasting like prophecy. “This place sealed a fragment of Void. I… I was part of the group that bound it. I thought we destroyed it.”

  The Keeper tilted its head. “You cannot destroy hunger.

  You can only bury it… until it finds another host.”

  Bai whispered, pale-faced. “You’re saying it’s in her?”

  “No,” Zhao Wei answered for it. “It’s becoming me.”

  The Keeper floated closer. “You have three choices, vessel.

  Unlock the shard and consume it, become what you fear.

  Leave it sealed, and allow it to consume you from within.

  Or pass it to another… and damn them in your place.”_

  Feng Ren cursed under his breath. “You’re not doing any of those.”

  But Zhao Wei was already stepping forward.

  This power, this curse, it wasn’t an enemy. Not fully. Not anymore. It was hers, because she was the only one who could shape it into something else. Something dangerous. Something free.

  “I choose the fourth path,” she said.

  The Keeper paused.

  “There is no fourth.”

  “There is now,” she said. “I don’t consume the shard. I don’t seal it. I wield it. And I make it remember me. Not the other way around.”

  The altar burst into light, gold and black entwining, spiraling upward like twin dragons in the air. The glyphs rearranged themselves, pulsing as they shifted to match her heartbeat.

  Zhao Wei stepped into the storm of symbols.

  The world cracked open.

  And when it closed again, she stood at the center, eyes blazing like dusk before apocalypse. Hair drifting as if underwater, her blade now etched with a spiral none of them could read.

  Bai just stared. “We’re so screwed.”

  Feng Ren smiled grimly. “No. They are.”