The moment Ming's urgent warning reached me, I snapped my soul-sense back to my own body with the force of a physical recoil. The faint, cold whisper from the valley of shadows was instantly forgotten, replaced by the immediate, heart-stopping threat of the present. I didn't make a sound. I flowed back from the ledge, my movements silent and fluid, melting into the shadows of our cave entrance where Ming was already waiting.
The sun had just dipped below the horizon, and the gorge was a breathtaking but treacherous landscape of deep purples and long, black shadows. Our secret expedition had suddenly become terrifyingly compromised.
"How many?" I asked, my voice a barely audible whisper, my mind already in a cold, tactical state. The fear was there, a knot of ice in my stomach, but the strategist in me took precedence.
Ming didn't take his eyes off the far side of the gorge. "Three of them," he reported, his own voice a low murmur. "Their energy signatures are disciplined. Two are Dou Shi, maybe around three or four stars. The leader is a Great Dou Shi, a strong one. Their energy feels… clean. Methodical. It doesn't have that rotten, malicious feel of the Hall of Souls trace."
"So they're not our primary targets," I reasoned. "But they're not a simple hunting party either. No hunter sits perfectly still for hours on end just watching an empty patch of mountains."
My eyes scanned Ming's form, checking for any signs of injury from his hasty retreat. I noticed a thin, red scratch on his forearm where a thorny branch had clearly snagged him as he scrambled back to the cave. My analytical focus immediately fractured.
"You were careless," I hissed, my voice dropping to a sharp, accusatory whisper. I grabbed his arm, my touch surprisingly firm. "You're always reckless. You think that forcefield of yours makes you invincible, but you're still clumsy. What if that had been a poison thorn? Hold still."
Before he could protest, I had pulled a small vial of healing ointment from my storage ring. My touch, in stark contrast to my scolding tone, was incredibly gentle as I carefully cleaned the minor wound and applied the soothing balm. This was the dere dere—the layer of deep, instinctual care that always lay just beneath the surface, a side of me that, for reasons I refused to analyze, only ever seemed to emerge when it came to him.
Ming just stood there, letting me fuss over the insignificant scratch, a slow, knowing smirk spreading across his face. He saw it. He always saw through the harsh words to the real meaning beneath.
"Yes, Mom," he teased softly. "I'll be more careful next time."
I flushed, immediately letting go of his arm and turning away to hide my embarrassment, my sharp, tactical demeanor snapping back into place like a shield. "Just… don't be an idiot. We're in enough trouble as it is."
We spent the night in a state of high alert, taking turns on watch. We used the Thousand Li Mirror to observe the three mysterious figures across the gorge. They were masters of their craft. They remained utterly motionless, perfectly camouflaged in the dense foliage, their energy signatures banked so low that any practitioner without Ming's Six Eyes would have been completely oblivious to their presence. They were professionals.
During my watch, in the deep, silent hours of the night, I had a quiet moment. I stared at my own reflection, faintly visible in the dark, polished surface of the mirror. A young woman with long, dark hair and eyes that held a weariness and a resolve that didn't belong to a sixteen-year-old, stared back. And for the first time, I felt… nothing. No jarring disconnect. No sense of playing a role. The face in the mirror was simply… mine. The memory of Yang Qing, the male college student, felt distant, like a character from a book I'd read a lifetime ago. Had that really been me? It felt more like a prelude, a prologue to my real life, which had only begun in this strange, dangerous world.
A stray lock of hair fell across my face. I tucked it behind my ear, and a fleeting, entirely unbidden thought crossed my mind. This cloak is so drab. Maybe I can find some nice silk ribbons in the city to tie my hair back. A silver one would match my favorite dress.
The thought was so mundane, so naturally feminine, that it startled me. It wasn't a calculated part of my persona. It was a simple, genuine desire. A small, almost imperceptible shift had occurred deep within me. I wasn't a man trapped in a woman's body anymore. I was simply… me. And I happened to be a woman. The realization was less of a shock and more of a quiet, settling acceptance.
At the first light of dawn, the situation changed. The three figures across the gorge finally moved. They packed up their small, traceless camp with disciplined efficiency. But they didn't move north, towards the valley of shadows. Nor did they move west, towards us. They began a swift, silent retreat, heading south, back towards the outer edges of the mountain range.
"They're leaving," Ming observed, his voice pulling me from my thoughts. "Maybe they were just scouts on a long-range patrol. We were getting worked up over nothing."
I shook my head, my mind already analyzing the new development. "No. Their discipline was too perfect. Their observation was targeted. They weren't patrolling; they were monitoring. Their watch is over, and now they are going back to deliver their report." A new, audacious plan began to form in my mind, a reckless gambit that made my heart beat faster. "We have to follow them."
Ming's head whipped around to look at me. "Follow them? Qing-er, we're talking about a Great Dou Shi and two Dou Shi. They're professional trackers. We're a couple of teenagers who just learned how to kill a pig and a cat."
"They are the only other players on this board who are interested in that valley," I insisted, my voice low and intense. "They might be enemies, or they might be potential allies against the Hall of Souls. But we can't know anything for certain if we just sit here and guess. We are ghosts, remember? What do ghosts do better than anyone else? They haunt. We need to know who they are, and who they report to."
A slow, dangerous grin spread across Ming's face. The prospect of a real challenge, a true test of our skills, ignited a fire in him. "Spying on the spies," he said, his voice filled with a familiar, reckless excitement. "I like it. Finally, some real action."
We broke camp in minutes, leaving no trace that we had ever been there. The hunt was on.
It was a supreme test of our combined abilities. The three scouts moved with incredible speed and efficiency, their path a direct, purposeful line through the dense forest. Keeping up with them without being detected was a monumental challenge.
Ming took the lead, a phantom flitting through the high canopy of the trees. His Six Eyes allowed him to track their faint, fading energy signatures from an immense distance, a feat that would be impossible for any other practitioner. He was our long-range radar, our eye in the sky.
I followed on the ground, moving through the undergrowth. My role was to cover our tracks and to read their physical trail, using the subtle tracking skills I'd learned from the ancestor's journal. I could see the signs of their passage—a bent twig here, a scuffed patch of moss there—signs that would be invisible to an untrained eye. We were a perfect hunter-tracker team, a fusion of supernatural senses and meticulous, learned skill.
For an entire day, we shadowed them. We followed them out of the deep mountains and back into the more frequently traveled outer regions. As night fell on the second day of our pursuit, the trail led us to an unexpected landmark: a small, hidden, and heavily guarded encampment, nestled in a narrow, defensible ravine near the edge of the mountain range.
From a high, concealed ridge, we looked down. The three scouts we had followed were standing before a large, central tent, giving their report to a fourth figure. This figure was a man. He was tall and old, his silver hair tied up in an intricate style, and he wore the deep purple, high-collared robes of a high-ranking alchemist, a badge on his chest bearing four shimmering, silver stars. A Tier 4 Alchemist.
His back was mostly to us, but as he turned slightly to dismiss the scouts, I caught a glimpse of his profile. My breath hitched in my throat. I recognized him. Not from my own memories, but from the deep, encyclopedic lore of the novel I now inhabited. He was a famous, powerful, and influential figure in the Jia Ma Empire's capital city.
It was Fa Ma, the venerable president of the Jia Ma Empire's Alchemist Association.
The realization struck me with the force of a physical blow. The watchers in the gorge weren't a third, unknown faction. They were agents of the official, state-sanctioned power of the empire itself. The Alchemist Association, and by extension the Imperial Family, was also secretly investigating the anomaly in the mountains.
The conspiracy was bigger, deeper, and more complex than we had ever imagined. We had stumbled out of a nest of soul-eating demons and directly into a covert war between the continent's darkest shadow organization and its most powerful legitimate authority. We were no longer just ghosts haunting a single phantom. We were now caught between two colliding titans.