The rain hit first thin at first, then heavy, like needles stabbing the earth.

  Zhao Wei stood in the clearing just beyond Zhaoling, barefoot in the mud, hair slicked to her skin, listening.

  Not for birdsong. That had vanished.

  Not for insects. The air had gone too still for that.

  But for breath.

  For movement.

  For the sound of death wearing a heartbeat.

  Behind her, Bai whispered, “You feel that too?”

  She nodded once. “We’re being hunted.”

  Feng Ren had vanished into the trees twenty minutes ago to scout, but Zhao Wei already knew he wouldn’t find the hunter.

  Because it wasn’t hiding.

  It was announcing itself.

  She knelt, pressing her palm to the ground. The qi around her trembled. Her spirit had been fractured, yes but not broken.

  Not anymore.

  A ripple ran through her bones.

  Something was walking through the boundary of their world.

  The old monks used to speak of such beings: those who were born between neither beast nor man, neither soul nor shadow. They were Creed-forged. Made of ritual, born of oaths.

  And they carried the Black Sutras, death scrolls inked in a language that fed on memory.

  Zhao Wei rose slowly as the trees ahead began to bend not from wind, but weight. Roots pulled back. Leaves curled inward. Even the rain seemed hesitant to fall too close.

  Then it stepped into view.

  A man. Or something shaped like one.

  Tall. Clad in monk’s robes turned black with ash. His head was shaved, his eyes hollow not empty, but filled with spinning script. Around his neck, a rosary of bone. In one hand, he held a scroll case, humming with a low, droning chant. In the other, a blade that was not metal, but ink hardened by curse.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  The rain hissed off him.

  The Black Sutra’s envoy had arrived.

  “You are the Vessel,” he intoned. His voice sounded like ten voices speaking at once, all wrong, all cracked.

  Zhao Wei stared him down. “You’re late.”

  He blinked.

  Then, without warning he attacked.

  No signal. No breath. Just movement.

  His blade lashed out, the air itself curving to follow its strike. Zhao Wei barely dodged, rolling under it and flipping back. The edge of her sleeve was sliced clean off, cloth disintegrated midair.

  Inkblight.

  “Don’t get hit,” she snapped at Bai, who was already backpedaling behind a tree.

  The envoy moved again, this time faster. His form was unreadable. Where one step landed, three shadows flickered.

  Zhao Wei let her spirit surge. Light coiled beneath her skin,blue, silver, and something else. Darker.

  She clashed against him mid-air, foot meeting blade. Sparks of cursed qi exploded around them.

  Each strike sent ghost-light flying. The ground beneath them warped, torn between seals of past and present.

  “Why are you here?” she demanded as they clashed again.

  The envoy said nothing. Only opened the scroll.

  And the rain stopped.

  Bai screamed. Zhao Wei turned and saw nothing.

  No trees. No mud. No sky.

  Only scroll. They were inside it.

  The world had folded inward. The air now reeked of old temples and rotting prayer.

  She stood in an illusion. No, a cage.

  “I am the reader,” the envoy’s voice echoed everywhere. “You are the sentence.”

  Zhao Wei gritted her teeth. She pressed her hands together.

  And called the seal.

  The obsidian shard in her chest pulsed. The world shivered. Runes blazed across her arms and throat broken seals screaming awake.

  She flared.

  And the scroll tore.

  Not fully. Not yet. But enough to rip through the illusion.

  She emerged back into the clearing, panting, blood leaking from her ears. The envoy stumbled, for the first time.

  “Impossible,” he muttered. “You’re still incomplete”

  “You don’t get to tell me what I am.”

  Her eyes glowed.

  “I sealed that beast. I sealed myself. And now I decide who lives in this story.”

  The air exploded.

  From the trees, Feng Ren leapt, sword gleaming. It cleaved down, disrupting the envoy’s rhythm. Bai hurled a talisman—spirit-etched and glowing with stolen fire. It hit the envoy in the face, igniting a burst of crimson flame.

  Zhao Wei didn’t waste the opening.

  She ran him through.

  Her hand, wrapped in spiritlight, punched straight into his chest, seizing the scroll.

  The envoy howled.

  “You can’t read it!” he cried. “It will devour your soul!”

  “I wrote the damn thing,” she snarled and ripped the scroll from his body.

  Ink burst upward like black fire. The envoy collapsed, body crumbling into script and bone. The scroll screamed, the chants lashing at her mind.

  But she held on.

  Because it knew her. Because she remembered.

  Later that night, the three of them sat around a low fire.

  The scroll lay sealed inside a jar made from spiritglass, runes wrapped around it like chains.

  Zhao Wei stared at it.

  “You really wrote it?” Bai asked softly.

  She nodded.

  “In a former life,” she whispered. “It was the only way to bind the Creed’s first commander. I wrote the curse. And now it’s hunting me with my own words.”

  Feng Ren leaned back, arms crossed. “So they know you’re awake now.”

  “They do.”

  “What will they send next?”

  Zhao Wei looked up at the sky.

  Lightning forked in the distance. “Something worse.”