The road changed when the sect walls appeared.
Mud gave way to swept gravel. Wild grass flattened into obedient rows. The pines combed their needles like soldiers. Even the wind seemed to check its clothing before crossing the boundary stones.
Open Sky had decided to look holy today.
Rat stepped under the gate and the air tightened, clean and cold, as if the mountain had just taken a deep sip of discipline. Outer disciples moved through the terraces with baskets, scrolls, and the quiet hurry of people who fear being noticed. A few stared because his clothes were badly mended. A few flinched because his shadow hummed.
He pretended not to hear it. The Bell under his cloak rested warm against his spine, rune seal cool on the strap. The faint tone it made refused ears and went straight for teeth. The Fate Interface pressed against his sight like a patient fingertip and he kept it folded. No threads here. Not yet.
He climbed the main stair. Carved balustrades traced the slope in pale stone. Flags along the rail moved together in a rhythm that was not wind. High above, a soft aurora rolled along the ridge like silk taking a breath.
[Observation: Peak Qi Aurora. Frequency matches Old Temple ring residue.]
"Do not make that my fault," Rat said under his breath.
Outer disciples cleared a path. Some nodded with the politeness used for snakes. No one greeted him like a friend. Rumors walked faster than people on these steps.
A guide in blue waited where the stair turned. He kept his eyes a respectful fraction low.
"Fate Rat," he said. "Elder Yue requests your presence."
"I was beginning to miss being requested," Rat said.
They walked together along the curve that cradled the mountain. The air smelled like water and white stone. A curtain of threads hung over the Loom Hall's open face, not cloth, not mist, something finer than a spider would dare. The hall breathed without moving.
The guide stopped at the threshold and bowed out of being. Rat stepped inside and the temperature changed by a thought.
The hall held a mirror pool. It did not ripple unless someone asked it to. Beside it knelt a woman with silver hair bound in a simple loop. Elder Yue. Starlight lived in the threads that drifted down around her. They leaned in slightly as if to listen whenever she inhaled.
Rat bowed as much as kept him morally upright. He did not kneel. He had knelt enough for one life.
Elder Yue opened her eyes. If she saw the Bell, she did not say. If she heard it, she did not blink.
"Do you know why you are here," she asked.
"Because I was not somewhere you could see me," Rat said. "Also, the mountain started singing."
Her mouth might have moved. A small degree. The pool reflected it as if it were a sunrise.
"The Loom trembled," she said. "Heaven miscounted for a breath. Rivers reversed for a moment. Children woke crying. Rooted Stone sent three hawks and a poem. Their poem was poor."
"I was occupied," Rat said. "Responsibly."
"You do not carry responsibility the way we do," she said. "That is why you might be useful."
She set two fingers on the water. A ripple grew, reached the rim, returned. It broke around her fingertip without touching skin.
"You will not speak of what you carry," she said. "You will not name what woke. You will not teach your shadow to joke about it within these walls."
Rat studied the ripple. "I can be quiet when quiet lets me live."
"Good." She lifted her hand and the ripple lay down.
"The sect must not learn the truth," she said. "Not yet. There are seniors who will panic. There are rivals who will pray. There are poets who will write. None of these help."
"So we do not tell them the mountain sings," Rat said.
"We tell them the wind misbehaved," Elder Yue said. "And we tell them we punished it."
Rat almost smiled. The pool pretended not to notice.
She stood without effort. Light threaded through the ends of her hair and seemed to approve of the decision.
"You will be placed under observation and protection," she said. "Provisional rank. Temporary Inner Disciple, Heaven's Loom Peak."
He blinked once. "Promotion by leash. Fancy."
"You will remain alive," she said. "Also fancy."
"I am very fond of alive."
"Then consent to the leash."
He bowed again. It was almost deep. "I consent," he said. "Temporarily."
Elder Yue clapped once, soft. A boy and a girl in deep blue stepped through a side screen like quiet materialized.
"Yan Mei," Elder Yue said. "He Shen. This is Rat. He will live on Terrace Five. He has permissions for Terraces Three through Six. He may enter the Loom Hall by summons. He will not climb where the stars drink. If he steps on a formation, he will step lightly. If he falls, you will not let him die."
"Yes, Elder," they said together.
Elder Yue turned away, then paused without turning back. "The Gateway to Heaven breathes again," she said to the pool. Or to him. "If you can stay very still, you may hear it call your name."
Rat swallowed without moving his throat. "I prefer when mountains forget me," he said.
"Then make them forget," she said, and resumed being the still point of the room.
Yan Mei and He Shen led him out into sunlight and rules.
They took him along a crescent balcony that clung to the mountain's shoulder. The stone beneath their feet held fine carvings that shifted if he looked askance. Arrays. The Fate Interface stirred, sketched pale lines under the floor that ran like veins toward somewhere below, then folded itself with good manners.
"Watch the floor," He Shen said. He spoke like someone who had learned to lift heavy things without complaint. "Some lines sing when you cross them. That is on purpose."
Yan Mei glanced at Rat without turning her head. She had a scholar's bun that did not dare a stray hair and a pale scar under one eye that said she had learned a lesson the hard way and kept it. "Do not step in front of Elder Fan on the stairs," she said. "He breaks legs on accident."
"On accident?"" Rat said.
"On principle," He Shen said.
Terrace Five held open galleries looking over a grove of white-barked trees and a square of raked gravel where the wind drew thin lines and then erased them. Steam rose from a spring in a stone basin. Doorless chambers lined one side. The view reached across the entire Basin, a bowl of green and silver veins under a clean sky.
They showed him a corner room. A reed mat lay on the floor. A low table waited for bowls and arguments. A rack for weapons stood empty and hopeful. Rat shrugged out of his strap and set the Bell on a folded cloak. The rune seal that bound it to him glowed once, then cooled.
"Dawn Forms at first light," Yan Mei said. "You will be late once. Only once."
"I am loyal to the sun," Rat said. "We meet at noon."
He Shen's mouth almost bent. Yan Mei's did not.
They fed him plain rice and clear broth that tasted expensive. They left him with a folded robe and instructions not to die without permission.
The inner peaks did not hide their sharpness. Everywhere he looked, silence had a job. The outer terraces had bustle, laughter, gamblers, cooks arguing loudly with sky gods. Here, the noise had been sent to work in the kitchens and told to keep its voice down.
Rat walked the high paths. He passed a pair of inner disciples arguing about whether a sword should be silent or understandable. He passed three acolytes learning to bow to an invisible inscription. He stopped at a railing and watched a class below trace footwork on a grid carved by someone who loved geometry more than mercy.
"The inner mountains are an archive," Yan Mei said quietly at his shoulder. He had not heard her arrive. "We keep what can be kept. We borrow what cannot. We do not brag."
"I brag to myself," Rat said. "I am a patient audience."
He took one step and the formation under the stone sighed. The lines answered him with a soft glow that only his eyes would admit. The glow ran outward, down, and then curved like a stream. Somewhere out of sight, something old turned its head.
[Advisory: Passage triggers minor array harmonics. The network purrs when you walk.]
"Do not make it sound cute," Rat whispered.
He crossed into another courtyard and halted. Elder Lian of Stone Heart Peak stood with two attendants under a pine that refused to be straight. She was not tall, not adorned, her hair in a simple knot, her robes free of lies. Her hands had the scars of someone who had done labor before she did teachings. She looked at Rat and smiled like a person who split wood to warm herself and offered the extra to neighbors.
"You are the boy with the unlucky thread," she said. "Come closer."
He did. She did not reach. She let her Qi brush the edge of his. It smelled like rain on earth and honesty.
The Bell pulsed once under his cloak. He kept his face a plain bowl.
"Curious," Elder Lian said. "Your field steadies when pressed. Most bristle."
"Too tired to bristle," Rat said. "Ask me again after a nap."
"Take two," she said. "The mountain does not wake slower if you hurry."
Her attendant coughed into his sleeve as if to catch a laugh before it made trouble.
Another elder arrived with the hush of a librarian appearing. Elder Ren Jinhai of Crimson Root. He wore a polite smile. His eyes did not push. People would tell him secrets because he listened as if they mattered.
Rat felt the wrongness before he found the reason. Ren's Qi lay across the stone like a silk sheet that had been turned inside out. The current moved in the opposite direction from what the lines underfoot demanded. It was soft. It was wrong.
The codex raised one quiet flag at the edge of his sight.
[Anomaly. Surface flow inverted.]
Rat's mouth stayed agreeable.
"Welcome to the inner air," Ren said softly. "It breaks if you pull."
"I try not to break things I will need to breathe later," Rat said.
"Very wise," Ren said. "Wisdom is not fashionable on Terrace Five."
Yan Mei looked at the pine needles. He Shen looked at the shape of a cloud. Elder Lian glanced at Ren and did not frown. She had practice at not frowning in the presence of problems she could not solve by punching.
"Elder Yue is indulgent," Ren said, still smiling. "Make her patience worth the expense."
"I am expensive," Rat said. "You get what you pay for."
Ren's smile held. His Qi did not.
They moved on. Rat walked and the inner peaks watched him with carved eyes and listening stones. He saw formations that did not like him. He saw a few that did. He saw where the terraces had been patched after old disasters and where the rock held memory like a scar.
He ate a second bowl of rice he did not earn. He listened to Yan Mei explain which silence meant respect and which meant teeth. He sparred He Shen once and learned his mistake three times before he learned not to make it a fourth.
At dusk the terrace lanterns came alive. They held flame like it was a ceremony. The Stargazer Pavilion atop the peak lit blue and soft. From his new room Rat could see the whole Basin turn violet. The aurora thinned to nothing. The wind decided to rest.
He lay on the mat and did not trust the quiet. The Bell warmed and cooled with his breath. The Fate Interface slept when he asked, then peered from a corner the way cats do. Rat closed his eyes and listened to a mountain that had learned to sing in its sleep.
He woke because the room moved.
Not much. Half a heartbeat of motion. The stone under the mat lifted and set down like a giant had coughed.
Rat sat up and did not speak. The Fate Interface uncurled and drew one thin line in his vision, straight down through floor and bed and belly, into the mountain's throat. It burned a soft gold and did not accept argument.
The codex chimed very calmly inside his head.
[Warning: Resonance Source Detected. Depth - Approximately 0.3 leagues beneath Heaven's Loom.]
Rat rubbed his face with both hands and tasted stone dust in the back of his mouth. He stood and put his palm to the floor. It felt like quiet with a heartbeat.
Let me guess, he thought. He said it out loud so the mountain could hear.
"Another bell."
The room did not answer. The mountain did not need to.
He opened his shutters and looked across the dark terraces. Lanterns slept. Disciples dreamed of glory and schedules. Somewhere far below, something very old hummed a single note that had not been sung in a long time.
Rat smiled without humor. "Fine," he whispered. "I am listening."
[Codex of Strands of Fate - Status Update]
Vitality: 6
Qi Sense: 8
Comprehension: 5
Fate Entanglement: 33
Realm: Foundation Establishment, (Peak)
Rank: Temporary Inner Disciple, Heaven's Loom
Access: Inner Terraces 3–6, Loom Hall by summons, limited array study, restricted libraries with sponsor
Trait: Mountain Quiet
Effect: Within inner peaks, Administrator presence stabilizes minor arrays and lowers ambient turbulence. Side effect, attention from elders increases.
Module: Fate Interface v2.0
Effect: Administrator only. Perceive and nudge destiny threads within 200 paces. In inner peaks, draws faint reply from hidden source below. Overuse risks cognitive echo.
Flagged Entity: Elder Ren Jinhai
Note: Qi flow pattern inverted. Probability of demonic method, nonzero. Continue observation.
Network Note: Subterranean resonance beneath Heaven's Loom aligned at 3 percent. Trend upward.