The crack in the bronze wall did not open so much as breathe.
Cold blue light pulsed through the seam, steady as a heartbeat. Each pulse pressed dust outward and then drew it back in, like the tomb had a tide of its own.
Li Muye pressed a palm to his chest.
The hidden sigil beneath his ribs answered with a faint, reluctant thump.
"Door's alive," Old Yu muttered. "Never liked doors that breathe."
"Positions," Captain Li said. "No crossing the threshold until we read it."
Zhou Zhan was already kneeling, notebook open, pencil skittering. "Blue's not decorative. It's filtered resonance—low-frequency, high density. Think… sound turned to mist."
A'Chuang flicked his knife and watched the reflection bend in the light. "Mist that cuts throats?"
"Only if you breathe at the wrong time," Zhou said.
Li Muye moved closer to the seam. The blue wasn't really light; it was a slow-motion ripple, a membrane humming on the edge of sound. If he relaxed his eyes, he could see patterns woven through it—rings within rings, a script made of rhythm.
The tomb spoke first.
Thump.
Not loud. Certain.
The bronze seam widened a finger's breadth. Frost skittered across the floor and vanished. Symbols on the doorframe woke with dull red highlights, as if blood re-entered dead veins.
Captain Li lifted two fingers. "Test."
Li Muye let his breath fall into the drum's rhythm. Not matching it head-on. Sliding beside it. A half-beat out of phase, the way you shadow a step to avoid stepping on the same tile.
His sigil flared.
The membrane shivered.
"Careful," A'Chuang warned. "It remembers you."
"That's the point," Li Muye said, though his voice sounded far away.
The blue ripples smoothed. A second pulse rolled out, slower, almost patient. The seam opened to a full palm and the cold grew teeth.
Zhou Zhan's pencil stopped. "Hear that? It's shifted from heart-rate to breath-rate. The door is… syncing with the lungs, not the drum."
"Meaning?" Captain Li said.
"Meaning we can fake it."
They faked the tomb's breath.
Captain Li counted them in. Old Yu took the rear with a short torch and a longer swear under his breath. A'Chuang set his knife at the membrane, not touching, just angling the blade to break the ripple if it surged.
Li Muye stood where the blue and red met. He inhaled when the door exhaled. Exhaled when the door inhaled. The rhythm felt wrong in his body, like he was wearing someone else's heartbeat.
"Now," Captain Li said.
They stepped.
The membrane passed through them like cold smoke.
For a heartbeat the world turned inside out. Floor became ceiling. The walls folded like the bellows of an old instrument. Then the fold released and they were through, stumbling onto a stone landing that stretched into a dark, circular shaft.
The shaft descended in terraces, each ring carved with reliefs: beasts with too many eyes; men wearing masks; masks wearing men. Between the rings, bronze ropes as thick as a man's waist ran downward and disappeared into black.
A wind rose from below, not air but pressure. It tasted of iron and the after-smell of lightning.
"Below the drum," Zhou whispered. "We're in the resonant chamber."
From somewhere in the depth came a small, distinct sound.
Not the drum.
A chime.
Clear. Singular. Like a fingernail touched to crystal.
Li Muye's sigil tightened.
He knew that tone.
He had heard it when the mirror Gate woke and when the Eye beneath the Drum opened and learned his breath.
A'Chuang crouched at the landing's edge. "Movement," he said. "Statues." He lifted the knife a fraction. "Not statues."
Figures stood on the next terrace down—six of them, spaced like the hours of a clock. They wore high bronze collars that hid their mouths and mirrored masks that held no eyes. Their bodies were wrapped in narrow plates like fish armor. One raised an arm and the chime sounded again, effortless as a drop of water.
"They're not seeing us," Zhou said. "They're listening."
"Then they hear him," Old Yu said, nodding at Li Muye. "Because that thing in his chest won't shut up."
Captain Li scanned the levels below. "Path?"
Zhou pointed. "Three terraces down, then across the rope gantry. There's a control dais at the center—see the four sockets? That's where the drum bones tune the chamber."
"And those six?" A'Chuang asked.
Zhou swallowed. "Guardians. Resonators. If they sing, the chamber will harmonize and we'll be paste."
"We move without sound," Captain Li said. "Muye, shadow their rhythm. Don't meet it. A'Chuang, on my mark."
Li Muye nodded. He let his breath drift a hair slower than the chime, then a hair faster, staying in the pocket where waves cancel. His skin prickled. The guardians' mirrored faces tilted, as if confused by an echo that refused to settle.
They began the descent.
Each step demanded a decision: heel or toe, weight or ghost, hold or fall. The air thickened into glass and then relaxed. The bronze ropes thrummed without moving, making phantom notes in the bones.
Halfway down, one guardian turned its mask fully toward Li Muye.
The chime came again, closer.
He answered with silence.
The mask paused.
Then it lowered its arm.
Captain Li's shoulders eased half an inch. "Good."
They reached the third terrace. The rope gantry hung across a black drop, narrow as a blade's spine and slick with condensed breath. Blue light pulsed up from the dark like bioluminescent tide.
"Go," Captain Li said.
A'Chuang went first, soft as a shadow. Li Muye followed, counting breaths that weren't his. The rope dipped under their weight. Below, the dark seemed to swell, as if something huge rolled over in its sleep.
The fourth step.
The chime struck wrong.
The guardians moved together, collars opening like shutters. The mirrored masks flashed and threw back not torchlight but Li Muye's own golden rune-fire, multiplied six times.
"Not listening," Zhou said, voice dry. "Singing."
The shaft answered.
The rope jumped.
Li Muye lost his breath.
For two heartbeats he hung between notes, nothing to hold but air and the thin whine of metal.
He found the wrong breath again and fell into it.
A'Chuang's hand caught his arm and hauled.
They spilled onto the central dais.
It was a round plate of black stone, veined with pale threads that looked like buried lightning. In the center sat a short pillar with four sockets, each glowing faintly blue. Bronze ribs curved overhead, inward, like the skeleton of a great drum.
The chime ceased.
The guardians tilted their masks as one.
Captain Li said, very softly, "Now what?"
Li Muye laid both hands on the pillar.
The sockets were not empty.
They were waiting.
The tomb breathed in.
He exhaled.
The sockets answered.
The blue deepened. The ribs tightened. The shaft became a throat, and for an instant Li Muye felt the enormous body of the tomb around him: the drum above like a skull, the chamber below like lungs, the ropes like tendons. He saw where breath became motion, where motion became sound, and where sound learned to remember.
The guardians stepped.
A'Chuang raised his knife.
"Hold," Li Muye said.
He wasn't sure who he said it to—them, the guardians, or the thing that had made a home under his ribs.
"Let me listen back."
The pillar throbbed under his hands.
What came was not words but a map of pressure and timing, doors that were lungs and locks that were throats. It showed him the way down and the cost of crossing.
The cost was always the same.
Remember me, the chamber breathed.
"Then echo me," Li Muye whispered.
He drew a breath that wasn't his.
The sockets opened like pupils.
The terrace shook.
The guardians sang.
The chamber answered.
And the dais began to sink.
They descended on the black stone plate like a slow elevator made by gods who knew music better than mercy.
The rope gantry rose above them and vanished into fog. The blue pulse came from below now, steady and stronger, painting their faces with underwater shadows.
Old Yu crouched with both hands on the rim. "If this drops faster I'll leave my stomach up there."
"It won't," Zhou said, though his voice betrayed hope more than knowledge. "This is tempo-controlled. Four sockets, four beats, quarter time."
A'Chuang snorted. "Speak human."
"Don't move off-beat," Zhou said. "Or the floor stops being floor."
The guardians remained on their terrace, watching. Or listening. Their collars were shut; their masks reflected only the faint gold in Li Muye's eyes.
Captain Li checked his knife, then the drop. "Muye."
"I've got it," Li Muye said. "For now."
The dais slid into a larger chamber.
Here the bronze ribs turned to pillars and arched overhead. The ceiling was a shallow dome; its inner surface held thousands of thin plates that fluttered with each pulse like a field of metal grass. At the dome's center hung a circular stone—no larger than a shield—suspended by four hair-thin chains.
It was not a drum.
It was a mouth.
Zhou Zhan's pencil clicked against paper. "Sub-glottal resonator. The drum above produces the primary impulse. This converts it into… speech."
"What language?" Old Yu asked.
"Whatever hears it," Zhou said.
The dais settled with a sigh.
Across the chamber, three doors waited, identical bronze crescents set into the wall. Above each door was a relief. The first showed a mask split in two. The second, a hand over a heart. The third, a person kneeling in front of a great coil of rope.
"Tests," Captain Li said. "Pick one."
The chains at the ceiling trembled.
The hanging stone vibrated.
A word rolled across the chamber, not spoken, not sung—grown.
"Echo."
The first door lit with a soft blue halo.
"Left it is," Captain Li decided. "Keep the line."
They approached.
The bronze smelled faintly of rain after dust. The halo thickened into membrane. Li Muye could see the weave: the same script of breath, finer, faster, hungry.
He glanced back at the suspended stone. It swayed once, like a pendulum deciding time.
He stepped through.
The corridor on the other side was narrow and curved, forcing them single file. The walls were smooth enough to be treacherous. The echo of their steps came back wrong—delayed, fractured, as if the corridor recorded then rewrote them.
Halfway in, a whisper brushed Li Muye's ear.
Not from behind. Not from ahead.
From perfectly beside him.
"Breathe with me."
He did not obey. He matched a half-beat off, the same trick that opened the door.
The whisper mirrored his disobedience.
"Good," it said, and became his own voice.
Captain Li's hand touched his shoulder. "Report."
"Corridor copies echo," Li Muye said. "It tries to lead. We don't follow."
They reached a round chamber with no visible exit. The walls wore no carvings, only a shallow ring like a worn groove.
The groove hummed.
A shape rose from it, the size of a man, made entirely of sound. Not like the mirror-being from above—the shape here was imperfect, blurred at the edges, as if still learning the outlines of living things. It took a step, its footfall a clean chime. Then another. And another. Each step brought it closer to Li Muye, as if pulled by a magnet hidden under his skin.
"Don't fight the first copy," Zhou said quickly. "Let it align. It's an imprint test—echo resonance. If you resist too early the chamber classifies you as noise."
"And if we let it?" A'Chuang asked.
"You become its teacher," Zhou said.
The sound-man reached Li Muye and stopped. It lifted a hand that was not a hand and placed it against his chest.
The sigil under his ribs flared white-hot.
He did not push it away.
He breathed.
It breathed a fraction later.
He sped up.
It pursued.
He broke rhythm.
It compensated.
He held still, at last, and let his pulse settle at the wrong rate he had learned at the Gate. The thing shuddered.
"You don't own me," he said, quietly. "You follow."
The copy bowed its head.
When it raised it again, its face was more like a face.
It stepped back and struck the ring with its heel.
A door opened.
"Next," Captain Li said.
They moved as a unit, Li Muye leading, the copy gliding at his side like a shadow made of music. The second chamber held a low plinth and a bronze plate. The plate bore lines that refused to be read head-on; only when Li Muye relaxed his eyes did the pattern resolve: four circles, two broken, two whole, connected by a thread.
"Heart over hand," Old Yu said, reading the relief from outside. "What's that mean in scholar?"
Zhou grinned despite himself. "Feedback control. If the hand moves before the heart decides, the system punishes the hand."
"So think first," A'Chuang said. "I can do that."
The copy looked up at Li Muye.
"Teach," it said, in a voice that was almost human.
He placed his palm on the plate. Under his skin, the sigil expanded like a slow blossom. The plate heated without heat and became a field: if he pressed, it pushed back; if he waited, it invited.
He waited.
The field opened a narrow path.
He pressed gently.
The path widened.
He changed his mind mid-move and the plate hissed like a warning animal.
"Don't lie to it," Zhou said. "It hears the before-thought."
So he didn't.
He let the decision grow in his chest like a clean note, then let the hand follow. The plate cooled. The room brightened from nowhere. The copy watched and mirrored, slower, careful, as if afraid to bruise the air.
Another door opened.
They entered the third chamber.
Rope hung from the ceiling in a great coil, each strand flat, bronze, inscribed. It wasn't rope at all but a net, knotted into a shape that held itself.
"Submission test," Zhou said softly. "Kneel and you pass. Or—"
"Or?" Old Yu said.
"Or you refuse and prove something harder," Zhou said. "Autonomy inside resonance."
Captain Li looked at Li Muye. "Decision."
The net lowered a handspan.
Words in no language breathed across the room.
Remember me.
Li Muye laughed, not unkindly. "I already do."
He did not kneel.
He stepped forward and lifted the net with both hands, careful not to tear the script. "You don't get my knees," he said, "but you can have my breath."
He exhaled.
The net rose, turned, and knit itself into a new pattern. A window opened in the far wall, showing the dais and the chamber they had left and, beyond that, the shaft.
The suspended stone chimed once.
The copy spoke in his voice. "Approved."
The window collapsed into an open arch.
They stepped through.
The chamber received them with a long, low breath like surf at night. The guardians on the terrace above turned their masks away, as if uninterested now that the chamber had taught what it wanted to teach.
Old Yu wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "We done?"
"No," Captain Li said. He looked up at the hanging stone. "We just got a language lesson."
The stone answered with a new tone.
Not chime.
Drum.
Far below, something heavy moved.
The floor trembled.
A'Chuang lifted his knife with a small smile that was mostly teeth. "Class dismissed?"
Zhou closed his notebook. "Chapter two."
Li Muye felt the answer before it sounded. The sigil under his ribs opened like an eye and shut again. The pillar on the dais pulsed through his hands in time with his heart.
The chamber spoke one word that was not a word.
"Down."
Captain Li nodded once. "Then down."
They gathered at the rim.
Blue light rose to meet them.
The dais shivered.
And the tomb drew them, breath by breath, into the echoing dark.