Chapter 3: The First Fracture

  Three days passed.

  The old evergreen stood bare, its stripped branches twitching in the wind like skeletal fingers. No birds returned to perch. Children avoided it without knowing why. Even the adults, out of habit, began walking the longer path around it.

  Only Shen Liang still approached.

  He didn’t know why. Only that some part of him felt that if he didn’t look, he’d forget something important.

  The split in the bark remained — narrow, straight, deliberate. And beneath the crack, if he pressed his ear against the wood, the tree felt… warm.

  *****

  That morning, a messenger from the outer prefecture arrived.

  On horseback, dressed in the red-gray robes of a minor regional sect — barely above peasants, but still cultivators. He brought with him two things:

  A procmation scroll.

  A corpse.

  The scroll was nailed to the meeting post:

  “The heavens have stirred. We seek signs of spiritual imbance. A reward will be given for omens, strange weather, vanished beasts, or the sudden blooming of unnatural pnts.”

  The corpse was left unceremoniously at the base of the hill.

  A man in traveling clothes. No wounds. No blood. Eyes open.

  But his body was dry — shriveled like fruit left in the sun too long. As if something had taken the water, the breath, and even the time from his skin.

  Only a few dared approach.

  Shen Liang stood apart from them. Watching.

  The man’s face looked… peaceful.

  Too peaceful.

  *****

  That night, Shen Liang dreamed.

  He stood in a field he did not know. Under a sky full of stars he had never seen.

  The earth was soft, bck like ash, and warm beneath his feet.

  Above him, the stars moved. Not twinkling — turning. Spinning slowly, like an enormous wheel.

  Each star pulsed with a color he could not name. Each flicker brought a feeling into his chest — grief, awe, loneliness, ecstasy — and then vanished.

  At the center of the sky, one star did not move.

  And it looked back at him.

  He woke up sweating, heart still beating as if someone had spoken his name in a foreign tongue.

  *****

  The next day, Old Qi didn’t open his door.

  Shen Liang found it unlocked.

  Inside, the herbs had rotted overnight. Ink had run across scrolls like they’d been soaked — though no water touched them. And the scroll of the star-map on the wall?

  Gone.

  In its pce, carved into the bare wooden wall, were four vertical symbols written in deep, curling strokes:

  “Some stars do not sleep.”

  No one else could read it.

  No one else even saw the marks.

  But Shen Liang did.

  And somehow, he understood them.

  Like he'd once written them himself — in a life he couldn’t yet remember.

  (End of chapter)