The moon hung high, too bright for how quiet everything was.
Yue sat cross-legged in the garden courtyard behind the east library. No one ever came here this late. The wind barely moved, and the silence was almost thick. Like the world had stopped breathing, just for a moment, to watch her.
She liked the stillness. Or, she used to.
Tonight, it was... wrong.
There was a hum under her skin, like threads being pulled tight. The flow of her qi wasn't gentle anymore; it snarled, coiled, surged like a tide trying to drag her somewhere she didn't remember walking toward.
She opened her eyes. They glowed faintly in the dark.
That had never happened before.
Not even when she broke through Foundation. Not even during the ritual.
She exhaled slowly. Control it. That's all cultivation really was, control, over yourself, over the world. And she was good at that. No one outpaced her for long.
But tonight, even her breathing didn't feel like her own.
Yue brought her hand up, fingers open. A quiet pulse of qi moved from her palm outward, like a ripple across still water. It should've dissipated, harmless, clean, calculated.
Instead, the grass around her hand browned and curled, wilting as if something had sucked the life straight out of it.
She stared.
'That... wasn't normal.'
She wasn't practicing any death-element technique. And she hadn't even focused her intent on anything destructive. Just a simple flow release. A check.
But the qi wasn't obeying her. It was reacting to something else. Or someone.
Yue stood, brushing off her uniform. The air was too still, the silence too heavy.
A noise cracked through the quiet, faint, distant, but deliberate. A pluck, like a string being tuned.
She turned sharply.
Nothing.
But she knew the sound. Haku's gloves. Or something close. A ripple of sound-magic, maybe far off. Not hostile. Not even invasive. But layered, like someone testing the shape of things without touching them.
She bit the inside of her cheek. She didn't want to think about Haku right now.
Too complicated. Not right now.
But her cultivation didn't care about what she wanted.
She knelt again, this time pressing her hand to the soil. Closed her eyes.
Listened, not with ears, but through her meridians, through the flow of qi inside her that now felt half-wild, like a beast circling the edges of her soul.
There was something beneath the surface.
Old.
Familiar.
She saw a flash, too quick to hold onto. A memory that wasn't hers. Red banners in the sky. A woman in robes of silk and steel. A battlefield carved into a leyline like a scar.
Yue gasped and pulled back. Her hand trembled.
'What was that?'
Her cultivation wasn't just reacting. It was remembering.
But that was impossible.
Right?
She had always been talented. Born to a minor clan, trained in secret under the waterfall rites, chosen by chance. Or fate. But never, ever, had she been told her soul might not be entirely her own.
She looked at her hands. The faintest silver traced her fingertips now, flickering in and out like phantom veins.
She wasn't ascending.
She was... waking up.
And whatever this was, it wasn't just hers to command.
A sharp wind cut through the courtyard, rustling the old trees. The leaves overhead hissed like whispers.
Something had changed.
No. Something was changing.
And Yue wasn't sure it would stop.
....
She rose slowly this time, eyes still scanning the garden shadows like they might peel back and show her the truth. But all she found was the smell of dry grass and distant rain. No footsteps. No answers.
Only the hum.
It hadn't stopped. Just lowered itself beneath the surface of her thoughts like an echo waiting for permission to rise again.
She reached for her pendant, an old thing, a circle of jade cracked down the middle and bound in silver wire. Her mother had given it to her during the clan's parting ceremony, saying it was an heirloom from a generation no one remembered clearly. It had never done anything. Just hung there, cool and inert.
Tonight, it pulsed.
Not with qi. With something deeper.
Memory.
Or maybe intent.
The jade shimmered faintly, and for a moment, Yue swore she saw script across its surface, runes she couldn't read but somehow understood. The moment she blinked, it was gone. But her heartbeat didn't slow.
"You're not a legacy," she whispered aloud to herself. "You're a key."
The words tasted like someone else's, left behind in her mouth.
She clenched the pendant tight and backed away from the grass she'd killed earlier. Even now, the earth looked brittle where she'd touched it, like it had aged years in seconds.
Something was wrong with her qi. Or not wrong, changed. As if the ritual hadn't just drawn on her cultivation, but rewrote its foundation in return.
And if that was true...
She'd need help.
Not the kind the school or her sect could offer, either. They would wrap her in containment spells and theories and call her dangerous, unpredictable.
She wasn't ready to be dissected.
But maybe, just maybe, Haku would understand. Not because he knew cultivation. He didn't. But because he treated power like a pattern, not a weapon.
And something about this, this shift, this thrum in her bones, it felt like a pattern unfolding backwards. Like someone had set it in motion long before she was born.
Her eyes burned faint silver again.
She didn't wipe the tears that followed.
Some part of her was grieving.
She just didn't know what for.
Yet.
...
She stood in place far longer than she meant to, fingers still curled around the jade like it might shatter if she let go. But the truth was, it wasn't the pendant she was afraid of breaking.
It was herself.
'Haku, Alex, help'
She didn't know anymore who or what she was.
For the first time in years, Yue didn't feel powerful. She felt precarious. Like she was made of glass held together by will alone, and someone had started tapping on the edges just to see where it would crack.
There was a sound, soft and close.
A footstep?
No, just the wind again. It felt like her mind was playing tricks.
She turned toward the gates of the school, wanting to lie in her bed. Her room was waiting. Her bed, her damned books that Haku gave her, the world that had made sense before the ritual. She could go back. Pretend it was just side effects. That it would pass.
But she already knew better.
This wasn't something she could sleep off. This was a thread pulled from a book she hadn't realized she was written into. And once unraveling started, it never stopped.
She'd have to tell Haku.
Not yet.
But as soon as he dealt with the fact that Sofia was still in a coma, and whatever Bernard was planning.
But bfefore, whatever was inside her remembered more than she wanted, and she would be herself anymore.