Chapter 11: The North Remembers

  The northern hills were not forbidden.

  Just… avoided.

  The way one avoids the room where someone died. The way children avoid wells too quiet for too long.

  No one could recall what once stood there. Only that stone y buried beneath vines, and that animals never crossed the ridge.

  Shen Liang brought no ntern.

  The stars were enough.

  They clung to him in fractured glints — on his robe, in his hair, along the bamboo flute slung at his side. As he climbed, the wind thinned, and the trees began to change.

  Thicker bark. Less undergrowth. A silence too heavy for birdsong.

  Each step felt older than the st.

  *****

  The first ruin was just a wall.

  Half-submerged in moss, cracked in a dozen pces.

  But the moment he saw it, his knees almost buckled.

  Not from fear.

  From grief.

  It hit him like a memory that didn’t belong. A pce he had never seen, yet mourned as if it had crumbled yesterday.

  He reached out. Touched the stone.

  A whisper.

  Not in his ears — in his bones.

  “Return…”

  Then it was gone.

  He exhaled slowly. Counted his breath.

  One. Two. Three. Still yourself.

  Then he stepped deeper.

  *****

  Beyond the wall y what remained of a courtyard. A few pilrs. The skeleton of an altar. A tree stump long since petrified.

  And in the center — a depression in the earth, ringed by broken tiles.

  A cultivation ptform.

  Long dead.

  He stepped into it.

  The air shifted.

  Cold. Then warm. Then cold again.

  His ears rang.

  And for a moment — just a moment — he saw the courtyard as it had been.

  Lit by red nterns. Filled with quiet chanting. The tree alive, its leaves silver. The sky overhead wrong — stars in pces no sky should allow.

  Then it all vanished.

  Just ruin again.

  Just night.

  Just him.

  *****

  He did not panic.

  Instead, he sat.

  Crossed his legs.

  Unsheathed the flute.

  Held it, not to py, but to listen.

  The silence here was not empty. It was watching.

  And somewhere inside it, something waited to see how he would choose.

  He closed his eyes.

  And said, not aloud, but inwardly:

  “I do not know the method.

  I do not know the name.

  But I know the stillness.

  I know the shape of waiting.”

  The ptform pulsed.

  Just once.

  Faint as breath.

  And from below — not sound, but sensation — something began to rise.

  Old.

  Hungry.

  Not for flesh, not for power.

  But for recognition.

  (End of chapter)