Jianli's days shifted like ink beneath water.
Each morning, he swept the stoop and boiled tea leaves for Master Lin, his silent form a fixture in the fog-drenched district. By afternoon, he trained—brush in hand, muscles taut, breath controlled—copying ancient scripts until his fingers ached and the parchment beneath him felt scorched with effort. At night, he read.
Not books—the book.
The Treatise of Living Script.
Lin kept it bound in red cords, locked behind a lacquered cabinet carved with warning sigils. But each evening, after the shop's lamps were dimmed and the last footsteps had faded into the hush of the alleys, Lin would beckon with a grumble and a flick of the wrist. Jianli would kneel, and the tome would be unbound.
The pages whispered.
Not aloud. Not always. But in ways he felt. The scratch of ink that hadn't moved, the ache in his wrist before he turned a page, the low thrum of words not yet read humming behind his ribs.
The Treatise contained more than glyphs. It breathed.
Some entries shimmered like wet stone—characters written in blood-ink or ash. Some were diagrams of brush strokes looping like dragon tails or thorned vines. Others were... instructions. Riddles, rituals, warnings.
On the third night, Jianli found a passage scrawled in a hand unlike the others—spidery, rushed, as if the writer feared the page might swallow the words.
"Ink remembers. Be cautious what you teach it.The brush is not a servant. It is a mirror.Speak with lies, and it shall reflect them back with teeth."
Jianli paused.
He hadn't spoken a lie.
He hadn't spoken at all.
But already, he could feel the cost of the character he'd written—the way the marrow in his bones sometimes pulsed cold, or how his shadow clung to walls seconds too long. Small things. But wrong things.
On the sixth night, the tome showed him another character. One without name or meaning.
A glyph shaped like a spiral folded in on itself—no translation beside it. But Jianli's fingers twitched toward his brush.
He knew it. Not the way a student knows a lesson, but the way a sleeper knows their name when jolted from a dream.
He reached for the inkpot.
And Lin's cane slammed onto the desk beside him.
"No."
The old man's voice was sharp. Sharper than Jianli had ever heard.
He stared at the boy, eyes wide—not with anger, but fear.
"That word has no name because it should have none," Lin said. "It's not a character. It's a lock. You write it, you invite what it's keeping out."
Jianli drew back.
The Treatise closed with a shudder, as if in disappointment.
Lin's hands trembled. "That book doesn't teach. It tests. And it does not care if you fail."
Jianli looked down, ashamed.
But inside, something shifted. Not rebellion—something older. Like a memory trying to wake.
That night, as the moon swam in clouds the color of pale bruises, Jianli dreamed.
He stood in a world made of parchment. The sky above was ink, always falling. And in the distance, a scroll unrolled across the horizon, its letters massive, shifting like serpents.
From its depths, a voice—not with sound, but with presence—called to him.
One word.
His name.
Not "Blank Scroll." Not Mo Jianli.
But the real name.
The one the ink had not yet written.
And when he woke, his fingers were stained with characters he did not remember writing.