The woman in black watched Wei as he was taken away, her gaze lingering on his retreating figure with open interest. After a moment, she turned to her master and asked quietly,
"Is his talent really that extraordinary?"
Her master paused before answering. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped, as if even the night should not hear it too clearly.
"It's like someone lighting a fire for the first time, alone, in complete darkness," he said."That kind of talent… you might see it once in ten thousand lives."
The woman's eyebrow lifted slightly.
"But if that's the case," she said,"he might not even know what he did himself."
"Exactly."
The master nodded.
"That's why I said—this is interesting."
He looked back toward the distant figure once more.
"If it were only power forced into him from the outside," he went on,"he wouldn't have survived that moment."
"But he did."
"That means whatever it was," he added slowly,"at least part of it… was not borrowed."
The woman did not respond right away. Her gaze drifted past her master and settled instead on the body being carried away in the distance.
It was too quiet.
Not the quiet of someone on the verge of death.
People who are dying breathe unevenly. Their hearts lose rhythm. Their bodies struggle on instinct.
But he had done none of that.
That kind of stillness felt more like—
as if something had been pressed down on him, forcing him into a state where he simply could not move.
She did not say this out loud.
She only frowned slightly, almost without realizing it.
After a brief silence, the woman spoke again, testing the thought as she voiced it.
"Then could it be… that for a moment, he accidentally touched the most basic form of external awakening?"
This time, the master did not deny it immediately.
The night wind passed through the trees, leaves whispering softly.
After a long while, he finally said in a low voice,
"I can't be sure."
"But if that really is the case…"
He did not finish the sentence.
He did not need to.
The woman already understood.
"Talent like that," she said quietly,"shouldn't appear in a place like this."
The master nodded slowly.
"Even more so," he said,"it shouldn't appear in someone who hasn't been shaped yet."
Her voice dropped even further.
"If that's true… then if he were brought into the resistance, where would he rank?"
Once again, the master did not answer at once.
He stood with his hands behind his back, as if weighing a possibility he did not want to admit.
After a long time, he finally spoke.
"If we're only talking about'potential,'" he said softly,
"then saying top ten would already be an understatement."
The woman froze for a brief moment.
"You mean—"
"I mean," the master cut in calmly,
"someone like that, once their path is confirmed, is not someone you rank."
"They're someone you watch. Closely."
The woman lowered her eyes and fell silent.
After a long pause, her voice returned, so light it almost scattered into the night air.
"Master… I want to save him."
"No."
The master shook his head. His tone was even, but there was no room to argue.
"We can't afford that gamble."
She did not speak again.
The master turned to leave.
But just before he did, he couldn't help glancing back one last time at the distant figure being carried away.
"What a waste," he murmured.
When Wei woke again, cold wind was slipping through the broken cracks in the wooden walls, crawling over his body.
It was not an ordinary wind.
It clung to his skin as it passed, like countless tiny needles, pricking deeper and deeper until they seemed to pierce his bones.
Instinctively, he tried to curl up—
and managed only halfway.
In that moment, Wei did not panic.
Instead, a strange calm settled over him.
Not because he wasn't afraid.
But because—
he had finally found an explanation.
He wasn't trapped.
He wasn't being suppressed.
And it wasn't that some external force was restraining him.
He had broken himself.
That single moment.
Pushed to the absolute limit, he had forced himself to do something he was never meant to do.
And now—
this numbness, this heaviness, this complete lack of response—
this was the result.
Not restraint.
Consequence.
The price.
His body did not answer him.
For a brief instant, Wei's awareness lifted slightly.
Not clarity.
Just a fleeting confirmation.
He suddenly understood something.
That moment had not been something done to him by someone else.
It was—
himself, somewhere inside, applying force in the wrong way.
The sensation did not feel like an injury.
It felt more like a string that had already been pulled too tight—
and then snapped, violently.
The next moment, his consciousness sank completely.
The first thing to return was sound.
Not a single sound.
A mass of them.
Low, suppressed wailing. Broken pleas for mercy. The dull thud of whips striking flesh. And crying that was being forcibly stifled, yet still leaking out in fragments.
There was no rhythm to it.
No end.
All of it blended together, like a layer of background noise that had existed long before he arrived.
As if this place was meant to sound like this.
A foul stench flooded his nose.
It was not one smell, but many, fermented together—
damp weeds, rotting soil, the sour tang of sweat, and the lingering metallic scent left behind by long-held fear.
Wei's awareness slowly surfaced.
The only clear image in his mind was still the final instant before he lost consciousness—
weightlessness.
A sudden flip.
His body being yanked violently downward by something.
Not a fall.
More like something being ripped out of him.
Then the world had begun to spin.
Sky, ground, figures, battlefield—everything stretched into blurred lines, twisting together, spiraling inward, pulled through some cold, narrow passage.
Like being thrown into a bottomless well.
Until now.
Wei struggled to open his eyes.
The moment he did, every sensation crashed back into his body at once.
Pain.
Cold.
Weight.
Breath.
It was as if he had been slammed back into reality by sheer force.
His eyelids felt swollen and heavy, like they had been soaked in water all night.
He managed to pry them open just a sliver—
and pain shot straight through his vision into his skull.
He realized he was lying on a pile of dry straw.
The stalks were stiff and brittle, their broken ends stabbing mercilessly into his skin.
Some only caused sharp pricks.
Others had already broken the surface.
Every sensation was painfully clear.
As if someone had turned his senses up too high.
Wei tried to shift his body.
Tried to roll, even just enough to move his face away from the stabbing points.
He couldn't move a single finger.
His chest felt like it was being pinned down by the paw of some heavy beast.
His breathing came in broken fragments. Every breath felt like dragging a slab of cold iron into his lungs.
He could hear his heartbeat.
Not just in his chest.
But in his ears.
In his veins.
In the soles of his feet.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Each beat struck the edge of his consciousness, over and over again.
Slowly, his vision began to clear.