A strange, tinged hush blanketed the ruined village, as if even the wind dared not to but tread quietly. Ash drifted through the air in slow spirals, and charred, wood pillars protruded from the blackened earth like gravestones. In the center of all this, Yun Ze moved with calculated stillness, each footstep barely stirring the fine dust beneath his boots.
He paused, kneeling beside an edge of what once had been a home. The dirt held the imprint of a child's shoe—a small print, nearly intact amid the chaos. Memories like this didn't yield resonance by themselves, but hinted at what had happened. He vanished his momentary empathy as he brought a slender rod from within his cloak. Etched with ancient glyphs that shimmered faintly, it was his tool for harvesting psychic fragments.
He placed the rod's tip on the ground. It vibrated—a pale blue glow running upward, soaking into his skin like a chill. The rod tuned into lingering echoes: grief, sharp with sorrow; fear, thick with panic; and beneath it all, a thread of magic—something unlike the trauma he'd felt before.
The rod flashed, and he captured the resonance. It felt insubstantial, a whisper of a life, but enough for now.
Yun Ze stood and tilted his head at the crater of a collapsed well nearby. That was where he'd tracked the faintest echo of arcane malware—an engineered corruption of the soul. The villagers had burned this place down after the presence of seeders had turned children into bewitched husks. This world hadn't defaulted to moral ambiguity or heroic intervention. They blamed weakness—and razed it.
He reached the well's rim and knelt to peer in. Darkness swallowed the interior, but at the bottom, he could sense the distorted tendrils of psychic memory rotting in damp soil. He lowered the rod. Light wavered between walls of mud, settling on a patch of contaminated aura.
A twitch of movement caused him to yank back. There, crouching a few meters off, was a figure in rags: small, thin, human-shaped, but broken. Ice-blue eyes—no fear, only silent calculation—met his.
He smirked, slow and disinterested as ever. No need for theatrics; he had no time. He flicked the rod's blade out, its whisper slicing through the nothingness. He advanced.
The figure did not run—curious, defiant. Perfect.
He leaned down, pressing the rod's tip against cold mud. The aura pulsed, and memory shards crawled up the sheath: mother singing lullaby, younger sibling screaming, flames ripping through homes, eyes widening in sudden betrayal.
He cataloged each shard with practiced efficiency. Then he turned to the figure, feet apart in balance.
"I know what you are," he said quietly. "A deformed sleeper—someone who plucks fragments from minds without knowing their origin." Pause. "But I can buy your ignorance."
The figure stood. A girl, maybe sixteen, with hair half-shorn. Her voice was thin as smoke. "You can't buy me," she said.
"Then I don't buy you. I harvest your ignorance."
He tapped his rod, and glyph-light bled along its metal. Her aura sharpened—fear, resentment, something deeper and darker. He leaned closer, eyes narrowing. "You'll want to sell one memory. One knot of glyc—the polished gold-grade. Something pure you won't miss."
She swallowed. "I… I will not." She sounded like defiance, but Yun Ze detected the thin fissure of doubt.
With no more words exchanged, he struck the ground beside her. Resonance shockwave hit her chest—shockwaves founded. Eyes wide, she staggered, then collapsed. The rod's tip glowed crimson as it siphoned a twisted aura tuft from her.
He collected, rewound, cataloged. She lay still. He could count her breaths, timing them.
A damaged blade in his hand didn't move. No slashing. No face-to-face confrontation. Because blunt force produces nuance—and nuance yields resonance. Slayers bleed. Harvesters learn.
He picked the girl up and carried her to the edge of the village. He laid her down against a fallen beam.
"Wake when you want," he said. His voice implied threat without need. "I'll find you when I need the next knot."
He turned away, walking back past burned-out huts and broken households. The glyph-rod pulsed with stolen memories, thrumming like a wound. Traitors, priests, irrationals—they all had resonance flavors. And he—he knew how to mine them, monetize them, sell them.
When he disappeared into the swirling ash, the village was still. Broken. With that final severance of life and mind.