The frost hadn't burned that morning.
It clung instead—lazy, quiet. As if the realm had decided not to act. Just to listen.
Su Xue woke before sunrise, eyes opening like frostblades unsheathing.
Her seal pulsed. Not sharply. Just enough to remind her it still tethered Lu Xuan's fate to hers.
She hadn't checked the formation altar in two days. It worried her. Not because she doubted Lu Xuan's control.
But because she feared the world was remembering something about him that he hadn't yet remembered himself.
In the scroll vault beneath the eastern archive chamber, she descended quietly. A place even senior disciples avoided—its pages were warped by heatless fire, left behind after the Blood Lotus Sect siege.
She wasn't here to read history.
She was here to listen to it whisper.
Half-charred scrolls lay on fractured tables. Stone shelves cracked down the middle. But in the third alcove, tucked beneath an altar of silence, she found a fragment.
A chant. Scripted in coils.
Not poetic. Not religious. Just rhythmic.
She read the words aloud, voice barely a breath.
"The Coiled One sleeps in the root of worldskin.
Let no seal be permanent.
Let no dream be pure.
When the mirror cracks, he will remember."
Her hand tightened.
The serpent cult hadn't just worshipped chaos.
They had written prophecy.
She traced the final glyph—half-erased, but familiar.
Not because she had studied it.
Because she had seen it.
On Lu Xuan.
At the same hour, Lu Xuan sat in the northern garden.
Yao Lin had left him with a parchment and ink—but he hadn't been drawing consciously.
When he finally looked down, his breath caught.
Spirals.
Not wild. Not random.
Each line tight, geometric, ancient.
And in the center—a glyph with no name.
He didn't remember drawing it.
But he'd seen it before.
In dreams.
On scales.
On his chest, once, when his qi overloaded and Bai Yujing cast a containment lock.
He rolled the parchment slowly, placed it inside his sleeve, and walked to the observatory bridge.
Su Xue arrived moments later.
They didn't speak at first.
The air was too still.
The wind too careful.
Only the frost sang—scratching light across stone tiles.
Lu Xuan offered her the parchment.
She looked.
Her face didn't change.
But her grip tightened.
"You've seen this," she said.
"Not in waking."
"It's a glyph from Blood Lotus ruins."
She didn't mention the chant.
Not yet.
"What does it mean?" Lu Xuan asked.
"It's not a symbol. It's a wound."
He didn't respond.
She added:
"From the last soul sealed unsuccessfully."
His pulse faltered.
Not physically.
Spiritually.
That evening, Bai Yujing entered her vault.
She didn't open a scroll.
She shattered a memory pearl—the kind cultivators preserved from failed battles. Inside, flickers of sound emerged:
Screams across a bloodlit horizon.
A serpent face reflected in starfire.
A boy—laughing, then burning.
She turned to a stone slab where an old map flickered.
At the center: Celestial Dawn.
Three faults pulsed beneath it. They hadn't moved in centuries.
Now they did.
Slowly.
Like tides awakening.
Elsewhere, in a forgotten monastery far south, one of Emperor Zhao Rui's envoys reported:
"The glyph has resurfaced."
"On paper?" Zhao asked.
"On skin."
That night, Lu Xuan dreamed again.
But this time—no frost.
No bridge.
Just coils.
Tightening.
Breathing.
Watching.
At the center of the spiral:
Su Xue.
No sword.
No seal.
Just one line spoken before he woke:
"If I forget again… remember me before the abyss does."