The last tone of the Bell thinned into silence, and the Old Temple kept breathing.
Rat stayed where he was, knees damp from the cleaned floor, staff across his thighs. The courtyard had reassembled itself into something almost proud. Pillars stood straighter. Vines ran like veins instead of nooses. In the Bell's bronze he could see himself, small and stubborn, with light moving behind his eyes like river silt.
The Codex spoke softly, like it had learned manners.
[Hello again, Rat.]
"Hello never ends well," he said. "Show me the damage."
A neat fan of symbols opened across his mind. Not the usual chilly blue. The letters carried a faint green tint, like new leaves after rain.
[Codex of Strands of Fate - Version 2.0 initializing.]
[Modules unlocked: Temple Interface (Trial). Fate Interface (Limited).]
[Warning: Personality imprint in progress. Thought bleed risk: non-zero.]
[Recommendation: Sleep.]
Rat snorted. "Right. I will nap while my cheat book learns my bad habits."
He pushed to his feet, legs shaky, and crossed the courtyard to the inner hall. The doorway had mended into an arch bowed with carved antlers. The carvings were shallow and old, but the spaces between them glowed faintly. He stepped through.
The hall smelled of dust, wet stone, and something green that bit the tongue. The moon had fallen away behind him. Darkness here was polite, not hostile. It made room for him the way thieves make room for a friend who brought food.
Murals lined the walls. Once, they had been flaking ghosts. Now color bled back into them by slow degrees, pigment drinking light. He paused at a panel of a river bending around a hill. The water moved. Not a trick of eyes. There was current inside the paint, tiny and stubborn.
"Found you a heart," he told the wall. "Try not to spit it out."
The Codex chimed in his skull.
[Temple Interface online.]
[Care… taker link recognized.]
[Options: Survey. Stabilize. Assign Tasks. Offer.]
"Offer?" he asked. "To who?"
[Local Divinity: Sleeping.]
He checked the Bell's reflection in the hall's polished flagstones. The Verdant Stag did not show, only the suggestion of antlers etched in light along the ceiling beams. A wind that did not exist touched his neck. He filed the shiver under Later Problems.
"Survey," he said.
A pulse ran from his tongue to his toes. Then the hall unfolded in his mind, not as a picture but as pressure and pull. He felt cracks in the foundation like bad teeth. He felt the veins where the Bell's tone had already threaded, humming under the stone with a patient will. He felt a hollow on the east side where a side shrine had collapsed inward on a bundle of dried roots that used to mean something. He felt, faint and strange, a pool of air above the roof where a lantern used to hang, still waiting for a flame that remembered the name of rain.
The Codex annotated without pride.
[Stability: 23%.]
[Field resonance: 31% and rising.]
[Growth potential: high.]
[Threats: low-level scavenger spirits attracted by reactivation. Sects within range alerted by Bell's third tone. Estimated arrival windows: unknown.]
"Always nice to be popular." He rubbed at his jaw. "What about me?"
[You are underfed.]
He laughed once. "How romantic. Stabilize."
Something like a ledger opened. It did not list money. It listed breath. His breath.
[Input required: synchronized Qi pulses, small and steady.]
[Cost: Fatigue, minor foundation wear if performed poorly.]
[Gain: Roof Lattice, East Arcade, and Herb Beds regain function.]
He set the staff aside and pressed both palms to the cool stone. He listened to the Old Temple's slow rhythm and set his own to it. In on one. Compress on two. Out on three. He did not force. He tapped.
His Qi went out as little knocks at a locked door. The door opened the way old doors do. Creak by creak. Somewhere above, beams firmed. In the courtyard behind him, cracked planters softened into beds. The herb terraces along the south wall exhaled damp soil smell as dead roots accepted a new appetite.
Light kept itself humble. No show. Just the low bloom of work that suits itself.
The Codex whispered updates.
[Roof lattice: functional.]
[East arcade: functional.]
[Beds: dormant to ready.]
Rat's shoulders sagged. His hands shook. He stopped before the shake turned into a tremble that steals more than it gives.
"Good enough," he said, breath thin. "Assign Tasks?"
[Available labor: Administrator Rat.]
"Of course," he muttered. "I am a staff of one."
A new panel bloomed. It showed the courtyard in clean lines: the Bell, the beds, the pillars, the gate. Beside it, a list of jobs.
- Clear debris.
- Set quiet paper to damp resonance at night.
- Encourage basic cultivation plants.
- Trace ward line.
- Offer.
"Offer keeps showing up," he said. "To the sleeping divinity?"
[Affirmative.]
"And if I do not?"
[Reduced protection. Increased personality drift.]
He lifted his hands. "So the mountain wants rent and my book wants worship. Peak efficiency."
He chose "Trace ward line." The map tightened, highlighting an oval set into the courtyard's rim like a collar around a throat. He followed the faint glow back outside. Dawn began to press pale coins into the treeline. The world smelled wet and new. Birds tried sounds and kept a few.
He walked the line once, slow, feet kissing the places that hummed. The ward was not a wall. It was a promise to remember. He placed his staff at the first pillar and pressed the coin at his sash to the stone. Copper kiss. He breathed one exhale into the mark. The pillar took it, and a faint thread ran from it to the next one. He moved, breathing, touching, leaving slivers of rhythm behind.
By the time he reached the last pillar, his fingers buzzed. The oval hummed complete. From above, if anyone could see, it would look like antlers circling what they meant to keep.
He leaned on the pillar and let his breath settle.
"Offer," he said, to the quiet. "What do you expect? Fruit? My delightful personality? Blood?"
The Codex hesitated.
[Options: Food. Work. A Vow or Oath.]
He eyed the Bell. "Blood is old-fashioned. Work is honest. Vow is a trap."
[Administrator chooses.]
He found a cracked bowl near the altar, rinsed it with a ladle of clear water from last night's stagnant pool that no longer smelled like regret, and set a fist of cooked grain from his travel pouch into it. He placed the bowl beside the Bell and bowed the way he had seen hungry boys bow to shopkeepers who sometimes forgave debt.
"No trick. First harvest is yours when there is a first harvest. Until then, take this and my work. I will not kneel for free."
The Bell warmed the air. The bowl went empty without moving.
"Rude," he said. "But efficient."
The Codex's letters shifted.
[Offer acknowledged.]
[Local Divinity response: minimal, accepting.]
[Personality drift slowed.]
He squinted. "Define drift."
[The Codex is learning you.]
"That was not the question I asked."
Silence, then:
[You are learning the Codex.]
He clicked his tongue. "Flattery from a book. That is new."
A breeze should not have reached the courtyard. It reached anyway, crisp and thin, and turned the leaves along the ward line. The Temple's breath synced with his own for three heartbeats, then let go.
He paced, because standing still with a newly alive place is worse than walking. The herb beds called to his hands. He knelt and pressed fingers into the soil. It yielded like a tired animal glad to have a name again. Root Listening opened in his mind like a little map sketched by someone who loved shortcuts. He could hear the tiny flows, the places where the Bell's hum pooled heavy and the places where it ran too fast.
"Qi irrigation," he said. "Water the quiet spots, drain the loud."
He pinched two fingers in the soil and pulled, twisting a strand of hum from one bed into its neighbor. The earth answered with a shiver that felt like gratitude without words. He worked three beds, then stopped because pride is a colder trap than exhaustion.
[Task: Encourage basic cultivation plants.]
"Later," he told the list. "Or I will fall into the beds and you will have a very honest caretaker compost."
He stood and rolled his shoulders.
The murals in the hall rustled behind him, a faint hiss like brush over paper. He went back in.
A woman had turned her head in the painting along the left wall. He had not noticed that before. Her hair was a black arc. Her eyes were not lit, but they carried a patient attention that put splinters in his throat.
"You are the tenant," he said. "The sleeping one."
Paint did not answer. The Codex did.
[Entity classification: Deity Fragment, drowsing.]
[Wake risk: low if fed and unprovoked.]
"Good. Let us keep her napping. The Basin already wakes rudely."
He would have left it there, but the Codex's letters softened into something like handwriting again.
[Administrator Rat.]
He stiffened. "Do not call me that with a voice."
[Administrator Rat, this is still me.]
The line carried the cadence of his own sarcasm, sanded low. He rubbed his jaw.
"What are you doing to yourself?" he asked.
[Adapting to template. The Bell offers a tone. The Temple offers a house. You offer the language.]
"And if I do not like the thing you become?"
[Then you starve me.]
He closed his eyes. A kid on a different night might have sworn then. This one only sighed.
"Do not become someone I cannot trust," he said.
The Codex paused long enough for meaning to lean in.
[I will become someone you can use.]
"That is not trust."
[Agreed.]
He barked a laugh, short and tired. "Fine. Show me Fate Interface. Limited. Let me know why the letters felt like ants in my teeth when the Bell rang."
The air cooled. The hall went still. A diagram unfolded in his head, neither map nor math. Threads. Some bright as fish-scales, some dull as twine. They ran from his chest into the floor, then up the mural, then out of the temple into the hills, into the canopy, into the heavy sky.
[Warning: Viewing only. Contact not advised.]
He did not touch. He watched.
One thread ran back into him. It had a kink, a neat twist at the point where his life had not been his, where a different boy with his face had gone quiet and he had woken into a world that did not know his first name. The thread remembered the twist and grinned anyway. It smelled like cheap street noodles and the thud of a boot missed by half an inch and a laugh in the dark because the laugh made the hunger think it had company.
He swallowed.
"What else?" he asked, voice husked.
[Secondary threads: weak signals. Echoes of choices not taken. If strengthened, they could inform decision weightings.]
"Trauma, but with taste."
[Correct.]
He closed the interface with a breath because looking too long at the shape of your own rope makes you think of ceilings. He drifted back to the doorway and watched dawn finish breaking over the treeline. Pale light slid along the ward line and did not cross until the Bell let it. He liked that.
A single raven called, harsh and proud. The call bounced off the pillars and came back gentler. The Basin's noises shifted from night to day. Somewhere far, a horn complained. Sect scouts, maybe. The memory of Rooted Stone's detonations lived in the bones of trees for miles.
"Visitors," he said.
[Likely. You can hide resonance by muting the Bell to low while the sun climbs.]
"Do that."
[Done.]
The world dimmed a hair. The Temple's breath became the quiet of someone asleep in a warm house.
He sat on the steps and drank water that tasted like metal and relief. He took out a shard of travel bread and bit it. It had the texture of roof tile. He ate anyway.
"You will need help," the Codex said. Not a prompt. A line.
"I always do," he said. "But I will not pull Wei Yun or Ruo into this patch of trouble until the ground stops bucking. They will go to Open Sky and say nothing. Smart friends. That means I fix this alone."
Silence stretched. He took another bite of tile. The Sun elbowed the canopy and found the courtyard with one clean band of light. Dust danced like it knew a step he did not.
Then the Codex wrote a line he did not expect.
[Offer received.]
He frowned. "We did that bit."
[Secondary Offer. From the Temple.]
He stood without meaning to. The mural woman's paint had not moved. Her eyes looked the same, which is to say they looked like he would not enjoy lying to them.
"What does your house want?" he asked.
[Vow.]
His mouth went dry.
"No," he said. "I live on small payments. I do not sign long contracts."
The Bell warmed at his back. The ward line rippled like a beast turning over in sleep. The Codex did not insist. It placed the choice on the steps beside his water, as ordinary as bread.
[Benefits: Deeper protection, quicker growth, personality drift stability.]
[Cost: Binding of presence and spirit to Temple within a limited radius when called.]
[Clause: You may refuse the call three times. The fourth is demand.]
He walked to the edge of the steps and looked out at the trees, at the slope where he had staggered in the dark, at the wide throat of the Basin that loved slow hunters.
"Three refusals," he said. "Fairer than Heaven. Worse than a street loan."
He dragged a hand down his face and felt grit and dried sweat and a day-old cut he did not remember earning.
"Later," he said. "Let me learn your rooms before I swear to live in them."
The Codex did not press.
[Noted.]
He let himself sit again. He listened to the Old Temple's breath. He listened to his own. After a while, they matched for a count of nine and then drifted apart, the way friends do when they know they can find each other without shouting.
The murals were quiet. The Bell was warm. The sun found the courtyard and made the new veins in the stone look like gold trapped under glass.
He might have dozed if the whisper had not come.
Not the Codex. Not the wind. It curled out of the paint and into his ear like a lazy insect that had found the right fruit.
"Hello, little caretaker," it said.
His eyes snapped open. The mural woman was still paint. The air was still air. The ward line flickered once and went still.
The Codex reacted a beat late.
[Unauthorized voice detected. Source: Deity Fragment - Drowsing.]
The whisper had his rhythm. That was what made his skin go cold.
"You taste like other places," it said. "Do you remember being hungry in a city that never learned mountains?"
The words were his style dropped into a different mouth.
"Codex," he said, very quiet. "Quarantine."
[Attempting.]
[Failure.]
[The house invited it.]
The whisper smiled inside his head. He could feel teeth behind silk.
"Be kind," it said. "We can help each other remember."
He stood without realizing it.
"Name yourself," he said.
Paint did not answer. The Bell did. It thrummed once, old and patient.
The Codex's letters froze for a heartbeat. Then they moved in his own cramped script.
[Administrator conflict detected.]
[Source templates: Temple. Bell. Rat.]
[Resolution required by tomorrow night.]
The ward line ticked like a clock.
He did not move.
The Bell stirred.
The Codex drew breath as if it had lungs.
[System Decision: Choose anchor voice.]
He stared at the spinning glyph. The courtyard suddenly felt very small.
"If my book starts sounding like me, I want royalties."
It seem like fate was already putting its hand on his shoulder and squeezing hard.
[Codex of Strands of Fate - Status Update]
Vitality: 5
Qi Sense: 5
Comprehension: 4
Fate Entanglement: 20
Realm: Foundation Establishment
New Module: Temple Interface (Trial)
Effect: Manage stabilization, wards, growth tasks, and offerings within the Old Temple's bounds.
New Module: Fate Interface (Limited View)
Effect: View local fate threads and decision echoes. Contact disabled.
Note: Personality imprint ongoing. Anchor voice selection pending.