The black wood pressed against his forearms in the exact same way. The papers lay scattered in the same deliberate disorder. The strip of red silk still weighed down the same corner. Even the faint smell of incense—cold, metallic, old—had not shifted by a fraction.
For a long moment, he did not breathe.
He did not move.
His first thought was not panic.
It was accounting.
Same desk. Same posture. Same headache—less sharp this time, but present, like a bruise you press to confirm it's real. No blood on his clothes. No hole in his abdomen. No warmth leaking out of him and into the stone.
He raised his hand.
It moved.
Slowly this time. Carefully. As if the air might object.
It didn't.
Weaver exhaled.
Then laughed.
Once. Quietly. The sound came out thin and brittle, like glass tapped with a spoon.
"…I died," he said to the empty room.
The room did not argue.
He leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling, counting heartbeats. One. Two. Three. They came evenly. Calmly. The same infuriating steadiness as before.
Regression, his mind supplied.
Time reversal. Save point. Resurrection. Loop.
Words from stories. From games. From fantasies he'd devoured at night when the world stopped demanding he be useful.
He sat forward again, elbows on the desk, fingers laced.
"If this is godhood," he muttered, "it's got a sense of humour."
The idea didn't feel absurd. Not anymore. A perk. A safeguard. A divine failsafe against death. He had returned to a fixed state—this room, this moment, this configuration.
Not rewound arbitrarily.
Anchored.
The thought sent a chill through him that had nothing to do with fear.
Anchors implied limits.
And limits implied that if he didn't change something—
Footsteps would come.
And he would die again.
Weaver straightened.
Think.
Why was he here in the first place?
This wasn't a random room. The men had said it plainly: Paper Fox private chambers. That meant jurisdiction. Ownership. A reason for his presence that wasn't accidental.
He closed his eyes and forced himself not to grab at everything at once.
Fragments only came when he chased them sideways.
He focused on the ache behind his eyes.
On the Tell burning faintly at his temple.
On the name that didn't belong to him.
Amos.
The headache flared.
Images surfaced—not clean memories, but impressions.
This room, seen from another angle. Standing instead of sitting. Voices kept low. Curtains drawn. Someone saying "stay here" with urgency sharpened into command.
Another fragment: a man's back, broad shoulders wrapped in red-and-white robes. The same feathered motif as the Tell. Authority without cruelty.
A father.
Missing.
Not dead—missing.
Oslo.
The name dragged heat behind it, like a match struck too close to skin.
Weaver's breath caught as understanding assembled itself without asking permission.
Oslo had been Amos's father.
Leader—Patriarch—of the Red Swan Sect.
And when he vanished after the Holy summit, Amos had been hidden.
Here.
With allies.
The Paper Fox Sect.
The headache intensified, sharp enough to make him hiss.
"Allies," he whispered.
Which made the men's words wrong.
Never heard of the Red Swan Sect.
Weaver opened his eyes slowly.
If the Red Swan Sect had truly been erased—not just destroyed, but removed—then that meant more than burned buildings and dead disciples.
It meant memory.
Records.
Recognition.
People didn't forget sects overnight.
Unless forgetting had been enforced.
The broadcast voice had said it plainly: erased from history.
Not conquered.
Not purged.
Deleted.
Weaver felt something cold settle behind his ribs.
If that was true, then Amos didn't just die.
He had never existed.
And if Amos had never existed, then Weaver was wearing a body the world had no category for.
No Dao circulation.
No lineage.
No place.
A missing entry.
Footsteps.
The sound cut cleanly through his thoughts.
Weaver snapped upright, pulse finally spiking—not with fear, but urgency.
He didn't have time to learn what Dao was. Didn't have time to coax Dao into circulation even if he knew how. Whatever godhood he'd inherited, it hadn't come with a manual.
But—
He smiled, thin and sharp.
Ignorance could be useful.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
Weaver stood.
He did not touch the papers. Did not reach for the mirror. Did not hide the Tell. Let it burn openly, a visible mistake.
The door opened.
The same two men entered.
Same robes. Same posture. Same fox-brown and grey layers. Same relaxed readiness.
One shut the door.
Click.
Weaver raised his hands slightly before they spoke.
"I don't know why I'm here," he said.
The words landed like a stone dropped into still water.
The taller man blinked.
The other tilted his head. "That's new."
Weaver swallowed and let confusion—not fear—colour his face. "I woke up here. I don't remember how I arrived. I don't remember…" He hesitated, then shook his head once, frustrated. "I don't remember anything clearly."
The men exchanged a look.
The taller one frowned. "You expect us to believe that?"
"I expect you to verify it," Weaver replied quietly. "You already know something's wrong."
The smiling man circled him slowly, eyes narrowed. "There's no Dao moving in you."
Weaver nodded. "I can feel that."
That was the truth.
The man stopped in front of him. "A cultivator doesn't forget how to cycle."
"I'm not cycling," Weaver said. "I don't know how."
Silence stretched.
The taller man exhaled through his nose. "Memory loss happens. Trauma. Severe backlash."
"From what?" the other asked.
Weaver met his gaze. "That's what I'm trying to understand."
For a moment—just a sliver of time—the possibility hung there.
A damaged cultivator.
A hidden political liability.
A problem that might be explained later.
The smiling man sighed.
"Or," he said mildly, "you're something worse."
Weaver's chest tightened.
The taller man's voice hardened. "Someone with no Dao, no record, no tell mark we can verify, sitting in our private chambers."
Weaver's hands curled slowly at his sides. "If I wanted to infiltrate you," he said, "would I really do it this badly?"
The smiling man stepped forward.
Close.
Close enough for Weaver to see the faint scars along his knuckles.
"That," he said softly, "is exactly why this isn't worth the risk."
Pain bloomed again.
Not as shocking this time.
Not unfamiliar.
The strike landed in the same place. Precise. Efficient. No hesitation.
Weaver gasped and folded, blood warm against his skin.
As he fell, he laughed.
Not weakly.
Bitterly.
"See?" he rasped, breath bubbling. "Doesn't matter what world it is."
The men paused.
Weaver looked up at them from the floor, eyes bright with something ugly and lucid.
"You still kill first," he said. "Still call it order."
The taller man frowned. "Quiet."
Weaver's vision dimmed.
"Gods above," he whispered, voice almost fond. "You really didn't change anything."
The pendant clicked.
Golden light spilled out again—gentle, insistent, denying the end rather than reversing it.
The room faded.
—
Weaver woke at the desk.
Again.
Same posture.
Same papers.
Same silence.
He stared at his hands for a long time.
And laughed
That was the second time.
Weaver's laughter thinned out and died on his tongue as the fact settled into place with a weight that wasn't emotional—it was structural. A pattern. A mechanism repeating itself with the same clean indifference the broadcast voice had used when it said erased.
The room hadn't changed between deaths.
Neither had the way the pain had arrived. Neither had the moment the world refused to let him finish dying.
And—most importantly—neither had the sound.
That soft, metallic click.
Not his heartbeat. Not the desk shifting. Not a hinge in the door.
The pendant.
Weaver's hand drifted to his chest as if it belonged to someone else, fingers pressing through fabric until they found the object hanging there. It was heavier than jewellery had any right to be, a small insistence against his sternum like a coin that refused to be spent.
He drew it out into the light.
At first glance it looked like ornament—expensive, deliberate, made to be seen. A hexagonal medallion, black as lacquered stone, rimmed in dull gold. Around its edges, small round studs sat like rivets or seals, evenly spaced, the kind of detail that suggested the thing wasn't meant to be opened by casual hands.
The face of it was carved through with swirling cutouts—curving, sharp, almost avian, like feathers caught mid-spiral. Not quite a crest. Not quite a sigil. More like a stylised storm trapped inside a piece of metal. Beneath the cutouts, darkness pooled, swallowing light as if the pendant had depth it shouldn't have.
A cord looped through the top—black, thick, worn in the way something worn for years became worn: not frayed, but softened by constant contact with a body.
Weaver turned it slightly.
The gold caught, warm and muted, not bright. Not gaudy. Like old wealth. Like antique authority.
He stared at it until the silence started to feel like pressure.
"Is it you?," he whispered.
The pendant did not answer, but the statement changed the room anyway. It changed his posture. It changed the way the future looked. Because if the loop wasn't a divine perk—if it wasn't godhood's generosity—then it wasn't infinite.
It was countable.
And countable things ran out.
Weaver's thumb traced one of the tiny studs on the rim.
A memory tried to rise—Amos's fingers doing the same thing with familiarity, as if he'd opened it a thousand times in the dark. The fragment slid away before it became useful, leaving only the taste of urgency.
No time. No more time.
Weaver swallowed.
He could test the theory, he thought. Take it off, die, see if he woke again.
The thought didn't feel brave. It felt like mathematics.
But his stomach turned anyway.
Because if he was wrong, there would be no second result.
There would be nothing.
No desk. No room. No chance to correct his own stupidity.
He hadn't survived two lives just to gamble his third on curiosity.
Weaver held the pendant in his palm and waited for his fear to arrive.
It didn't.
His body remained calm. His mind remained bright.
Whatever this body was, it treated panic as an unnecessary function.
Which meant he had to manufacture caution manually, like a skill.
He forced himself to breathe.
Then he noticed something he hadn't noticed before.
A sound so quiet it was almost imagined.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Weaver's eyes narrowed.
The pendant wasn't just heavy.
It was working.
The ticking wasn't loud, wasn't the theatrical click of a clock meant to be heard. It was private. Intimate. A small machine counting down in the dark beneath his hand.
He brought it closer to his ear.
Tick.
Tick.
The rhythm was steady, patient, the way a prison sentence was patient. The way policy waited.
Weaver's jaw tightened.
He slid a fingernail under the seam where black met gold.
For a moment nothing happened. The pendant resisted with the dignified stubbornness of something designed to remain closed.
Then—almost reluctantly—there was a give.
A faint release.
Like a lock deciding you'd earned access.
The hexagon split.
The faceplate lifted on a hidden hinge, opening outward and down into his palm.
Inside, it wasn't hollow.
It was architecture.
A round mechanism sat within the hexagonal casing, a sun-disk nested in black metal and edged in gold. Along the outer ring, roman numerals were embossed—I, II, III… curving all the way around like the mouth of a clock pretending to be ceremonial.
In the centre, a compass rose was etched, clean and sharp.
Around the compass, crescent shapes arced in a sequence—phases of a moon marching around the dial, each one a different posture of light.
Five thin "hands" lay over the face like spokes, not all the same thickness. Not all the same length. They weren't set like a normal clock.
They looked like choices.
Like lanes.
Three of those hands were filled.
Not with solid metal. With motion.
Golden powder swirled inside them—fine, luminous dust turning as if suspended in oil. It didn't clump. It didn't settle. It moved with quiet intelligence, spiralling within the narrow channels of the hands as though time itself had been ground down and poured in.
Two hands were empty.
Not broken. Not damaged.
Empty like a cup that had already been drunk.
Weaver stared.
The emptiness had a kind of cruelty to it. A simple, clear subtraction.
He lifted the pendant slightly, angling it toward the pale light of the room.
The gold dust shifted, catching. Not sparkling—watching.
And then he understood, not as a guess but as a conclusion so obvious it made him feel stupid for taking this long.
"Three," he said softly.
His voice sounded too loud in the held-breath room.
Three hands filled.
Two hands empty.
Five total.
Five lives.
Or five chances.
Or five resets.
And he had already spent two.
Weaver's throat went tight, and for the first time since waking into this body, he felt something close to fear—not in his chest, but in his thinking. A narrowing. A calculation becoming urgent.
If the pendant was the anchor, then his "godhood" wasn't saving him.
A device was.
A tool.
And tools ran out.
The ticking continued beneath his fingers, indifferent to his revelation.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Weaver shut his eyes for one heartbeat and forced his mind to stop chasing the horror of it.
He didn't have the luxury to despair. Despair was what you did when you still believed time belonged to you.
He lowered the pendant until it rested against his palm again and tried to think like the person he'd been trained to be: not a boy with wishes, but a man solving a problem inside a hostile system.
What did he know?
He was in a sect world—Paper Fox territory, specifically.
The Red Swan Sect had been erased from history. Or something like it. Enough that even allies didn't recognise the name, or couldn't recognise it.
Dao existed. Cultivators could sense it. Those two men had sensed his lack of circulation immediately.
He could not fake circulation.
He could not convince them to keep him alive, because they weren't killing out of anger. They were killing out of efficiency.
Risk management.
He had seen this logic before. His father's country ran on it. You eliminated uncertainties before they became stories.
He could not fight them.
At least not in any way that would be meaningful.