Mist curled low across the mountain path, pale and thin as gauze, clinging to the soles of Wei Xie's shoes as he walked beneath the hollow light of the waxing moon. It was quiet. Unnaturally so. No owls. No insects. Not even the faint rustle of pine needles in the night breeze. As though the mountain itself were holding its breath.
The Records Hall loomed ahead, a silhouette carved of ink and shadow. Three stories tall. Stone steps cracked with time. A roof that never gathered snow, even in deepest winter. No torches lit the entrance. No voices stirred within.
Wei Xie stopped just beyond its reach. From where he stood, the building looked less like a structure and more like a sentinel—silent, ancient, watching.
His breath clouded faintly in the cold.
He waited.
One minute. Two.
Then, quietly, he turned and sat beneath a nearby tree, back pressed to the bark, arms crossed over his knees. He did not move. He did not speak. He simply listened.
He'd come here every night for the past four days.
Never approached. Never broke the ward lines.
Just listened.
---
The sect was a noisy place during the day. Clanging steel, barked orders, the occasional pained scream from the training grounds. But here—at the edge of the second ring, beyond the guards and gardens—there was only stillness.
Stillness had a texture to it. A rhythm. It told stories, if one was quiet enough.
Wei Xie had grown up learning to hear silence.
Back in the slums of Green Hollow, silence meant a shift in wind direction. It meant someone had entered the alley behind you. It meant a drunk had stopped stumbling, which often meant they were now watching.
Silence was never just silence.
Tonight, the silence whispered something different.
He heard it again—barely audible. A faint tapping. Like brush against stone.
Wei Xie rose slowly and crossed to the far side of the courtyard, staying beneath the shadow of the overhang. His movement was methodical, rehearsed. Every footstep tested for weight and sound before the next.
And then he saw him.
Descending the side stair of the Hall—slow, as if gravity tugged harder at his limbs—was a figure dressed in loose white robes. Elder Yun. Or what remained of him.
The man's steps were deliberate. At each landing, he paused and knelt, drawing a character onto the stone with a brush dipped in some glowing fluid. Each character pulsed once—dim, then gone.
Not warding. Not cleansing.
Remembering.
Wei Xie did not approach. He crouched beneath the shade of the courtyard's stone lantern and watched, heartbeat measured.
Elder Yun's face was… wrong.
The skin was stretched thin, not sagged with age but emptied. Eyes clouded, yet sharp with something Wei Xie couldn't name. The elder looked like a vessel that had once held something vast and terrifying—and had not quite been emptied of it.
"…You watch," the elder said softly.
Wei Xie froze.
Elder Yun's head turned slightly, but not toward him. The man stared into the sky.
"To see is not to understand. To listen is not to know."
Then silence again.
The old man continued his descent and vanished into the mist.
Wei Xie remained in hiding until the moon had begun to set.
---
When he returned to the servants' quarters, the world was beginning to stir. The clang of buckets. The low mutter of cooks stoking fires. He moved through it like a ghost, shedding his observation like a second skin.
But he remembered.
He always remembered.
He spent the next two days in deep planning. The nights were for observation, but the days he spent in the shadows of the inner library's back courtyard, faking deliveries to eavesdrop on the scholar-disciples.
He learned that Elder Yun had not always been what he was. Decades ago, he had been a prodigy of the Records Path—an obscure branch of cultivation said to touch the flow of karma and history. One mistake had shattered his core. But even crippled, he remained custodian of the Hall.
What mistake?
No one dared say.
---
Three days passed.
Each night he returned to the Records Hall. Never entered. Only watched.
He mapped every patrol. Timed every lantern's extinguishing. Memorized the step count of Elder Yun's nightly descent.
He did not act. Not yet.
Patience was a weapon. In the slums, it had been the only one he could wield.
He once waited eight days to steal a coin purse. Slept in rain. Ate nothing. Just watched the mark grow complacent. He'd been twelve.
This? This was nothing.
On the fifth night, something changed.
A door opened on the second floor.
Not to the outside.
To below.
And what emerged… wasn't Elder Yun.
It was a girl.
Young. Plain robes. Eyes wide as if she'd seen a ghost—and not just one.
She stumbled, barefoot, into the courtyard. Paused. Looked up.
Wei Xie remained still as death.
Then, she ran.
No one stopped her.
The next morning, there was no sign she had ever existed.
He asked subtle questions. None of the servants knew her name. He checked the outer registries—no matches. He began to wonder if she had ever existed at all.
But he remembered the terror in her eyes. That could not be faked.
---
The following night, Wei Xie brought ink and paper. He knelt beneath the same tree as before and copied the symbols he had seen Elder Yun paint. Every stroke, every flick of the brush. It took him hours.
The characters made no sense. They weren't from any known dialect. Yet they stirred something beneath his skin—a prickling sense of recognition, like a forgotten dream pressing against the edge of memory.
He burned the paper after he was done.
Not out of fear.
Out of respect.
Some knowledge was meant to be remembered in silence.
---
That night, Wei Xie stepped over the ward line for the first time.
He felt the cold immediately—sharp and wet, like breath on steel. The Records Hall didn't resist his presence.
It welcomed it.
The door creaked open.
Inside was darker than the outside world, despite no roof above.
He passed the first floor in silence. Shelves of rotting texts, scrolls too brittle to unroll. He did not touch anything.
The second floor was worse.
Candles burned here—blue flame, flickering in rhythm with his breath. There were no windows. No air. Just masks.
Rows of them.
Wooden. Bone. Jade. Some smiling. Others screaming. One wore a serene expression that chilled him more than the others.
He didn't dare approach.
At the far end was the stair to the third floor—sealed by a door etched with old scripts. He stood before it and waited.
He could hear something on the other side.
Not movement.
Breathing.
But deep. Below. As if the floor had lungs, and the whole Hall exhaled with it.
He backed away. Slowly.
Then, from behind him—a voice.
"You shouldn't be here."
Wei Xie turned slowly.
It was Elder Yun.
The old man's eyes no longer looked clouded.
They were completely black.
"I… apologize," Wei Xie murmured, bowing.
"You were not sent. Yet the Hall opens to you."
"I am merely curious."
"There is no such thing as mere curiosity. Curiosity is hunger. You are feeding it."
Wei Xie said nothing.
Elder Yun tilted his head. "We will see what it grows into."
Then he turned and walked past, vanishing into the shadows of the stair.
---
Wei Xie stood alone.
He had crossed the threshold. The Hall knew him now.
And somewhere deep beneath its stone belly, something was awake.
He stepped outside and let the door close behind him.
From behind his sleeve, he retrieved a single silver needle and pricked his fingertip.
With his blood, he wrote a character on the palm of his hand.
Patience.
The wound would fade by morning. The lesson would not.
---
Far away, in a mirrored chamber ringed by lotus-shaped glass, Elder Qin Yue opened her eyes.
"Let him continue," she said to no one.
"But veil his path. If Elder Yun sees too clearly… he may remember."
She extinguished a candle.
"And remembering is dangerous."
---