Ye Mingzhu woke up at seven fifty-three with the specific alertness of someone who had learned a long time ago not to oversleep.
She sat up, looked at the desk, and looked at Wei Liang sitting under the lamp exactly where she had placed him.
"Good morning," Wei Liang said.
She blinked once. Something in her expression suggested she had not fully expected him to still be there — or perhaps had not fully expected last night to have been real.
Then it settled back into its usual composure.
"Good morning," she said.
[Light Energy: 11/15]
Wei Liang had spent the three and a half hours productively. The desk lamp, the streetlight coming through the gap in the curtains, the pale early morning sun that had begun pressing through the window around six — all of it absorbed steadily, incrementally, his surface deepening with each addition.
Eleven out of fifteen. He was close. Not close enough for tonight, but close.
Ye Mingzhu stood, opened the curtains fully, and the morning light flooded in.
[Light Energy +0.3]
"Thank you," Wei Liang said.
She glanced at him. "Was that intentional?"
"Yes."
She nodded and went to get ready for school.
Qinghe No. 7 High School was a twenty minute walk from Ye Mingzhu's apartment, or twelve minutes if she cut through the covered market on Fenglin Road, which she did every morning without thinking about it.
Wei Liang sat in the front pocket of her school bag, angled so that his surface caught the light filtering through the bag's mesh panel. Absorbing as he went.
[Light Energy +0.1... Light Energy +0.1...]
The city in the morning was entirely different from the city at night. Louder, warmer, more cluttered with ordinary life. Delivery trucks blocking intersections. A breakfast stall with a line of students still in their uniforms, eating paper-wrapped scallion pancakes while checking their phones. Two elderly men doing slow deliberate exercises in a small square, ignoring the noise around them completely.
Wei Liang had not seen any of this before. He had existed for less than twelve hours.
He found himself paying attention to everything.
"Is it always this busy in the morning?" he asked.
Ye Mingzhu considered. "This is normal."
"You walk through this every day."
"Every day that I have school." A pause. "And the days I don't, I'm usually already at work before this."
Wei Liang was quiet for a moment, thinking about that. She worked through the night and then walked through a busy morning to get to school. Every day.
"How long have you been working the night shift?" he asked.
"Eight months."
He did not ask why. She had said she lived alone. He could assemble the rest without making her explain it.
They crossed through the covered market, past rows of vegetable stalls and a fish seller and a woman arranging stacks of tofu with the focused precision of someone who had done it ten thousand times. The light inside was warm and yellow, coming from bare bulbs strung along the ceiling.
[Light Energy +0.2]
"That kind of light is different," Wei Liang said. "Warmer."
"Incandescent bulbs," Ye Mingzhu said. "Most places have switched to LED. This market hasn't."
"I noticed." He paused. "The warmth of it goes deeper. It feels different when I absorb it."
Ye Mingzhu glanced down at her bag. "Different how?"
Wei Liang thought about how to describe it. "Moonlight is precise. Neon signs are sharp and a little restless. The lamp on your desk is steady and functional." He paused. "That light is — settled. Like it belongs to the space it's in."
Ye Mingzhu was quiet for a moment.
"You can taste the difference," she said. It was not quite a question.
"Something like that."
She walked out of the market and back into the morning sunlight without responding, but Wei Liang had the sense she was thinking about it.
School was its own kind of education.
Wei Liang sat in Ye Mingzhu's bag on the floor beside her desk and listened to a mathematics lesson he could follow without effort, which told him something about who he had been before he woke up in the night market. The particulars of that life were still blurred — faces and events that dissolved before he could examine them — but capabilities remained. He understood the equations on the board. He understood the geography lesson that followed, and the classical literature discussion after that.
What he did not understand, and found genuinely absorbing, was the social layer running underneath all of it.
The girl who sat in front of Ye Mingzhu turned around three times during the first class alone to show her something on her phone, each time with the energy of someone delivering critically important news. Ye Mingzhu looked at the screen each time with polite attention and said very little. The girl did not seem to require much response. She talked enough for both of them.
"—and then he said he was going to the library but everyone knows he actually just goes to the roof to sleep, which, honestly, same, but the point is—"
"Chen Rui," Ye Mingzhu said.
"What?"
"The teacher."
Chen Rui turned back around half a second before the teacher looked up from his notes.
During the break between second and third period, Chen Rui spun fully around in her seat and planted her elbows on Ye Mingzhu's desk.
"You look tired," she announced.
"I'm fine."
"You always say that." Chen Rui tilted her head. "Did something happen last night? At the store?"
"Nothing happened."
"You have that face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have a very specific face that you make when something happened but you've already decided not to talk about it." Chen Rui pointed at her. "That face. Right now."
Ye Mingzhu looked at her with an expression that Wei Liang was beginning to recognize as her version of patience being quietly exercised.
"Nothing happened," she said again, with exactly the same tone as before.
Chen Rui studied her for another moment. Then she dropped it — not because she believed her, Wei Liang suspected, but because she understood when Ye Mingzhu had made a decision.
"Fine," Chen Rui said. "But you should eat more at lunch. You're going to fall asleep in fourth period."
"I won't fall asleep."
"I will, though," Chen Rui said cheerfully, and turned back around.
Wei Liang, from inside the bag, considered what he had just observed.
"She's worried about you," he said, very quietly.
Ye Mingzhu glanced down at the bag. "She worries about everything."
"That's not the same as saying she isn't worried about you."
Ye Mingzhu opened her textbook and did not respond.
Lunch.
The school canteen was bright and loud and full of students moving in chaotic overlapping streams. Ye Mingzhu collected her tray with the efficient calm of someone who had long ago stopped being bothered by crowds, found a seat near the window, and ate with her phone face-down on the table beside her tray.
Wei Liang was in her bag, which she had hung on the back of her chair.
Through the window, sunlight.
[Light Energy +0.3... Light Energy +0.3...]
[Light Energy: 13/15]
Close. Very close now.
"Wei Liang," Ye Mingzhu said quietly, below the noise of the canteen.
"Yes."
"Tonight. Walk me through what we're going to do."
Wei Liang had been thinking about this since three in the morning.
"The entity is dormant during the day," he said. "Based on the pattern you described — the darkness expanding each night — it becomes active after dark. That's when it feeds most aggressively."
"So we go after dark."
"We go after dark, but not too late. While it's still in the early part of its feeding cycle, before it's fully alert." He paused. "I'll be at full capacity by then. When you're transformed, your perception will be enhanced and you'll be able to see it clearly."
"And then?"
"And then we deal with it." He paused. "I can use telekinesis to move objects. Twenty kilograms currently. Combined with your physical ability and the enhancement from the transformation, we should be able to engage it directly."
Ye Mingzhu was quiet for a moment. "You said twenty kilograms."
"Yes."
"That's not very much."
"No," Wei Liang agreed. "It isn't. We'll need to be creative."
Another pause.
"Have you ever fought anything before?" she asked.
"No. I've existed for less than a day."
"So neither of us knows what we're doing."
"That's accurate."
Ye Mingzhu ate a spoonful of rice without any particular change in expression. "Okay," she said.
Wei Liang found her composure either very reassuring or very concerning and had not yet determined which.
"You're not worried?" he asked.
"I'm always worried," Ye Mingzhu said. "I just don't find it useful to show it."
Wei Liang absorbed a long band of afternoon sunlight coming through the canteen window and thought that this was probably the most honest thing she had said to him so far.
[Light Energy: 14/15]
One more.
The afternoon passed.
Third period. Fourth period. An announcement over the school intercom about a cultural festival committee that needed volunteers, which Chen Rui immediately signed Ye Mingzhu up for by writing her name on the clipboard before she could object.
"You need more school activities," Chen Rui said firmly.
"I have school activities."
"Attending class is not an activity."
"I also do the—"
"The library organizing does not count, that's just you being in a quiet room alone, which you would do anyway for free."
Ye Mingzhu looked at the clipboard. Her name was already written in Chen Rui's large enthusiastic handwriting.
"One meeting," Ye Mingzhu said.
"Three meetings minimum, that's the requirement."
"..."
"It'll be fun! Probably. The theme is spring, which is extremely vague, so there's a lot of creative room. I'm thinking paper lanterns." Chen Rui was already walking away. "I'll send you the group chat!"
Ye Mingzhu looked down at her bag.
Wei Liang said nothing.
"Don't," she said.
"I wasn't going to say anything," he said.
"You were thinking something."
"I was thinking that paper lanterns produce a warm and pleasant light," Wei Liang said. "That's all."
A very long pause.
"...That's all?" Ye Mingzhu said.
"That's all."
She picked up her bag and headed toward the school gate.
They took the long way home — not because Ye Mingzhu had planned to, but because Wei Liang asked her to walk past the night market where he had woken up.
She stopped in front of it. In daylight it was entirely ordinary. Shuttered stalls, dusty wooden frames, the debris of last night still unswept on the ground. The cracked stall where he had spent the night was visible from the entrance, its broken display frame leaning against the wall.
"Is this where you died?" Ye Mingzhu asked.
"Yes," Wei Liang said. "The mirror fell."
She looked at it for a moment. "Do you remember much? From before?"
"Capabilities," he said. "Not details. It's like knowing how to read without being able to remember being taught." He paused. "I remember the feeling of things more than the content. That I was careful with people. That I was used to working alone."
Ye Mingzhu was quiet.
"Does it bother you?" she asked. "Not remembering."
Wei Liang considered this honestly.
"It bothers me less than I would expect," he said. "I think the more pressing concern is what's in that alley tonight."
Ye Mingzhu made a sound that was not quite agreement but in the same direction. She turned away from the market and kept walking.
The afternoon sun was long and golden and coming from low in the sky, and as Ye Mingzhu walked through it Wei Liang absorbed it steadily — the warm late light of a day ending, different from everything else he had absorbed so far, slower and more golden, the kind that made long shadows on the pavement.
[Light Energy +0.4]
[Light Energy: 15/15]
[Combat Form: Unlocked.]
Wei Liang felt the change immediately — not dramatic, but definite. A new capability settling into place inside him, present and ready in the way a door was ready to be opened.
"I'm at full capacity," he said.
Ye Mingzhu glanced down at her bag. "Already?"
"The afternoon sun." He paused. "We're ready."
She stopped walking for just a moment. The long shadow of a building stretched across the pavement in front of her.
"Tonight then," she said.
"Tonight," Wei Liang confirmed.
She started walking again, steady and unhurried, toward home and whatever came after dark.