The first tremor passed unnoticed by most.

  A low quake, no more than a breath, sighing across the highlands of Jiuyi. Farmers paused in their work, heads tilting. Monks raised their eyes from sutras. Across the Spiritwood coast, beasts cried to skies laced with unnatural stillness.

  But deep in the eastern ravines beyond mortal kingdoms and the rules that governed them, an obsidian bell rang once.

  The Creed heard.

  Far beneath a ruined temple swallowed by vines and shadow, the Citadel of Shrouded Flame came alive.

  In the sanctum's center, a shallow basin of silvered water rippled. Above it, a single mask hovered, crafted of bone and gold, smooth and expressionless save for a red line down the center.

  The moment the seal at Mount Qilun cracked, the mask turned.

  “...She has awakened,” whispered a voice from the shadows. Male. Tired. Reverent.

  A second figure stepped from the gloom and tall, shrouded in layered robes woven with scripts that writhed of their own will.

  “She was never meant to remember,” the second voice rasped, female, older, broken-glass sharp. “The binding was complete. Her soul was shattered.”

  “Clearly, not enough.”

  The basin pulsed. From it rose an image of Zhao Wei, standing amid fractured stone and silver fire. Around her, the air blurred with ghost-light. She was pale, but not afraid. She looked sovereign.

  And she was holding the obsidian heart.

  “The Vessel has reclaimed the tether,” the old voice said, bitter. “The Writ of Fracture is no longer enough.”

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  A third voice, cold and feminine, spoke from a perch above the sanctum. “Then we retrieve the rest of her.”

  A soft growl stirred from the deeper dark.

  “No,” said a fourth figure, stepping forward, a woman robed in crimson scale, eyes like burning coals, face bare and cruelly beautiful. “We wait.”

  “You risk everything”

  “We risk nothing until she remembers why she sealed it away.”

  The others fell silent.

  She walked to the basin, dipping a clawed finger into the image. Zhao Wei flickered, like disturbed flame. “Let her taste the past. Let her wake the curse inside herself.”

  “And if she resists?”

  “She won’t.”

  “Why?”

  The woman smiled. “Because in every life, the Vessel returns. But in this one... she’s angry.”

  She turned to the others.

  “Send the Black Sutra.”

  Back in the wilds beyond Qilun, the mountain had gone quiet once more.

  Zhao Wei sat cross-legged at the broken altar, her breath slow but uneven. Around her, runes continued to smolder faintly. The obsidian heart no longer pulsed, it now lay inert in her lap, like a relic stolen from a god’s tomb.

  Feng Ren crouched nearby, blade resting across his knees, face unreadable.

  “You’re too calm,” he muttered.

  “I’m not calm. I’m trying not to fall apart,” Zhao Wei replied, voice tight.

  Bai was pacing in frantic circles, muttering to himself.

  Feng Ren gave a slow exhale. “So. You were the prison for a nameless beast of pre-Elemental origin, tied to a seal buried under a war temple destroyed in the Spirit Wars. And now... the seal is cracked.”

  “Correct.”

  “Great.”

  Zhao Wei ran a hand through her hair, still damp with sweat. “And now I remember why I asked to be killed.”

  That stopped both boys.

  She looked up. Her eyes weren’t sad. They were furious. “Because I didn’t trust anyone else to keep the seal from breaking.”

  Silence.

  “I was bonded. Not to a beast, but to the entity itself,” she said. “I bound it inside me. And over time, it began to... unbind me instead. I was losing control. I asked the High Circle to end me. They agreed.”

  “Only they didn’t,” Feng Ren murmured.

  “No. They sealed me. Wiped my mind. Let the world think I was dead. Then they tried to bury the temple—and the truth—with me.”

  “And now?” Bai asked.

  Zhao Wei rose. Her shadow stretched long across the stones. “Now I decide if I stay buried—or dig.”

  That night, under a thunder-streaked sky, a rider in black reached the outskirts of Zhaoling village.

  He wore no crest. No banners. But the scroll tucked into his armor pulsed with ink that bled through silk.

  The Black Sutra.

  He dismounted, stepped into the rain, and let the storm hide his presence.

  From beneath his hood, eyes like dying stars searched the hills beyond.

  “Zhao Wei,” he whispered, “...you don’t get to stay forgotten.”