They left the town at dawn.
No farewells. No eyes watching.
Zhui rode in silence. Yun Shou walked ahead, never checking if they followed.
Kaifeng walked behind them both, not as leader or guard, but like someone tracing a trail already written into the earth.
By the third day, the path was no longer made of stone.
By the fourth, even the birds stopped following.
Only the wind kept them company — and even that, too often, felt like it was listening.
On the fifth night, they reached it.
A gorge between twin cliffs, carved not by water, but by withheld memory.
Here, the mountains split like a wound left to harden. Trees grew sideways. Mist never lifted. The ground pulsed faintly — not with Qi, but with something older.
They stood before a broken arch, half-swallowed by moss and shadow.
Carved into it were the words:
Yán Mù Dào
"The Path That Closed Its Eyes."
Zhui shivered.
"I thought this was myth. A precursor to Qingwu itself. A sect with no students left."
Yun Shou said nothing.
Kaifeng stepped forward and knelt, brushing moss from the stones.
Symbols emerged — not words, but steps.
Faint grooves, etched with fingertips, too deliberate to be erosion.
He touched one.
And his heart nearly stopped.
It's not a map, he realized.
It's a form.
A sequence written into the mountain itself.
Yun Shou finally spoke.
"This is where the first motion was created."
"Not the Listening Path?" Kaifeng asked.
She shook her head.
"No. This came before even that."
"Then why was it buried?"
She looked at him, eyes steady.
"Because the last man who finished it—"
She didn't need to finish.
Because Kaifeng could already feel it.
The presence.
The watching.
They moved further in.
No one spoke.
The deeper they walked, the more the path narrowed, until it became nothing but motion — a corridor of space that shifted as they passed.
Steps they didn't remember taking.
Silence that didn't feel empty.
At the end of the path, they reached a stone dais.
And sitting cross-legged atop it…
Was a child.
Barefoot. Eyes shut. Breathing shallow.
Hair white with age he had never lived.
Around him, faint lines shimmered in the air — invisible strings of unspoken forms, suspended between stillness and memory.
Zhui gasped.
"He's… alive?"
Kaifeng stepped forward.
And as his foot touched the final stone…
The child opened his eyes.
Not with fear.
But with recognition.
And softly — almost gently — he said:
"Lián Kaifeng."
"I've been waiting."
End of Chapter 7